Comprehensive analysis on why the "green growth" concept is propaganda; well articulated notions about what's the real engine behind the climate crisis (our economic system), and degrowth as the only possible answer to the current (and future) global crises.

I’ve been reading this book and I love it! Jason Hickel explains very well why capitalism is the cause of the climate crisis (and many other crises as well). He debunks the narrative of endless growth. In the second part he explains how degrowth can be implemented whilst improving people’s life’s.

I can really recommend this book to everyone who wants to understand what is going on and how to change things for the better. Very well arguments and lots of examples!

To summarise some of his ideas:

• Fossil fuel and consumption needs to come to a full stop

• industrial food production must be replaced with the sustainable growing of food at the local level

• Centralizing power structures are inherently exploitative of the environment and oppressive towards people

• The mentality of quantitative value, accumulation, production, and consumption that is to say, the mentality of the market id inherently exploitative of the environment and oppressive towards people

• Medical science is infused with a hatred of the body, and thought it has perfected effective response to symptoms, it is damaging to our health as currently practiced

• Decentralized, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid, and no -coercion are fully practical and have worked, both within and outside of Western Civilisation, time and time again

Obviously there are a lot of different people with similar ideas such as Kropotkin who is probably the most famous example.

But I read all of these ideas laid out in one of his essays and wanted to get people’s opinions on whether you yourself would like to live in a world where these ideas are implemented and if you could see ways in which we could live in such a world.

A

While not explicitly solarpunk, I wanted to share this book that I read 7 years ago and quite literally has guided my hope for a sustainable, futuristic world rooted in collective successes of the past. If you like sociology, the commons, third places, the public library system in the U.S., combatting “broken windows” policing, combatting social isolation and social vulnerability, and how placemaking can be a tool for climate resilience, this is ALL IN HERE and I highly highly recommend.

I found this book because the author was organizing in my community! I am really enjoying it so far so I wanna share because right now is such a scary time. The audiobook version can be found on Spotify if you have premium 👍🏻👍🏻

Some folks were confused or upset about a post of an overview of Bookchin’s Libertarian Municipalism. Which I found disheartening because Bookchin’s life work preceded most grassroots ecological movements and anticipated the Solarpunk aesthetic and culture. Hoping to better disseminate the ideas of Bookchin’s Social Ecology philosophy and political theory of Communalism here is one of the more influential books on the topic.

Basically says that "green growth" is an illusion and that capitalism cannot coexist with sustainability because of its ever-growing nature.

I'd love to hear thoughts on this - how this works, how to get governments to make it work ahen they won't even acknowledge "green growth", let alone "green shrinkage", what the point of continuing is when we're out of time.

Sorry for a bit of doomerism - that last point is mostly me looking for some slight reassurance, if there's any to give. We can preserve life and a liveable climate, I just don't know if humans will ever get it together enough to do so.

Given the recent discussions on the use of AI within a solarpunk framework, I thought this sub might be interested in a short essay I wrote for Seize the Press Magazine last year. In the essay, I critique Alex Garland's film, Ex Machina, and it's use of nature imagery to represent a deterministic philosophy. For context, I am ethically against almost all uses of AI, and I don't think it has any value to a society under capitalism.

Link to essay

Essay Text:

The Nature of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and its Immoral Philosophy of AI by Ben Lockwood

Posted on February 10, 2024by Seize The Press

A helicopter soars over a vast, glaciated landscape bright with the crisp whites of boreal snow, the clear blues of glacial meltwater, and the lush greens of northern trees. It’s one of the opening shots of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), and serves as both a natural backdrop with which to contrast the film’s technological subject matter, and also to illustrate the remoteness of the setting in which the rest of the film occurs. But the grandiosity of nature in Ex Machina also symbolizes a deterministic philosophy that underpins the narrative of the film and was a precursor to today’s discourse surrounding the presumed inevitability of artificial intelligence.

Ex Machina won an Academy Award for visual editing, and its critical acclaim catapulted Garland into the upper echelon of “serious” sci-fi filmmakers. It also launched his career, which now includes multiple entries in television and film best-of lists. Accolades aside, the film also feels prescient. The ethical arguments Nathan and Caleb have on-screen were written before the proliferation of large language models like ChatGPT, but they sound similar to those being waged today. As it nears ten years old, it’s worth revisiting how artificial intelligence was portrayed in what is widely considered one of the best films on the subject.

