Went to a town called Sutton's Bay in Michigan, USA this last weekend. Definitely solar Punk leaning. Solar: a lot of people drive EVs, bike paths throughout the town and connecting other local towns, rain gardens are interspersed throughout the town, some business stops nearby from the local intercity bus network. Punk: residents are encouraged not to mow their lawns until the end of May, the only gas station in town looked pretty closed, their groceries is a mom and pop shop. Obviously, the town has a long way to go (economy is largely tourist/consumerism based, no public ev chargers, housing does not appear affordable, no light rail nearby), but as far as USA cities in the "middle of nowhere" go, it's a speck of hope.

Pictures taken in local coffee shop.

Hopefully a blow to planned obsolescence

This is one I’ve had on my list for months now, and I finally decided to just go ahead and make it. Back when I was researching solar cookers, solar concentrator, and solar furnaces, I ran into a few really interesting ideas around fresnel lenses. Look them up on youtube and you can find all kinds videos of people melting glass or burning skillsaw blades in half, but the ones that kind of showed me how useful a really-concentrated point of heat could be was this 3D printer for sintering sand into glass objects and this solar rig for smelting zinc or aluminum. Both used fresnel lenses, but were limited by the size of their portable builds.

So here’s my take on something bigger and more permanent, though hopefully still flexible enough to do multiple jobs using concentrated sunlight. The building’s tower houses an observatory-style dome with an irising shutter around a very large fresnel lens. This lens is meant to gather light, but deliberately doesn’t focus it too much, just directs it to another lens, which aims the light straight down. There, on a motorized rig which allows for some adjustment up and down, is the third lens which actually brings it to a searing focal point.

With that focal point reliable and known, the people at the workshop could move several different tools underneath it as necessary, from a crucible for smelting, to a firepot for solar forging, perhaps a glassblowing oven, a 3D sinterer, or the large CNC plasma cutter-style rig shown in the scene.

A set of computers would be set up with light sensors and control over the rotation of the dome, to allow it to track the sun, and the width of the aperture in the shutters, to allow it to regulate the amount of light. The upper limit on the light would be based on how bright the day is, but if they need anything less than full sun, then the opening and closing of the shutters should help with providing consistency. If it starts around half open in full sun and a cloud moves in front of the dome, it might open all the way, then close partially as the cloud leaves. With many minute adjustments, the overall amount of light could remain very consistent down on the ground.

As for the level of focus, I suspect the kerf while cutting would almost definitely be wider than with a modern plasma cutter, but like I said before, people have cut through skillsaw blades with just a lens from a rear-projection TV. So it's possible a larger lens could concentrate even more heat, allowing it to burn through much faster, with less damage to the surrounding material. The tightness of the point would mostly come down to the quality of the lens, as far as I know.

I’ve tried to include a number of controls, caution markings, and red emergency stop buttons, but the one thing I really don’t like about the design as drawn is that it’s not obviously fail-safe. I think ideally there’d be some kind of hanging weight or other mechanism so that when power is lost (not just to the building, as that probably happens fairly often on a less-reliable grid, but to the system’s control unit) the shutters or another light-blocking mechanism slams into place.

Other notes about the scene, I’ve tried to include a diversity of ways to use the sun, the photovoltaic panels for powering the electronics and perhaps some of the tools, a set of fiberoptic solar daylighting systems, which track the sun and pipe light down to the shop floor, along with the simplest version, large windows. This emphasis on daylight should help avoid the risk of electric lights strobing in sync with moving items (such as on a lathe or milling machine) which can cause them to appear stationary and safe to grab onto, though they likely have two sources of light on each just in case. I’ve also included a water wheel, either for power generation, or for the direct motion, to be connected to certain tools or machinery via axles and belts.

Am curious if Solarpunk music is a thing or not yet? If it is please do share some links to tracks to check out, am very cruious. If it isnt a thing yet, what type of music do you imagined it would be like? I found this on the Tubes, which is very relaxing, ambiance type of music. This is personally the type of music I have in mind when thinking solarpunk.

• Invidious; https://iv.datura.network/watch?v=rWEI9y6PElo
• Tubes; https://youtu.be/rWEI9y6PElo

The energy system we have today does not match the solarpunk future we dream of. If we work towards the right energy system today, we may just have a solarpunk tomorrow

I've been slowly converting all of my outdoor lighting to solar and adding more rain barrels for my garden. This got me thinking--what are the rest of you working on? I'd love to see and hear about your projects if you feel like sharing them.

Thanks in advance, I hope you're all having a wonderful day!

(image via daily-dragon-drawing on tumblr, specific post here)

happy spring to many - here in western Colorado we're vacillating between warm and cold in a true, classic Colorado manner.

i do these posts about praxis periodically because i seek inspiration and motivation for concrete actions i can take in my life, and you, the community of people who are into solarpunk, are creative powerhouses. with that in mind, what kind of projects are you all working on, or have you seen going down? any ideas that you're excited about doing as the weather gets warmer?

thanks for being rad, friends.

