stabby_cicada

Good discussion of two types of social movements: Inclusionary (building a wide coalition by appealing to many different groups) vs exclusionary (building group solidarity through us v them strategies). The challenges to both, and the ways the elite try to capture and appropriate inclusionary social movements to maintain the status quo.

Why is this "solarpunk"? Because solarpunk is a social movement, not just an aesthetic. If you want to make positive change (environmental or otherwise) you need collective action, and understanding the challenges to collective action helps you decide what orgs are worth committing to and see when those orgs have been appropriated.

The other articles in the series are “Widening the We” and “The Growth of Malignant and Exclusionary Social Movements” - linked at the bottom and also worth reading.

Appropriate technology in action. And as a bonus, textile insulation could use material from all those fast fashion clothes dumped in the desert or otherwise abandoned to dissolve into microplastics :/

Smartphones are making us unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free. If we can’t yet nationalize the attention economy, maybe it’s time to abolish its primary tool — before it finishes abolishing us.

Edit: of course this is satire. The power of the reading comprehension devil grows stronger every day 😢

The rise of doomers, preppers, and antinatalists on the Left reveals something deeper than the hollow posture of rebellion: a collapse of belief in tomorrow. A Left that chants “No future” isn’t just demoralized — it’s unserious, misanthropic, and bound to lose.

Tldr: How do you inspire people to work for a better tomorrow if you don't believe tomorrow can be better? Trump and the American right have a vision of a future America that they claim will be great and glorious. The American left - and the global left - have lost sight of the future entirely. Instead of promising a bright future, they merely seek to endure the crises of the present - and some on the left have given up even that.

The article speaks to the desperate need for hope - for a clear, compelling, leftist vision of the future to serve as a guiding light for left-wing activists and politicians.

And hey, what political slash environmental slash aesthetic movement focused on a hopeful future just got its instance back up?

(Welcome back, everybody!)

Tldr: go forth, imagine shit! Lest the doomerism fungus consume us!

I'm going to highlight this paragraph:

It's worth saying, too, as many headlines point out, that meeting our target temperature of +1.5°C means we still lose the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. We should hope for this target, even if it's all but impossible, because it's certainly better than the alternative. But, as I've made clear, I don't think it's gonna happen.

A billion people live in areas 40 ft or less above sea level, areas that will be flooded when - not if, WHEN - the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets go. A billion climate refugees. That's not a "possibility". That's inevitable even in the best case scenario of 1.5 C. The most likely scenario - 3 to 4 C by 2100 - is exponentially worse.

Solarpunk is about radical hope. Plenty of the visions for a solarpunk future are unlikely or improbable. But none of those visions should be impossible.

A future where the seas don't rise? That's impossible.

A future where we slow the rising seas through both individual and collective action, prepare global civilization for the oncoming crisis with love, unity, and respect for every single person's basic humanity, and end capitalism? That's still worth fighting for.

The most important paragraphs, to me:

Here lies the difficult truth for many Pākehā [the Maori word for non-native New Zealanders]: your ancestors may not have been colonisers by choice. Many were the descendants of the English poor, pushed off their own land by enclosure, then shipped off to build lives on land stolen from Māori.

This is capitalism’s double theft, stealing land from the peasantry in England, then using those same dispossessed people to colonise indigenous land abroad. Settler working-class people are not responsible for the theft of land, but they have often been its beneficiaries, whether knowingly or not.

Acknowledging this does not mean embracing guilt—it means embracing solidarity. It means recognising that both Māori and working-class Pākehā have a common enemy: the system that profits off enclosure, exploitation, and empire.

The globalization of trade has given the wealthier share of the global population the impression that you can eat what you want. This fits well with the neoliberal ideology that portrays capitalism as democratic where people “vote with their wallets”. But it is an illusion – even for the rich countries. Rather than putting our faith in green consumerism we should strive to de-commodify food.