Mastodawn

The end message might be too grim, as it doesn't see a chance for communities, but I think it makes a point -

We can hope and strive for a better future, but we all need to admit that it will be traumatic in the meantime.

We need to be ready for that trauma, we need to acknowledge that each year we don't address the climate change more people will suffer, and we should incorporate this into our narratives.

Will it be really bad? Yes.

Can we make it better?

That's the point of #solarpunk

That's why all the stories of @SolarpunkPrompts suggest incorporating this trauma instead of avoiding it.

Taking a realistic situation we could encounter in the oncoming decades and instead of playing it with old postapocalyptic and hopeless tropes, seeing how we can imagine getting out of it, surviving it together.

A world with no meat, traumatizing multiple cultures?

Millions people losing their jobs, confused and lost?

Whole communities losing their homes to disasters?

#solarpunkPrompts

That is the fatigue I've been talking about a few days ago, trying to convince #writers that tackling a traumatic story and seeing hope in there is worth it.

The language is so alien.

We don't want MadMaxian barbarians trading women for water.

We want communities working together, and I mean really together: internally and with other communities around the world, to find new ways to get water in their regions.

Maybe a solution from Iraq or Colombia could work in Greece?

To really write #solarpunk dealing with traumas and processing them we should make a lot of symbols and tropes which could allow us to describe the real world around us.

We need to be able to write about communities and virtues of #wikipedia and the #floss movement.

We need to imagine non-violent conflict resolution and incorporating it within a story.

We need new, revolutionary perspectives on today, to unlock #writing about a better tomorrow.

With that, we could do more with #solarpunkReporting , showing things like the Sierra Leone's emergency infrastructure created by grassroots, gynepunks from Calafou not as "outliers", not as "fleeting" or "whimsical", but as very real things that keep happening around the world DESPITE us refusing to give them place in our popular culture.

These things happen despite being unimaginable for most of us.

What is more #solarpunk than people creating a better world where others see no possibility?

Maggie Maybe Aug 25, 2023

@alxd but @jessicawildfire isn’t trying to write stories of Hopium meant to calm peoples anxieties, she is living in reality trying to bust through the delusions so we can stop or slow the social murder that is ripping through the country/world.

At least that’s how I interpret her writing, but I don’t know her so I definitely am not speaking for her. Personally, I don’t want pretty lies I like to deal in reality.

@maggiemaybe @jessicawildfire ha, I didn't know she's on Mastodon!

Hello and thank you for your essay.

I'll need to read more of Jessica's work to say anything beyond that, but I think that this piece is pretty compatible with how I see Solarpunk: as a way to acknowledge and process the trauma while believing and working towards a future beyond collapse.

Antoine Martin Aug 26, 2023

@alxd I like that you mentioned Colombia. I'm currently in the Arauca department visiting campesino communities who live almost entirely off the land. Many communities were born from retaking land from the petrol industry. Thus, at the core of these communities is a strong desire for autonomy and a capacity to defend their land from the interests of multinationals.

Maggie Maybe Aug 25, 2023

@alxd no I don’t think she’s saying there’s no chance for community, I think what she’s saying is that we would have to form communities which would be a “grid” so it wouldn’t be “living off the grid” anymore. She’s saying we would need community to survive and the preppers don’t envision the future that way.

@maggiemaybe I think you're right, I just wanted to extra-emphasize that I can see communities as a solution, with or without the word "grid" (which for some can have really bad connotations).

bs2 Aug 25, 2023

@alxd The article reminded me of the guy that went to live by himself somewhere in Alaska. They found is body in an abandoned bus. I think there is a book and a movie about it. An article suggested that his last meal poisoned him. The greens were edible in other areas but had too many toxins(?) where he was for the way he had to rely on them. A local community might have taught him to avoid self-poisoning with local plants.

🐻 John Aug 26, 2023

@bsmall2 @alxd Sorry, this is just one of my pet peeves. Chris McCandless died because he ate a plant that no one at the time knew was toxic, including the guides he consulted. The toxin in question, ODAP, also just so happens to hit young men the hardest. Chris McCandless may have been kinda dumb but the manner in which he died was very much NOT his fault: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccandless-died

How Chris McCandless Died

A new paper presents hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of Christopher McCandless’s death…

The New Yorker

bs2 Aug 27, 2023

@EponymousBosh The smarter he was the more the story of his death supports the points made in the article at the start of this thread. People can't go it alone, we need community. The rough outlines I read made me think of some lines about the Pirahã...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2

@alxd

The Interpreter

Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?

The New Yorker

bs2 Aug 27, 2023

@EponymousBosh
My guess is thatin order to go "into the wild" people need to specific local knowledge that is built up over generations, and passed along in subtle cultural ways...
> ... they know the usefulness and location of all important plants in their area; they understand the behavior of local animals and how to catch and avoid them; and they can walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts, and small game....

Crab With Knife Aug 25, 2023

@alxd I don't know where you keep finding these good blog posts. I enjoyed this one as well. I don't think we are going to escape by being super independent. It's just not really feasible.

Cassandrich Aug 25, 2023

@_CrabWithKnife_ @alxd Cost of being "independently" secure against bad events, *even in a working society* (IOW where your money/property/on-paper power still mean something), is at least 2-3 orders of magnitude more costly than having working safety nets.

