NOTE I don’t mean to superficially criticize, but I’m just very aware of how we elect our words. I haven’t looked into the article itself yet, so this is not to criticize the content of the post.
The word repair is a word that we should avoid when it comes to talking about turning our planet well again. Repair turns Gaja into an unliving machine, similar to a car or a washing machine. Repair is a word we use for unliving things, but Gaja is living.
We should instead dream of a world healed. By doing this, we transform our understanding of Gaja. As a being that needs to be taken care of instead of as something that is used to our benefit.
By looking at Gaja as a living being, we also challenge our conception of improving our world. Because we are taught to look at bringing forth positive change as finding solutions. But solutions are what we do in engineer work. The doctor doesn’t talk about their patients as problems to be solved, but rather patients to be healed, or unwellnesses to be healed.
In other words we need to go away from an engineer mindset towards a doctor mindset. Working with the living instead of machines. To relight away from problem solving towards unwellness healing.
The engineer mindset makes us see the world superficially without requiring to take the totality of the body in mind.
The doctor mindset on the other side makes us see the world wholistically and taking everything into account.
Using engineer mindset tells us that we need engineers to improve our world, whereas using the doctor mindset tells us that we need healers to heal the world. This will channel people into becoming healers instead of engineers.
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I see it as a counter to capitalist realism. It’s a world that could have been if the 20th century had been spent building for the future, proof that a better world is possible not just morally but in terms of the personal prosperity and happiness of literally everyone.
It’s fuel for rage at our lost potential. But it’s also a call for us to be the change we want to see. Even if we can’t manage a solarpunk future in the next century or two amidst all the climate catastrophes, we can help the millions or perhaps billions of people that make it through get as close as we can get them.
This video does a great job explaining the practical usefulness of the ‘Collective dreaming’ that Solarpunk provides. In short, it gives us a collective goal to aim toward, which then prompts us to figure out what the best way of achieving that goal is with the tools at hand.
In that way, I would put forward that Solarpunk provides a useful framework to address the issues we face today. At its core it encourages decentralized grassroots community building to address problems (the ‘punk’ part), which is generally more effective than spinning our collective wheels trying to reform political machinery that is fully corporate captured, and I would consider a form of prefiguration.
And the ‘Solar’ part encourages adopting practical and ecological technology to address the issue of our planet becoming uninhabitable from our current political and economic models; adopting renewable energy (which often scales down really well, helping out the decentralized part), viewing a healthy ecology as essential infrastructure to a prosperous existence, stopping consumerism with Degrowth, etc.
In practice, Solarpunk basically lets us collectively see a plausible outcome if we embraced Eco-Anarchism (basically combining what Catalonia was able to achieve in the 30’s, along with a distinct focus on restoring our planet’s ecosystems).
That it isn’t some impractical sci-fi concept needing yet to be invented tech, but instead an achievable goal even with our existing technology, is a very encouraging and motivating concept, IMO.
For some? 🤷 And you seem to imply that this would be bad?
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For some people it is. But I think you are making a category error in thinking that a concept that is primarily ment to open the imagination and move the overton window would lend itself as an activist movement. It is supplementary to one though: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/articles:infrapolitics
You have a valid argument, maybe I am just too depressed and burned out to still see the positive.
If you think of solarpunk as a future utopia that could (or could have) existed, that sounds about right.
If you think of it as attitudes/ways of life people can and do hold and act on, right now and whenever, whether we are pre-, post-, or during apocalypse, then its heft becomes clearer. For me the centers are the centering of and working cooperatively with life (including us human beans), the kind of social awareness and care that tends to go along with that, and appropriate tech (generally seeking/preferencing simplest thing that could work, most local, understandable & repairable. but not to the point of shooting ourselves in the foot).
