solarpunkworld

[solarpunkworld]

Y'all follow my main blog @muavery where I regularly post. I forget about this sideblog.

[solarpunkworld]

[solarpunkworld]

The Honey House: Cob home made by 3 girls, plenty of helpers, only $1500 and a whole lot of mud love

[solarpunkworld]

Plastic water bottles might soon be a thing of the past thanks to these incredible edible water bubbles created by an innovative sustainable packaging start-up based in London, UK.

The bubbles, called the Ooho!, are created by encasing a blob of drinking water within an edible membrane made from a natural seaweed extract. Nothing goes to waste, and the product will fully biodegrade in 4-6 weeks if left unconsumed.

The team behind this brilliant idea is called Skipping Rocks Lab, a bunch of engineering graduates from RCA and Imperial College London who first introduced their ground-breaking concept in 2013. Since then they’ve been working hard to make their dream a reality, and a crowdfunding page they recently set up has already raised over 600k GBP (750k USD) in just a few days. Given that the US alone uses an estimated 35 billion plastic bottles per year, and given that plastic water bottles take hundreds of years to decompose, this sounds like a brilliant idea that everybody should get behind. (Source)

[solarpunkworld]

Guerrilla Gardening

Guerrilla Gardening is the act of illegally gardening in spaces that are not technically yours to garden, to make subversive statements, protests, or as a form of direct action. The idea goes all the way back to 1973!

In other words, guerrilla gardeners take unloved or neglected land and assign it a new purpose – to make things pretty or useful. Cities are full of waste land and unused public spaces which people walk past every day without noticing. Spaces which would look a lot better if they were green!

Some guerrilla gardeners prefer to work at night when they can be more discreet. Others are activists who’ll do so in broad daylight, when everyone can see what they’re doing. Some choose to grow flowers to make places brighter. Others choose to grow fruit or vegetables (though care should be taken not to grow anything edible in places where plants might absorb toxins).

I don’t know why I haven’t posted any guerrilla gardening things on this blog yet, and I think I should change that. 

In the meantime, here are some links!

GuerrillaGardening.org

Guerrilla gardening: a report from the frontline

How to Start Guerrilla Gardening

Ron Finley: The Gangsta Gardener

What is guerrilla gardening?

[solarpunkworld]

🌿💐🌱Joanna’s Garden 🌱💐🌿

[solarpunkworld]

Status of the Paris Climate Agreement, by nation. Currently 173 nations have ratified it, 22 have signed the agreement but have yet to ratify it, and 1 country is trying to withdraw, April 2018.

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Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.

The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.

The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.”

The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic – far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process.

(via Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles | The Guardian)

[solarpunkworld]

absolutely nothing should be sold for a profit if its absence can kill you.

water shouldn’t be sold for a profit.

food shouldn’t be sold for a profit.

healthcare shouldn’t be sold for a profit.

any system where people can die because they’re unable to access these resources needs to be dismantled.

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IN THESE TIMES

You’ve been fired. According to your employer’s data, your facial expressions showed you were insubordinate and not trustworthy. You also move your hands at a rate that is considered substandard. Other companies you may want to work for could receive this data, making it difficult for you to find other work in this field.

That may sound like a scenario straight out of a George Orwell novel, but it’s the future many American workers could soon be facing.

In early February, media outlets reported that Amazon had received a patent for ultrasonic wristbands that could track the movement of warehouse workers’ hands during their shifts. If workers’ hands began moving in the wrong direction, the wristband would buzz, issuing an electronic corrective. If employed, this technology could easily be used to further surveil employees who already work under intense supervision.

Whole Foods, which is now owned by Amazon, recently instituted a complex and punitive inventory system where employees are graded based on everything from how quickly and effectively they stock shelves to how they report theft. The system is so harsh it reportedly causes employees enough stress to bring them to tears on a regular basis.

UPS drivers, who often operate individually on the road, are now becoming increasingly surveilled. Sensors in every UPS truck track when drivers’ seatbelts are put on, when doors open and close and when the engines start in order to monitor employee productivity at all times.

