I like the idea of being sustainable, growing your own food, and living naturally. I used to dream about starting a commune or homestead, but now I’m starting to think the idealization of it is petty bourgeois and part of the settler mindset. Starting some farm in the wilderness is very reminiscent of the western frontier, and the homestead act which I am myself a beneficiary of. We don’t need more socialists leaving society, we need more urban farming and an end to monoculture.
What do y’all think about it?
Cottage core is definitely petty-bougie, but what’s your problem with solarpunk? I’d like to see some vertical forests here. My model for solarpunk and China(high-speed rail, eco-cities), not Europe.
That one Chobani commercial is still a cornerstone in the Solarpunk “movement”, at least on social media (where I expect it lives and dies). There is a “de-advertised” version where someone took the time to remove all of the references to the dairy magnate. There is no criticism of the environment depicted in the art being full of colonizing species, only derision in it being produced by Chobani. This is worrying because the settlers in the settler states, even the “environmentally conscious”, can’t even imagine a form of living alongside nature, only a continent sized homestead. Environmental collapse is more than just carbon emissions and asphalt, the environments of the Americas have been collapsing ever since the colonizers came and exterminated tens of millions of bison, tens of millions of beavers, wolves, dammed rivers that wipe out salmon populations. It’s problematic that people here don’t know what nature actually looks like, especially those who play around with “revolutionary aesthetics”.
That ad is a nightmare. Vast patches of monoculture and tons of robots in the ecological “utopia.”
It’s also just… meaningless. It’s full of literal magic, like creating miniature clouds to water your garden. It’s eye candy, not anything -punk.
“Living in harmony with nature” for colonial corporations is when you have so much control that you decide when it rains.
I wouldn’t really call it “problematic” to not know what nature actually looks like. Nature isn’t virtuous by itself. The only problematic part is the tragedy of the scope of environmental destruction needed for people to not know what nature looks like.
We absolutely should avoid monocrops and a colonization mindset, but the fundamental ideas of SolarPunk aren’t those things.
It’s problematic that settlers in a settler colony don’t know what the environment looked like before their ancestors colonized the land. I’m not saying nature in the abstract but the specific environments of the Americas that were destroyed due to homesteading and colonizing. They want a return to “green” but that “green” is imported flora and fauna.
They can brainstorm all day but when it comes down to praxis, if they are reproducing settler Colonialism of the environment, they are a problem. If Solarpunks in the colonies don’t have an intimate understanding of their local native species, they are just colonizers, not much better than people who keep their lawn green.
Edit: relevant image I just ran into
Okay, that makes sense, my anprim sensors were overactive there for a moment.
I’m sure there are better and worse self titled “solarpunk” ideologies.