"A community center initially set up to help coal miners respecialize and find other jobs, now became a place for unofficial 'pilgrimages' of people striving to find their role in life and learn the history from those who lived it."
The "community center" solarpunk writing prompt got illustrated by the awesome Lemonaut ! As always, I'm incredibly impressed with their art.
You can listen to the podcast episode about it at https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts/episodes/the-community-center
I think what the Lemonaut does here is the essence of solarpunk : very intentionally creating new visual and narrative symbols we need to tell stories about our future. No AI could create such a vision.
I love how this one mixes the mundane prospects of looking for a new profession, identity, with the Solarpunk hope.
If you like their work, you can support them at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thelemonaut and read more of their art, including the (recently trending) Solarpunk Story, at https://www.tumblr.com/the-lemonaut/710271433164668928/thats-why-im-looking-into-solarpunk-and-am
As someone who spent a good part of their teens to early adulthood in a coal town, this really hit me. The towns absolutely tiny, and dying. You had 3 jobs there. Retail, mechanic, or the mines. Kids were told all their lives that underground was their future.
Now, people genuinely don't know what to do. This has been their entire lives, their livelihood, and there's very few in the area doing anything at all to help. Sure, you have the ones who saw the writing on the wall and found something, got out of that town, but for so many, there isn't anything else. What resources they have are a couple hours away, which is too far for people barely able to make ends meet, and they can't afford to lose hours at whatever they've found in the now to get re-educated into a better field.
There are so many small towns, nestled far away from the interstates and highways across the US, that are absolutely forgotten, slowly rotting away out of sight, with nothing left. Even those who will gladly say the change needed to happen, that we needed to stop, are bitter, because they look at how it happened and feel absolutely fucking abandoned by the people who told them things would get better.