Just had January's #solarpunk bookclub last night and it was the usual vibrant conversation! We'll be picking book selections for February on Monday—join the discord to weigh in and/or join the newsletter to get reminders and recaps!
I almost never do #FollowFriday recommendations, but I simply have to recommend following @nuwagaba2.
He doesn't post very often, but when he does, it's always about Fill the Empty Stomachs Farming Initiative he is running. With photos of real change done in their community.
While the world burns, they just farm. While a lot of people (including myself) are trying to find something, anything, to do about all the crises, they just feed people.
Giving this pic the #solarPunk tag. I don't follow it, because _this_ is what solarPunk means to me and too much of what I see on the tag leans heavily on fantasy that could only be realised through dialogue with techno-fascism in these times.
8 m x 4.5 m polytunnel hoop frame made from tensioned pine-tree bundles. 7 year old trees grown since the 2017 fire, and now killed by the Aug 2025 #wildfire.
Hundreds more dead pines can be seen standing in the background on the dusk mountainside.
The frame is waiting one more hoop before the polythene can be stretched over. Cold and rain is delaying the process.
The frame construction has involved no combustion-powered machinery.
Balkonkraftwerke sind in Baden-Württemberg so gefragt wie nie. Dafür sorgen unter anderem die niedrigen Preise und die einfache Installation. Worauf man dabei achten sollte.
Nochmal ein Toot, da der erste nicht „ausgespielt“ wurde.
Moin! Ich bin hier mit meinem Zweitaccount und daher eigentlich nicht wirklich #neuhier Ich blogge gelegentlich, schreibe Sach- und Fachtexte und versuche mich an meiner ersten #scifi -Story. Freue mich über Empfehlungen zu den Themen #scifi #sciencefiction #solarpunk und alles was related ist.
If you would like some free hosting for a static website perhaps to document your projects or host your digital #zine then you are very welcome. The server has #geocities vibes as each user gets a public_html folder. You'll get ssh access and the server has #Hugo installed to help make nice static websites. The goal will be to have 100% uptime, due to its very low power consumption it does not require the power saving I use for the solarcene.community mastodon server.
Probably the key thing is that a project should have a mascot and in this case the server is called Squeak and it's an awesome bat! Squeak was designed by @alipunk (check out her website for more of her work).
Just get in touch if you would like to have a small website!
Dass #Trump dem Land nach der Verhaftung von #Maduro die #Demokratie bringen wolle, glaubt ja kaum noch jemand. Und lasst uns niemals vergessen, dass der Fossilist vor dem Angriff nicht den #Kongress konsultierte - wohl aber einige #Ölkonzerne !
Just signed up for a "hopecore" class through Indivisible! Love that they're doing this (I had not heard this particular variant of the term before) and I'm intrigued to see what they're teaching in terms of art in activism.
For a long time people told tales about going to the moon, then we in the US decided to **GO!** Our National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) was established on July 29, 1958.
LAST DAY to get the first and second books in my #solarpunk Nothing is Promised series FREE!
The year is 2050, and amidst rolling pandemics and the climate crisis, our intrepid power engineer just wants a family… but finds a power grid mystery instead.
If you like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future or Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot, you’ll enjoy this 4-novel, tightly-connected hopepunk cli-fi series. #Bookstodon susankayequinn.com/series/noth…
Suche einen Roman, der als Setting den Zusammenbruch der Ordnung hat. Und dann finden die Akteure zusammen und bauen sich Alternativen auf. Am Anfang noch gemeinsames Plündern, trotzdem Barbarei verhindern. Ein möglichst realistisches Szenario, nicht zu rosarot. Gibts da was? Falls nicht, wärs doch schön, wenn sich jemand dran versuchen könnte ;)
@crcollins could anyone explain the anger to me? I seem to be missing something.
The AI companies have been DDoSing Wikipedia for years, attacking the servers with constant crawling bots. Now they will get their own gate to the same content and leave Wikipedia alone, so that it will not suffer extra costs.
They will also pay extra for having this access.
What is wrong with that? Where is the betrayal of #solarpunk values?
I’m not sure what I’m waiting for. I know what it will look like when it gets here, but not until I see it.
I’m quite certain that doing nothing is not an option. I’ve done nothing for most of my life, and that didn’t get me anywhere.
But that’s not true.
Waiting got me everywhere. The only way I know how to get anywhere is to wait.
I’m waiting.
