videos

When I say "polycultures like Three Sisters can outperform broadacre cereals", and you say "actually it's Four Sisters btw" (that term is nowhere near as commonplace as the one I gave), you are doing an extreme case of nitpicking.

When I say "mass commodity crops that get highly refined are ultimately not good for our health" and you say "they are actually better because they won't get wasted as much", you are defending industrial monoculture for globalized commodity production.

When you say "it isn't possible to make flooded canals over every city to make floating gardens in" you are saying something extremely obvious that doesn't prove anything or advance the discussion. No one is making the assumption that what works on a mountain lake can be replicated all across the world, this is obvious and you are using it as a strawman. I'm not going to list every tradition of polyculture for you, I was giving two examples that are either already present in the thread or extremely widespread and well-known.

When you say "chinampas don't promote a 'oneness with nature' characteristic of solarpunk", you are contradicting the original claims that solarpunk is too broad, and making an arbitrary line that does not exist in the genre. Any depiction of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan would be highly suited to solarpunk. Milpas, ahupua'a stream terracing, Inraren-style food forests, they all would look well-placed in solarpunk. In fact one of the problems with solarpunk is hanging on to the element of broadacre monocrop fields.

When you say "there's no change in the demands on arable land [between two different crops that provide the same number of calories]" that is simply wrong. Growing field corn for 2 million calories of chemically homogenized corn derivatives is far more damaging to the soil than growing 2 million calories of chestnuts or hazelnuts is, to say nothing of the logistical burden, health outcomes, or other structural issues around industrial farming.

Or if you are ignoring my point about how industrial commodity agriculture is ultimately bad for everything, and just zoning in on "bleached flour vs. unbleached", you are nitpicking to avoid actually engaging with what I'm saying. I should have said "not adaptive for our food system" instead of "not essential to our nutrition" though.

When you imply that solarpunk envisions a big gentry-like homestead for everyone, you are ignoring the majority of the genre which suggests a city/countryside dichotomy and plenty of small consolidated residential units. I haven't seen evidence that people in solarpunk settings live in ultra-low densities, which seemed to be the core of your argument.

Appropriate Technology is a rigorous term that refers to technologies that are sustainable, accessible, adapted to local factors/constraints, and maintainable by people that use them; the corollary of this is that they do not increase scarcity, and decrease alienation. It is not equivalent to "appropriate use of technology", and interchanging the two is just showing your unfamiliarity with the subject. Appropriate tech is nearly inseparable from an ecological emphasis, and it is a vital part of any model that projects to still be operational 150 years from now. At some point we're going to need to resort to our own body power, energy from photosynthesis, and long-lifespan solar panels... this kind of sounds like it would be a core pillar of a certain art/design genre.

Maybe I'm biased because my own experience engaging with the genre overlapped with my personal radicalization and the struggle to imagine what decolonized and decommodified life would look like, but I see a deep usefulness in it. Growing and harvesting things yourself, relying on the people you live nearby instead of the global market, and keeping your consumption within the bounds of your solar envelope sound like the most plausible pillars of solarpunk to me. Oh, and touching grass.

The video creator's points were that without a clear sense of boundaries, solarpunk can have its identity diluted, and if it only depicts the finished product, it can end up as nothing more than escapism and end up completely disconnected from our living practices. These are deeply true and apply to any aesthetic movement/style.

But so much of the criticism ITT and elsewhere boils down to "I don't see it in the subset that I glanced at, therefore it doesn't exist throughout the genre". Especially wrt labor and wild lands. For wild lands, they'd just be the same, a solarpunk wilderness scene looks on the surface the same as pretty much any other wilderness scene. As for labor, having gardens right next to houses implies that the people in the houses tend the gardens. I said this before in one of Ysgwñss' threads that became the last (?) solarpunk struggle session, you're not going to be inundated with imagery of people doing manual labor when one of the goals is for us all to have less labor that needs to be done.

You could just be honest and say "I don't like solarpunk because it's not explicitly Marxist enough" and be done with it. I'm not interested in losing track of the topic through back and forth arguments.

What I am interested in is being prefigurative, experimental, and living in a way that is consistent with revolutionary ideals and long-term vision, where the means are continuous with the ends.