#but there is no easy solutions | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

is-solarpunk · 1 year

Text

Solarpunk Writing Prompts #2

Here you can listen to original podcast

Here is the source of the podcast's transcript you can read below

Solarpunk Prompts - The Refugee Camp

Hello world. I'm Tomasino.

This is Solarpunk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss Solarpunk as a literary, artistic, and activist movement.

Or, as RoAnna Sylva describes it: Solarpunk is a genre of ecologically-oriented speculative fiction characterized both by its aesthetic and its underlying socio-political vision.

In each episode we look at one story prompt using that genre lens, offering commentary on the prompt, some inspirations from the world today, and some considerations for writers.

Most importantly, we consider how that story might help us to better envision a sustainable civilization.

If this is your first time here, I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what Solarpunk is, why you should care, and why this series came into being.

This episode's prompt is titled: "The Refugee Camp".

There is a full-fledged town built from a refugee camp which was set up there two decades ago. The inhabitants speak their own creole, a mix of more than five languages, and have very shaky relationships with their neighboring communities or states, each of which considers it a lawless territory and might be plotting to take over.

I think the refugee camp is a fitting place to start our prompts. They are the standard setting in our world for communities just coming through tragedy. When there is war, famine, flooding, or any number of challenges to a people they often find shelters in foreign lands, sometimes thrown together with other groups fleeing their own hardships.

Refugee stories are also plentiful in science-fiction: Superman is a refugee from Krypton, The Doctor is a refugee from Gallifrey, or Arthur Dent, a refugee from Cottington in the West Country. These are all individual stories, though, and not the camp and community we are striving for. Instead we might look to Battlestar Gallactica, or Babylon 5, or the Nantucket trilogy for examples of entire communities of refugees. And, indeed, those are vibrant and capture a bit of the colorful characters and internal conflicts that arise in such places. But Solarpunk can depart from this view of refugee camps as places of despair.

In our prompt the camp has grown into a full-fledged town. That suggests a thriving regrowth emerging from this mixed culture and reflected in their creole dialect.

Is that a realistic vision to take, though? Is this just Solarpunk being naïve and blindly optimistic?

Let's take a look to real refugee camps in South Sudan and Uganda, where the r0g_agency, a Berlin-based nonprofit, has been working with communities to help them develop innovation hubs. Five of these communities have linked together to form #ASKnet, a program that offers training in open-source hardware and software, entrepreneurship, media production, gender equality, and financial literacy. They also run repair cafes, giving hands-on experience and learning, and reducing waste and preserving natural resources.

This is just one program that is built and run by small community organizations.

How about Communitere? It was founded by individuals who saw the amazing rebuilding efforts after natural disasters like the 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean which caused the deadliest tsunami in history. The world responded with one of the greatest relief efforts in record time, all at once. But then medicines spoiled before they could reach the sick. Food rotted before it could find the hungry. This failure of local logistics is what inspired the organization.

What do they do? Well, they don' “intervene”. Instead, they provide spaces where communities can implement their own plans and choose from a variety of tools and models that Communitere makes available. They provide training, processes, toolkits, and space. They empower the communities to build their own futures. And now they're up and running in Haiti, Nepal, Greece, and the Philippines.

These are both stories of information sharing and empowering local communities. They succeed by building together both local talent and infrastructure and focus on sustainability.

And they mean sustainability in many forms:

environmental sustainability - processes that work with the unique local environment

economic sustainability - processes that can continue without ongoing external funding

and cultural sustainability - respecting and empowering local cultures

When you start thinking of these refugee camps as places where people are building new things, new homes, new lives, new opportunities, then the writing opportunities open up for you as well. Gone are the two dimensional sketches of a dirty camp full of broken people. These people are alive and empowered!

In a different genre setting we might lean into the shantytown aesthetic, or the lawlessness of the area might become an easy setting for crime stories. I challenge you, with this prompt, to steer clear of those well trodden paths, and focus on the community as a vibrant, living thing.

Speaking of shantytowns, I'm reminded of Cory Doctorow's setting in the book, Makers, with it's unique community of hackers, and the unique way they used language… Which brings us to the next aspect of this writing prompt: Creole.

According to Collins English Dictionary: A Creole is a language that has developed from a mixture of different languages and has become the main language in a particular place.

