Solarpunk Inktober
31 utopian ideas and concepts for better futures
For the 2024 Inktober, I decided to remix it and ask:
What would X be like in a Solarpunk future?
So for each day, I took the prompt, and wrote a little blurb about it. These are not quite short stories… and I suck at drawing. So there’s no visuals just yet (mayyyybe I’ll attempt to make some at some point in the future), but I hope that these ideas nonetheless inspire some hopeful thinking.
Enjoy!
Day 1 - Backpack
Backpacks would be made of more sustainable materials, thus also be more diverse in their construction and design. In some ways, there may be less of a range of ‘product skus’ due to no longer having manufacturing plants and sweatshops that can produce all kinds of backpacks… but that also means the ones that get made would likely be far more durable and unique, since they would be made by hand or with limited automation/machinery involved.
They would be more unique to their local ecosystem, since most would only be made using the materials that can be found in that geographic area, and/or by recycling the fabrics already strewn about in that area.
Furthermore, they would be made so that they are more easily repaired and possibly even augmented, so that if a strap broke, you could easily grab another strap, or sew it back together, or even ‘glue’ or tie it back on. And if you needed to carry more stuff (or less stuff), perhaps you’d be able to add to or remove pockets and straps!
Zippers are notoriously hard to produce well… so perhaps many backpacks, if they dont have the means to make good zippers, would instead use velcro, snap buttons, drawstrings, or perhaps even more innovative methods like magnets, electrostatic, or even ‘organic’ orifices…
A big part of making products is to make them custom for the need and the user, so perhaps people would even be able to design their own bags via an online tool, and/or a makerspace that doubles as a crafting class where people can learn how to make their own bags (and other things too)! Thus, backpacks would be far more personal, customizable, durable, and punktastic!
Day 2 - Discover
Discovery would be an absolute JOY in a solarpunk future! Thanks to hyperlocalization and freedom to express one’s self and culture without need of arbitrary barriers like money, people can and would likely create all sorts of very specific things to explore. From handcrafted items to specialized architecture to new art, there would be a bevy of things to discover. Beyond the human-created things, there would be whole new and/or revived ecosystems to rediscover as well due to rewilding and wide-scale efforts to fix and foster endangered flora and fauna.
Solarpunk futures would likely stop the urban sprawl and car dependency, which would create more opportunities to discover one’s area through a diverse range of means, from fun busses and trains to even blimps and caravans. Every trip could itself be an adventure. Every new city a unique experience. And everywhere else a healthy wilderness!
Day 3 - Boots
Boots would be far more durable in a Solarpunk future. Many shoes today are made extremely cheaply via nigh slave labor. The quality of most shoes are thus poor, and even more expensive ones are inconsistent and not always worth the price. But in a world where products have been de-industrialized, artisan crafters would make a comeback. Cobblers and the like would be more prevalent, thus making it more likely that people would have at least one pair of exceptional boots.
What makes a good boot though? Fit, comfort, durability, tread, material, breathability, and so on. Because boots would be made to last and to be used, one would not have to sacrifice any of these elements just for style or expense. Sure, they may take more time, but twould be worth the wait. At first, it may be tough even finding good cobblers, but over time, apprenticeships would come back in force and a new generation of craftsmanship would blossom.
Day 4 - Exotic
One of the many upsides of a solarpunk world is that it will be a world of worlds… meaning hyperlocalism would create the space and opportunity for a vast range of diversity to flourish. In a global industrial age, to be ‘exotic’ is more often than not a marketing tool… Truly exotic things or people only stay that way so long as they are not discovered by the global market; their uniqueness commoditized and watered down for mass appeal.
A solarpunk world is a world of exotics, where every new place and peoples can fully express themselves without fear of being subsumed by the weight of industry. Instead, even a humble square mile could be its own world standing apart from its surroundings so long as those in that area wish to do so. Furthermore, the wildlife can also once again become an untamed frontier, a mystical place full of unknowns and constant change, a font of exotic life unbound, untapped, and understood to be better that way.
Day 5 - Binoculars
Binoculars are a good example for something that may quite hard to do in a solarpunk world where most industry is banned or otherwise limited in favor of environmental sustainability. Most industry is inherently harmful to the environment since they rarely ever measure how much the extraction of their raw resources impact the habitats they come from, nor do they measure much of the pollution that’s created in the production facilities that manufacture, package, and transport these processed goods. Though simple binoculars can be made by hand, creating something with the same level of quality of modern day products likely requires some form of complex manufacturing plants.
