Solarpunk Is Not Enough 

@@erseshe i love how this highlight all the bullcraps of this system we stuck in. they come to land that does not belong to them, taking away and destroying the nature they did not create nor contribute to, imposing systems that serve them onto others, putting price tags that only benefit them onto everything. Then they claim the system is the only truth of life and everyone and everything must suck it up and accept it.

@@slimetank394 sounds more like a cautionary tale to handle threats before they gain power. that a live and let live attitude doesn't work too well. are you really asking bad inconsiderate people to be companionate and cooperative? kind of naïve , no? what do you think the fisherman should have done?

@@erseshe what do you think the fisherman should have done?

Then you get what happened to the cod in newfoundland and the whole ecosystem collapses.

@@erseshe eek. i was thinking just stopping the industrialist before he destroys the local eco system or moves on to a neighbors area to destroy. do everyone a common good with the elimination of one. in turn making the industrialist an example of what will happen to any other industrialists that walk into town. beating the industrialist at his own game and becoming the king industrial of the dieing world .... thats an option ... i guess. i can understand the idea of feeling like it's inevitable with our current system. but i am suppirze da tthe "i may as well try to finish near the top" opinion on this channel.

You have to be in soft climate change denial sometimes, just for your mental wellbeing. If you focus too hard on the reality, it's easy to slip into despair and lose the will to fight.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” ― H.P. Lovecraft

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche

i will push back a little on this:" You can not solve a problem without understanding it". Some people have to understand the problem, but not everyone. its great if everyone did understand but i would hardly say it is necessary. solutions need only be implemented not understood by every individual doing the needed actions. examples from medical history show that people in NO WAY understood the problems and solutions for a long time, but solutions none the less were developed. equally so there are hard headed people that deny medical practices because they are not tested scientifically. but do not want to put in the effort to correctly rule the treatment as valid or not. categorizing symptoms to make diagnosis then implementing tests and treatments for possible solutions. understanding is not really needed for this process. it is of course trusted a lot more if some kind of understanding is provided. to the religious, it cleanses the spirits from your red humour, for the scientific, dialysis removes waste, salt and extra water to prevent them from building up in the body. 2 explanations, both practical, only one has understanding.

I spent 2020 writing a dissertation on climate change & lovecraftian horror

I feel this. So much of activism is about opposing status quo and not about building something better. Of course, there are volumes written on ways to organize a community and few of the ideas of solarpunk are entirely new. Still, somehow having this aesthetic gives an aspirational character to activism that's very motivating. It's like a whole-planet dream board.

It’s not about aesthetics. It’s uniting the working class and breaking the yoke of the ruling class.

Imagine looking at communism and thinking “yes, I want more of that”

@@jb76489 imagine using the word communism and not understanding what it means.

@@borninvincible #notrealcommunism am I right?

Elements of it have already been co-opted, but that's not that surprising.

oh god the marketing teams... that is why a KEY to solarpunk must be anti corporation and anti capitalism.

sounds like solarpunk needs strong leadership, a clear doctrine, and better marketing for itself. I do not see a positive movement with no defense mechanism having a chance of surviving into a mature working system. Thoughts on how to defend it?

techno-fetishism? not sure what you mean, hehe .. would you prefer plant fetishism but without technology? 💭 ;-) (There are real people like that, confused, believing that technology/science is pretty much the "root of all evil". Silly analysis, right? 🧐 hmm "Cybernetics" is the future ..not just a cool word. (It means something different than most people think.., about system-thinking and holistic problem solving, look it up.) x

@@Andre-qo5ek This is a joke, right?

Hey Zoe, I just finished your cottage core vid (amazing!) Time for part 2🙌

Zoe? you 'round these parts? A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one

This is my favourite surprise youtube collab of the year!

Huh, you made a half-hour video on the resurgence of cottagecore without mentioning Li Ziqi? She has the Guinness World Record for most subscribers for a Chinese language RU-vid channel (16m). Maybe your impression of it is 'really, really white' but I reckon that's a secondary-influence thing, it's traceable to a CCP soft-power push that started on tiktok and gained influence through benefit of their algorithms. If you want cottagecore without cowpies, you need a film crew and, considering we're talking Yunnan province, likely a fair bit of forced labour. Not saying the rest of the video doesn't make great points, it's just interesting that that didn't come up.

Imagination is our best weapon in the fight against capitalist realism.

