#punkofsunshine

Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole art nouveau thing, but I’d like to take a step back and analyze how the aesthetic should reflect the movement. While it is nice to have an end goal in mind, the message should be “We need to work together so the earth doesn’t become uninhabitable in our lifetime.” and not “Hey, pretty pictures of green cityscapes, but also here’s the message based around a few different political philosophies that you have to look into.”

In short I’m saying, we need to put the punk firmly in solarpunk so it reflects upon the movement as one with ideas and ideals as opposed to overly utopian in nature. A nice change would be moving away from cityscapes and focusing on architecture that feels handmade, adding in the punk principle of DIY into the aesthetic while also keeping the greenery would make something totally unique and reflect the movement better than the current iteration does. Changing the aesthetic would also drive home the point that we’re constantly evolving as a movement, constantly growing and changing.

As I’ve said before, with growth comes new challenges. If we want our message to be fully understood and not just ogled at because it’s bright and pretty, we need to make it easier to understand off the bat and not as easy to twist into something harmful where someone could say “If [X group] weren’t around, we could have this future!” Visuals are a powerful medium, we sincerely want them to reflect our intent as well as provide a message that we’re not going away, ever. So now, I ask you artists to rethink the future of this look and imagine one which is more akin to a cobbled together house with solar panels and a water pump out front as opposed to a green apartment complex in a retrofitted city. One of these is achievable in our lifetime and I know you know which one.

Focusing on too many things at once is a problem I face personally, couple that with the need to take everything upon myself and low stress tolerance and you have a disaster waiting to happen. If you face the same problem as me, I'd highly suggest making a group of specialized people and solve small problems locally, whether that be growing food, hooking up satellites for free WiFi, setting up a Food Not Bombs chapter in your area, or even cooperation in local to state government. We all have our talents, honing yours can change a life, but it takes all of us to change the world in a significant way. To rebuild a structure, parts must be torn down, the more you tear down periodically, the better the structure is going to be, however it must be reinforced. You cannot expect a house to stand without a plan for a structure, we are the supports that make the wall, the roof, and the floor. The foundation is what we believe in, and what the foundation is, is hope. Hope for a future that can be, with action, collaboration, and resistance against the hierarchical, overbearing, and exploitative power structures that currently exist.

This has been my first post in a while, so I’ll see ya’ll again in probably a month to commemorate my first post on this site “A Beginner’s Guide to Solarpunk” which absolutely blew up my account, to be truthful I’m proud of how far we’ve all come with our small internet based movement reaching new heights and our voices getting louder in the ears of politicians and capitalists alike. We’re here to stay, don’t forget about it.

Hey guys, I’m back, I had a little reprieve from posting or even checking my blog. I wanted to address the themes of solarpunk, the direction it’s moving and if it’s considered too idealistic for our modern, cynical society.

Short Answer: Yes

Long Answer: No, not entirely

Yes, solarpunk may have optimism embedded in it, but that’s mostly to ward off despair. Despair is easy to fall into as an activist or even an entire movement, so the focus is mostly on environmental impact and restoration, mitigation of ecological collapse, etc. First and foremost however, solarpunk is a political movement and no political movement is entirely optimistic for the future, otherwise they wouldn’t exist to attempt to make a change. As a new movement, we all have to decide our direction, our appeal, etc and like I’ve said before, utopian visuals are a nice goal, but we must focus on what we can change now and not what the next generation will attempt to do down the line.

There are many things we can improve on as a movement, like drawing attention to it (either artistically or politically, preferably both), getting involved with local to state government, or even subversive action (not recommended, but very effective in certain circumstances). Whatever that can be done to push the movement into the public eye, do it, not only for yourself, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Hello my lovely humans, welcome back to what I like to call informal essays. Today brings together two very important topics to me, food and conservationism. This is going to be longer than my last post and is going to involve some sidetracking as well.

