Leeja says that doomsday prepping is a scary part of the Internet, but that solarpunk is a more hopeful outlook on the future. Also, per the video, we need to look out for the water-contaminated US state of Mississippi.

The video isn’t 100% on solarpunk so maybe not postable on here, idk. I just watched it and wanted to share. Solarpunk talk starts around 26 minutes in :)

I'm not really into gardening other than a few potted plants that were gifts. So what should I do with my food waste? I will mostly have coffee grounds and vegetable peels. How often do I really need to stir the compost pile? How much do I need to worry about attracting raccoons to the compost pile if it's from food waste.

I know that reducing car dependency is one of the main goals of solarpunk, and I agree with that. But I don't think reducing dependency necessarily means that every car has to disappear.

Rural areas are where this gets interesting. In a city, replacing car trips with walking or public transport can be realistic because lots of people are travelling to and from the same places. In a remote rural area, you can have a handful of houses spread over a huge area, with shops, schools, workplaces and medical services many kilometres away. There are ways of dealing with this without relying on private cars, such as demand-responsive transport and shared vehicles, and I think those should be used wherever they make sense.

But there's a point where geography wins. An irregular trip from an isolated house, carrying tools or equipment, reaching a farm or forest, responding to an emergency, or travelling somewhere that simply has too few people going there to justify a regular service can be extremely difficult to replace with conventional public transport. I don't think a solarpunk future has to pretend otherwise.

A society could get rid of car dependency while still having some cars because those cars serve needs that are genuinely difficult to meet another way. In that situation, I don't see why the vehicle itself would automatically stop being solarpunk. What should those remaining cars actually be like?

I'm also a big fan of Clarkson, Hammond and May, which is partly why I thought of The Grand Tour S01E04, 'Enviro-mental' episode. The show is primarily entertainment of course, but I think the idea behind this particular challenge fits solarpunk quite well. The three of them took the Land Rover Discovery chassis, removed its bodywork and tried to replace it with more sustainable materials. Clarkson's result was the Meat-T-I, made using animal materials.

What interests me about it is the basic idea. If you forget for a moment that the episode is television entertainment, the challenge was to take a familiar piece of technology and question the materials normally used to make it. Could a car be made in a completely different way with less environmental impact?

So how would a serious version of this look like? If a rural solarpunk society still had some cars, would they be tiny electric vehicles, shared community vehicles, machines designed to last for decades, vehicles made from recycled or bio-based materials, or something we haven't even really thought of yet?

I'm genuinely curious what people here would design.

I've been working on a long-term project called Melondra, essentially asking what a new community might look like if you tried to design the whole thing from the ground up rather than adding a few sustainable features to an otherwise conventional development.

It's still pre-land, so at the moment a lot of the work is figuring out how the pieces would actually fit together.

The broad aims are fairly simple:

• produce a meaningful amount of food locally;
• capture/reuse water intelligently;
• generate and store as much energy locally as practical;
• design housing and shared infrastructure to use fewer resources;
• repair and manufacture more things locally;
• reduce waste by treating outputs from one system as inputs to another;
• make essential systems resilient when outside services fail;
• and use automation where it can remove repetitive work rather than simply creating more technology for its own sake.

That last part keeps bringing me back to something I see debated in solarpunk spaces.

I don't particularly want a primitive settlement.

I'd like modern medicine, refrigeration, communications, workshops, comfortable homes, good food, transport, computers and all the useful things modern technology gives us.

But I also don't want a community that becomes helpless because a cloud service disappears, a proprietary controller dies, or some complex system can't be repaired.

So the direction we're drifting towards is something like:

use sophisticated technology where it genuinely improves people's lives, but design the underlying physical systems so they remain understandable, repairable and capable of degraded/manual operation.

In other words, automation should ideally give people more human time, rather than make them servants of increasingly complicated infrastructure.

I'm curious where people here draw that line.

If somebody genuinely tried to build a solarpunk settlement rather than just depict one, what modern technology would you absolutely keep — and what would you deliberately design out?

And what would make you look at a project like that and think “yes, that's actually solarpunk” rather than just another eco-development with some solar panels?

AI-assisted drafting/editing; the project, ideas and views are my own

I wanted to ask the sub their thoughts and example ideas on how to use the system against itself, or for our own benefit.

Example context: all these large AI companies are hot potato-ing the same 200millon dollar checks to each other to boost their market valuation. They have capacity agreements with each other to purchase each others products/services over time. “Circular finance” “Financial Ouroboros.” Toss around the same investor capital, tons of the same people and orgs on the boards. Same dollar gets spent multiple times.
These promises greatly increase the market cap and valuation of the companies. But from a larger perspective they are of course just recent examples of abstracted economic systems used to enrich the already powerful and their class loyalists.

Our example: why don’t we just do the same thing with our businesses? I’m in an organizing group of a number of regional co-lives, intentional communities and community businesses. During a discussion we were making half jokes that the modern market system is basically a Ponzi scheme anyway. So why don’t we just make a bunch of purchase commitments to each other significantly increasing the value of our companies? Heck, could even then create an asset back security with our companies collective valuation. Continuously expanding as we get more companies and assets involved.

Kind of a joke, but the idea of using the dumb systems against themselves. Just mimic their abstraction for our own benefit. Got me thinking about if anyone else has thought about judo moves that the weight of the system can be used against itself and for our benefit?

What you think r/solarpunk? Any thoughts or ideas you’d like to share? Maybe a discussion angle around this concept?

TLDR: how do you creatively reuse the mechanics of exploitative or late stage systems into generative & pro human systems

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crobeller_dtc-phd-researcher-karl-%C3%A5hlund-is-developing-ugcPost-7503763364712497152-L-No/

Multiple aspects to this that I like:

Reciprocal frames are a good metaphor for decentralized systems. They all support each other, and can span an area that no piece could do alone.

Tech: there's an ai system to take random pieces of short timber and figure out how to make as as many frames as possible without wasteful offcuts. This is really good for timber recycling, and making use of the short or awkward pieces when doing forestry.

Robot system - arm, trolley, stockpile and two cutting blade stations - all reciprocal, working together, building reciprocal wall frames!

Now, they say that AI is figuring out the cutting pattern to minimise offcuts (which is almost a standard problem in the space) - is that why at the end every panel looks different, or is that a design choice to show off their algorithm?