The materials used to make the lenses, the casing, the chemicals used to treat it, and any chips added for ‘smart’ devices all would need to be handled quite delicately and conscientiously. The challenge for solarpunkers would be to redesign the entire manufacturing process, down the entire supply chain, to be an environmentally friendly process. Some ways this can be done would first be to analyze the materials needed to build a high quality product, or perhaps even to surface the use case for this product to see what level of quality is even necessary.
What distance do they need to see? What kind of environment? How long do they wish to use it? Etc… If it is not absolutely necessary, perhaps materials sourced from recycled glass and plastics may work better. But if you truly did need to extract something from a specific environment via an inherently disruptive method, like mining and such, perhaps it could simply be done sparingly, and/or efforts made to reduce any negative externalities from the extraction and production process. Even just measuring the potential impact would help inform people more than today, where such things are often not even in the calculation of ‘profit and economics’.
Most likely though… even before any facilities are revamped, people could simply use the vast supply of binoculars that are no doubt hoarded away in commercial and military warehouses alike. These would be great products to add to a tool library, where people can take inventory of tools in their area, and simply borrow them when needed. This would likely cover most usecases for a long time before any new equipment would need to be made in the first place.
Day 6 - Trek
The adventure of travel has largely been made mundane today. Though one may still enjoy the occasional road trip, or seeing the world from a bird’s eye view in a plane, or going on a cruise, or even just discovering new parts of your city on a drive or public transit… the feeling that you are exploring unknown lands is hard to come by today. More problematic is the fact that many places are increasingly car-centric and hostile to more ambulatory ways of getting around. With the way roads cut through forests and POC communities alike, it can be quite hard to find vivacious paths to trek.
But what if many roads or even entire cities were rewilded? What if urban centers were both more distributed and more dense? You could have far more small-scale cities capped at a couple hundred thousand, but with a much smaller footprint than most rural towns today. Each of these small cities would be walkable, such that you wouldn’t need a car for most day-to-day needs. But they would also be connected via infrastructure that stretched above or below the land, via highways in the sky or tunnels underground, thus keeping the land open to nature.
You could therefore have countless cities each with their own unique cultures and architecture since they’d only be able to use materials that are local to them. It would be like a planetside star trek experience traveling between these cities, exploring how they all differ from each other.
Day 7 - Passport
Passports don’t have to be tools of hegemonic power. They don’t have to be a result of xenophobic immigration policies. In a borderless world, where the idea of nations, states, and other forms of artificial borders are a thing of the past, people would instead only need to notate territories in order to mark things like ecosystems and water tables. Many territories would be like atoms: centered around a distinct area with an amorphous ‘cloud’ consisting of successive perimeters of increasingly more porous influence or resource zones. These zones would be a natural result of how much raw resources around an urban center would actually be used for that city/town.
Your passport would thus be less of a ticket to enter a city/territory, and more a way to simply show off where you’ve been, and to help cities take stock of how many people have visited. This data would no doubt be useful to see where people tend to travel and when and from where. Which could in turn help optimize the resource allocation of any cities along popular (or unpopular) travel routes.
They could document things like the skills you’ve learned at a specific location, the cultures you’ve been exposed to, the aid you’ve provided and are looking for, as well as the habitats or ecosystems you’ve visited. They could even track if you’ve done any undue harm to areas that you haven’t taken accountability for.
Whatever the use cases, passports should be free, fun, and frictionless. Instead of being a barrier, they should be a gateway encouraging evermore people to travel ever further abroad!
Day 8 - Hike
Hiking seems pretty straightforward. How could it possible be made better? Simple: more hikes! Due to the lack of walkability in many, if not most western cities, urban hiking is a dangerous, not so fun endeavor. And hiking in nature preserves often feels unfulfilling if the nature trail is too manicured. For those that prefer to hike somewhere with ample visual diversity, challenging footing, and on trails that change regularly, the modern day can be disappointing.
Once more of the world is rewilded, and cities are far more walkable, then one could traverse through lands that feel magical, organic, and alive whether it be in the city or nature. Cities could be designed in ways that flows with their surroundings, and changes as fluidly as a forest across seasons. These changes would likely be cycles of growth, stasis, migration, and innovation respecting resource thresholds. Change would be expected rather than some force of 'progress' for the sake of progress or a constant enemy to 'tradition'. Cities would live and breathe like giant lifeforms rather than mere tools of control, power, or vanity.
Beyond that, instead of being disconnected islands, nature ‘parks’ could be entire ecosystems that span across vast swathes of land full of previously extinct and endangered species, unbroken by highways or industrial farming, mining, or logging. In fact, the entire idea of a ‘park’ could reverse, such that the manicured hiking and bike trails would be small, discrete islands within the greater ecosystems. One could therefore choose to meet nature ‘halfway’ in these parks, or expose oneself to the grandeur of the wild by venturing out beyond their bounds.