I came up with this topic while looking at all the spices I was using to make butter chicken for dinner tonight and wondering how much the price was going to go up when shit really hits the fan, if we could have such dishes like this again, etc. So, essentially my anxiety spiral led me to doing research and wanting to discuss the intersectionality of culinary arts, climate science, and farming. In our current state, beef reigns supreme in terms of climate change contribution, the most eaten meat in the world is actually chicken, which is significantly less harmful than beef or pork, and yet beef and pork have the greatest climate impact and are highly susceptible to diseases (poultry is as well, don’t get me wrong). In general animal farming is a big contributor to climate change, crop farming is as well...

Crop farming, which I talk about here, also emits a lot of fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and pollutes ground water, depletes soil, and flows downriver along with cow and pig manure, thus killing fish, crustaceans, marine reptiles, and mammals who live in or around the sea. This combination of disregard after disregard for natural ecosystems leads us into where we are now. The Midwest is on the cusp of desertification, there’s been no agriculture reform or sign of actual change, which is why we need to take it upon ourselves to start vertical farming, hydroponics, and soil-less farming on an industrial scale. Not only is it more efficient, it’s better for the environment in every possible aspect, even using less water and requiring very little usage of fertilizers, but how do you replace animal farming? Answer: You don’t, you just get rid of it, the least amount of impact out of any animal is the chicken, so it may be able to stay, but cows and pigs cannot be farmed en masse anymore, it’s dangerous for our environment and our health, so they must be used all at once, and composted (with the rich preferably). It sounds cruel, I know, but there aren’t many better options. Of course the meat and dairy industries will try to interfere like they always do, but we knew that would happen anyway.

Moral of the story, our modern agriculture industry is profit focused and not based around the health or well-being of us or our planet, causing both a rise in greenhouse gas emissions, water and land pollution, and is just generally bad for us in the dietary respect.

The idea that population growth becomes exponential is real... in species with a low gestation rate or animals with a reduced natural predator population (mostly due to human intervention). Humans have a rather high gestation rate, it takes three quarters of a year to produce a fully formed human, during that time, people die and are born, maintaining a rather stable population the whole time. So where did the overpopulation myth come from? Easy, a book called The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich which advocates for forced sterilization of black and brown peoples as a form of population control and has been used to justify massacres like the El Paso mass shooting where an eco-fascist said it was a form of population control and cited anti-immigration rhetoric to explain away hate crimes and murder.

It would be acceptable to say that overpopulation is a myth perpetuated by capitalists so they can push blame of climate change onto undeserving people. Also, that’s exactly what it is, shifting blame to people in over-exploited countries to continue making more money than is necessary for any human being, but as we all know by now, capitalism isn’t really about money, it’s about the power and lack of consequences for fucking things up. For some people, it may be about money, but generally it’s about the accumulation of power over others. To use a cliche, money is the root of all evil, therefore we shouldn’t use money anymore. Abolition of currency is a good thing, no matter what authorities may say. When we don’t use money anymore, that will be the day we can actually remove our chains as a species.

This was a very heavy topic for me, but it’s important to discuss the anti-human and anti-poc narrative we so dearly want to avoid as solarpunks. Don’t fall into the trap of becoming anti-human while trying to fix our race’s mistakes both environmentally and socially.

You guys may not know this, but I’m a fan of the fashion world, I have a deep respect for handcrafted clothing. The skill needed to make clothes is incredible, I’m a bit rusty with a needle and thread myself, but a few of my friends are spectacularly skilled with a sewing machine and a needle. Envy aside, this is actually a very good skill to learn, the decline of this knowledge has been beneficial to those who work in the fast fashion sector and nobody else. Clothing is an essential part of culture and I think that essential aspect is part of why I really dislike fast fashion as well as haute couture. Generally speaking the fashion industry does some pretty shitty things to workers and markets to those who don’t see anything bigger at stake than how they look, which is awful for a culture that’s as consumption obsessed as that of the US.

