I think “we” (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it’s terribly tempting to steal other people’s beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.

And though I’m sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.

Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn’t create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the “third places” of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?

People need something to believe in, and we told them “do your jobs and vote blue, but it won’t matter anyway because the environment is fucked”.

The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.

I think that was also why Qanon got so much play in the right-wing media ecosystem - getting conservatives comfortable with authoritarian big government conservatism.

Trump is going to declare martial law and have liberals killed or sent to camps? Qanon influencers have been telling conservatives that was the plan since 2017. And about 25% of the United States either believed it or thought “yeah, it’s crazy, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was real?”

Distance also matters a lot. I know where a bunch of little free libraries (no trademark) are in my community, but I don’t visit them because they’re too far away - I can check out books from Libby, I’m not going to take a bus ride for free books 😆

So advertising something like a free farm stand has diminishing returns, because you’re going to reach a lot of people for whom the stuff at the stand isn’t worth the time and effort to get to even if it’s free.

Which is to say, instead of creating a farm stand and then trying to advertise it, one might want to figure out what the people in walking distance want in a farm stand first. Then you set up an email chain or something similar and let the locals know what’s ripe when.

If you’re in the United States, don’t worry. Between tariffs and mass deportations, ordinary grocery store veggies are going to be more expensive than farmers’ markets pretty soon.

The cultural divide between you and I is so great that I don’t even know where to begin to respond. I appreciate you sharing your point of view, at least.

Are you talking about fresh fruit and vegetables? That sounds like you’re wasting a lot - in terms of money, not just in terms of food. It’s pretty easy to tell whether fresh fruit and vegetables are going bad (getting rotten, getting moldy, and so on), and if they’re not going bad they’re fine to use, whether there’s an expiration date or not.

Which is to say, I don’t think reducing food waste is a non-starter, but I do think it’s a matter of bottom-up education and practice (for you, I think that would mean learning how to tell when fruits and vegetables are going bad, and being confident enough in your knowledge that you can feel secure eating fruit and vegetables you didn’t buy recently) as much as it is top-down changes in policy.

At this point, “we should install more solar panels and waste less food” is seen as crazy hippy delusion by the American right.

If anything, the American Democratic Party has swung too far in the other direction, portraying itself as defenders of the status quo - even being willing to move further right - in order to avoid being seen as “crazy hippies”.

Meanwhile, MAGA is a utopian movement - it wants to completely transform America in the image of an idealized Christian conservative past, and doesn’t care what laws it has to break in the process.

The Democrats haven’t been able to effectively challenge MAGA’s utopian vision, because all they offer is a return to the status quo under Biden, and Americans are sick of that status quo. And the American left outside the Democratic Party has been so marginalized (mostly by the Democratic Party) that even mild “let’s do things a little bit better” leftists like Bernie Sanders have no real voice in American politics.

It’s not about being crazy hippies. It’s about having a vision for a better America, a plan to carry it out, and the courage to fight for that plan even when people call you a crazy hippie.

I think there are at least two other reasons, too:

One, sweat equity matters. I know I value pieces of furniture I built myself more than furniture I bought, even though the furniture I bought is better quality - because what I made myself represents my skill and my labor and my commitment. And in a throwaway culture, creating that emotional commitment to clothing or furniture or a home matters.

And two, rammed earth tires require no supply lines, no 3D printers, no expensive tools or complex chemistry, no gas or electricity, even. Just used tires, local dirt, and local labor. If global supply chains fall apart and resources get scarce, people can still build Earthships - and the people who are building them now will be able to teach others how to build them in the future.

“But solar power takes fertile soil out of production and hurts farmers!”

Yet again, Republican policies hurt their own rural red state base.

(clippy) It sounds like you’re trying to build a commune. Would you like help with that? (\clippy)

So I’m going to try to answer your questions, but before I do I want to emphasize the commune issue. It sounds like you’re trying to draw people together, artificially build a community where people live, work, and play in common under the guidance of the same organization, and keep them working together for a lengthy period of, frankly, impoverished struggle.

You’re trying to build a commune from the top down.

The problem with communes is they require a HIGH level of trust between members BEFORE they commit to sharing their lives, finances, and other resources. because of how quickly they can lose everything if the commune’s leadership exploits or fails them, and how easily they can be exploited by free riders and abusers.

And they need members who won’t abuse that trust. Which, historically, has been the sticking point.

When you set up a situation like this, where a person’s employment, housing, and social life all depend on maintaining their status within the same organization, you’re building a fragile edifice. Because if that organization fails, either through bad decisions, exploitation, or reasons out of its control, everyone who relies on it goes down with it.

