#solarpunk imagination

[cognitivejustice]

Tending a garden is about as hands-on as climate solutions get. On a basic level, putting plants in the ground helps sequester carbon. Vegetation can reduce stress and tension for the humans around it, and it provides habitat and sustenance for pollinators and other wildlife. Gardens can provide spaces for education, and, of course, sources of food. But the act of designing and planting a green space serves another, more metaphorical purpose: It gives the gardener agency over a piece of the world and what they want it to look like — and a role in conveying of all those aforementioned benefits.

That’s the premise behind Wild Visions, a challenge launched in the DMV area (that’s District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, for the uninitiated) in January. The project invited university students to design gardens with all sorts of visions and themes, then bring them to fruition this spring with native seedlings from Garden for Wildlife — an offshoot of the National Wildlife Federation.

For every plant the company sells, it donates one to a community project, said campus engagement lead Rosalie Bull. This spring, around 2,000 went to Wild Visions.

“We’ll be creating in total nearly 6,000 square feet of new wildlife habitat in the DMV,” Bull said. “And that’s just this year. We hope to do it year after year.”

In Bull’s view, this project has a distinctly solarpunk framing — celebrating a literary genre and art movement that conjures visions of a sustainable future, where nature is as central as technology. Although part of the goal was to get more native flowers in the ground, the challenge also hoped to “activate the solarpunk imagination,” and let students offer their perspectives on what the gardens could accomplish.

For instance, a group called Latinos en Acción from American University wanted to focus on monarch butterfly habitat, as a symbol of the migrant justice movement. Others, like the Community Learning Garden at the University of Maryland, were interested in exploring culinary uses of the plants they received, which included sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, milkweed, goldenrod, and aster.

[gnome-punk]

Artist credit:

[emotopunkpipeline]

I 100% truly believe that the next step in human evolution is to ever strive towards a communal and stateless and interconnected society. Where we use our most advanced adaptation, our brains and their cognitive and regulatory abilities, to elevate the existence of ourselves and every being on this earth. We learn that our greatest powers are our abilities to connect and nurture and protect and analyze and improve, not to produce. To connect. To understand. That is how we grow and move forward. We can imagine that future.

[solar-sunnyside-up]

I'm currently resisting the urge to plant strawberries along side the highways

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Support independent solarpunk media!

Heyo followers and friends and solarpunks, here’s your reminder for the day that we have a Patreon and we need support! This podcast is a passion project run by two people who have (multiple) other jobs, aging and sick family members, and the endless tasks of adulting to attend to, and that means we’re pretty busy and paying for this out of our own pockets. We're ad-free and we'd like to keep it that way.

So if you like what we do, or you want some of that sweet sweet bonus content and early access to episodes, or just want to support solarpunk work in the present, please support us financially through Patreon (starting as low as $3 a month) or make a one-time donation through PayPal.

If you’re hard up for cash, but still would like to support us and solarpunk in general but just can’t financially right now, it would still go a long way if you could take a moment to write us a review on your podcatcher of choice, or subscribe to our YouTube channel and leave us a comment on your favourite video. If you really liked a certain episode, please share it with someone you know who you think would like it - word of mouth is really important for podcasts!

As I’ve said before, it's rough out there for anyone valuing the environment, social justice, compassion, and more, and we want to keep doing our part to keep hope alive. We want to broaden the imagination of what it's possible to do to contribute to a better world, no matter who you are, where you live, or what life stage you're at.

-Ariel

[spenjelly]

Ink drawing of ideas for improvement for my city

I’m not a city designer this is just what I think would be cool - don’t come for me lol

Diff things u can see looking closely:

-solar panels shading a pedestrian crossing (we have a lot of ppl who walk on the side of the hwy)

-rain runoff goes into garden w/ grab n eat plants

-support columns have wedges on sides for nesting since the birds are already shoving themselves into the crannies of the underside

-water mill since we have a fairly big river

-buildings have smaller-scale wind turbines and/or solar panels to support their energy output

-more plants in the city itself! Not just pollen producing trees

-there’s a light rail that goes thru the nearby cities

-continuing to protect the “protected wildlife” areas

[alpaca-clouds]

Money is worthless, actually

Just a quick something, I wanted to share with you guys. Because in a weird way I consider it to be quite hopeful.

See, here is the thing: Money is worthless. Technically it is worthless. You cannot do anything from money. You cannot make food from money. You cannot build a house from money. You cannot knit a sweater from it. Not from the coins, not from the paper, not from imaginary numbers on your bank account.

If for some reason money just vanished tomorrow, people would not in fact die. They just would find other ways to deal with it.

Money was originally probably partly invented, because it made both the collection of taxes - and the payment of people working for the "empire". Most societies before just... shared. They literally shared, because they knew that their society worked better if everyone just got, what they needed. Often it was on the basis of "gift" societies. To translate it into a modern understanding (because we still kinda do that): "You need eggs to make a cake? Sure. I will give you some. But next week, when I gonna need some butter, you will give me some of that."

It makes the economy trudge along just a bit easier. But it is not required for it to work.

Money has only worth as long as the people agree that it has that worth. Which is usually what happens whenever a currency collapses: People no longer agree that the currency holds any worth. Yes, we can now go and argue about all those methods of inflation and what not. But the baseline thing that happens really is not that there is too much money, but that people agree that the money hence is worthless.

So, basically... Money is worthless.

Right now it is mostly just used as a tool of oppression, because it is linked to power. It can buy you power more than it can buy you anything else.

But we would not need it to make a society function. Which is also why I like to build my utopias around the idea of societies without money. Where people just get what they need, because it is the best for everyone.

Because whenever there is something like money around, someone will hoard it and it will inevitably lead to bad things. So...