That’s not a new thing. But it’s as well to always guard against the poisonous elixir of marketing gurus, even if they assure us that they’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

@@rationalactor8695 thats an interesting statement. Could you explain it a little more?

@@AtheistEve propganda and marketing really is a timeless weapon. Any thoughts on how solarpunk can counter these corporate marketers?

@@Andre-qo5ek Nothing springs to mind. But, as soon as I see an advert I click/look away and make a mental note never to buy from that company.

My parents have a hard time under why I am not enthusiastic about them joining their parents in hating several rooms to be used for less than a week every year... By moving out. I would love some less dependent situation but don't see the point in waisting money and energy on that while I am comfortable enough and pick less waist full replacement applies for "their" household.

i know what you mean me an my bother fight about it all the time he keep on saying i don't care i will be dead so i say so you don't care about your kid's then he just walks away.

Ah to be young again. Growing up the govt and teachers would tell everyone "climate change will melt the ice caps and our capital will be under water in 5 years", this was 20 years ago and I'm still waiting for the ice caps to melt, I remember joking about it when for the first time in 50 years, 16 years ago we had snowfall in my city, despite all this talk about climate changing for the worse. Now for the meat of the argument, not believing that technology will fix or that we will find a way to fix climate to stay livable for human beings, is kind of dumb. Humanity's biggest and most important trait is adaptivity. Yes, we will have to fall first, to get back up again, but we we'll do it as long as we never lose hope and we never stop trying to improve our quality of life. Yeah, capitalism will have to be kind of abolished if we want to have a bright future (not a happy one, because we find happiness in the smallest things, adaptability again). Communism or socialism are not the answers, same with anarchism, these views are delusional, we need a variation and combination of capitalism and communism that isn't socialism. Anarchism on the other hand, is the worst idea to come out of humanity. Since humanity started evolving we've always had an organization, leaders, just look at the tribes or ancient civilizations. We can't thrive without order and an organization to keep it. I'm 32 and I still feel like there so much more to think and to ponder about, so much to be improved in my way of thinking. When I was a teenager I was a huge rebel, anticapitalist, communist, anti nations, a big anarchist, so much so I participated in some violent protests because I believed the dumb stuff people with the same mindset would preach about. Once I started growing up I started getting more and more obsessed with cyberpunk, space exploration and the future of humanity, so I started reading so many different books, blogs, studies and documentaries, I started seeing why the archaic ideas of communism and anarchism were out of touch, delusional and extremely outdated. But I also started seeing why I disliked capitalism (the extreme variation like corporations and monopolies) and why borders and a government and an organization keeping the laws are so important for us.

@@rRekko space exploration is cool, but I’m more worried about being able to afford rent in the future. And worried about being able to afford food now that the climate is changing in the areas where most of the cheap food is grown that everyone relies on. And it is changing, not in the future, its already started to happen. billions of crabs gone off the ocean floor, endless droughts, lake beds drying up exposing toxic metals. Worsening natural disasters. Surprise snowstorms can still happen, that doesn’t mean climate change doesn’t exist, and it’s not going to protect people like me when the sociological effects hit. I appreciate the reply, but advocating against people trying to improve things and arguing for a vague “combination between capitalism and communism, but not the existing combination between capitalism and communism” doesn’t help me, and it doesn’t help anyone.

I'm 32 and... comments like this make me sad. I don't know what specifically you've been reading, but know that it is rooted in demonstrably false ideas about prehistoric humanity that were generated during the Enlightenment in the absence of evidence. Anarchist societies produced the majority of the foundational technologies of the agricultural revolution. I strongly suggest you read The Dawn of Everything. It's a good introduction to modern archeology and what it tells us about how societies have actually functioned in the past. As for the future of the climate, it is far worse than you could possibly imagine. I went to school for climatology. I studied the ancient climate, specifically the most recent analog for our current predicament, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. During this time, the ice caps entirely melted, the equator was too hot for lizards, and there was a rainforest on the northern coast of Baffin Island. The CO2 level then... was what it will be if we burn all our coal reserves. The ice caps will act as a buffer. But we must act quickly to draw down the CO2 we have already released. The amount we have will not drive us extinct. But it WILL end advanced civilization if left unaddressed. We are already seeing the impacts of extreme weather events that are fueled by climate change pushing migrants into the OECD and bolstering fascist movements. This is not a tomorrow problem. This is already destroying our political climate. What you are promulgating is soft climate change denial. Andrew has covered this in other videos, and it is insidious, but understandable. If you want resources to demonstrate why this unhelpful, I can help.

you bring up a major point and a point even this video could not resolve. what are the necessary actions to achieve steps towards SolarPunk. we know what is not progressive steps. Have you gained any additional knowledge you can share as to what IS a progressive , actionable, step towards SolarPunk?

