Solarpunk: When your ideology is pictures : videos

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 37 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Yesssss. I've been saying this.

I don't mean to shit on people who are into solarpunk but it's really just an aesthetic imo. It's really nice visually but it isn't anything more than that and talking about it as if it's a political ideology is doing it, yourself, and political discourse a disservice.

Look, there's a whole lot of value in imagining a better future especially amongst the doomer malaise of the western left that broadly seems incapable of aspiring to much of anything. I love the aspirational propaganda posters from the USSR and the DPRK and Vietnam etc. They are great. This exercise is valuable. But it's only valuable insofar as it motivates you to make change and to keep focused on what you are working towards; a bookshelf can have a library of books but that will only ever function as a collection of objects unless you actually pick up those books and read them. Likewise with a solarpunk aesthetic, or something else like that, it's only a collection of images unless you are working towards bringing about a world that looks and, more importantly, functions like that.

[–] SootySootySoot@hexbear.net 21 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

I mean, sure, I agree. But unless I missed something, I never saw any significant number of people claim otherwise. Solarpunk was always just an aesthetic and a cool envisioning of possible future life. I never saw it portrayed as an 'ideology'.

Aesthetics and shared artistic ideas are revolutionary in importance, I appreciate you saying they have value, but what I do frequently see is such a weird amount of pushback to it. Yeah read theory mfers, but this is important.

Solarpunk is the first non-AES art genre(/small scale art movement) I've personally seen that's genuinely trying to feel out, build and coalesce a shared vision, beauty and sense of wonder about the world we're aiming for, and I'd mark that as equally if not more important to a successful socialist victory.

At no point should we be regarding this kind of revolutionary art and sentiment as an obstacle; Yeah it can't be the ONLY basis for revolution, but it's a form of communication I'd argue that is criminally underused in social movements, because it can speak to billions of people more effectively than words, and we would do well to actively embrace and evolve it.

[–] CarmineCatboy2@hexbear.net 35 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

I always thought that the problem with stuff like the Solarpunk Manifesto is that it's like Soviet Aesthetic purged of workers and labor. I could make a drawing or a song based on the ideal of Communism, such as it may exist in the far (hopefully not too far) future. Soviet art tends not to depict that per se, instead what you see is workers labouring and happy to be labouring under Socialism, building out that Communist ideal. Solarpunk as an ideology is meant to be an antidote to despair, so the ideal Solarpunk world is already built.

The focus of Soviet art always seemed on people, wether they were working, fighting or building that Communist ideal. The focus of Solarpunk is on places, it is farms, gardens and green plazas, all devoid of mosquitoes, never being built but always being used - and I think only a minority of the Solarpunk artists caught up with that and started adding people on work suits doing the work of maintaining those places.

This is a picture I found online of a Sistema Agro-Florestal (Agri-Forest System) in Brazil. It is an idea that is arising under capitalism to combine local, native flora with staple foods and cash crops, in a way that permits you to more reliably control pests and cut back on both fertilizer and presticides. It also allows you to utilize land for food production without completely breaking down natural ecosystems, as native fauna like birds, mammals and insects, can make use of the Forest part of the system for transit and other purposes.

If I'm not mistaken, this sort of thing is also becoming a thing in upscale coffee farms in order to a) improve crop quality due to symbiosis, b) reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events such as heatwaves and extreme rains. There's also the idea to increase cocoa production in Brazil back to historical levels, as the country has had to deal with the Witch's Broom plague for decades at this point. So its not limited to small scale family farms either. Again, its an idea of that is arising in capitalist Brazil and, presumably, in many other places as well.

This is a drawing by a magazine in capitalist Brazil depicting an idealized version of Agri-Forest systems.. There's a guy using a hoe to till the soil and there's another guy climbing a ladder to harvest fruit. Idealized in a way, as there's no use of machinery, not even for watering crops. But its something human and achievable right away.

And this is a Solarpunk farm. Labor is only implied - the lady is having her cup of coffee in the morning, raring to go. But go where? The even larger implication is that everything is automated. The future is optimistic. Even the picking of delicate, fresh fruit has been optimized by ghibli octoarms machines.

Then you've got the floating gardens in places like Mexico, which harness native techniques to create pockets of extreme fertility and endurance in the middle of Mexico City. It really is something to behold but it is not something that can be appreciated without the labor involved in creating, maintaining and cleaning canal farms in the middle of a metropolis.