It is some time in the Spring of 2037. I waited out the winter, and now I’m waiting out the spring, but I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
_Think!_
It’s cool and dry. The clouds don’t come by much here. I saw a couple last week. That made for a nice change of pace.
I know what the world outside this valley looks like.
Except that’s not true either.
I know that I’ve read reports from the far East of the continent. They don’t paint a very happy picture. I don’t want to think about that right now.
I know what I’ve been told about the coast West of me. Industry and massive rails and people who help each other.
I feel the weight of my waterskin at my waist, hooked to a belt that goes over my left shoulder, and look out of the low cinderblock building I’ve been living out of. Conduit comes inside through a hole near the ceiling, leading into a ventilated cabinet that hums.
I look to my supply of water and food. I don’t want to think about that right now.
I’m waiting.
It took the crew that dropped me here 4 days to traverse the desert. Sun City is a further 2 days at the pace that they were traveling. This was at the start of winter, when they were able to collect 5 peak sun hours per day. I don’t have a transport.
I pull my screen out of my pocket again. An ancient pre-rupture model, about the size of my hand. After the rupture, data connections to screens were spotty. I see myself in the cracked glass and I look away. I don’t want to think about that right now.
Screens used to have a data connection basically everywhere, even after the rupture, but not out here, not anymore. In a lot of places, when people stopped getting paid with money, they stopped doing things. They left to find their way east, where people were still paid in money. Other people who didn’t mind getting paid in other things stuck around to keep things working.
The crew who dropped me here said they’d be back for me, at the end of spring. They left food and water enough to last the winter and the spring.
I’m waiting.
Why?
I don’t have the resources to get anywhere else.
But that’s not true. I have several months supply remaining of food and water.
_THINK!_
I.
Am.
Waiting.
I grew up in the desert north of here. There was nothing to do there. When the trucks stopped coming through, no one did anything. Well, that’s not true. The people around me did a lot of things. They drank. They complained about the wider world that they couldn’t see. Complained about Californians and politicians and tourists not spending money. I think they secretly enjoyed the rupture. It gave them more to complain about, and people stopped coming by to tell them they’re wrong.
It’s not so much that they didnt do anything, as much as they kept doing the nothing that they were doing before, and now there was even less else to do.
I look out to the foothills of the mountains to the east. They look impossibly far away. I don’t have any maps, but from what I remember, it’s maybe 20 miles. I can see the mechanical sheen of solar arrays.
I am waiting.
When I went with the crew through other towns, the people of those towns seemed less surprised to see a walking cube a bit longer than a shipping container to a side than the people of my town. The people of other towns had kids.
I used to be a kid.
I don’t want to think about that right now.
The kids would run around the crew’s cube, and jump up and down, and be so excited about everything.
Except that’s not quite right.
At first, the kids would hang back, behind the cloaks and skirts of the adults, peering out from behind them. The crew opened one of the smaller doors in our cube, and brought out meybe a dozen solar panels, each taller than a person. The adults erupted in a cheer, and the leader of the crew went out to shake a local man’s hand, and they all looked very pleased. *then* the kids ran around getting excited.
What were their names?
I… want to think about that right now. They learned my name, and then called me “Scrap,” on account of me being so short and scrawny, and always looking through their piles of scrap, but they would still take a few moments every day, and say “Thank you for joining us for dinner, Austin,” and I’d be a little confused every time because no one ever thanked me in my town for eating their food. Best I could ever hope for was that they looked away and didn’t say anything.
But what were their names?
My head is hurting, and my chest feels tight and I want to think about this! Right now!
Why did the children hide? They were doing what the adults were doing. They were cautious. Then when the adults were happy to see us, the kids were happy to see us.
I can’t remember their faces, I can’t remember their names. The crew left me here, but the crew of what? The cube had a name. They were very proud of it, and I looked at that name plate every time I entered the cube through the small people-door.
When I saw the children, I was a bit amused to see how alike to the adults they were, in little cloaks and dresses. They’d run back to their parents and I could see that their small clothes were even made from the same fabric as their parents.
I am waiting.
I saw this pattern enough times that I began to become familiar with the flow of it. The initial tension, the gifting of solar panels, celebrations and reciprocal gifts of water, sometimes refused because the crew had enough.
My head hurts and my chest is tight and my face is wet and I don’t know why. I don’t want to think about this right now but I want to think about this right now.