@@Andre-qo5ek look up cybernetics

@@aerobique cybernetics as a means towards Solarpunk? we are already on the path of being cyborgs. our phones are very much becoming an inseparable part of individuals. computers are already inseparable form the global society. looking into what you might be talking about i am finding some pseudo science about the power of attraction, faith, self actualization, vibrations, cross dependencies. is this what you are trying to say? "the art of steering" i'm not sure how this is an actionable step towards solarpunk, can you explain your reasoning?

@@Andre-qo5ek 😴 transhumanists be about

@@voladisco my understanding of transhumanists is that its a philosophy and kind-of a tech movement. since the tech is so early in its development i am hesitant to call it a tech movement just yet. i am not sure how improvement of the human species is a step towards solarpunk though. i can see it running is parallel, solving human weaknesses while solarpunk solving external factors. further explanation to your comment would be appreciated. what would you say are actionable steps in transhumanism that every day people can take to achieve the grand picture of a Transhuman-Solarpunk vision?

I couldn't agree more. Item 1 : End private financing of elections. Fortunately both left and right (the humans rather than the lizards at the top) agree on this. It has (as they say) broad-based support. Unfortunately Lawrence Lessig (who is far smarter and more reliable than I) has already had a shot at this, and I don't think he succeeded. It would be a good idea to talk to him about it though. Item 2 : Abolish the European models of land-ownership that we inherited from the feudal era. Because it's not really land-ownership is it. What "land" really is, is a license from whoever controls the local monopoly on violence to "make people obey you" within a certain prescribed area. This generally boils down to "Fuck you, give me your money" or protection therefrom (that modest aspiration being The American Dream) The purpose of the housing market isn't to distribute housing, it's to skim wealth, aka: make the majority of the population work for free.

@@nicktaylor5264 abolition of land-ownership. you have stated the problem well enough. what alternative do you suggest?

@@Andre-qo5ek Although this video is about England, the model (via European capitalist colonialism) has been exported virtually everywhere... I am in NZ right now, and "enclosure" was basically imposed as a fait-accompli over the entire place as a default setting. In the video early on though, it describes other possibilities for land-allocation... that were used before the "total enclosure" approach was adopted. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uedPl9vGt4c.html And I quite like the idea of everyone having something like a library card, which entitles them to a free place to live. People can move from place to place (as locations become available)... and maybe if there are shortages in particular areas, we can get around these by building up. Personally I think the way we build houses right now (optimised for solidity and longevity) is a design-flaw at the philosophical level, and that portability and modularity might be a better bet. If I had the resources I think I'd set up live-in design institutes where people can design and build their own structures free of regulatory constraints. "glamping with power tools". It wouldn't suit everyone... but I used to live in squats (in London) in my 20s, and I can see cultures growing around this which work really well, bearing in mind the simple fact : "The trouble with communes is that nobody wants to do the dishes". The key to utopia is not to have just one of them :) Living space need not be an immutable scarcity (as we can build upwards), but land itself is this tapestry of scarcities... everyone wants the house on the hill, so I think there will need to be a way to allocate those, and I wouldn't want to impose "my solution" on anyone else. Maybe something like scarcity being allocated according to "contributions to society"... or even just lottery. Maybe the high-demand locations could have limited time-spans. Dunno. What we're doing now though "allocating according to market" is a horrible way of doing it, because it means The Rich (ie: people who have successfully clipped the ticket on other people's labour) get first say, and these are people who's legitimisation-myths are really toxic for society as a whole. See Fox News for examples of this.

It always makes me deeply sad when I hear people say or know they believe human life is utterly worthless...if such living beings aren't slaving away in some soul crushing, pointless *"jobs".*

Wow! Great quotes!

sounds great to be out of cyberpunk and into solarpunk, what kind of actions do you now dismiss as appropriate and what actions have you gained insight on how to carry out?