My hypothesis is that what forces of production remain in the US are so regressive that the people with a positive, environmental outlook into the future just aren't in industry or farming. They are city dwellers who, for the most part, wish their cities were livable spaces. Whereas elsewhere in the Global South, however regressive the landowners and capitalists may be when it comes to rewarding labor, environmental pressures do force them and their media to open the way for different ways of doing things. Even if it starts as a cynical ploy to acquire carbon credits or greenwash their initiatives of capital, something like a large scale sugar farm that doesn't do harvest burns respond to a real, social demand for fewer miserable months of mass air pollution in a year, for an instance - while also being a frontier for capital investment.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

This is a really good response and I wanted to elaborate on it a little but I don't have much juice left in my battery so it's gonna be more of a sketch than a fully fleshed out reply like yours:

Solarpunk feels reminiscent of that Marx quote, that it is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Although it's transposed onto the political realm and urban design rather than the spiritual.)

I think so much of this goes back to the urge that traces its roots to a Thoreauvian desire to "return to nature" and to realign oneself with the "good", away from the debased reality of society as it exists around us. It's a way of checking out of society and this urge is endemic in the west, especially in the US, where it seems like every other person longs to check out from their conditions and escape to an alienated, self-sufficient back-to-nature lifestyle on a generous homestead. (Look, I'm gonna be real - I can't lie and say that this doesn't hold an allure for me too but the solution to political ills is never and will never be to escape and check out from politics.)

The thing is though that a solarpunk world isn't one that is a degrowth or sustainable growth society but it's only possible to achieve this bucolic utopian vision by depopulation; there absolutely is not enough acreage available even if we had multiple earths to provide this lifestyle for everyone while also being sustainable and while having sufficient wild regions that maintain healthy biodiversity and a stable ecology. Strange that the solarpunk vision never seems to have room for wild spaces within its vision, just like how it conspicuously omits labor.

And there's the rub - it's really an alienated, deeply consumerist vision of what it's like to be "back in nature" or whatever from the perspective of an urban or suburban westerner; there are no stables to muck out, no weeds to pull, no battling against the elements and instead fruit drops from the trees into your hands and the crops grow themselves. It's a very mystified or mythologized post capitalist techno-eden that feels very, very petit-bourgeois in spirit and especially in its view of the world. Yeah, it's not the same as a European aristocrat's lavish estate from a few centuries back but it feels like it has a lot more in common with that than it has the people who are producing the coffee to make your morning comfort a reality while you wistfully gaze out at rolling hills with babbling brooks and wind power generation as an electrified bullet train whizzes between the meadows in the background.

[–] CarmineCatboy2@hexbear.net 4 points 6 days ago

Solarpunk feels reminiscent of that Marx quote, that it is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Although it's transposed onto the political realm and urban design rather than the spiritual.)

This is why I think its important to be charitable about criticisms of Solarpunk. It does come from a genuine place. It's not the vapid futurism that Tech Oligarchs sell. And the video does make this point well: its not enough to have an aesthetic, you have to ask yourself how you get to that Solarpunk ideal, because, after all is said and done, if your aesthetic and your wellwishes do not arise from a concrete programme it becomes the easiest thing to co-op. Especially by said Tech Oligarchs. This, of course, without asking oneself any questions about de-growth, consumerism or the economic system in place. Even within a capitalist framework you have to be smart about it, otherwise you'll never get those walkable cities you so desire.

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

it's only possible to achieve this bucolic utopian vision by depopulation; there absolutely is not enough acreage available even if we had multiple earths to provide this lifestyle for everyone

Are you sure about that?

One, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and acorns have a calories-per-acre production metric that rivals or surpasses broadacre cereal crops. It is not an accident that they are well established as food crops across the northern hemisphere's temperate forest regions.

Two, companion planting or polyculture is more productive per acre than broadacre farming. Chinampas (which CarmineCatboy posted) and Three Sisters plantings are two examples of wildly productive formats. The difference is that polyculture is labor-intensive, and conventional agriculture economizes labor above all else. We certainly won't be able to feed the world with 1% of people working as farmers as the West does now, but 10-20% farmers would be feasible. If you bring the energy cost and embodied energy of farm equipment into account, conventional farms fall even further behind.

Three, the standard Western farm grows wheat or field corn or soy and about half of all this goes to livestock feed or biofuels, then most of the remainder is refined into corn syrup or modified food starch or bleached flour or hydrogenated vegetable oil and so on. These especially shelf stable commodities are not essential to our nutrition.

Four, conventional farming is depleting our topsoil and our oil resources and our other mineral resources, and it won't last until the beginning of the next century anyway.

The idea that we need conventional agriculture to survive was planted in our heads by the capitalists, and we need to unlearn it.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

And we could provide for 10x the current population if we shifted agricultural production to wolffia or azolla but that's not the point. I said this directly after talking about the image of a homestead, hence the term bucolic and talking about it in terms of lifestyle and not in sheer terms of agricultural productivity. The fact of the matter is that there is not enough habitable land to provide a homestead to 8 billion+ people.