Thus is the joy of a world where humans are just one of many thriving animals interacting together in a homeostasis of global life.
Day 9 - Sun
What is Solarpunk without the sun? It is the actual center of our lives on this Earth. It only makes sense to restructure our society around it too. Unlike pretty much any other potential ‘resource’ within cosmic reach, we could truly use as much of its bounty as we can possibly imagine for eons to come. Once the sun expands to engulf the earth in a billion years, we’d hopefully have learned to reach other stars as well.
No other source of energy is so reliable, renewable, and even usable without actually having to use up the source. Ideally, we wouldn’t continue to use the fruits of this stellar cornucopia so foolishly. Solar panels are incredibly inefficient, even beyond their construction, due to the very nature of having to translate the pure energy of light into other more mundane energies. Though electricity is no doubt useful and versatile in its own way, we should be trying to use the power of the sun more directly. There are countless bands of EM waves, endless heat, and even constant chemical and quantum reactions that can all be harnessed into useful energy.
Imagine devices that never have to be plugged in, merely left out in the sun to charge quickly and be ready to go. Or ways to funnel excessive heat from the climate into other devices or stored for colder times. Or perhaps even methods that replicate photosynthesis to create sugar and other foods directly from sunlight!
The applications and fuel we could get from the sun would rise exponentially once we go beyond our atmosphere to get to the wavelengths of light that is usually filtered out. This could perhaps even be beamed back down planet side, or to other locations for highly concentrated and potent energy.
We need only keep in mind that the entire point of using all of this energy is not merely to grow endlessly like some kind of cancer… the goal cannot be to simply ‘profit’… but instead to experience more of what life has to offer. To find ever better ways to connect with each other and the lifeforms around us. To help more people and beings reach their fullest potential. To explore beyond our little blue marble… our speck of dust. To be a way for the universe to know itself. The sun is not merely a resource to use… it is a gateway to the heavens… a friend to love… a greater power that is something to believe in on both a material and spiritual level. The sun is our guiding star.
Day 10 - Nomadic
Nomadic lifestyles would be the new norm in a solarpunk world. There is a long, problematic history with settlements. Ever since humans have begun settling in one place for generations, ie since the dawn of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago, people have been stuck in a more hierarchical, violent, and environmentally damaging way of life than ever before. Though there are indubitable benefits from being able to stockpile resources to create surplus, we are quickly reaching the ultimate end of the inherently unsustainable lifestyle.
We must be more self sufficient, environmentally conscious, and utilize regenerative practices that allows nature to recover from the resources we extract.
Cities are inherently unsustainable. They must extract ever more resources from the surrounding areas and even abroad. If cities of the future instead migrated every few years or even decades, then it would allow nature to replenish. Furthermore, if people were of a mindset to migrate regularly, that would further keep things fresh, as well expose people to new cultures more regularly, therefore reducing the likelihood of xenophobia.
Combined, these cultural changes would necessitate technological and infrastructural changes, such that we will no longer build roads that carve up the geography, or giant buildings that seem to draw in heat, or industry that pollutes and endangers countless lifeforms. We could have floating highways that shift as cities shift, floating above ecosystems rather than cutting through them. We could have free, wireless energy and internet. We could even have food production that creates food forests wherever people go, rather than destroys them.
In a world with limited resources, being nomadic is a necessity. We must embrace that reality before it’s too late to migrate anywhere.
Day 11 - Snacks
Snacks could be SO much better! Many, if not most, snacks today are terribly unhealthy, and often not filling. But what if you could have healthy, filling, and tasty snacks? And what if you could even make much of them yourself?! In an ideal world, one could make delectable, bite-sized appetizers out of simple ingredients that can be found in your backyard. A keen understanding of what makes food tasty, customized to your own palette, and ripe with helpful nutrients would make it far easier to actually create good foods.
Perhaps there may not be as many sweets and ‘junk food’ that is sinfully delicious without the perverse incentives to produce unhealthy addictive foods. But maybe that will also open up the space to develop healthy alternatives that are just as tasteful, but without the negative externalities. In the end, it may just be a matter of making it easier for people grow their own fruit trees and vegetable gardens and such so that anyone can snack on fresh produce whenever they wished. Regardless, it’s always good to remember; what tastes good is not always good, but being good does not mean it must taste bad. We should always endeavor to make healthy items attractive, and to make unhealthy things undesirable.