@@Andre-qo5ek Well, the old sustainable future I imagined wasn't cyberpunk, so I wouldn't say I went from cyberpunk to solarpunk, but to actually answer your question, basically I was thinking that the only way to truly stop natural destruction that we do through using modern tech is to simply stop using it and go back to pre-industrial era technologies. As I said, it was bleak and primitivist. It was also a lot more authoritarian. Honestly I can't give you very direct answers because my thoughts back then weren't very detailed about this, it was more just a small idea than anything else. But I can give more direct answers to the second part of your question. First of all: I stopped naively believing that just voting for the right government and collecting waste selectively will be enough. We need to take action ourselves. I also got ideas about how to locally realise the world that should be brought forward. Things like permablitzing, communally investing in green energy, teaching each other useful timeless skills like gardening, sewing your own clothes but also not dismissing modern technologies. And if we are heading into utopian territory, fighting for small local governments instead of big central states, unionising or if possible just creating our own worker co-ops, and generally working to end capitalism and the mindset of constant growth and conquest. I know these are still just random ideas and not an actual plan of action, but I'd say they are miles better than my previous way of thinking.

@@ArgaJacint ah i see now. thank you for the clarification. it is great to hear the steps you are taking and the ideas that are stirring in your mind. i have always liked the wartime efforts myself. victory gardens , huge recycling programs, mending and caring for what you have. then into the post war CCC efforts for infrastructure. if we solarpunk as hard as we declare world war, oh man, we would be years ahead by now.

I’m still in the “we’re going to have to return to a more simple pre-industrial life and need to start adapting now for when global trade collapses and many key components in technology run out” stage. How did you get from that to ‘technology will continue to flourish’, bearing in mind the whole… collapse of global trade and the materials needed for computer components thing? Bear in mind I clicked on this video by accident and flicked through the comment section, so I’m not up and up on a bunch of ‘solarpunk’ concepts. I’m also pretty authoritarian but that’s pretty disconnected from the other stuff and not really pertinent to the conversation.

@@legateelizabeth people here will think being authoritarian is absolutely pertinent to the conversation. Solarpunk aesthetically has tones of anti-state anti-capitalism in it. I do agree that the discussion of environment and technology can absolutely be spoken to without those anti-state anti-capitalism tones. There are certainly many ways one can be authoritarian so i agree its neither here or there for this conversation. you bring up a very valid position on the global nature of technology and the collapse of trade routes vital to manufacturing. from what i gather from solarpunk is that it is not thought out that far. it is currently in a concept stage of wishes and art. your position of "return to a more simple pre-industrial life and need to start adapting now" can certainly fall into solarpunk to a degree IMO. if 'adapt' here means to bring the best concepts we have today to the simplest form possible and not a luddite anti-tech regression. future proofing our designs is an absolute need. Solarpunk is very much for more naturalist approaches where possible, decreased unnecessary consumption, lo-tech and hi-tech (more so , appropriate tech) solutions, keeping things local, keeping things sustainable. Though i have not seen solarpunk explicitly say it, it does seem to presuppose their systems built before the fall and insulated from the influences of the fall. (though i have asked the community what defenses a solarpunk system would have from outside forces and have yet to receive an adequate answer. it would be nice to hear some more on what you mean by " return to a more simple pre-industrial life and need to start adapting now ' , in your own words though.

may i ask if this is a rural, suburban, city, food forest/garden? i am certainly looking for inspiration to get active but resources and support are less than stellar in my area.

@@Andre-qo5ek The food forest is in a rural area and the community garden will be in an urban environment. We are working on figuring out native seeds for our area and it's been a ride but I can certainly give you some resources Ive found. They're on my computer at home so I'll comment later with what I have

@@youtility6685 sounds fantastic.

@@Andre-qo5ek I'd also say, be patient with yourself. This takes a lot of knowledge and it can be frustrating/overwhelming, but step-by-step is the best way to go about this. I'd highly, highly recommend reaching out with friends and others you trust to help. It makes it easier and helps with accountability. I've also found that a few of my friends have much more knowledge about this stuff- that I didn't know prior- and it's been really helpful to have that support as well. Good luck and thank you for helping build towards a better world!

@@youtility6685 You sound like you have good friends and support on your endeavor. best of luck and thank you for your kind words.

Sounds great! You go!

radically beautiful, may i ask what you mean by this? hope is great but did you glean what necessary action is needed?

You sound like an Earthseed😂 i do love the idea of interplanetary exploration, one of the first games i ever got hyped for was No Man's Sky, but I still don't know how feasible it will be to tackle such a massive project when the even more massive project of surviving and healing this planet is already before us. I have no final answer on the matter, and that's okay.