_Think!_
The thoughts hurt and they won’t stop, and I want to think them, but it’s like I’m trying to climb up stairs with big metal boxes on my feet and I keep slipping down and why am I waiting? Why can’t I remember the crew’s names? They told me things other than how useless and wrong I was, and smiled at me when I ate meals with them and didn’t scream at me when I fidgeted.
There’s a roaring in my ears and my face is wet and I think about the people in my town and what they would tell me. The interactions blurred together because the message was always the same.
“You have to wait.”
“That’s wrong”
“I don’t want to think about that right now”
“You’re not thinking!”
I pull my screen out of my pocket again, even though I know it’s dead, and there’s no data connection. Every time I’ve felt like this in the past I could pull out my screen and the feeling would go away. I look desperately into the black rectangle in my hands, and my father’s face looks back at me, filling my vision.
I used to distinguish more strongly between my solarpunk stories and my anti-AI stories but now I'm coming to think of them as two flavors of the same thing.
The thing the machines consume is us.
Ready to lease out your mind? Or pay for your next meal with involuntary ads?
The Closet Full of Time collection contains five short stories that speak to that sinking feeling that we're serving the machin…
There are many ways a better world exists alongside the terrible one...growing those seeds & using them as familiar models to help people transition conceptually away from exploitive capitalism... brightgreenfutures.substack.co… 2/n
ok, I woke up with another reason why this wikipedia sell out has me so angry...
I've long held up gifting economy models like wikipedia (and reddit and craigslist and buy nothing) as #Solarpunk In Real Life, here today, manifesting the better world I want to see.
In addition to all the other betrayals this is, I realized this morning that Wiki has always been one of those #solarpunk in real life models I held up of gifting economies where people help people, build knowledge, just for the love... and this... just utterly destroys that. And they're gaslighting everyone about it at the same time. It's disgusting.
@ianto_jones whereas I, the fool, donated and believed them that they wouldn't sell out to AI corps
There's a ML person on bsky who's just utterly convinced this is GREAT...and she's working on "keeping AI out of wikipedia"... by recruiting more human editors! Because of course! That's what they want. All that human labor for free!
One of the things I published in the last two years is the utopian #novella "2042 – The Forbidden Library". It was funded by the Call for Stories of the CCC e.V. in Germany. Thus I could make it free for download on my website, but also print and ebook versions that are available everywhere. There's also an English version, even available at Waterstones. waterstones.com/book/2042-engl…
When I first saw the ocean temperatures literally go off the charts (Mar 2023) I wrote a drabble (a story of exactly 100 words) about it and published it as a zine.
What is a Drabble? A story of precisely 100 words. For a Solarpunk Futures expo, I wrote solarpunk drabble to hand out. I wanted something that could be distributed both in paper and digitally, qui…
"Seit der #Gaskrise & den zunehmenden Risiken, die mit fossilen Brennstoffen in Verbindung gebracht werden, suchen viele Eigentümer nun doch nach Alternativen. Gemessen an den Verkaufszahlen liegt derzeit die #Wärmepumpe vorn: 2025 wurden mit 284.000 erstmals mehr dieser Anlagen verkauft als #Gasheizungen, die 230.000-mal verkauft wurden." #Marktt-online.de/heim-garten/aktuel…
PLEASE, I am begging you, write your queer stories, your Weird stories, your #hopepunk & #solarpunk stories, your stories of a better world & our broken one, of healing & liberation. PLEASE
(Brought to you by the trauma of me reading a story of horrifying conservative status quo justification)
Whether the world addresses global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity in a timely manner depends largely on country transition rates to clean, renewable energy.
Libby is shoving AI into its service (and allowing AI books!) and I couldn't be more furious.
Libby is supposedly a library app but it doesn't have any of the values of a library (I adore libraries, they are manifestations of a #solarpunk future).
Libby is an enshittified tech corp who bought a library app. "Libby and its parent company, OverDrive, are owned by the private equity firm KKR."
Esquema inicial de un diseño genérico de solución isla #offGrid para las necesidades del casco y en particular de #laCasona de la tierra de nuestros nietos.
Resigning myself that we're entering stage 2 with #solarpunk... but that mostly means it's getting too big (genre/movement)to ignore, that's it's a threat & that mocking will only spread it more.
first they ignore you then they mock you <<-we are here with solarpunk then they fight you then you win
LOVE these #solarpunk stickers! Definitely picking up some...
over the holiday, I used stickers as stocking stuffers and they were a big hit. I'd collected them through the year, supporting artists and picking up stuff I liked whenever I saw it. They're perfect little "pick me up" gifts too.