Day 12 - Remote
Today, people think being hyperlocal means being remote and rural; unconnected and limited in resources. But that only really happens when a community stays closed off from others (voluntarily or otherwise). Hyperlocal communities can still be highly connected to many other communities to form an interconnected network of places that rivals or even surpasses global trade in the modern day. These connections would likely be even stronger because they’d be more mutual and won’t put undue pressure on any one community.
At the same time though, if a community Does want to be remote, they’d be able to do so without having to worry about being destitute, since they’d still be able to sustain their own needs. This further contributes to the diversity of cities and communities, and the sense of adventure one will have attempting to explore, discover, and map out the vast array of towns and such.
Day 13 - Horizon
Every home should have a view, and every view should have an unblemished view of the horizon. Apartment and office buildings should be designed such that every window faced some kind of body of water, some greenery, and the landscape. It has already been shown that people do better when they can see an open environment around them; when they have more to look at than merely glass and stone.
If cities were designed such that every view was a good view, it would likely improve people's mental state in a variety of unexpected ways. Furthermore, it would demand much more intentional, conscientious, and forward thinking urban design.
With sights unbound, it is likely that so too would that expand the minds' horizon of all humanity to match.
Day 14 - Roam
What is the joy of roaming? In contemporary times, roaming is all but extinct… or at least severely constrained to specific events or contained locations. With the advent of cars, people typically don’t randomly travel to unknown destinations, they focus on going from Point A to Point B. How could you not? It would be highly inefficient and risky to go somewhere that you don’t know would have parking, or that you’d have the time (or gas) to explore, or which roads lead there in the first place.
In a world where most transit is by foot or via mass transit, one can far more easily explore all manner of places with far less risk of being stuck or lost. You can always find your way back through well mapped trains, trollies and busses. Instead of streets being designed linearly and rigidly around cars, many cities could have pathways carved more organically by the ever shifting whims of people going to and from locations that pop up like mushrooms in the rain. You could hop off a random stop on a bus or train and explore a neighborhood just as unique and interesting as any other.
Going beyond cities would itself be a wondrous adventure. Landscapes would be ripe with more wildlife than any stretch of forest, sliced up by industry and commerce, can hope to be today. Instead of countless monocultural fields or suburbs, one could traverse through borderless ecosystems that are entire worlds onto themselves. One could roam from dawn till dusk and never see quite the same sights. One could live their entire life simply exploring new lands and peoples and ideas. One could wander through countless wonders in a world ever changing. That is what it should mean to roam.
Day 15 - Guidebook
Despite living in an age of information, society lives in ignorance. It is hard for most people to actually understand, much less create or fully utilize, most modern technologies. Even age-old practices around things like how to forage or grow food, how to clean water, and how to make stone tools are all but lost. Though these ‘primitive’ skills may seem useless when you can simply click a button, tap a screen, or even just have things happen in the background for you… we are starting to see more and more how dangerous that dependency is. As more natural disasters strike and crises threatens the very fabric of our society, it becomes apparent that not knowing these basics leaves us incredibly vulnerable.
Furthermore, people who suffer from poverty are magnitudes more vulnerable to this lack of knowledge, since they regularly lack many modern amenities and access to (good) infrastructure.
But what if there was a guidebook for self sustainability? What if anyone, anywhere, could pick up easy to read and easy to follow guidebooks that explain exactly how to build basic infrastructure and learn basic skills? In a better world, there would be no need to depend on some state or corporation to meet one’s needs. You could learn how to build a house, grow food, and even handle transportation just by picking up the things humanity has been doing for thousands of years.
Beyond the basics though, there could even be guidebooks for any and all new technologies. Without the barriers of intellectual ‘property’ the full potential of human knowledge could be pooled and built upon far more quickly and easily. Inventions and discoveries could be stored in a public ledger. Instead of hidden away in legalese or eaten by large corporations, every individual contributor would be known for generations by anyone who follows their open source guidance. Most importantly though, this free information would ensure that any and everyone could learn the skills they need for whatever they want to do.
There’d be no poverty since anyone could learn how to make basic shelter from the materials around them all the way up to extravagant abodes should they have the resources. There’d be no hunger since anyone could learn how to grow or forage for food specific to their geography and skillset. There’d be no stagnation or lost knowledge since all information would be fastidiously recorded and built upon in these books.
Entire professions and communities would likely be built around designing, updating, preserving, and distributing these guides. They could be physical, digital, audible, visual, and perhaps even take forms we can only imagine today. The power of knowledge would be unlocked for all to share. And shared knowledge is exponentially more powerful, because we can empower not just a few individuals, but all of humanity.
