Absolute madwoman that I am I went and gone and done did it
The Watermelon Manifesto (solarpunk and a future worth fighting for)
The culture around us, most especially the worlds of speculative
fiction and independent music, is replete with trends ending in -punk,
representing alternative visions of the world, and one of the newest,
having entered the public discourse only about five years ago, is
solarpunk. But aren’t there enough of these punks floating around
already? What is it that makes solarpunk so special?
Put simply, solarpunk is a rupture with these other subcultural
trends because it presents an alternative vision of the world which is
both desirable and achievable, unlike its predecessors. For example,
steampunk presents a Romantic vision of an alternative present based on a
retrofuturist reimagining of the development of industry, while
cyberpunk presents people moving through and surviving within a grim and
dystopic vision of the future. The former is pure fantasy, whereas the
latter, though imminently possible and becoming ever more relevant in
these the waning days capitalism in decay, is deeply undesirable.
The world envisioned by solarpunk is imminently achievable, reliant
on technological and social developments that are not only well within
our reach but that, in many places, are already in use today. And from
these building blocks, it presents to us a vision of the world that’s
based in the most radical, most revolutionary of all human emotions:
Hope.
Solarpunk is a rejection of the crawling chaos of Silicon Valley’s
third-positionist technocracy as well as the liberal and
settler-colonialist nature of mainstream environmentalism and the toxic
and hopeless nihilism and creeping ecofascism and natioanl-anarchism of
primitivism or so-called “post-civ” anarchism. Fictioneers dream of a
world where technology is neither abused for profit and excess nor
abandoned, but serves human need; where goods and services are produced
not in service of profit, but rationally, in service of the needs of our
communities; a world where we are no longer alienated, no longer have
to live our lives alone, but can exist genuinely as a part of our
community, free and equal, a world decolonized and repatriated where we
no longer oppress one another on bases of race or gender or ability. And
it’s a green new world, a world of social ecology, where we recognize
that human beings with all of our constructs and our technology are not
stewards of the natural world nor need be its expropriators, but are a
part of it, blood and bone, as much as we’re a part of any human
community.
And this can be more than idle speculative fiction. As I said above,
solarpunk’s alternative vision of the world is based on futurist
speculation of technology that has been developed, of sociopolitical
structures that are already extant in miniature. For the movement to
become a reality, to become a real force in the world, requires rational
implementation. But, sadly, implementation will require a radical
change in the economic base.
Our present mode of production will never allow this future to come into
being so long as it stands, ever lumbering ahead under the oppressive
weight of its own failure. All of the carbon taxes and Green New Deals
the bourgeois state can dream up will not save us, for the rough beast
of capitalism, ever-hungry to generate more capital and concentrate that
capital into fewer and fewer hands, will ever lurch knowingly towards
its own destruction so long as more profit can be squeezed out of our
dying planet, so long as the bourgeoisie remain convinced they can
weather the storm they are dragging us all into the heart of. It is
incumbent upon us, the people, to save ourselves. As the coming crisis
deepens, extreme weather ravages the land, populations are displaced,
moribund empires shake at their foundations, it is incumbent upon us to
learn how to weather the storm.
And misanthropic nihilism gives us no liberatory solution. The
retreat of the bourgeois state as crisis deepens will highten
capitalism’s contradictions, will reveal more cracks in the armor,
presenting ever more opportunities for us to assert ourselves. The rank
defeatism of the post-left will pass these opportunities by, leaving
capitalism unchallenged to adapt to the new conditions as it has done so
many times in the past; is it not the great failure of Marx, that he
failed to anticipate how well and quickly capitalism might adapt?
Moreover, the crises of capitalism in decay will cause, are already
causing, mass displacements of human life, and the deep misanthropy of
primitivism as well as primitivism’s wholly wrong and unscientific
Malthusian ideological base provides a ready breeding ground for
reaction; primitivism is merely the boneless cousin of
national-anarchism and ecofascism.
Our revolutionary watchword is hope, hope based in the knowledge that
we have to tools to save ourselves at our fingertips. We must dare to
invent the future. Our job is first to dare to imagine a future that’s
worth fighting for, and to then fight for it. The path forward, the road
out of the darkness and into this new world, is simple enough to say:
Organize.