Ich habe soeben hochauflösende (im Original 11k) #Solarpunk #Fernfusion Ja Bitte -Patches bzw. #Sticker in 4 Varianten erstellt. Ihr dürft sie frei verwenden. Wer will, bekommt auch die GIMP-Datei (ich weiß, ist nicht das Standardprogramm dafür 😅) und kann bei Bedarf selbst Veränderungen vornehmen.
Die 12 Sonnen sind natürlich eine Anspielung auf Europa, aber auch auf die #Resilienz vieler kleiner, verteilter #PV-Anlagen.
Hallo chaos.social! Das hier ist mein neuer "Zweitaccount" - ich poste schon auf @kawunngg@mastoart.social was ich zeichne und male wenn ich genug Zeit dafür habe.
Ich habe soeben hochauflösende (im Original 11k) #Solarpunk #Fernfusion Ja Bitte -Patches bzw. #Sticker in 4 Varianten erstellt. Ihr dürft sie frei verwenden. Wer will, bekommt auch die GIMP-Datei (ich weiß, ist nicht das Standardprogramm dafür 😅) und kann bei Bedarf selbst Veränderungen vornehmen.
Die 12 Sonnen sind natürlich eine Anspielung auf Europa, aber auch auf die #Resilienz vieler kleiner, verteilter #PV-Anlagen.
Ich habe soeben hochauflösende (im Original 11k) #Solarpunk #Fernfusion Ja Bitte -Patches bzw. #Sticker in 4 Varianten erstellt. Ihr dürft sie frei verwenden. Wer will, bekommt auch die GIMP-Datei (ich weiß, ist nicht das Standardprogramm dafür 😅) und kann bei Bedarf selbst Veränderungen vornehmen.
Die 12 Sonnen sind natürlich eine Anspielung auf Europa, aber auch auf die #Resilienz vieler kleiner, verteilter #PV-Anlagen.
Frage mich gerade, ob ich als Wissenschaftler & #Solarpunk mit der Benennung von erneuerbaren #Friedensenergien doch noch zu brav & moderat war! 😅🤣👇 Hier ein #Windenergie - Plakatvorschlag für Rechte! 🤭🌬️🇩🇪✊
I chatted with @tkrex about their short solarpunk story SQUAWKER AND DOLPHIN SWIMMING TOGETHER very early on in my Bright Green Futures podcast! It's a delightful conversation about a delightful story (now avail on audio above)! #bookstodon #audiobook #solarpunk
#Solarpunk is (among other things) an aesthetic, a literary genre and a movement. AFAIK it's a commonly held belief in the community that the 3 are connected; specifically that the first two (while of course also having value in themselves) motivate people to "join the movement", take action, enact change in the physical world.
Do you agree with the premise?
Have you experienced or heard about examples of this "solarpunk pipeline" happening?
Niedrige #Ölpreise führen zu weniger #Fossilismus. Mehrere fossile Regime wie jenes von #Putin (Russland), #Chamenei (Iran) & #Venezuela geraten bei unter 60 USD / Barrel unter massiven Druck, auch #Trump kann die #Ölkonzerne dann nicht mehr bedienen, die seinen #Wahlkampf finanzierten.
@susankayequinn Hi! I just wanted to share with you the fact that I've published in electronic form a short #solarpunk novel. The bad news is that it's in French only for now. It can be downloaded here: standblog.org/blog/pages/Velor… (PDF, HTML and ePub formats, with a link for Kindle too). It's free and under a CC-BY licence too. I don't know what to do with this information, except that maybe it could be useful to you!
Cela fait des années que je me demande à quoi pourrait ressembler un monde où on aurait réussi à prendre le virage climatique, un monde qui serait mieux que celui d’aujourd’hui.
675 kWh Solar-Strom erzeugt 2025. Dabei habe ich erst ab Mai von 2 auf 4 Solarpanele aufgerüstet. Das sind um die 40 % meines Jahresverbrauchs ohne Solar. Bin sehr gespannt, wie das 2026 wird.
You can also help by requesting that your library carry #solarpunk! Helps the authors with both purchases by the library and discovery by the patrons. Helps people discover and try solarpunk risk-free. Helps the libraries know what to stock. Win all around!
