Sunlit Revolution

Say goodbye to trays, buffets, and waiting in lines to eat at a regular old soup kitchen.

When you step inside the Kansas City Community Kitchen today, a greeter shows you to a table. Volunteer waitstaff takes your order after you’ve had time to look at the menu and see what the culinary team has been cookin’ up. The options are healthier and quite creative, like an episode of Food Network’s “Chopped,” but with the ingredients available to the kitchen that day.

Diners are encouraged to leave reviews of their service and requests for what they’d like to see on the menu. Have health, dietary, or religious-observance needs? No sweat.

“We are trying to flip the photo of what a soup kitchen looks like,” Mandy Caruso-Yahne, director of community engagement at Episcopal Community Services (ECS), told Upworthy. 

But feeding those in need isn’t the only way the kitchen is helping. They’re training others too.

Through the program, students work their way up to cooking in the kitchen and providing suggestions for the menu and dishes they prepare. They develop knowledge and confidence in a variety of ways that help them continue down a path in the food industry once they’re finished with the program.

As one diner named Brian put it, 

“They’re treating me good, like they don’t know I’m homeless.”

Why Growing Vegetables in High-Rises Is Wrong on So Many Levels

The dream of vertical farming is gaining momentum despite many unanswered questions about its feasibility.

There are projections that the vertical farming market will hit $4 billion by 2020. In a recent segment of NPR’s Diane Rehm Show (in which I participated), several guests argued that vertical farming could revolutionize agriculture and even supply most of our food needs. The show’s guest host, Maria Hinojosa, declared it “something big, different, and permanent.”

However, in their efforts to develop a system that sustainably supplies cities with a large share of their food, theorists and practitioners of vertical farming face insurmountable obstacles. These include the limited range of crop species that can be grown; the tiny proportion of our population’s total food needs that indoor crops could supply; the elite market being targeted; and the irrelevance of indoor agriculture to the lives and diets of people living in economically stressed rural regions where the bulk of our food is grown.

Meanwhile, looming largest among the many factors that will restrict the growth of vertical gardening (a term I believe is more apt than “vertical farming,” given the potential scale and the types of food that can be produced) are its extraordinary energy requirements and heavy climate impact.

I was just thinking that the whole history of how I’ve reacted to Solarpunk is kind of complicated. Like… When I first heard of it, I liked it a lot, really just for the aesthetics. But then I found out there was this whole ideology that went with it, and got kind of put off, mostly because people are acting like Bright! Hopeful! sci-fi is something they invented themselves, when… No? That’s just utopian sci-fi. It was actually the standard, and for far too long, in my opinion. And I get that the dystopian backlash against it might have been a step too far, but for different reasons than a lot of people seem to agree on. Basically, it comes down to a) “dystopian” fiction actually being set in someone else’s utopia, and thus not that different at all, and b) being just as idealized, in a way, because both give humanity too much credit for having its shit together.

And then I picked up on the weird anti-space thread going through a lot of it. The whole “scientists are heroes again, but because it’s life science and they’re not being corrupted by bad scary physics” thing. And something about that just really bugged me, but I couldn’t really articulate it until I watched Bill Nye on The Good Stuff. It was that one thing he said, about how we are the way we are because the people who wanted to see what was over the next hill were the ones who survived.

Now, I don’t think sci-fi needs to be all space all the time, and I’m not currently writing a lot about space exploration myself, but I like it being a big part of the worldbuilding, if nothing else. Or at least not implicitly or explicitly devalued, because something about that is literally inhuman.

The whole Solarpunk ideal, at this point, kind of freaks me out. It feels like it’s all about maximizing efficiency (in food and energy production, communities, etc.), and getting humanity to reconcile with itself in ways that aren’t quite natural, so we can peacefully move toward a bright future with absolutely nothing to look forward to. The journey, such as there is one, is just the perfection of a new status quo. There’s a very claustrophobic, walking-in-circles feel to the whole thing.