I already know that polyculture farming is more productive but chinampas are not a model which is suitable for intensive farming in many places in the world and, like it or not, chinampas do not embody the vision of a oneness with nature that solarpunk promotes; establishing chinampas will require dramatically changing the waterways and thus the local ecology so it's not some magic bullet that resolves all of these issues. There are plenty of freshwater fish that are endangered around the world that probably wouldn't survive if we turned all the world's freshwater waterways into chinampas for food production. It's four sisters btw.

These especially shelf stable commodities are not essential to our nutrition.

Most foods are not essential to our nutrition. Bleached flour or unbleached flour, it doesn't change much in regard to if it's essential to our nutrition and it doesn't change the demands on arable land except for the fact that the more shelf stable a food is, the less food waste is incurred due to spoilage. I don't really get what your point is.

Four, conventional farming is depleting our topsoil and our oil resources and our other mineral resources, and it won't last until the beginning of the next century anyway.

Yes, but it's not a binary question of maintaining the current system or switching to solarpunk and this framing is disingenuous.

The idea that we need conventional agriculture to survive was planted in our heads by the capitalists, and we need to unlearn it.

This doesn't come off as being in good faith. I never said that we must maintain our current system of agricultural production or that it's totally fine. That was never my point and I didn't argue that whatsoever.

I was reserving this criticism of solarpunk politics but it's very retrograde in its outlook and I've never seen defenders of it beat the allegations that it advocates for a "return to nature" to reconnect with some essentialness of being human. In all honesty it seems to me to be this eclectic, aestheticized pseudopolitics or at its heart it's anprim ideology with a coat of permaculture-inspired paint to make it more palatable. We can't just throw chinampas at the problem and call it good; ecologists and agronomists at the top of their fields will tell you that it's very complex and dependent upon the local conditions and there aren't many simple solutions.

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Solarpunk doesn't have prescriptions about how things are grown, just some permaculture overlap. The comment you were responding to had pictures of both chinampas and agroforestry. If you're not talking about that, then you're arguing against something nebulous and undefined. Is it practical to try to define solarpunk as "anything you want it to be", or is it more practical to call it "appropriate tech with transparent social structures, and an environment that is scaled to human comprehension"?

Of course the Texcoco style won't be suitable around the globe. There are lots of vernacular approaches for every corner of the globe, pre-capitalism. No need to trip over yourself to justify homogenized grain and pulse products, these are not good for human health or for ecology, and they end up getting wasted at a similar rate anyway around the point of consumption.

The only rigorous and non-debatebro part of your post is saying that we can't give everyone a homestead with fields and buffer space. And yeah, sure. But the comment you're replying to also has a low-rise city skyline that's implied to be within cycling distance.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that solarpunk is anything more than a gateway drug, but if it's not something that gets eaten up by cottagecore, it ends up orienting toward ecology and accessibility.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Solarpunk doesn't have prescriptions about how things are grown

Yeah, but this is my exact point - it's not rigorous, it's just vibes and aesthetics. That's the whole point of my criticisms.

The comment you were responding to had pictures of both chinampas and agroforestry.

I am aware. Did I not just describe my criticisms of chinampas in the comment you just replied to?

Why do you presume I needed to be informed of this so deep into the replies?

If you're not talking about that, then you're arguing against something nebulous and undefined.

I don't understand what you're saying here. I wasn't responding to the use or depiction of chinampas or agroforestry. I'm responding to the lack of political dimensions and the lack of program inherent to the solarpunk movement.

I'm not sure how I could have made that clearer unless I specifically prefaced my first comment with "This is not about the agriculture methods depicted in the images above".

Is it practical to try to define solarpunk as "anything you want it to be", or is it more practical to call it "appropriate tech with transparent social structures, and an environment that is scaled to human comprehension"?

That's a question for people who count themselves as part of the solarpunk movement.

But to me "appropriate" is a floating signifier as much as "in line with ecology" is - if you drill down into the details, all you find is vibes.

Of course the Texcoco style won't be suitable around the globe.

So what was the point in giving me the cliff notes of chinampas exactly unless you were trying to flex your knowledge and position the discussion as if I had no idea what they are?

You keep on attempting to school me on chinampas for some reason. I don't get it.

No need to trip over yourself to justify homogenized grain and pulse products

Again, I never said anything like this. I never argued in favor of conventional agriculture nor did I say that it's justified. You're tilting at windmills.

and they end up getting wasted at a similar rate anyway around the point of consumption.

I have zero clue what point you're trying to make here. In comparison to what? Based on what evidence?

