mambabasa

Solarpunk is innately about hope for a better future, but Desert is rather about the impossibility to save the world from climate change and the opportunities for anarchy that arise after the world's end. It's not as if Desert is devoid of hope, but rather it sees hope and possibilities within the end of the world. In that respect, there is some overlap with solarpunk, but I can't help but think the nihilism doesn't jive well with the solarpunk ethos.

Here's a modern classic introduction to anarchism. Love this text!

Just as much of the politics that has historically mattered has taken the form of unruly defiance, it is also the case that for subordinate classes, for most of their history, politics has taken a very different extra-institutional form. For the peasantry and much of the early working class historically, we may look in vain for formal organizations and public manifestations. There is a whole realm of what I have called “infrapolitics” because it is practiced outside the visible spectrum of what usually passes for political activity. The state has historically thwarted lower-class organization, let alone public defiance. For subordinate groups, such politics is dangerous. They have, by and large, understood, as have guerrillas, that divisibility, small numbers, and dispersion help them avoid reprisal.

By infrapolitics I have in mind such acts as foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absenteeism, squatting, and flight. Why risk getting shot for a failed mutiny when desertion will do just as well? Why risk an open land invasion when squatting will secure de facto land rights? Why openly petition for rights to wood, fish, and game when poaching will accomplish the same purpose quietly? In many cases these forms of de facto self-help flourish and are sustained by deeply held collective opinions about conscription, unjust wars, and rights to land and nature that cannot safely be ventured openly. And yet the accumulation of thousands or even millions of such petty acts can have massive effects on warfare, land rights, taxes, and property relations. The large-mesh net political scientists and most historians use to troll for political activity utterly misses the fact that most subordinate classes have historically not had the luxury of open political organization. That has not prevented them from working microscopically, cooperatively, complicitly, and massively at political change from below. As Milovan Djilas noted long ago, "The slow, unproductive work of disinterested millions, together with the prevention of all work not considered “socialist”, is the incalculable, invisible, and gigantic waste which no communist regime has been able to avoid."

While science fiction most often conjures up images of technology and the so-called ‘hard sciences’, writers in the genre also address human social relations. One of the exemplars of this tradition is Kim Stanley Robinson. In his award-winning Mars trilogy, Red,Green and Blue Mars, Robinson uses the idea of transforming Mars into a habitable planet to explore the ethics and limits of the human ability to (re)produce nature. Philosophically and theoretically, Robinson’s writing has particular relevance to the work of social ecologist Murray Bookchin. The Mars trilogy provides a fruitful exploration of what Bookchin refers to as third or free nature, a synthesis of first (bio-physical) nature and second (human social) nature wherein humans ‘co-operate’ with first nature and directly participate in the evolution of life.

For those interested both in social ecology and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, this is a very interesting chapter!

Any other banger quotes?

Solarpunk recognizes that climate change, the consequences of centuries of damage, aren’t averted in the future. Yet it still manages to incorporate hope. A future where we’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’re doing better. We’re using technology for more uplifting ends. Like seed bombing drones and solar ovens. Solarpunk emphasizes real-world application. It’s all about what we do here and now, from DIY projects to larger organization. Solarpunk is also very aesthetic, as I’m sure you’ve realized. It uses a lot of nature motifs and takes inspiration from art nouveau, upcycling, and Asian and African styles and artistic movements.

I quite enjoyed the ride. I liked its experimentation with genders, its dealing of nature versus nurture, what it means to be human, and what it means to be alien.

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world , but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/415628

Check it, Felipe Corrêa has a new article looking at the various debates in the anarchist tradition!

The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human. ~Murray Bookchin

Check out one of the greatest books on the philosophy of green anarchism.

From the abstract:

Fredy Perlman’s anarchist maximalism had a formative influence on the movement’s post-1960s revival, quite apart from his later and better-known critiques of domestication. Perlman’s longneglected books, pamphlets and parodies from 1968–1972 show him championing an antivanguardist ethos of direct action and practical de-alienation, while working towards an original and distinctly anarchist social theory of domination. This article traces the influences of Isaak Rubin, C. Wright Mills, and possibly Henri Lefebvre and Peter Kropotkin, on Perlman’s thought. Perlman’s originality was to generalise a heterodox Marxian critique of social reproduction, including but exceeding productive relations. Thus, he explicitly sets the state in analytical parity with capital, theorising authority as a fetish distinct from exchange value. Implicitly, he points to other containers for alienated powers, including the family, religion and scholarship. Perlman’s account of self- and community powers remains incomplete, however, eliding constitutive violence and inviting engagement with current intersectional approaches.