…And, you know, a world like that would be an interesting thing to write about, after all. Refer back to the first paragraph: every dystopia is someone else’s utopia. Obviously, this works in reverse. And, yeah, we don’t have our shit together enough to properly maintain either, so it would probably be much like the world today in some places, and absolutely falling apart at the seams in others. So I want to write about people pushing back against the constraints of a world like that, and how they struggle and compromise and try to fight back, the way people always have.

A lot of solarpunk is about getting our house in order and addressing the grotesque inadequacies of the current dominant systems. That’s not incompatible with looking beyond our home planet, though. Indeed, I’d suggest that if we ever reach that utopian state we will collectively think “right, what now?” and turn our eyes to the stars, for the reasons you mention.

Even on the way towards that peaceful green future there’s plenty of opportunity for space stuff. Orbital solar power plants beaming energy down to the surface; mining the asteroid belt for resources long-since exhausted on Earth; habitations on inhospitable worlds, the ultimate in closed-loop sustainable living; colonising Mars, experimenting with new social systems and methods of organisation; terraforming Mars, building a biosphere from the ground up; using the knowledge gained to rebuild Earth’s biosphere. 

 There are these certain narratives that exist in science fiction specifically that are about getting off this dirt ball planet and inheriting the stars. […] What it sort of feels like is… an extension of the great American westward expansion narrative. It’s like ‘there must be something more to explore, there must be something more to explore’[…] it’s seductive […] but it also sort of encourages this sense that […] the earth is a largely disposable object that we’re supposed to be deserting. [My sidenote: Do NOT get me started about Interstellar’s insidious manifest destiny space epic bullshit. …] narratives of human expansion and survival depend on the idea […] of a destroyed earth while we’ve gone on into the stars. […] The thing that really strikes me is the idea that we think that our best human chance of survival lies on someplace like Mars. Like, we have a hard time surviving in Antarctica, where you still have free water and free air. So the idea that a place that doesn’t provide literally anything that we’re bio-adapted to require is a better option for us is putting the cart before the horse. […]  We’re just sort of missing something there narratively, and there’ just sort of a base stupidity there in saying that our future lies off planet. If we solve our problems on present earth within the limits of this space, probably we can also figure out how to live in other limited environments […] if we fail to sort it out here, I’m pretty sure the limited environments we manage to establish in other places will quickly die off. […] I just don’t take the extraterrestrial exploration story very seriously. 

-from CENHS Cultures of Energy Podcast, ep. 1

It’s worth noting, too, too, that solarpunk is not utopian, and if a work is about simply revamping the status quo it isn’t solarpunk. I would characterize solarpunk fiction as a self-consciously ideological genre committed to imagining our way into new, better, more inclusive forms of life. Sometimes that means depicting bright! hopeful! worlds (and ffs, we need an answer to the self-aggrandizing, grimdark, individualist, ableist, hetero-centric, white-centric post-apocalyptic narratives with which our culture is currently enamoured). And yeah, it also means exploring ways in which solarpunk ideology can fail or be challenged or become its own dystopia (a concept at the centre of a few stories from the excellent podcast produced by @solarpunkpress​​ and which comes up in the SP dragons anthology Wings of Renewal not infrequently).

Relaxing with Runcible, the circular ‘anti-smartphone’

“The Runcible is both the strangest and most intriguing device that I’ve seen at Mobile World Congress this year. It offers many of the same capabilities as a smartphone, but it looks like a trinket you would find in a trendy vintage store. That’s by design, though: Its creator, Monohm, wants the circular gizmo to challenge the now ubiquitous smartphone experience, which is increasingly defined by a relentless stream of notifications. Aubrey Anderson, the company’s founder and CEO, describes the Runcible as a “quieter” gadget that can help people relax and live in the moment, while still staying connected online.”