The only rigorous and non-debatebro part of your post

See this is where I take issue with your attitude in these replies. You have approached this discussion as if there are only two options and that any criticism of solarpunk as an aesthetic masquerading as a political program equates to defending conventional agriculture and the typical western diet.

On top of that, instead of actually engaging with my arguments you decided that I don't know basic terms and that I needed to be told about food production methods like chinampas. Then you sling an insult at me by calling me a debatebro. That's dismal. If you take issue with debatebro comments then you should reflect on how you've approached this exchange with me.

The only rigorous and non-debatebro part of your post is saying that we can't give everyone a homestead with fields and buffer space.

That was the entire point of what I was saying. The fact that you felt it necessary to gripe about bleached flour and shelf-stable foods and it's only when this deep into the replies that you finally start discussing the point really illustrates your hypocrisy in calling me a debatebro.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that solarpunk is anything more than a gateway drug, but if it's not something that gets eaten up by cottagecore, it ends up orienting toward ecology and accessibility.

Not from what I've seen. I just see buzzwords like "appropriate use of technology" being deployed to avoid engaging with matters of implementation. I don't see any real engagement with ecology.

Just like with what permaculture has become today, so too is solarpunk. I've seen people with waterlogged soil making swales that further exacerbate the problems of water management on their land because they only understand form and not function, the same can be said with countless rocket stoves and rocket mass heaters - it's an utter disregard for any design principles because it has become aestheticized and a rocket mass heater has somehow become a symbol of permaculture. This is the exact same problem inherent to solarpunk except for the fact that solarpunk started as an aesthetic and, for all its problems and all the criticisms of it, at least permaculture was founded on serious agro-ecological design principles. The same cannot be said for the solarpunk movement.

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 1 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 4 points 5 days ago

Then you've got the floating gardens in places like Mexico, which harness native techniques to create pockets of extreme fertility and endurance in the middle of Mexico City. It really is something to behold but it is not something that can be appreciated without the labor involved in creating, maintaining and cleaning canal farms in the middle of a metropolis.

That looks so fucking cool. Far cooler than some shitty yogurt commercial.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I never saw any significant number of people claim otherwise.

It's definitely niche and it seems to be much more of a cul-de-sac for baby leftists, although you see the odd solarpunk person in primarily anarchist spaces just like you do with the odd egoist. There are also works of solarpunk theory, to use that term generously, but idk if anyone aside from the hardcore fans actually take any of it seriously.

I agree with everything else you have said aside from this part:

I'd mark that as equally if not more important to a successful socialist victory.

I'm a staunch materialist so imo the socialist revolution is more important because it's a necessary precondition and we can work on building the future from that point. [Insert all other the standard boilerplate materialist arguments which I'm not gonna bore you with here]

[–] Soot@hexbear.net 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Ah, sorry, I think I perhaps worded the last point poorly. I meant it's equally if not more important [than unspecified other things] in achieving a successful socialist victory. Yes the socialist revolution is absolutely a necessary precondition.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 3 points 5 days ago

I get you. I figured that you didn't mean it that way (although I wasn't gonna tell you what you meant with your own words), hence why I didn't litigate a whole argument telling you why I thought your take was the wrong one.

[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 24 points 6 days ago (2 children)

A lot of these pictures are of stuff that's real in China right now. Blimp windfarms, agrivoltaics, windmills next to the high speed rail.

[–] LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins@hexbear.net 6 points 6 days ago

but where's all the chinese people

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Please send pica of Chinese blimp windfarms, that sounds neat

[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 2 points 5 days ago

This thing produces 1MW of power and is designed to operate over a kilometer up in the sky

[–] towhee@hexbear.net 16 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

never forget this banger by the cruelty squad dev:

Cruelty Squad uses Godot by the way. It's good. Play it!

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 4 points 5 days ago

I have lived on what is basically a solarpunk commune, they just don't call it that because they lead off with their values, goals, and methods. There's solar panels and big gardens and wood shacks and cob huts, and there's also cars and big vans and dumpster diving and power tools hooked up to gas-powered generators and a lot of scrappy, half-finished stuff.

[–] Arahnya@hexbear.net 11 points 6 days ago

I propose that solarpunk is when you tear down highways to daylight rivers in cities, which has been done sucessfully before. Also decentering cars in cities in general.

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 3 points 5 days ago

You could probably generalize this to say that any movement, if it doesn't incorporate proximal or intermediate steps into a way of life, is going to be disingenuous about what it aspires to.

If you're not moving toward your preferred future, that future will never exist.

[–] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 3 points 6 days ago

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

[–] puppygirlpets@hexbear.net 1 points 5 days ago

i can't take a movement spawned from a yogurt advert seriously