It all has to start somewhere, mostly from seeds, as long as you pretend that synthetic fabrics don’t exist for a moment (that deserves a post of its own when I move onto the topic of fossil fuels and their obsolescence), most clothes are made from cotton yarn, which is woven into fabric, which is then cut into various shapes and made into whatever clothing item is being manufactured, yeah? Well, there’s a problem with cotton even into the modern day and that’s the energy cost for processing and water cost for growing when you look at the water cost alone and combine it with the fact that in needs to be processed, transported, woven, and cut that comes out to be a lot of fossil fuels and even more water consumed. Roughly 20,000 litres of water (5,283 gallons) is used to produce 1 kilogram of cotton (2.2 pounds). High water cost combined with pesticide, herbicide, and fungicide use make cotton a nightmare for groundwater pollution, agricultural runoff, and soil depletion. There is a better source of fiber than cotton which uses less water and produces more than cotton does, hemp, the industrial variety of hemp is easy to grow and could be replacing half of all textiles very soon. Industrial hemp uses less than a third of cotton and produces, to read more about this hemp click here. 

Now onto the textile industry and how it feeds into both fast fashion and couture. As we’ve established, cloth is incredibly important when talking about fashion and clothing. It’s sometimes a selling point, if you want clothes that are easy to take care of, or want something that’s luxurious but is dry-clean only (I don’t know why people would do that to themselves, but that’s besides the point). The top textile manufacturer right now is Arvind Limited which deals in cotton fabrics, cotton is still king it seems, but it’s an India based company. I can’t seem to find who they supply to, although their financial reports are public access, I cannot find who they sell their fabrics to. I am willing to bet it’s mostly to fast fashion companies and some premier brands. That information is out of my hands however, but I can say they’re making bank as a 3rd party distributor with cheap labour on the ground floor. I’m afraid I cannot give detailed accounts of whom they ship to, but speculation will have to do for now.

A little break from serious topics to discuss couture, haute couture, and handmade clothing, I swear we’ll move onto the topic of exploitation of workers after this. Couture is essentially custom fitted clothing, haute couture is luxury custom fitted clothing, and handmade clothes are self explanatory. The only one out of the three that I don’t have a problem with is handmade clothing because it’s made to be warn more than once and is pragmatic, the couture however, is basically what you see at the Met Gala, to be worn once and never again. I think you see the problem as much as I do, a waste of resources and idolization of others based on appearance. Now, I may be misunderstanding or biased, but clothes are supposed to be worn multiple times. In this respect, couture is no better than fast fashion. 

Now onto the final topic of an already lengthy post, exploitation of workers in textiles. From the farmers who grow the fiber, to the cloth makers, to the ones operating the sewing machines in sweatshops, all of these people are being exploited by different organizations. The farmers are exploited via the seed industry as well as pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer industries because they’re viewed as essential in the production of clothing fibers and food crops. For the manufactures of the cloth, they’re being exploited by whomever runs the factory for processing and weaving the fibers, same goes for sweatshop workers. It’s like this anywhere you go in the textile industry, even “high end” fashion is infamous for seasonal crunch times and overworking designers, photographers, and models. It may not be the same as meager wages in a sweatshop, but nobody should be under extreme stress over something that will go away from public vision in a month’s time. We need to rethink what we wear, me included. Instead of throwing clothes away, we should learn how to resize and repair. We’ll get to that point eventually, but until then we have to be more conscious about the things we take for granted and their social & ecological impact.

That was all for today, this post was 2 days late, but I work a lot now and it’s hard to keep up with any social media, especially when I’m essentially writing essays. So have a good one and stay safe babes.

God, political theory is dry as fuck. I’ve obtained The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and multiple works by Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Fields, Factories and Workshops, An Appeal to the Young, and The Life of Kropotkin respectively) 

Quick Side note: You don’t have to read theory to be a leftist, dogmatism isn’t attractive and I’m well aware a lot of people don’t have access to these materials.