I think this is why I like solarpunk. It enables us to imagine a better world, focused on us instead of the economy or whatever society thinks the most important construct is.

These two helped launch the Svalbard seed vault in Norway and protect massive amounts of seed diversity for future use. Not to mention their work on bringing orphan crops back into production to support food security in developing countries.

Somewhat contrarian take, but despite the click-baity title it does have some good points.

A concept which aligns nicely with Solarpunk. 🙂

Projected last night at the Free Palestine Encampment at Cal, Berkeley. Colonial capitalism drives the war machine that bulldozes people from Gaza, to the Congo, to the Philippines. It’s important for solarpunks to show up in solidarity with native peoples against imperialism. Sustainability depends on the knowledge and stewardship of native populations. And, most importantly, Zionist punks fuck off! -

I know most Solarpunks already know about Andrew Millison from his permaculture work, but his new videos are both awesome and very solarpunk vibes, simple solutions for big problems.

Houses require maintenance. How much and how often depends on the design and its surroundings. They also require occupants - in my brief experience at least, they degrade much faster when they’re left cold and empty than when someone lives there, even if that someone doesn’t fix things. Weather, encroaching water, mold, ice, and animals can all cause compounding damage surprisingly fast.

I think of the solarpunk society I've been depicting as being post-postapoclyptic. They’ve been through the worst of the climate crisis, wars, plagues, and all kinds of shortages, and they’re trying to rebuild better. In some of my previous postcards, I’ve tried to imagine what the rural communities I grew up in would look like transformed into a modern version of how they looked a hundred years ago, with denser villages, trains, and wide stretches of forests and farmland in between. They were set up this way back when because it was practical for people who walked or relied on horse carts to get around day-to-day, and who traveled to use a boat or a steam train for a longer trip. A solarpunk society that doesn’t want to rebuild the infrastructure(s) to produce and maintain personal vehicles, fuel them, and to drive them on, might have to look pretty similar out here.

But what happens to the houses and developments spattered across the land between those villages? Every road with a house a quarter mile from its nearest neighbor, now miles from those hubs of public transit? In a society where public transit is effective, and cars are rare, I think a lot of roads will degrade pretty quickly. They already need tons of maintenance, and that’s with people using them every day, totally dependent on them, grudgingly agreeing to pay for it. It’s not uncommon to live thirty minutes or an hour from your grocery store today, but on badly broken roads, that kind of travel is going to be more difficult and costly. Some people will do it, heck, some will have held out through all the bad times and will stay no matter what else changes. But I suspect a lot of houses will have been abandoned a long time ago.

There’s tons of embodied carbon stored in those structures. In their carefully-refined materials, their transportation, and in the act of construction. Some of those materials might be very difficult to produce for a society that carefully watches its externalities and seeks to do as little harm as possible. And the longer they’re left abandoned, the more they’ll degrade. The structures will become unsafe, the materials will rot or break, or become inaccessible, and in some cases, they’ll pose environmental risks as fuel tanks rust out, chemicals escape their storage, or damaged structures catch fire (even with the powerlines cut upstream, abandoned solar panels or poorly-isolated generators backfeeding into the grid might allow for damage to an abandoned house to cause a fire). This is especially true with modern buildings, particularly the kind of McMansion featured in the scene, with their heavy reliance on petro-products like “structural” foam columns and facades, which will go up like a struck match in the next wildfire.

In some cases, old buildings could be put back into use. Perhaps they’re nearby something the rebuilding society needs. Maybe one development will make for a good farming community, and another the barracks of a logging camp. Maybe one near a river can support trade or fishing. But there will be others that are simply not very useful. They were practical enough for semi-suburban life when gas was cheap, cars were plentiful, and roads were maintained. But in a world where most people have other priorities, live in closer communities, use public transportation, and aren’t interested in rebuilding a car-centric world, these houses don’t make sense. And of course there's the ones in unsafe locations (flood plain, unstable/eroding cliff, etc) where they won’t last no matter what. To that society, deconstruction might be a very practical answer to both the long term threat posed by these structures and to their own building material needs.

Deconstruction is an alternative to home demolition. It means carefully dismantling the constructed components of a house so the materials can be salvaged and reused. Materials are typically removed in the opposite order in which they were installed, to maximize reuse.

By carefully disassembling these structures and hauling the materials back to their communities, they can build and expand for a much lower overall cost (both environmentally and in resources harvested from the world) while removing potential toxin or fire threats. And by filling in their cellarholes and replanting, they can rewild developed land, build better habitats, and restore their local ecosystems.

On top of that, even buildings picked over by looters may be full of usable stuff - furniture, dishes, cooking tools, hardware - which a society with an interconnected library economy could use to meet its needs without producing new items.

