The punk in solarpunk
There been another discussion going through reddit, wondering where is the punk in solarpunk (this was prompted by a piece of art that declared itself solarpunk, though was a great depiction of ecofascism). The art led to ConnorCarbon making a post, here’s my $0.02:
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.
As it says at the top of the wiki:
Solarpunk is everything from a positive imagining of our collective futures to actually creating it.
The only reason why we don’t live in a solarpunk world right now is because no one has bothered to make it yet.
We’ll have to make it ourselves, and we’ll have to help each other make it. That’s why it is solarpunk.“
On this day, 19 August 1944, this photograph was taken in Paris of 18 year old French Resistance fighter, Simone Segouin, with war name Nicole Minet. She had come from Chartres to help liberate the capital. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1191264511058697/?type=3
