Leaving you all with this essay about the #ExistentialDread a lot of us are experiencing, and how one person found hope through #SolarPunk! (And I am another one of those people!)
It's been a record-breaking #SolarPunkSunday, and a great way to celebrate a year of #Resiliency, #SharingInformation, #Rewilding, #Mending, #Gardening, and building the foundation for the future we all need! I'll re-post a few articles from yesterday, and then will call it a Solar Punk day! ! A special thanks to @BrambleBearGrrrauwling and @MaQuest !
A Future Dream - How solarpunk helped alleviate my existential dread.
Solarpunk pushes against the bleak Blade Runner future of cyberpunk that centers urban dystopias dominated by corporations and technology. Solarpunk imagines an #inclusive, #sustainable, possible future, where #renewable #technology meets #ecological #enlightenment.
by Sage Agee, Art by Yuumei, Spring 2023
"LIKE MANY OF MY GENERATION, I have known dread nearly my entire life. In fifth grade, I was assigned a research paper on the topic of my choice. I had begun to spend my weekends with my dad, hanging out at coffee shops in downtown Salem, Oregon, and chatting with adults about the news. We had just witnessed the 9/11 attacks, and the adults in my life seemed to be waking up to global issues, their fear palpable even to a young child.
"This was not long after the release of #AnInconvenientTruth, and I decided to interview my dad’s friends about #ClimateChange and their predictions for the future. When I turned in the finished paper, which detailed mass extinctions and natural disasters, my teacher, Mrs. Stark, wouldn’t accept it. She didn’t believe in climate change, she said, and I needed to study a different topic.
"After that, I felt myself slipping from endless curiosity about the world into a mindset where I had to prepare for the worst, and trust no one. This helped me create the shield I needed to get through adolescence. By then, I knew that my gender and sexuality didn’t align with typical gender roles, but I kept that secret close to my tape-bound chest.
"Solarpunk represents a movement from today’s reality toward a gritty, pragmatic, better future.
"Before my parents divorced, we went to an Evangelical church every Sunday, and I learned to pray each night before bed. These prayers became a place for me to put every bad thought I would have during the day, to pass them along to God. I had already developed a deep shame for my thoughts of being more boyish, and I prayed for these thoughts to end, just as I prayed for an end to natural disasters. I prayed for a better girl-mask. I prayed for a better world. My compulsive thinking followed me into my teenage years. In the ninth grade, I started an environmental justice group, hosting letter-writing parties and taking part in local protests at the Oregon Capitol, but when anti-green legislation passed into law, or when images emerged detailing islands of garbage in the ocean, I blamed myself for not doing more.
"This kind of thinking kept me from coming out as transgender. Every time I had an intrusive thought about growing facial hair and passing as a boy, my self-blame returned. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough to be a girl; maybe I just needed to date boys and straighten my hair and shave my legs and wear makeup; maybe too, I needed to do more about the environment, protest more, organize more, do something more. I kept making up versions of myself. I only talked about environmental justice around my dad’s liberal friends. I only downplayed my femininity around my queer friends.
artwork depicting someone reading in a futuristic setting
"The one place where I escaped from this constant masking and shifting was in the books I consumed. At 17, I read #UrsulaLeGuin’s series of novels, the #HainishCycle, for the first time. I was instantly drawn into the worlds she created, where gender was fluid, as in #TheLeftHandOfDarkness, where some worlds grappled with climate disaster just as some had overcome it, as in #TheDispossessed. The way she experimented with the utopian, which always included queerness and dissolved gender roles, was like nothing I had read or experienced.
"When I allowed myself to fall into these fictions, my dread would turn over into an almost hopeful outlook. I understood this as fantasy, though, and never considered taking what I had read in LeGuin into my real life. Instead, I spent years dreaming of alternate realities, where I hadn’t been born into a doomed world. To cope with the real world, I would make lists of everything I would need to survive a catastrophe, and I taught myself #SurvivalSkills, like how to build a friction fire in the backyard."
Read more:
https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/solarpunk-imagines-future-renewable-tech-socio-ecological-enlightenment/
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/PHXNH
#SolarPunkSunday #Earth4All #HopePunk #BuildingCommunity #Resiliency
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