So that’s what I’ve tried to depict here, a deconstruction crew carefully disassembling old world structures so that everything, from the windows to the metal roof panels, to the cabinets to the stick framing itself, can be reused elsewhere rather than produced new.

They’ve been working from left to right in this scene, taking each house apart in reverse order to how it was built. Much as with construction, this would require different crews of specialists: inspectors, roofers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and others who can safely remove resources without doing unnecessary damage. Once a crew finishes their part of a building, they’d hopefully be able to move on to another one nearby.

They’re also replanting/rewilding the old backfilled foundations, something that would certainly help with breaking up the concrete (eventually). Roots are great at that.

I’m not sure if it’d be worthwhile to use concrete saws to cut at least some of the concrete foundations into construction blocks. It’d certainly help with restoring the site quicker, and it’d be a low-ish carbon source for concrete blocks, but the tradeoffs in labor, transportation, and power for the saw might not be worth it. In that case, they’d probably crack it up with a jackhammer before filling it back in.

There’s a lot of vehicles in this scene, so I should emphasize that these aren’t daily drivers. These are equipment used to haul work crews and construction materials on fairly short trips.

All the big trucks in the scene are old internal combustion engine vehicles converted to run on woodgas. I imagine they burn a lot of the wooden construction debris which were otherwise too small or damaged to be worth salvaging. Perhaps some trucks are even set up with plastic de-refineries and are able to use astroturf lawns, broken plastic siding, or “structural” foam facades as fuel on their trips. This isn’t perfect: it still produces pollution and releases CO2, but if the goal is to salvage as much material as possible, and to prevent it from burning pointlessly in the next wildfire, I could still see an aspirational society accepting that use of it.

As a bonus, woodgas vehicles are often used as generators, so they may be able to serve that role part-time on-site, powering lights and air pumps for confined spaces like basements, and even certain tools. Otherwise they’d probably use portable solar panels.

The other (smaller) vehicles are electric minitrucks and rickshaws.

I imagine that the workers are a mix of specialized crews brought in by the larger community for the scheduled deconstruction, and local volunteers who are working for trade in recovered materials. I imagine a lot of the cargo bikes, Chinese wheelbarrows, rickshaws, and minitrucks belong to them. I figure in place of real roads, the really small villages and isolated homesteads maintain a surprisingly dense web of rough trails suitable for mountain bikes or snowmobiles, which connect to all their neighbors.

Last art thoughts: I have another scene of a golf course and its surrounding McMansions turned into a solarpunk intentional community that I’d like to do, but the scope on that one is big enough it’ll be awhile before I can get to it. At this point, I’m confident I’ll make it though. McMansions, with their pointless, wasteful scale, their cheap construction, their reliance on petro-product materials, and their often vain attempt to spend their way to classiness, seem kind of like the antithesis of solarpunk design to me. Golf courses with their endless, expensive-to-maintain grass monocrop hold a similar, though less severe place in my mind.

If you read all that, thank you! And if you’re a person who owns a building in real life, and you’re thinking about doing some renovations, please consider reaching out to your local chapter of Habitat for Humanity or another group who will do deconstruction, rather than just smashing everything up and throwing it away.

I like it, it's a good movie, and I want to make the (maybe hot take argument) that this is solarpunk!

Thoughts?

I’m swimming-with-mermaids delighted to reveal the cover of my next solarpunk mystery novel, Missing Mermaid. Right now I’m deciding how best to arrange the text on the cover. Do you recommend option one (author name on her tail) or option two (author name and title both up in the sky)?

The illustration is by Nell Fallcard. You can order the ebook, internationally, on the indie site Smashwords after its release on May 24th. You can preorder the book on Amazon. The paperback will come later on Barnes and Noble.

i don't like sharing crowdfundings because there are a looooot of them; but i feel like this can be an exception for 3 reasons:

• it's Gaza
• i know that the hacker association behind it is more than honest
• dulcis in fundo, looks like a very much solarpunk solution on a lot of fronts, it's not ''just'' the usual mutual aid :D

Hello everyone! For my bachelor’s thesis, I am making a survey to find out what Solarpunks think of the movement, the genre and the community. I believe Solarpunks are often curious about the thoughts of others in the community, so I think this could be another instance to promote discussion and interesting conversations within the community. Once the survey is closed, I'll distribute the key findings within the communities where I initially posted the survey (so, here, in the r/solarpunk subreddit, etc). It takes around 9 minutes and it would be great if we get a lot of responses. It is also anonymous and under the supervision of my tutors. If this sounds like something that interests you, please fill it in and share it with other Solarpunks! And if you still have questions I am happy to answer them, but there is also more information available in the first part of the survey!

I think there is a link already in the post but just in case: click here

(btw, I sadly wont be gathering data from people under 18 years old. This is because consent-wise it gets tricky, not because I don’t value your input. Thank you very much for understanding!)