Yeah. In the second Doctor Strange movie it is played for laughs that there are many worlds without money where you not pay for stuff. But... Why play it for laughs? Why not take it serious. You know?

Just a thought.

[solarpunkmagazine]

Out Now! The Winning Stories of Grist’s Imagine 2200 Contest

Climate fiction can be a powerful climate solution. It invites us to look beyond the current moment to envision the world that could be, and empowers us to work toward it. The winners of this year’s Imagine 2200 short story contest from Grist are not afraid to explore the challenges ahead, but offer hope that we can work together to build a more sustainable and just world. Through rich characters, lovingly sketched settings, and gripping plots, these stories welcome you into futures that celebrate who we are and what we can become. Read them now: https://grist.org/imagine2200-climate-fiction-contest-2025

I, co-EIC Bri, have had the pleasure of serving as Imagine 2200’s first reader for the past two years. It has been a wonderful experience marked by collaboration, inspiration, and hope. Tory Stephens and his team have been fantastic to work with; I hope you’ll give this collection a read!

[cognitivejustice]

By accepting as inevitable humanity’s demise by its own hand, post-apocalyptic fiction places no responsibility on the living to course correct.

Solarpunk looks towards a post-capitalist future of renewable energy. It rejects climate “doomerism” and shows what our collective future could look like if we heal our relationship with the natural world.

Far from Star Trek’s “full luxury space communism,” where humans race across galaxies via endless sources of energy, the technology in solarpunk is imminently achievable. In the anthology Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, science fiction writer and democratic socialist Kim Stanley Robinson describes this genre as rejecting “the inevitability of the machine future.”

Instead [solarpunk] asks, “What is the healthiest way to live? What is the most beautiful?”

Rather than Elon Musk’s tent cities on Mars, these fictional worlds “cobble together aspects of the postmodern and the paleolithic, asserting that we might for very good reasons choose to live in ways that resemble in part the ways of our ancestors.” 

[avalina-music]

I really grieve that I'll never be able to live a normal blissfully ignorant life like I thought I would. Things are so dire and I am called to do whatever I can to help, I can't not, because I for one will never give up hope, never, till my dying breath I'll never give up hope for a better world

[seascapesandsalt]

I've decided to only put good or neutral things on my 2025 bingo card but now I have to think up good things that have a chance of happening in the next year

[ufohio]

If all things were possible, what kinds of technologies and miraculous feats of science do you think would put mankind in harmony with the Earth?

Happy Earth Day from the Science-Fiction Nerds at Kaleidoscope World. 💕

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Support your local solarpunk podcast

Heyo followers and friends and solarpunks, here’s your reminder for the day that Solarpunk Presents Podcast has a Patreon and we need support! This podcast is a passion project run by two people who have (multiple) other jobs, aging and sick family members, and the endless tasks of adulting to attend to, and that means we’re pretty busy and paying for this out of our own pockets. We're ad-free and we'd like to keep it that way. So if you like what we do, or you want some of that sweet sweet bonus content and early access to episodes, or just want to support solarpunk work in the present, please support us financially through Patreon (starting as low as $3 a month) or make a one-time donation through PayPal.

If you’re hard up for cash, but still would like to support us and solarpunk in general but just can’t financially right now, it would still go a long way to write us a review on your podcatcher of choice, or subscribe to our YouTube channel and leave us a comment on your favourite video. Sometimes we feel like we’re shouting into the void, and as writers we do thrive on feedback. If you really liked a certain episode, please share it with someone you know who you think would like it - word of mouth is really important for podcasts!

It's rough out there for anyone valuing the environment, social justice, compassion, and more, and we want to keep doing our part to keep hope alive. We want to broaden the imagination of what it's possible to do to contribute to a better world, no matter who you are, where you live, or what life stage you're at.

-Ariel

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[eleanor-arroway]

“What we found was a broad, common description of Indigenous ways of valuing, ways of being, ways of knowing, and ways of doing. These things had a widespread order, a sequence in all cultural activities in which people were sharing or producing knowledge on Country. We had our own personal metaphors for describing this process of induction. I referred to it as spirit, head, heart, and hands. Mumma Doris knew it as Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct. She insisted on this order. She also noted that non-Aboriginal people seemed to work through the same steps but in reverse.

Mumma Doris has observed interventions and programs imposed on her community for over half a century, noticing that they always begin with the last step, Direct. Government agents come into the community with a plan for change, and they direct activities toward this change immediately. When it all fails, they go backward to the next step. Reflect. They gather data and measure outcomes and try to figure out what went wrong. Then they realize they didn’t form relationships with the community, so belatedly they go to the next step, Connect. Through these relationships they discover the final step (which should have been the first), finding a profound respect for members of the community they ruined. They cry as they say farewell and return to the city, calling, “Thank you! I have learned so much from you!”

Invert that process and you’ll have something approximating an appropriate way of coming to Indigenous Knowledge and working toward sustainable solutions. The first step of Respect is aligned with values and protocols of introduction, setting rules and boundaries. This is the work of your spirit, your gut. The second step, Connect, is about establishing strong relationships and routines of exchange that are equal for all involved. Your way of being is your way of relating, because all things only exist in relationship to other things. This is the work of your heart. The third step, Reflect, is about thinking as part of the group and collectively establishing a shared body of knowledge to inform what you will do. This is the work of the head. The final step, Direct, is about acting on that shared knowledge in ways that are negotiated by all. This is the work of the hands.

Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct – in that order. Everything in creation is sentient and carries knowledge, therefore everything is deserving of our respect.”

- Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World

[loreleyfromouterspace]

Controversial opinion (maybe?) but if your article/video/wtvr about a positive vision of the future where humanity lives in harmony wih nature uses AI art to visualise said future I automatically loose all respect for you