It’s the opposite of the sustainability and resilience that we need in the uncertain future.

And it attracts a higher than normal share of desperate people, exploiters, and bad actors. Because people with good prospects in society won’t gamble those prospects, and people with strong economic and social ties to society won’t give those up, by submitting their entire lives to the governance of one organization.

Also, I am NOT millennial or Gen-Z so am not going to speak for them - polling people in those demographics directly would be a lot more helpful to you. And since the answers to a lot of your questions will reasonably correlate with age (e.g. older people who already own homes will be MUCH less likely to go live in a yurt), I think adding age ranges to your more formal polling will really help you focus on your core age demographics.

Anyway:

Q1. I’d be mostly unwilling, primarily since I’d have to quit my job, though I’d at least be curious. Not speaking for other generations.

Q2. It depends VERY MUCH on the details your question leaves out. Do I know the person? Can I choose the person? Can I switch people? Being stuck with the same roommate for five years can be fine and can end up a complete nightmare - the situation would need a strong conflict resolution model at minimum.

And then there’s the environment. What are summers and winters like? What heating and cooling exists? What kitchen/bathroom facilities are there? Is there any privacy in this four seasons tent? Is this going to be five years of basically camping?

And what’s the incentive? Do I have to pay for five years of camping? What do I get out of it and do I get any of that reward if I back out before the five years?

PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO ANSWER ALL THESE QUESTIONS. I’m not joining your commune and don’t need the answers. I’m just bringing up things people WILL want to know before committing.

Q3. Holy labor law violations, Batman! I count a max of 72 hours of blue collar + white collar + teaching work in there, and I would absolutely not sign up for anything even remotely near that without seeing a contract with much clearer labor terms and worker’s rights protections. And how exactly is the 8-24 hours of “leisure” separate from the rest of your life during that week? Is this managed leisure of some kind? Honestly that description reminds me of a 996 startup grind and I would come at it with extreme suspicion.

Q4. And there’s the incentive: five years of camping with a roommate and 996 grinding in exchange for the lifetime right to live in a 2000 sq ft house. For me: absolutely not. For younger people who have basically no chance of ever owning a house in this economy? I won’t speak for them, but maaaaaaybe?

Here’s the thing. I don’t believe land should be owned. I believe land should be managed by communities, with usage rights to a home guaranteed to the members of that community who reside in it. So from THAT standpoint your idea sounds like a great prefigurative phase shift from private ownership to community ownership. But it’s still ownership, because we still live under capitalism - and if I don’t own the home I live in, who does? What rights do they have that I don’t? And what happens when we disagree?

And circling back: who decides what counts as “satisfactorily maintaining”, and to whom can someone appeal if that decision-making body abuses its authority? Because if it takes five years to vest in a house, and in year 4 management realizes they’re not going to have enough houses for everybody and decides to kick out half their workers…

Q5. Fuuuuuuck no. This is where a lot of communes fail - because they’re totalizing, and the worker’s homes are linked to the worker’s jobs are linked to the worker’s status in the community, and if the employment fails everything fails. (Look up “The Farm” in Tennessee.) I think a community that relies so heavily on one employer, owner operated or not, multiple divisions or not, is dangerously fragile.

Q6. As long as it takes? Not writing any startup a blank check for my labor. Sorry.

Q7. Won’t change. My problems with this setup have nothing to do with the size of the house.

Q8. Holy shit, no, fuck that. So abusable.

Q9. My first reaction is to fear for victims of domestic violence.

Without going on an incredibly lengthy rant, the best way to protect individual human rights is to guarantee those rights universally, and, if those rights have to be restricted or removed for some reason, have a carefully structured procedure with objective oversight, checks and balances, and an appeal process, before anyone’s rights are restricted. And if this sounds like a court system, that’s because taking away people’s rights for the good of society is what a court system does, and even then there are some rights not even a court can take away.

A system where someone can lose their place in a commune - lose their home, lose whatever sweat equity they put into the work of the commune, and so on and so forth - if a sufficient number of fellow commune members hate them enough to vote against them, is a bad system. The way it could facilitate racism, bigotry, prejudice of all kinds, should be obvious.

And I bring up domestic violence in particular because I’ve seen too many people somehow find the courage to accuse a well-respected community member of abuse, and end up ostracized, punished, even banished from their community, because the community took the side of the well-respected member and believed they’d falsely accused a good man of a heinous crime.