This isn’t going to be an easy journey, not by any means. We are in
for the fight of our lives. The place where decaying capitalism is
leading us is not a good place. We will have to walk through wire and
fire to make it through this, and we’re gonna bury friends along the
way. But we will make it.
We can make it through together. All we have to do is organize, and we can fight, and when we fight, we win.
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old For the union makes us strong
The best time for neighbors and co-workers to become friends, for
friends to become better friends, for communities to come together, was
yesterday. The second-best time is today. Soon, nothing else will
matter.
But that’s not a message of despair. It’s a message of hope. Because when we fight, we win.
And we will win. And someday the fight will be over. And someday a
new generation of babies will be born, and they’ll grow up knowing
nothing but freedom.
Somewhere outside right now is a sapling growing up through a crack
in the pavement. Someday it will be a tree, towering over the street,
its branches kissing the balconies of the buildings nearby, with the
pavement that once tried to restrain it shattered and thrown up in slabs
to either side, crumbling in its shade.
But for now, it’s just a little sapling, just an acorn that happened
to roll into a little crack, just a little bit of green barely visible
in the smoke and smog. But every day, our little sapling gets just a bit
taller, and the crack just a bit wider.
It knows hope, and it’s not afraid to dream.
“We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know
how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that
we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in
Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others
to take their place, and better ones. We are not in the least afraid of
ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest
doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their own world
before they leave the stage of history. We carry a new world, here in
our hearts. That world is growing this minute.” –Durruti
Jessica Meir dreamed of the day she would make it to space since the age of five. That dream became a reality Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, as she left Earth on her first spaceflight – later floating into her new home aboard the International Space Station. Jessica lifted off from Kazakhstan in the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft at 9:57 a.m. EDT (1357 GMT) alongside spaceflight participant Ali Almansoori, the first United Arab Emirates astronaut, and Oleg Skripochka, a Russian cosmonaut.
As an Expedition 61 and 62 crew member, Jessica will spend six months in the vacuum of space – conducting research on a multitude of science investigations and participating in several Human Research Program studies.
While Jessica’s new home is about 200 miles over the Earth, this astronaut is no stranger to extreme environments. She’s studied penguins in Antarctica and mapped caves in Italy, all of which prepared her for the ultimate extreme environment: space. Get to know astronaut and scientist, Jessica Meir.
Antarctic Field Researcher
For her Ph.D. research, Jessoca studied the diving physiology of marine mammals and birds. Her filed research took her all the way to Antarctica, where she focused on oxygen depletion in diving emperor penguins. Jessica is also an Antarctic diver!
Geese Trainer
Image Credit: UBC Media Relations
Jessica investigated the high‐flying bar-headed goose during her post‐doctoral research at the University of British Columbia .She trained geese to fly in a wind tunnel while obtaining various physiological measurements in reduced oxygen conditions.
Wilderness Survival Expert
In 2013, Jessica was selected as an Astronaut Candidate. While training to be a full-fledged astronaut, she participated in three days of wilderness survival training near Rangeley, Maine, the first phase of her intensive astronaut training program.
Mission Control Flight Controller
In the astronaut office, Jessica has extensive mission control experience, including serving as the Lead Capsule Communicator (CapCom) for Expedition 47, the BEAM (Bigelow expandable module on the International Space Station) mission, and an HTV (Japanese Space Agency cargo vehicle) mission. The CapCom is the flight controller that speaks directly to the astronaut crew in space, on behalf of the rest of the Mission Control team.
She’s reconnecting with her best friend… in space!
Following a successful launch and six hour journey to the space station, NASA astronaut Christina Koch tweeted this image of Jessica and the crew arriving to the orbital lab in a Soyuz spacecraft. Excitement was high as Christina tweeted, “What it looks like from @Space_Station when your best friend achieves her lifelong dream to go to space. Caught the second stage in progress! We can’t wait to welcome you onboard, crew of Soyuz 61!”
We know. #FriendshipGoals.
Follow Jessica on Twitter at @Astro_Jessica and follow the International Space Station on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to keep up with all the cool stuff happening on our orbital laboratory.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
