#punkofsunshine
I applied to a college program to get my culinary certification,it’s not much, but it’s a start. Food is one of my many passions and working with it for a living has been a dream of mine since I was young(er). If there are any updates, I’ll post them here.
That’s been all for today, this has been @punkofsunshine have a good one and stay safe.
God, political theory is dry as fuck. I’ve obtained The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and multiple works by Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Fields, Factories and Workshops, An Appeal to the Young, and The Life of Kropotkin respectively)
Quick Side note: You don’t have to read theory to be a leftist, dogmatism isn’t attractive and I’m well aware a lot of people don’t have access to these materials.
But anyway, that’s all from me today. This has been @punkofsunshine .Have a good one and stay safe.
Hello my lovely humans, welcome back to what I like to call informal essays. Today brings together two very important topics to me, food and conservationism. This is going to be longer than my last post and is going to involve some sidetracking as well.
I came up with this topic while looking at all the spices I was using to make butter chicken for dinner tonight and wondering how much the price was going to go up when shit really hits the fan, if we could have such dishes like this again, etc. So, essentially my anxiety spiral led me to doing research and wanting to discuss the intersectionality of culinary arts, climate science, and farming. In our current state, beef reigns supreme in terms of climate change contribution, the most eaten meat in the world is actually chicken, which is significantly less harmful than beef or pork, and yet beef and pork have the greatest climate impact and are highly susceptible to diseases (poultry is as well, don’t get me wrong). In general animal farming is a big contributor to climate change, crop farming is as well…
Crop farming, which I talk about here, also emits a lot of fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and pollutes ground water, depletes soil, and flows downriver along with cow and pig manure, thus killing fish, crustaceans, marine reptiles, and mammals who live in or around the sea. This combination of disregard after disregard for natural ecosystems leads us into where we are now. The Midwest is on the cusp of desertification, there’s been no agriculture reform or sign of actual change, which is why we need to take it upon ourselves to start vertical farming, hydroponics, and soil-less farming on an industrial scale. Not only is it more efficient, it’s better for the environment in every possible aspect, even using less water and requiring very little usage of fertilizers, but how do you replace animal farming? Answer: You don’t, you just get rid of it, the least amount of impact out of any animal is the chicken, so it may be able to stay, but cows and pigs cannot be farmed en masse anymore, it’s dangerous for our environment and our health, so they must be used all at once, and composted (with the rich preferably). It sounds cruel, I know, but there aren’t many better options. Of course the meat and dairy industries will try to interfere like they always do, but we knew that would happen anyway.
Moral of the story, our modern agriculture industry is profit focused and not based around the health or well-being of us or our planet, causing both a rise in greenhouse gas emissions, water and land pollution, and is just generally bad for us in the dietary respect.
Anyway, that’s all for today babes. This has been @punkofsunshine have a good one and stay safe.
Hey guys, I’m back, I had a little reprieve from posting or even checking my blog. I wanted to address the themes of solarpunk, the direction it’s moving and if it’s considered too idealistic for our modern, cynical society.
Short Answer: Yes
Long Answer: No, not entirely
Yes, solarpunk may have optimism embedded in it, but that’s mostly to ward off despair. Despair is easy to fall into as an activist or even an entire movement, so the focus is mostly on environmental impact and restoration, mitigation of ecological collapse, etc. First and foremost however, solarpunk is a political movement and no political movement is entirely optimistic for the future, otherwise they wouldn’t exist to attempt to make a change. As a new movement, we all have to decide our direction, our appeal, etc and like I’ve said before, utopian visuals are a nice goal, but we must focus on what we can change now and not what the next generation will attempt to do down the line.