Day 16 - Grungy
One would think a world with less industrialized infrastructure would be more grungy… that limiting things like water usage, sewage treatments, and even disrupting soap production would thrust people back into the old days of perpetual grunginess… but such a fear is inherently outdated… In reality, many cultures had fastidious cleaning habits and methods. Many golden age (ie ‘medieval’) cities in Africa for instance, had indoor toilets even upstairs thanks to their exceptional command of irrigation systems.
We will absolutely need to use far less water if we wish to keep it… but by utilizing new and ancient knowledge on how to irrigate, clean, and transport water, we could easily set up efficient water systems in both homes and throughout whole cities. Each house would be responsible for filtering their own water, but by coming together, they could take stock of how much was being used and decide how said water should be used. Even the ‘sewage’ water could be sanitized and used as a kind of substrate for water born plants.
It will be a lot of effort to make it all work… but so too did any modern technology….
Day 17 - Journal
Journals have long been said to be an incredibly effective and therapeutic way to document one’s thoughts, reflections, and ideas. But written journals are all too easily lost, and even digital ones are not that easy to review or search through. What if journals were both digital and physical? One could have the best of both worlds!
A physical journal is very convenient, but it could do with privacy screens, password protection, and encryption. One should be able to write in it by hand, or digitally. Handwritten words should be stored digitally, and typed words should be transcribed onto the pages of the journal to ensure two-way continuity. Furthermore, everything written should be indexed, so the owner can easily search anything they’ve ever written. They should also be able to perform various data analytics on it, such as sentiment analysis, word association, and more; thus allowing them to see how they felt about a certain topic over time and to pick up patterns in their thinking according to this documentation.
Journals can be so much more once people truly take the practice seriously and adapt it to modern times while still maintaining the ancient habits around them.
Day 18 - Drive
We drive far too much these days… the fact that you have to drive to get anywhere in much of America and all other car-centric countries is a travesty. Car-centricity is a plight on the environment, a socioeconomic disaster constantly getting worse, and just a huge waste of time. The fact that the very design of our cities and crisscrossed countryside is driven by the tyranny of individualistic vehicles is the biggest drain on human potential. It is a major cause of death, of unhealthy lifestyles, of loneliness, of pollution, of extinction, of poverty, and so much more.
Instead of driving everywhere, we should be riding everywhere. We should be walking, flying, gliding, and utilizing various other methods of less disruptive and more efficient transportation. We should have trains, blimps, trollies, busses, tubes, caravans, and even orbital transit systems.
In a better future, we could have smaller, denser, walkable cities that allows anyone to get anywhere they need on foot in an easy and enjoyable way. Cities could be interlinked via various high-speed rail networks, clean-energy planes or even blimps, as well as skyways; ie highways in the sky so they don’t cut through ecosystems. They could even be connected via space elevator connected to sky hooks allowing for people to travel to space, or even just up to a high enough altitude to where high altitude planes or other vehicles can send them across the world at supersonic speeds.
Most importantly though, having a healthy network of trains and trollies in every city and even leading into the countryside would unlock untold potential. Most people would not need to waste time and attention of their day driving, as they could do things while in transit, while at the same time meet and mingle with people more organically, thus making socialization easier as well. People without means to get a car would no longer be trapped in whatever small town or even big city they happened to be in, since they could simply hop on a train to go anywhere else. Places that didn’t have the infrastructure for rail could be accessed through traveling groups where people could enjoy a more stately procession and a more migratory lifestyle.
Perhaps there could still be a use for cars as we know them today for very specific routes, or even attached to the skyways used for high-speed overground rail and such. Either way, to drive today is to waste countless hours doing a task that should very much be a far more passive and yet engaging experience. Even the joy one may get from their vehicle could arguably be far enjoyable and less coping if it was actually purely optional and recreational. For now, we must drive for a future where we can ride on the wings of freedom.
Day 19 - Ridge
What if every city, or at least many, were designed with parkour in mind? We could have cities that aren’t just walkable, but also runnable, climbable, and altogether far more recreational on a fundamental level. Buildings would be like mountain ridges with ample ‘natural’ anchor points people can use to scale, jump or just enjoy for the texture of it; a visual feast.
There would also be many large trees diligently raised into a new age of old growth trees to foster a more balanced environment of built terrain and organic. Some of these would be earmarked for tree houses and human-sized rope webbing allowing people of all skill levels to venture into the foliage.
Furthermore, more mountainside towns could be built right on actual ridges vertically and horizontally. these could be more experimental towns where you may have to utilize rappelling, grapples, poles, and lifts to get around. Whatever the case, a focus on making cities fun to explore and traverse in a myriad of ways would no doubt create truly epic environments!