@@Andrewism earthseed is beautiful but you're right, the first planet we need to terraform is terra itself

Afaik, degrowth is the idea of shifting macroeconomic priorities from specifically and only GDP to other, more human or environmental metrics like happiness or recovered forest area or something like that. This is opposed to the dogma of our current infinite-growth economy which demands that, each year, GDP goes up (otherwise, things must be bad). This is because there is a strong correlation between a declining GDP and recovering ecosystems. Rather than being an impediment to space exploration, I'd think degrowth is a necessary prerequisite since otherwise, we're risking losing everything on the only planet we currently have.

I have the same experience as you!! 🙃I am also very interested in interplanetary/interstellar exploration, as I have been since a very young age. My premise was/still is that the Earth's habitability is finite and we should prepare to leave it and find other places to live. I believed that life was rare and beautiful, and that if we are truly alone in the universe, then humans should seed and spread our life across the universe. Kinda does sound like your definition of an Earthseed, does it? But now, I see that this viewpoint is VERY susceptible to colonialist, anthropocentric, and hegemonic rhetoric. I share the same dream as you, with the added emphasis on taking care of Earth that came with Solarpunk. It's been an interesting journey for sure. I still hope that we humans can fix our existential problems and change our ways. I still hope for the glorious future where we, as stewards of life, carry the torch far into the future. Per aspera ad astra.

​@@spencerharmon4669 If we construct solar shades at L1 and built up a decent point defense system against asteroids, we have basically made the earth immune to most forms of cosmological disaster. The off world manufacturing and automation required for such an endeavour is likely to be developed in the next few decades - and arguably most of the tech is already ready to go. We can't rely on rockets for getting off earth long term. It just cannot scale well past a certain point before having deleterious effects on the environment and of course you're never going to have ones launch off near any population centre if you don't desire burst eardrums. There are stop gap technologies like skyhooks and lofstroom loops but ultimately we need to move on to something like the orbital ring where a ring is kept suspended above earth in a stationary position relative to the ground by having a faster counter rotating inner ring exchange momentum with the outer ring via magnetic induction - with a net rest momentum of zero. You can accelerate ships along the ring by using it as essentially a giant rail gun that encircles the earth. Because such a structure is stationary (or rather only moves as fast as the earth rotates) and since it's fairly close to the ground, you can have cable cars extending down from it into cities and villages. Scaled up enough and with support for gliding vehicles, this could get you anywhere on earth within an hour with zero fuel expenditure. Needless to say, for such a structure which will pass over many different nations, you either need a one world government (dystopia) or a solar punk future without any hard borders. We're not going to see such a structure for at least another century since it only really makes sense when you have millions of people living and working in orbit and beyond but it does demonstrate that we need no new technologies or magic materials to make mass transit into space possible.

Quite frankly, by any realistic standart, we're doomed. Even if small groups startet to change things now nothing significant would happen. Every large scale attempt would either fail, or end up becoming something even worse than what we have now. It doesn't matter how significant a majority is if even fewer people have all the recources, and the power to ceep them for themselves. All we can seemingly do is to make the end a little less miserable for the people around us, and then the cycle continues, because if theres one thing humanity is really good at, it's not learning from past mistakes. Ideas and Ideals are great and all, but they're pretty useless if there isn't even a chance to get a heavily compromised version them started. I hope you can prove me wrong about this, I just feel so powerless about all this stuff.

If it helps → OF COURSEEEE

i also wanted to know, so i googled "solarpunk anime" and found it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UqJJktxCY9U.html

i agree the writing was good. but what of substance? what actions did you learn must be taken to further SoalrPunk and the like?

i also wanted to know, so i googled "solarpunk anime" and found it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UqJJktxCY9U.html

Came here to figure this out as well.

i also wanted to know, so i googled "solarpunk anime" and found it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UqJJktxCY9U.html

@@jeroenboom8 Of course solarpunk was coopted by a corporation. What isn't these days? Ah well, still a nice animation though.

Not as bad as diselpunk lol

i also wanted to know, so i googled "solarpunk anime" and found it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UqJJktxCY9U.html

i also wanted to know, so i googled "solarpunk anime" and found it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UqJJktxCY9U.html

i also wanted to know, so i googled "solarpunk anime" and found it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UqJJktxCY9U.html