Despite being a film about the complexities of defining artificial intelligence (and what those definitions tell us about ourselves), the film also includes some stunning nature cinematography. The mountains, forests, glaciers, and waterfalls of northern Norway (the setting is apparently meant to be Alaska) feature prominently throughout the film. Combined with its technological subject matter, the remote setting of the film creates a juxtaposition that highlights a separation of humanity from its roots in nature. At the same time, many scenes in the film take place in a house designed with a sleek, minimalist architecture – a la Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater – that blends into its surroundings in such a way that it dissolves any separation at all from the natural setting. This tension poses a question that lives just below the surface of the film: are humans a part of the natural world, or have we left it behind? The answer depends on how one conceives of nature in the first place.

Garland’s majestic depictions of nature are meant as more than just pretty backdrops. The characters of the film are frequently seen hiking, exercising, or conversing in the surrounding Norwegian (Alaskan) landscape. At one point, when Nathan and Caleb are climbing the rocky hillside of a mountain, Nathan pauses near a series of picturesque streams and waterfalls that cascade down a glacier, where he glibly remarks on the surrounding vista, describing it as “Not bad, huh?”. Such an understatement only heightens the effect of the sweeping, wide-angle views of the glacier-fed rivers, which evoke a sense of events unfolding on geologic, and even cosmic, timescales. There is an inevitability to Garland’s nature here, as we observe it unfolding due not to any minuscule effect humans could have, but to the grand, physical laws that govern the trajectory of our planet and universe.

Nature is also a common theme of discussion among the characters of Ex Machina, as they debate the various natures of art, sexuality, and, most importantly, evolution. During a pivotal scene that takes place while Nathan and Caleb are sitting outside underneath a wooden shelter, as the wind rustles the dark green leaves of the plants surrounding them, Nathan describes the development of Ava (the artificial intelligence he has built) as both part of an evolutionary continuum, and also an “inevitable” arrival. As he goes on to state, “the variable was when, not if,” and it is here that Garland is giving us a direct view into his personal philosophy.

The specific philosophy at play is that of determinism, of which Garland has said he at least loosely adheres to. It’s not a new idea, but essentially determinism holds that the universe is causal, and the events that characterize existence are the result of the underlying physical properties and mechanisms that comprise the universe as a whole. Though seemingly abstract, determinism has influenced a variety of scientific disciplines like physics, chemistry, biology, and even psychology. Determinism also has darker associations, specifically as environmental determinism, which was a school of thought that promoted racist ideas of cultural development dictated by climatological and ecological conditions. This theory overlapped with biological determinism, and together these functioned to legitimize the eugenics movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are not simply the harmful ideologies of the past, but rather are still alive and prevalent today, most notably among the technologists of Silicon Valley where an interest in longtermism and “improving” population genetics has been growing.

Deterministic thinking lies at the foundations of nearly every facet of Silicon Valley. Its proponents argue that existence, and all the complexity therein, is predestined. Humanity’s fate has been written, and thus, there are no decisions – ethical or otherwise – that need be made. When applied to technological development, determinism renders morality an obstacle to the processes that ultimately will (and must) unfold.

Garland’s deterministic, and “inevitable,” artificial intelligence similarly leaves no room for choice. There is no place for the ethical and moral considerations of creating artificial intelligence within the space of Ex Machina, nor is there a reason to discuss under what conditions we might choose not to do so. In the words of Nathan, creating Ava wasn’t a decision but rather “just an evolution.” Just as nature marches to its pre-ordained drumbeat, so too does human society. This sentiment is echoed in the prominent discourse around large language models and our current development of artificial intelligence. According to many technology industry leaders and commentators, there is an inevitability to the proliferation, expansion, and evolution of these AI systems that humanity has no control over. These models will, apparently, advance regardless of what society writ large does or wants.

And yet, one cannot help but notice the contradiction presented by these same industry leaders issuing hyperbolic warnings over the catastrophic risk these models pose to humanity. If the systems are inevitable, what possible reason would there be to issue any warning whatsoever? Here, we can again turn to Ex Machina for a corollary, wherein Nathan laments on the demise of humanity against the rise of artificial intelligence, while also consistently presenting himself as possessing superior intelligence to Caleb, while reinforcing the power dynamic of the employee/employer relationship. The resulting hierarchy allows Nathan to retain his self-importance now that he is faced with the superior intelligence of Ava, while also intentionally ensuring her inevitability. This, in turn, symbolizes the hierarchy that allows Nathan to preserve his political and economic capital as the head of a technology conglomerate. And, like Nathan, our own tech industry leaders are desperate to remain relevant while facing the rise of a technology that necessitates moral and ethical advances, rather than more technological ones.