Day 20 - Uncharted
It seems like there’s not much that is uncharted these days… Cities and other signs of human ‘development’ seems to touch every corner of the globe. And yet… there are countless forests, desserts, mountains, and of course vast swathes of the ocean that is unmapped and unknown. There are even abandoned cities that have been forgotten; as well as hidden underground caves with rich histories to tell. The very concept of the uncharted could apply to anything, such as the forgotten internet memes and websites floating around on the web.
In an ideal world, people would be able to truly explore these areas as much as they like, so long as they’re safe. Despite more things being charted, there would still be far more places to explore than not due to the way each city would diverge into their own unique aesthetics and culture. Then of course there’s the realm of how virtual worlds could intermingle with the physical; thus one could have nigh limitless frontiers to explore. Beyond that, people could explore things like the human mind, DNA, the microscopic world, and eventually… space!
This charting can feed into a world-wide open source repository for explorers and cartographers to document their discoveries, therefore ensuring people can have the most updated information when they venture out into potentially dangerous frontiers. Further, people may even attempt to explore abstract concepts made real in a simulation or simulating actual history as people understand it today. Many have the dream to explore uncharted lands… but perhaps the ‘land’ in question may take unexpected forms.
Day 21 - Rhinoceros
The plight of the rhinoceros is an unfortunate example of why rewilding, conservation, and ending capitalism is so very important. These incredible creatures are endangered, some species are even extinct, due to poaching and habitat loss. A vast majority of the poaching is a direct result of poverty, which itself is a function of capitalism and environmental damage making it difficult if not impossible to sustain oneself via their own means. Habitat loss itself is due to industrial agriculture, which in turn makes it harder for people to be self-reliant since much of their agriculture ends up being cash crops bought and sold to rich, foreign countries.
Therefore, in a better future, communities would be able sustain themselves through things like food forests, which is a far more biophilic form of agriculture, as it allows ecosystems to develop and flourish. People can use smaller plots of land for growing food, and even that land would be open to wildlife, since it would be designed around their inclusion. It is paramount for larger creatures like rhinos, elephants, giraffes, buffalo, bison, and so on to have vast swathes of land that is open to their migrations. Thus the importance of removing borders and inhospitable farming land as well. Additionally, the creation of food forests would mean decreasing or even eliminating the need for herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides that is currently poisoning our soils and waters.
Rhinos should and need to be able to roam wide and free. By fostering more ecological food production, we’d be able to both allow them that freedom, as well as free communities to no longer need money to survive which naturally disincentivizes poaching. If we wish to have a world full of amazing lifeforms, we must ourselves become an amazing force for life!
Day 22 - Camp
Camp is an interesting genre of film. It can be good or bad; silly or serious; an homage or satire; blockbuster or indie. But what is interesting about camp is that it has the capacity to express ideas …
Camping is hard. Just figuring out how to make fire is astoundingly difficult despite it being the origin of humanity. Putting up a tent, much less building one from scratch, is its own ‘adventure’ by itself! Then if you want to also source your own food from the wild, clean your own water, and deal with your own lavatory needs… most people will never even bother trying to learn how to camp. Even those that do usually take shortcuts wherever they feel is necessary.
What if camping was, if not easy, at least fairly straightforward and accessible? We could and should have camping sets that come with everything from the actual equipment needed, down to the step-by-step directions on how to survive in the wild. There could be regional or even more local versions specifically designed for that ecosystem. There could be more advanced guides that give you hints on how to craft your own equipment from your environment. All while being affordable, if not free! If more people are comfortable actually living ‘off the grid’, and even realize how very possible it is to do so, then people will be far more open to actually letting go of the supposed ‘convenience’ of urban/modern day living.
Much of what is considered ‘convenient’ or ‘progress’ is relative. People are often taught to believe that modern society is so much better than the times of their ancestors, even though many of us have absolutely no realistic point of reference besides the very propaganda used to indoctrinate this belief. Thus the importance of enabling people to have positive and fulfilling experiences being in nature. In due time, even urban camping could be a matter of enjoying the rewilded parts of a city. Nothing beats being able to sleep below the cosmic garden of stars that is the Milky Way unfettered by light pollution, or the vibrant symphony of nature accompanying you to and from sleep, or the refreshing thrill of foraging your own dinner. Camping is hard… but it doesn’t have to be. Camping can be beautiful.
Day 23 - Rust
How fast can the word fix itself once capitalism is halted? How many generations would it take for fields stripped of nutrients and full of pesticides to be rewilded? How long till buildings rust and more ecologically friendly construction can take its place? They say it would take anywhere between ten and a hundred thousand years for any trace of human society to vanish beyond anything more than a layer of sediment. That’s not much in the grand scheme of time… but in human lifespans, that is an eternity.