There are many things we can improve on as a movement, like drawing attention to it (either artistically or politically, preferably both), getting involved with local to state government, or even subversive action (not recommended, but very effective in certain circumstances). Whatever that can be done to push the movement into the public eye, do it, not only for yourself, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Anyway babes, that’s all from me today. This has been @punkofsunshine have a good one and stay safe.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole art nouveau thing, but I’d like to take a step back and analyze how the aesthetic should reflect the movement. While it is nice to have an end goal in mind, the message should be “We need to work together so the earth doesn’t become uninhabitable in our lifetime.” and not “Hey, pretty pictures of green cityscapes, but also here’s the message based around a few different political philosophies that you have to look into.”
In short I’m saying, we need to put the punk firmly in solarpunk so it reflects upon the movement as one with ideas and ideals as opposed to overly utopian in nature. A nice change would be moving away from cityscapes and focusing on architecture that feels handmade, adding in the punk principle of DIY into the aesthetic while also keeping the greenery would make something totally unique and reflect the movement better than the current iteration does. Changing the aesthetic would also drive home the point that we’re constantly evolving as a movement, constantly growing and changing.
As I’ve said before, with growth comes new challenges. If we want our message to be fully understood and not just ogled at because it’s bright and pretty, we need to make it easier to understand off the bat and not as easy to twist into something harmful where someone could say “If [X group] weren’t around, we could have this future!” Visuals are a powerful medium, we sincerely want them to reflect our intent as well as provide a message that we’re not going away, ever. So now, I ask you artists to rethink the future of this look and imagine one which is more akin to a cobbled together house with solar panels and a water pump out front as opposed to a green apartment complex in a retrofitted city. One of these is achievable in our lifetime and I know you know which one.
That’s all for today (tonight really) babes. This has been @punkofsunshine, have a good one and stay safe.
Okay, shit, I never expected this to blow up like it did, I would like to add a few things.
Thing number one, (basically a summary) yes the art-nouveau thing has its place, it’s nice to have an end goal in mind, but right now we have to think pragmatically and semi-realistically otherwise the movement won’t go anywhere and will be stuck in fantastical visions of the future. We must be fluid and shape the movement into something we want to see it become, a pathway for the future.
Thing number two, thank you so much for all the constructive criticism and additions to the post. It’s really helped spread a message in the solarpunk community (at least on Tumblr) and builds a bigger platform for people with similar ideas to stand on. It’s extremely helpful for stay at home activists like myself (not that I don’t want to participate in direct action, but I have a job and nothing happens in rural Illinois) these blog posts are the best way for me to express myself as a neurodivergent person. Most of the time it’s incredibly hard for me to put my thoughts into words in an eloquent way until I start writing.
That’s all for this little addition babes, have a good rest of your day/night.
Focusing on too many things at once is a problem I face personally, couple that with the need to take everything upon myself and low stress tolerance and you have a disaster waiting to happen. If you face the same problem as me, I’d highly suggest making a group of specialized people and solve small problems locally, whether that be growing food, hooking up satellites for free WiFi, setting up a Food Not Bombs chapter in your area, or even cooperation in local to state government. We all have our talents, honing yours can change a life, but it takes all of us to change the world in a significant way. To rebuild a structure, parts must be torn down, the more you tear down periodically, the better the structure is going to be, however it must be reinforced. You cannot expect a house to stand without a plan for a structure, we are the supports that make the wall, the roof, and the floor. The foundation is what we believe in, and what the foundation is, is hope. Hope for a future that can be, with action, collaboration, and resistance against the hierarchical, overbearing, and exploitative power structures that currently exist.
This has been my first post in a while, so I’ll see ya’ll again in probably a month to commemorate my first post on this site “A Beginner’s Guide to Solarpunk” which absolutely blew up my account, to be truthful I’m proud of how far we’ve all come with our small internet based movement reaching new heights and our voices getting louder in the ears of politicians and capitalists alike. We’re here to stay, don’t forget about it.
This has been @punkofsunshine, have a good one and stay safe.
I work so hard on my other posts and the only meme I post is now my top post, I get that it’s easy to absorb, but the effort isn’t there at all. It’s not intellectually engaging at all however. It just points out shit un/under-educated Americans do, which is most Americans in regards to socialism. I don’t get it, whatever.