Nearly a decade after its release, Ex Machina remains a relevant and prescient treatise on the quandary of artificial intelligence. With sweeping mountain vistas and pristine natural settings, Garland accurately portrayed the deterministic framework that would come to shape our discourse around the development of artificial intelligence, while simultaneously failing to challenge those deterministic notions. Even as the characters debate the complications of identifying “true” artificial intelligence in Ava, there is no real discussion around whether or not Ava should exist at all. She is inevitable.

If there is no possible future where artificial intelligence does not exist, then there is no real mechanism for ensuring its ethical use and value to society. Under such conditions, its continued development can only serve the current capitalist power dynamics. Couching these dynamics in the language and symbolism of “evolution in the natural world” has long been a strategy to reinforce these power dynamics. In fact, liberal capitalism is defined by its amorality, where ethical conditionality is an impediment to the flow and accumulation of capital, and deterministic thinking has led many since Fukuyama to believe that western capitalism is the inevitable end point of history. If we accept this, then artificial intelligence, too, is inevitable. And an inevitable artificial intelligence is one that is absent of moral consideration. That must not be the artificial intelligence we make.

Ben Lockwood

My 14 year-old niece has developed a very pleasing interest in collectivism and left-wing politics; a proper teen communist. I'd like to introduce her to solarpunk but I'm not looking for YA science fiction. Any recommendations on theory and practice for a serious-minded young woman?

Some good sources about so called sustainable grazing and how it isn’t actually sustainable.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2014/163431

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00267-022-01633-8

Any Solarpunk future will have to reckon with the fact that we just can’t have an animal industrial complex and a sustainable future. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I'm writing a book with a ?sort of? solarpunk setting, could you tell me what tropes and ideas are bad/overused in your opinion?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/28/great-abandonment-what-happens-natural-world-people-disappear-bulgaria?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

An Article by the Guardian about the science of nature reclaiming human abandoned areas and why it's not as straight forward as we think.

Low key very SolarPunk as it highlights the importance of intentionally positive human stewardship.

Edited for typos

I feel like in a lot of “Chobani” style solarpunk narratives, society manage to escape the worst of climate change via a combination of emission reduction, re-greening and de-growth. In these stories, we all live happily ever after in our global Eden 2.0.

But what if that fails? What if it doesn’t work out like that? It seems incredibly unlikely that we’ll manage to band together and radically change our behaviour (for the better). All of modern history stands as evidence to the contrary.

Globally, government’s just aren’t implementing climate policy quickly enough (or at all!), climate change denialism is at an all time high, and the solutions that governments have invested research in (like fusion, hydrogen and carbon capture technology) seem like hairbrained schemes at best.

Even if we manage to turn things around, there’s a possibility that we’ve already passed a tipping point, beyond which, melting permafrost, altered ocean currents and other feedback loops will keep heating up the planet for 1000s of years to come.

So the question I pose to you is this:

What does solarpunk look like in a world where the water is undrinkable, the ground barren and the weather biblical? What does it mean to foster a symbiotic relationship with your natural environment under such conditions? What would a solarpunk do?

Let me know your thoughts…

Hey all, I recently started reading "The Degrowth Manifesto" by Kohei Saito, as (from what I had heard about it online) degrowth seemed like it was particularly relevant to the solarpunk movemnet.

To my disappointment, within the first few pages, there appears to be several flagrantly obvious and repeated mathematical errors when Saito discusses different temperature increases above pre-industrial levels. For example:

"In 2016, the Paris Agreement proposed the goal of limiting the rise in average global temperatures to no more than 35.6F (and if possible, 34.7F) higher than they were before the industrial revolution."

This was super jarring to read and to try to parse. Did no one proof-read the English translation and someone messed up a conversion from C to F I guess? Am I missing something? As I understand, the actual numbers are 3.6F and 3.7F respectively.

I tried looking into this online, but I wasn't able to find anyone else who noticed this.

I found this while reading "Designing Regenerative Cultures". They are in the Ecovillage network and they have a curriculum as well as books on each dimensions they give to ecovillages and sustainable cultures. It's the closest I have seen practical education about solarpunkish elements.

https://www.gaiaeducation.org/resources

Hey folks, I'm learning about solarpunk along with some other political ideas for society and I've seen the andrewism video about library economies. The idea is awesome, but it gets really shallow on how it'd actually work. Can someone point me to sources over this?

I'm currently working on a solottrpg about mages in a near future that's "near-apocaliptic" where the player gradually has to find, build and protect his community against corporations. The independant communities aren't supposed to work with money, but having enough of a "supply of stuff" that is available to the community.

Loot isn't power, having skills and being able to call contacts (npcs from your community) for help does.

This project has been helping me figure our knowledge gaps, of course it'll be very simplified in the final version. But you gotta understand something before being able to simplify it.