What if we could accelerate the process? Perhaps in order to shepherd a better future we should be considering ways to peacefully accelerate the demise of the present. Nothing so crass as to bring forth more disasters, but instead to empower people to live self sustainable lives that don’t depend on the very industry that poisons our bodies, minds, and environments in the first place. We should create tools that can recycle the built environment itself back into its raw ingredients. Or at the very least turn things like metals and plastics into more compostable materials. In order to avoid more disasters, we need to wholesale stop the disastrous nature of modern society. We need to be building ways for nature to reclaim what is lost so that we, too, won’t be grinded into dust by our own hands; to be forgotten in the epochs of geological history.
Day 24 - Expedition
What if we could go on an expedition to the future? To travel to multiple futures? Such an exploration could greatly inspire and motivate people to think and yearn and even fight for said futures. Many people struggle to imagine what a better future can look like; what can be possible; and what they would do in a world that is radically different from the one they are seemingly stuck in now.
Hence explains the use case for utopian simulations, games, and other platforms. People should be able to explore various concepts of the future through any and every medium possible. We should build worlds that visualize as many details about alternatives futures as we can imagine and allow people to immerse themselves within. Furthermore, people should be able to modify and even create said worlds, to feel like they are participating in building better futures.
Far too often do we tacitly assume the future is already determined… or at least that you need to have money and power to create the future. We should all feel like we can create our own futures.. because we can! We only need the tools… and the desire.
Day 25 - Scarecrow
Scarecrows shouldn’t be necessary… nor do they work, at least not in the static way they’re often depicted in movies. Scarecrows only work initially to deter animals from stopping in the vicinity. But ideally, the best way would be to move the scarecrow around fairly regularly lest the animals realize it's no threat.
The bigger issue though, is the need/risk of using pesticides and the vast expanses of monocultural fields that need be protected from pests in the first place. It would be far better to grow food in ecosystems where their are natural predators to keep 'pests' in check, or where every animal has enough to eat aside from whatever humans are growing. Perhaps a better future would be one where these deterrents aren’t needed, where one can read a guide on planting and attracting things that naturally counter any potential ‘pests’. Subsequently, any use of scarecrows would be purely aesthetic.
But in the case where people did want to use them, perhaps they could attach them to drones, or even just have robots that move around on their own. Ideally though, instead of scaring crows, we’d finally crack the code around corvid language and learn how to communicate with birds (and other animals) instead!
Day 26 - Camera
A camera is an amazing, magical piece of technology. The ability to capture any likeness at the touch of a button is truly astonishing! And yet… cameras have their limitations. Even with devices that can do far more than what most people will ever use, they still lack in their ability to truly capture what the human eye can see… much less other animals! Cameras cannot capture depth and perspective nearly the same as humans can. Nor can they always grasp the fluidity of colors or movement. They suffer in the low light and often have to be deployed in ways that are not always convenient, sometimes making it hard to capture life’s serendipitous moments.
Perhaps if cost did not matter, and scale was not a primary concern, we could have cameras that capture all of that and more. In addition to the aforementioned, we could have lenses that allow us to ‘see’ see things usually invisible eye, such as various wavelengths of light; Wi-Fi, microwaves, and radio waves. We could have ones that you to peer underground and through buildings, as well as other ways to visualize audio signals, like music n such. They could perhaps even be tuned to pick up brainwaves, or even chemicals in the air associated with feelings, with pheromones, and with plants (not to mention dangerous elements). They could allow people to mess with scale, use them as real-time eyes into micro worlds and above the world.
If given more time and space to explore the edge of what is possible, rather than merely what is profitable and scalable, than the limit of possibility itself may be pushed further afield… Cameras could be windows to whole other realities!
Day 27 - Road
Roads suck. They are indeed a feat of modern-day infrastructure and technology… but they are also a prime example of how technology can be just as bad, if not moreso, as it is impressive. It’s impact just as, if not more, chaotic and harmful as it is useful.
Roads and the cars that use them, are one of the most inefficient and wasteful modes of transit. Where a road may take dozens, even hundreds of people and cargo per minute per mile, a train could take orders of magnitude more. Where roads cost millions of dollars to maintain and regularly bankrupt entire cities, rail takes a fraction of the cost, after the initial creation, and can easily breathe new life into an area. Where roads cut through ecosystems and spread like cancer, rails require far more intentionality and can coexist more cohesively. Though both are still some level of hostile towards wildlife, a train can more easily be made to adapt, while a road forces nature to adapt to it.