O'Shaq Hennessy Aug 25, 2023

@alxd Sounds like someone ignored scientists, didn't build a bunker, and now they're realizing they're screwed and scared. See you in the water wars.

AGTMADCAT 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼🇵🇸Aug 25, 2023

@alxd If you're not planning your off-grid compound to include 149 of your closest friends, you don't understand how humans work. We're social animals and teamwork is OP.

lyam23 Aug 25, 2023

@alxd Accurate and sobering. The only thing we can count on is the inevitability of aging, sickness, and death. The only question is whether it will come sooner or later and unfortunately for much of humanity, climate change tips the scales closer to sooner.

Sylvestre Aug 25, 2023

Strikes me how this whole discussion leaves out indigenous and other traditional communities that are living without most Western stuff because they've never had it. Who have lived that way through very hard conditions, stuff like colonization, and now the climate apocalypse that is already on in their regions.

Isn't that the natural place to look / learn / do basic research if you want to start spinning fantasies about what living "off the grid" (without present Western infrastructure) means? What survival and resilience without such infrastructure requires?

I don't know much about the matter, but I know that societies that survived for long in harsh conditions are not individualistic; they didn't and don't survive as nuclear families. Quite the opposite. And from all I know, a lot of energy goes into developing and continuously maintaining and caring for communal life / social relationships for it to be successful.

So I'd say, yeah the prep is emotional and that includes emotionally going beyond individualism, beyond "me myself & I (& perhaps my nuclear family) in a bunker". That latter vision is absurd given (pre)history, by which I mean evolutionary time spans. Some of us could only stop living in extended communities because of this recent increase in automatised infrastructures making more direct and basic cooperation unnecessary (for some!).

Sylvestre Aug 25, 2023

So I'd say, meaningful prep is more like grassroots organizing and learning solidarity and how to get along with different types of people, than like playing Indiana Jones alone in the jungle (though sure of course practical skills are good, but the point is to share and trade them!).

Totally anecdotal, literally a few days before the Ukraine invasion I read how the UA army was running prep workshops for small groups of civilians in Kiev that predicted it could happen and requested training. There was stuff on what to stock and what to have in your evacuation backpack. But the main point they hammered home was, get to know the neighbors in your apartment block, talk to them, find out who they are. Because you will have to share and trade resources, cooperate to organise them, coordinate neighborhood security wards, etc. Better chance if you know and trust each other.

(Source some article in a Polish leftist zine)

I think this is a pretty down to earth realistic approach. I think Naomi Klein or a similar figure said a phrase about the broader climate crisis that was memorable to me (vague paraphrase): as soon as you start thinking in terms of individual action, you are already losing. She meant preventing the crisis, but I'd think it applies to riding it out, too.

Vincarsi Aug 25, 2023

@sensitivityisstrength @alxd yeahbutt doncha know that saying we can learn *anything at all* from indigenous groups is the noble savage myth? Doncha know that they didn't have the wheel so they're too stupid to compare ourselves to? And trying to say colonizers lied about them is offensive to white people who are sure they know better? They *couldn't* represent a more stable social system that might scale if we tried. (A sampling of responses I've gotten from trying to make this exact point)

Mekk Aug 25, 2023

@sensitivityisstrength @alxd those communities were and are small. Living in groups of dozens to hundreds is completely different from living in cities of millions. So we may look for some inspirations (like more cooperative and less competitive children games and edu) but in general those are completely different problems and contexts.

@sensitivityisstrength @alxd

Steve Moore

Aug 25, 2023

Link to a related post -
https://toad.social/@ArrowbearMoore/110566615518682279

So much attention is focused on “how” we are living. i.e. all the stuff we are producing & consuming, the cultures of capitalist or fascist consumerism. It may be as important to focus on the “why”, to what purpose are we doing this. Understanding who we are, how we got here is critical. Yuval Noah Harari explores this in his book Sapiens. We need to get over ourselves, re-indigenize our cultures.

Steve Moore :toad: (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image As it turns out, our notion of “self” may be all in our mind. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex of the brain is where the concept of self as an individual develops. The notion of “self”, of independent individualism, may be a miscalculation, leading to splintered social structures. Past #Indigenous societies offer examples that we are capable of supporting uniqueness while working together to benefit the universes around us. #Nature #Science https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-our-brain-preserves-our-sense-of-self/ https://bigthink.com/the-well/eastern-philosophy-neuroscience-no-self/

toad.social

J.H.Noyes Aug 25, 2023

The problem with going to the woods during times of collapse is that everyone else goes to the woods, too. The area that can be reached on a single tank of gas becomes populated like a city, perhaps even moreso if consider the cover to flesh needing cover ratio. That which can be hunted or gathered is quickly exhausted and the newcomers become meat in a dark forest of hungry things.

Tom Walker Aug 25, 2023

@alxd
> "He didn't realize his electric can opener wasn't going to work until after the power had gone out."

This does seem like quite an easy problem to avoid to be fair.

LisPi Aug 25, 2023

@tomw @alxd A sturdy knife could also have done the trick for a while (or a rock, even).

Ricardo Harvin Aug 25, 2023

@alxd It's really good to read what I've been thinking since I first saw Mad Max 40-ish years ago.

Even I could survive an apocalyptic breakdown of society, I absolutely do not want to live in such a world, and would definitely not survive long.

I barely want to live in this world, foul and cowardly as most people are.