I was just thinking that the whole history of how I’ve reacted to Solarpunk is kind of complicated. Like… When I first heard of it, I liked it a lot, really just for the aesthetics. But then I found out there was this whole ideology that went with it, and got kind of put off, mostly because people are acting like Bright! Hopeful! sci-fi is something they invented themselves, when… No? That’s just utopian sci-fi. It was actually the standard, and for far too long, in my opinion. And I get that the dystopian backlash against it might have been a step too far, but for different reasons than a lot of people seem to agree on. Basically, it comes down to a) “dystopian” fiction actually being set in someone else’s utopia, and thus not that different at all, and b) being just as idealized, in a way, because both give humanity too much credit for having its shit together.

And then I picked up on the weird anti-space thread going through a lot of it. The whole “scientists are heroes again, but because it’s life science and they’re not being corrupted by bad scary physics” thing. And something about that just really bugged me, but I couldn’t really articulate it until I watched Bill Nye on The Good Stuff. It was that one thing he said, about how we are the way we are because the people who wanted to see what was over the next hill were the ones who survived.

Now, I don’t think sci-fi needs to be all space all the time, and I’m not currently writing a lot about space exploration myself, but I like it being a big part of the worldbuilding, if nothing else. Or at least not implicitly or explicitly devalued, because something about that is literally inhuman.

The whole Solarpunk ideal, at this point, kind of freaks me out. It feels like it’s all about maximizing efficiency (in food and energy production, communities, etc.), and getting humanity to reconcile with itself in ways that aren’t quite natural, so we can peacefully move toward a bright future with absolutely nothing to look forward to. The journey, such as there is one, is just the perfection of a new status quo. There’s a very claustrophobic, walking-in-circles feel to the whole thing.

…And, you know, a world like that would be an interesting thing to write about, after all. Refer back to the first paragraph: every dystopia is someone else’s utopia. Obviously, this works in reverse. And, yeah, we don’t have our shit together enough to properly maintain either, so it would probably be much like the world today in some places, and absolutely falling apart at the seams in others. So I want to write about people pushing back against the constraints of a world like that, and how they struggle and compromise and try to fight back, the way people always have.

A lot of solarpunk is about getting our house in order and addressing the grotesque inadequacies of the current dominant systems. That’s not incompatible with looking beyond our home planet, though. Indeed, I’d suggest that if we ever reach that utopian state we will collectively think “right, what now?” and turn our eyes to the stars, for the reasons you mention.

Even on the way towards that peaceful green future there's plenty of opportunity for space stuff. Orbital solar power plants beaming energy down to the surface; mining the asteroid belt for resources long-since exhausted on Earth; habitations on inhospitable worlds, the ultimate in closed-loop sustainable living; colonising Mars, experimenting with new social systems and methods of organisation; terraforming Mars, building a biosphere from the ground up; using the knowledge gained to rebuild Earth’s biosphere. 

The UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo: The Seed Cathedral

Theme - Better City, Better Life

“The UK pavilion at Expo 2010, colloquially known as the Seed Cathedral, was a sculpture structure built by a nine member conglomeration of British business and government resources directed by designer Thomas Heatherwick. It referenced the race to save seeds from round the world in banks, and housed 250,000 plant seeds at the end of 60,000 acrylic rods, held in place by geometrically-cut holes with the rods inserted therein.”

-Wikipedia

“The Seed Cathedral is 20 metres in height, formed from 60,000 slender transparent rods, each 7.5 metres long and each encasing one or more seeds at its tip. During the day, they act as optic fibres and draw daylight inwards to illuminate the interior. At night, light sources inside each rod allow the whole structure to glow. As the wind moves past, the building and its optic “hairs” gently move to create a dynamic effect.“

- Despoke.com

Images: Heatherwick Studio; REUTERS/Aly Song

A new law in France bans supermarkets from throwing away or destroying unsold food. Instead, the food will be donated to food banks and charities. 

This is great news for the climate, too. If food waste was its own country, it would be the 3rd largest contributor to greenhouse gases after China and the United States.