The technology company Steelcase has experimented with monitoring employees’ faces to judge their expressions. The company claims that this innovation, which monitors and analyzes workers’ facial movements throughout the work day, is being used for research and to inform best practices on the job. Other companies are also taking interest in this kind of mood-observing technology, from Bank of America to Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc.

These developments are part of a larger trend of workers being watched and judged—often at jobs that offer low pay and demand long hours. Beyond simply tracking worker performance, it is becoming more common for companies to monitor the emails and phone calls their employees make, analyzing personal traits along with output.

Some companies are now using monitoring techniques—referred to as “people analytics”—to learn as much as they can about you, from your communication patterns to what types of websites you visit to how often you use the bathroom. This type of privacy invasion can cause employees immense stress, as they work with the constant knowledge that their boss is aware of their every behavior—and able to use that against them as they see fit.

Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute at Cornell University, tells In These Times that the level of surveillance workers are facing is increasing exponentially.

“If you look at what some people call ‘people analytics,’ it’s positively frightening,” Maltby says. “People analytics devices get how often you talk, the tone of your voice, where you are every single second you’re at work, your body language, your facial expressions and something called ‘patterns of interaction.’” He explains that some of these devices even record what employees say at work.

(Continue Reading)

[solarpunkworld]

Hey, listen: We’re not gonna get anywhere with this “socialism” stuff unless we can establish solidarity networks that provide real, tangible aid. And I do mean “tangible” in the sense of “you can fill up a box with it.”

Back in the old-timey days, when we didn’t have things like a minimum wage or government assistance, folks didn’t think twice about paying union dues every month out of their meager paychecks. And in those days, when it was a regular, everyday occurrence for union people to get beat up or outright murdered for their union-ing, the unions still managed to win a lot of their fights. Reason for all that? The bigger part of them union dues I mentioned *went into a strike fund*.

Time on a picket line means time off the clock. And as for me, in this economy, if I go a week without a check, my family don’t eat. I go two weeks without a check, and we’re homeless. And them’s the brakes.

[solarpunkworld]

Before we can live in a world of vertical gardens covering stained glass skyscrapers, we need to build a world of backyard garden boxes made of reclaimed wood. Before we can cover every rooftop with solar panels, we need to equip every home with solar smokeless cooking made of scrap metal

The appeal of those green cityscapes in the pretty pictures isn’t just that they’re hi-tech and clean, it’s that they sprout from a society that values compassion, the environment, and human lives more than it values profit. We need to build that society first, and we need to build it from the ground up with what we have available

The solarpunk future is for our grandchildren. Our job is to pave the way for it

[solarpunkworld]

the core tenets of most far-left ideology are pretty simple - we, collectively, produce more than enough resources to feed, house, clothe, educate, heal, and protect every single person on this planet. but we don’t. this is a moral failing of humanity, and needs to be corrected.

[solarpunkworld]

do you have to be a socialist or anarchist to be solarpunk?

I wouldn’t say you’d have to consider yourself one of those two labels, but I do think a precondition of solarpunk is “a better world is possible” — and that implies opposing the status quo formation of society. People of all stripes have opposed capitalism without using the traditional labels — including indigenous activists, social ecologists, radical democrats, and “Starhawk leftists” — all of which make exemplary solarpunks. I don’t think you can be a consistent solarpunk if you support capitalism, though, since capitalism is inherently anti-ecological (it’s predicated on unlimited growth and operates as though nature is just another outlet to extract profit) and hierarchical (there is a fundamental class divide between those who own society’s workplaces and resources and those who use society’s workplaces and resources, the former being dominant and the latter being subordinate), each of which stand in stark contrast to solarpunk’s core principles of ecological harmony and social egalitarianism. Not to mention solarpunk’s emphasis on “unity through diversity”, which is also very anti-capitalist in the grand scheme of things.

Hope this helped in some way!

[solarpunkworld]

@NeolithicSheep

[solarpunkworld]

I wish there was an active Catholic workers group around were I live.