I’ve always viewed the punk aspect as the DIY / grassroots combined with mutual aid / community building. Solarpunk is engineering students and tinkerers hanging out in maker spaces creating things that benefit everyone. Solarpunk is not engineers working for Tesla making shit for the 1%.
If you’re serious about reusing and recycling, you’re gonna find yourself curb picking, hanging out in dumpsters, at garbage dumps, in metal recycling facilities. If you’re super serious about the environment you’re gonna be chaining yourself up to trees, you’ll be at protests, you’ll be creating a ruckus. You’ll be creating.
I often think of solarpunk as a verb. It’s not something you are or are not, it’s something you do. A label is meaningless, that guerrilla garden you created, the community garden you nurture with your friends, your workplace that you helped to unionize - is not.
On this day, 25 May 1895, libertarian socialist author Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for two years’ hard labour for “indecency” for having sex with men. Though many potential witnesses refused to testify against him, he was convicted, and upon sentencing judge stated: “It is the worst case I have ever tried. I shall pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labor for two years.” Tragically his detention would cause him serious health problems which eventually contributed to his untimely death.
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On this day, 2 June 1863, the Combahee River raid took place, with formerly enslaved and underground railroad activist Harriet Tubman leading 150 black Union soldiers. The only woman known to have led a military operation during the American civil war, it was a major success in which 750 enslaved people were freed and the estates of several wealthy secessionist landowners were looted and burned. Tubman has of course been in the news again recently, following the Trump administration deciding to push back featuring her on the $20 bill by several years until after Trump leaves office. She had been set to replace Andrew Jackson, the former president and vicious slave owner, who owned hundreds of enslaved people during his lifetime, whom he beat and whipped. Jackson also ordered the forced removal of large numbers of Native Americans, killing tens of thousands.
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