Most people don’t pay much or any attention to local politics which makes advertising and incumbency very powerful. Most people literally just vote for the name they recognize from TV or mailers.
It would take a large increase in political consciousness to fix this.
I’ve had this very thought. Unfortunately we don’t have many trams here so there are no grassy ones at all to work on.
Interesting article, thanks for sharing.
I’ve heard people claim that Mondragon depends on a lot of workers who aren’t members of the co-op but this isn’t really mentioned. Perhaps this change happened after the period this piece is focused on?
Sacramento, CA. I am not involved yet but I’d like to connect with them and see if I can support in any way. I’m an arborist so maybe they could use some free tree services.
We just started one in my city and I’m so excited!
Working in some local community groups mainly focused on urban greening and safe streets. I am a leader in one of them, and more of an active supporter in others. I recently connected with a group focused on native plants and restoration/gardening for biodiversity.
I’d also like to get more involved with groups focusing on climate activism, Palestinian liberation, lgbtq rights, shielding immigrants from the coming violence, and mutual aid. But that’s a lot of topics and it remains aspirational at this point.
I feel strongly that home vegetable gardening is a solarpunk activity. Gaining the skills to produce food outside of corporate or state control is great as is.
If you want to make it even more solarpunk then participate in a mutual aid network, which can be a formal organization but could also just be sharing excess food with friends or community members, just as someone did for OP.
It doesn’t, but keep in mind that most weeds grow from seeds or roots in the immediate vicinity of where they end up. Even if you wipe out all of the above-ground weeds, there are typically thousands of dormant seeds and root fragments that will rapidly repopulate the area in response to the soil disturbance and lack of competition after this removal.
Proper sheet mulching prevents these roots and seeds from immediately repopulating the space. You’ll still have weeds invading from border areas and the occasional long-term dispersal but these will be much smaller in numbers and more easily handled by other methods. If the latent weed population in a larger space can be eliminated then the amount of weeding needed can be very low.
Also, very few weed seeds can establish in more typical mulch material like straw or wood chips. Thick layers of organic material require a large energy reserve to push through, usually provided by an existing root system. So once the process is completed, you can prevent recolonization with more ordinary mulching methods, though you’ll still have to fight at the borders if large weed populations exist there.
Thanks for posting this here. I don’t understand how this article was a violation of the rules on the LW politics community. Perhaps the mod simply did not like the content.
Yes, there is a clown law known as Prop 13. Property taxes are extremely low and can’t be raised except by a supermajority of voters… We do have high income taxes but overall it’s actually a middle-tax state.
Residential property values in CA are only reassessed when the property is sold. So if you’re sitting there for decades in the same house you’ll pay almost not taxes.
Almost every problem you’ve heard of about California can in some way be linked back to this law.
I wish the taxes would go up. Here in California there is absolutely no downside to treating your home as an investment vehicle. At least individually.
Well that’s kind of what I meant by taking long-term thinking to an illogical extreme. I’m not plugged into that community enough to say whether that is universal or just one voice among many. If that is the predominant view that we need to ignore present or even what most people would consider long-term problems in favor of trillions of future AI souls or whatever then I agree there is a bigger conflict.
I’ve not seen kurzegesagt saying anything like that though. Even in the video criticized above they are discussing the importance of dealing with climate change, albeit in a way that is not sufficiently critical of existing social structures.
I think there is some overlap. Solarpunk is a bit more grounded in simple solutions that are needed now but long term I think we have somewhat similar goals.
Technically, I think solarpunk is both optimistic about technology and concerned with long-term issues, just not to the illogical extreme of some members of those movements.
I think Nausicaa or the valley of the wind would qualify, despite being more of a post-apocalyptic setting the overall morality of the film is very in line with solarpunk.
This is the issue I have with the article—it recognizes the problem but it doesn’t go far enough.
Having an uncle babysit once a month is barely different from the failed nuclear family model. I’m trying to find or build child-care that is truly communal.
Anti-natalism is a toxic, doomer philosophy. And I wish this post went into more detail on how we can rebuild communal child-care networks.
I’m currently trying to procreate but due to fertility issues I find myself behind the rest of my friends who have all disappeared into atomized, suburban lives. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to avoid this fate. If anyone has insights please share.
Buildings with plants can totally be solarpunk. But obviously there’s more to it than that.
So I’m not sure I see how crypto is preferable to the non-crypto banking system? I don’t support either of them but if you can show that it’s better, then maybe it has some uses temporarily until we find a better solution.
It’s going to have to be a lot better in other ways to get over the issues around scams, volatility, and energy use though.
Car drivers in the last two years killed about 80,000 people in the US. That is of a similar scale to the murders in Gaza. So your point that this is unimportant is off base.