Roads host more deaths than almost any other form of technology not built for war, and yet is seen as the ‘safer’ or more ‘reliable’ route. In actuality, roads suck and will continue to do so since they were never designed to be better. They were designed under the assumption that nothing else mattered besides a few humans and their desire to hoard and to control and to affect power where none was needed. If every they could be redeemed, they’d have to turn into corridors for life to regenerate. They’d need to mend broken communities and innovate so as not to cost so much to maintain. They should be designed as recreational tracks or long-haul traveling across areas where trains could not go for whatever reason. They would need to be better at adapting to different environments and needs. Roads should be rail, or paths, or skyways… or anything that did not require crossing at all, but instead created connections... between more than just man and machine.
Day 28 - Jumbo
Jumbo shrimp. Jumbo jets. Jumbotrons. These are all related. They are examples of capitalism run amuck. They’re examples of overfishing, overproduction, and over-advertising. We instead need to have jumbo trains, trollies, and trellises. Sure there may be giant fish, large planes, and obnoxious digital billboards every now and then, but these should be exceptions rather than the rule. We can’t keep wasting resources trying to scale inherently unsustainable products.
Day 29 - Navigator
GPS navigation is an incredible feat of sci-fi level engineering and infrastructure. The ability to put things in space that then communicate with countless objects on the ground all while calculating literal time-bendingly complex maths is a true accomplishment of humanity. Unfortunately, it is largely misused and abused by governments and corporations spying and tracking people… even working together more times than not. The fact that we half the world carries devices that can and is used to track their every movement just to sell them ‘targeted’ ads that still suck is a waste of this technology.
If a solarpunk world still decides to maintain the GPS infrastructure, perhaps it can be used to do things like track natural disasters, endangered species, and even carry out consensual studies on people’s movement patterns. It can help manage mass migration events, de-densify cities so that people spread out more evenly, and map out the more dynamic, nomadic, and smaller-scale towns of the future.
Furthermore, the value of a navigator specialist could re-emerge to chart out all the new ways that world will change when entire regions are rewilded, roads decommissioned, borders are abolished, and cities fracture into fractal communities. It would be a whole new world to explore.
Day 30 - Violin
Not enough people play violins today. Or any instruments. As much as Midis, beat-making software, and sampling is great stuff, there is always something ineffable about live music played by passionate people. Fiddle-like instruments are especially underrated these days, as they have been largely relegated to ‘classical’ music rather than the jaunty or bardic expressions that spawned these instruments.
In a world where school is a completely different affair, where students can decide what they want to learn and when, it would be far easier to teach people how to play in a more fun way. There’d be everyday people playing instruments in jazz bars, restaurants, or even just while hanging out with friends; having fun making music together, telling stories, and just expressing themselves in more holistic ways. In a world where people don’t have to work for a living, they can actually feel and listen to the urge to just learn new skills, experiment, and try new things without worry of whether they need to get good enough to make a living from it.
We could have a Cambrian explosion of creativity and art and expression when people are free from constant labor and exploitation which in turn gives them the freedom to live truly fulfilling lives!
Day 31 - Landmark
Landmarks should be far more frequent and diverse than they are today. Industrialization has turned many a natural wonder into naught but a pile of ‘resources’ or a tourist spot at best. And even man-made wonders are largely surface-level and inherently unsustainable, thereby making them temporary landmarks that likely won’t survive the next few generations. Ideally, we’d have landmarks that are as timeless as Niagara Falls or the Himalayas or even the Egyptian Pyramids. We could have a ton more local legends too, whether it be natural or artificial, that help people more easily navigate from town to town.
The landmark components of solarpunk: solar panels and greenery, should themselves be unique to the location they are in. Different regions could develop different kinds of solar panels that use material they have readily available in ways bespoke to their abilities and needs. There could be panels as diverse as the flowers and leaves they are inspired from. Likewise for the type of plants grown and how they are grown. Some cities would make use of vertical farming, while others have maze-like gardens, still others have floating plants, or even pictographic designs, and so much more. The type and form of food forests people use instead of monocrops would further set people apart. Thus the food available, even in the same (previously known) ‘country’, would differ as widely as international foods do in global markets.
The beauty and magic of a solarpunk world is one that is constantly growing in the best of ways; changing and evolving not like the cancerous growth of capitalism, but like the fertile grounds of a forest… a jungle of ever-developing potential, interconnectedness, and vitality.
Please let me know what you think! And feel free to point out what days/ideas you like most in the comments! Which concepts would you want to be expanded upon more?