Q10. That question has so many caveats and unknowns that the answer to it wouldn’t change anything for me.

Nah. Tbh it’s just your average Twitter comment thread, arguing over pointless shit, and then one side of the argument reposting the thread on their own website with a bunch more commentary about why they’re right.

And it’s the side I agree with, but still.

The more I read, the more I shared the author’s frustration here. The person the author was arguing with was claiming that “punk” can’t exist in a utopia, that it needs a dystopian society to rebel against, so because “solarpunk” is a utopian movement it can’t be punk.

Which, one, that’s pedantic bullshit that quibbles about terminology and makes no substantive critique of solarpunk ideas; two, it’s wrong, because solarpunk as a genre does have a dystopia it’s rebelling against, and that dystopia is the modern 21st century capitalist West; and three, there is nothing less punk than trying to gatekeep the definition of “punk”.

Which is to say, the more I read, the more disappointed I was in this article, because there are genuine substantive critiques of solarpunk, eg as an escapist fantasy, as impractical utopianism, and ultimately this whole long article was just an argument about whether we should call solarpunk punk.

But there were some good book recommendations in it, so that’s cool.

I suppose the artist will have to content themselves with the rest of the Internet instead.

When I was younger I really liked the idea of communes, but now I think intentional communities are more practical and avoid some of the worst aspects of communes.

The difference, to me, is communes typically collectivize all aspects of life - religion, culture, economy, working for a business owned by the commune and sharing property in common, and so on - and this not only isolates people from the surrounding community, but creates a dangerous power imbalance because of how much power the commune’s leaders hold over every aspect of its members’ lives.

Basically, I think a commune is what you get when you try to run a community like a family. And, unfortunately, there are a lot of abusive families out there.

But communes are only a subset of intentional communities.

In an IC, you don’t have to share in any particular religious or philosophical belief system, you don’t have to give everything you own to the group, you just have to want to live a lifestyle more sustainable and more closely connected to other community members than your average suburb or apartment building.

And you buy into the community and start contributing to common spaces and common meals and that’s that.

You don’t lose your home and family if you criticize the commune’s leader. You don’t have to hide your doubts about the commune’s philosophy for fear of punishment. The community has a bunch of different income sources and doesn’t fall apart if one communal business fails. There’s no charismatic leader who, to give one completely hypothetical example, preys on teenage girls and gaslights their parents into thinking his dick is God’s will. Power imbalances are limited because the power the community’s leaders have over its members is limited.

And while the hyper-violent “rivers of blood” framing may be useful for some - I thoroughly refuse the “sad” positioning as I’d much rather build toward happiness in the ideal of “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”

I’m reminded of the old saying from the days of the AIDS crisis, when Reagan decided HIV was God’s solution to homosexuality and researching a cure went against His will - bury your friends in the morning, protest in the afternoon, and dance all night.

Which does kind of put things into perspective.

I think there might be a silver lining to this. One of the reasons American cars have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger is that CAFE fuel economy standards are more generous for bigger cars - so instead of building more efficient engines, manufacturers built cars with bigger footprints.

In the long run, I’d certainly want internal combustion engines phased out. But in the short term, we might get actual small pickups again 😆

Toronto has restricted development in the ravines and other low-lying areas since 1954, when a freak hurricane caused severe flooding that killed dozens of people and washed away homes and bridges.

Today, the ravines include restored and artificial wetlands that soak up rainfall and mitigate flood risk.

There’s the most important part of the article, I think. It’s a lot easier to get buy-in for urban green spaces when the land involved is “useless” (from a capitalist standpoint) for development.

How would you feel about purely secular “mumbo jumbo” ceremonies meant to encourage care for the environment? Like, for example, an organized moment of silence before or after a cleanup (to stop and think about the natural area you’re cleaning up, listen to the birds/bugs/water, whatever)?

Thank you for reading it!

I agree. Biden’s presidency was the biggest lost opportunity of my lifetime for exactly that reason.

FDR responded to a similar global challenge - the Great Depression - by transforming the American government to serve the needs of struggling Americans - and the American people rewarded his courage and vision with overwhelming support when he ran for his second term.

Biden? Barely tried to improve America. And everything he tried failed. He couldn’t even reduce student loan payments. And when Harris had the opportunity to break with him and fight for her own vision of what America could be, she either had no vision of her own or was too afraid to fight for it.

The American “left” is terrified to promote anything more than a return to the Obama-era status quo. But if they don’t find their vision and courage the United States is guaranteed one party Republican rule for another generation.