SlowBurn

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).

Maybe they're pivoting to rockets? https://global.honda/en/topics/2025/c_2025-06-17ceng.html

The most convincing thing for anyone who actually likes driving is to have them try an EV. The difference in responsiveness when accelerating (if it's any kind of decent EV) is like night & day.

Hard to get a solid sense with a lot of projects, until you meet the actual people involved and get a clearer sense of where their focus and values are, and how well they've worked out the things they're talking about. Also, smart contracts ≠ cryptocurrency, though it's an understandably unsavory association. :-)

I'm guessing you even have a particular graphic novel did you have in mind?

Really appreciate this, you can count me as on board. (obviously, see username)

Right?

Learning how to leave things alone, in our ecosystems as well as our built and social systems, is invaluable. Being able to just be with such things, observe, see how things develop on their own, how some wounds heal naturally and others do not. And, the results of that kind of learning in my experience include plenty of callings, ways we can and do participate actively to make life more wonderful.

In general, so much human activity is so frenzied and disconnected, that "Just do less" seems like generally applicable advice but it's more like one-sided advice which is good on average given our current society, but obviously is not on point 100% of the time.

Suzuki is a leading climate activist, worth learning more about. https://davidsuzuki.org/story/pipeline-blockade-is-a-sign-of-deeper-troubles/

Ding ding ding! Yeah, I was inspired to ask by this tweet: https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1940596143932768717

any large group we make is deadly

This is basically our challenge, finding ways to organize large numbers of ourselves in ways that are far less exploitative of other humans, and other life, than the systems we have going now. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything suggests it's not quite as hopeless as many believe.

Yup. And it's not just white people! In a very international course I took with Bija Vidyapeeth about 20 years ago, at least one of the non-white participants shared the view that any human engagement with the rest of the natural world was going to be a negative. I knew less then, but did recall and share about research in the Amazon which documented an increase in local biodiversity where humans were, over ecologically similar areas which were left alone.

The elites of many countries have absorbed the same Western-dominated views that those of us living in the West are bombarded with.

A little confused by this, but maybe it was intended to respond to one of the comments?