These are fascinating growths of blending cultures and can powerfully illustrate the fundamental aspects of a community:

who they are

what they believe in

and how they respond to a changing world

Think of the unique flavor of the Belter language in the Expanse. Every odd word choice, or word borrowed from Chinese or Indic or Slavic, is a reminder of what these people are. In some cases this unique language use even extends to meaningful gestures.

The way these languages develop is so interesting in its own right that there is an indy card game where you collaboratively create one with friends. It's called Dialect, and it won IGDN's Game of the Year in 2019 along with a host of other awards. In that game you 2-4 of your friends will create what's called an Isolation, basically a community set apart from others for some interesting reason, and then play out their history across three different ages. The game then ends with the Isolation no longer being isolated, whether for good or for bad.

As the game descriptions says: "Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost."

It's a fascinating way to spend 3-4 hours with friends, and incredibly insightful into this exact process.

Now, before we go let's take a look at that prompt one more time:

"The Refugee Camp"

Okay.

It's time to wrap up, but before we go, lets review our guidelines for Solarpunk writing one more time:

Community as Protagonist (No "Chosen One")

Infrastructure is Sexy (No simple solution)

Human/Environmental Context (Not Man vs Nature)

Thanks for staying with me today. I hope you'll join me for the next Solarpunk Prompt.

Links mentioned:

r0g_agency

Communitere

Dialect

Music from:

ExMemory - Solar Grid

#solarpunk #writing prompt #solarpunk writing prompts #solarpunk loredumps #solarpunk here and now #solarpunk real stories #community as a protagonist #infrastructure is sexy #but there is no easy solutions #human/environmental context

12 notes · View notes

is-solarpunk · 1 year

Text

Solarpunk Writing Prompts #7

Here you can listen to original podcast

Here is the source of the podcast's transcript you can read below

Solarpunk Prompts - The Great Infrastructural Project

Hello world. I'm Tomasino.

This is Solarpunk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss Solarpunk, a movement that imagines a world where technology is used for the good of the planet.

In this series we spend each episode exploring a single Solarpunk story prompt adding some commentary, some inspirations, and some considerations.

Most importantly, we consider how that story might help us to better envision a sustainable civilization.

If this is your first time here, I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what Solarpunk is, why you should care, and why this series came into being.

Today's prompt is: "The Great Infrastructure Project"

There is a small, rural town next to whom A Great Infrastructural Project was built. It was a dam, or a huge solar & wind power plant, or a gravitational battery, etc. Over time, the corporations and the government forgot about them and in order to avoid a catastrophe they need to work with unusual, driven activists who came from all over to help them.

This is a living reality for many small communities around the globe.

The village of Xiananshen in southern Zhejiang, China, was an idyllic, historic location which had fallen into disrepair due to depopulation from 20 years of migration. It was chosen for a program called Adaptive Reuse because of its beauty and close location to Lishui city. Local government brought in sponsors and worked with the historical heritage group to update and renovate all of the original houses regardless of condition. Space was rented out from locals. A downtown set of homes were converted to a boutique hotel. Cafes, library, exhibition hall, restaurants fed by the local farms, public parks, and more were designed and built in a cooperative mode called "historic village plus crowd innovation". Employment rates increased, as did tourism. Farms were given a steadier income, especially during the off-season. Designers competed in house renovation competitions for public prestige.

This village may not be built atop a hydro plant, but it shares the experience set forth in our prompt. This type of infrastructure maintenance and revitalization was made possible by a combination of internal and external communities working together.

In their case the goal was the restoration of their infrastructure, but that won't always be the case. Your story may be about a town's need for the safe deconstruction of infrastructure.

The World Wildlife Fund has this to say about infrastructure:

Most categories of infrastructure aren't inherently good or bad—it's all about context. The right dam in the right place can provide benefits with minimal negative impacts to the environment. But the wrong dam in the wrong place can do considerable and far-reaching damage. For infrastructure to be beneficial, planners must consider the long-term impacts, risks, and trade-offs. They must take biodiversity and climate change into account, develop a plan for long-term governance and management, and engage local communities at the earliest possible stages of planning.

It should come as no surprise that many infrastructure projects today do not achieve all these goals. Without long-term governance and management accounted for at the beginning of the project, many projects are left to age, crumble, or fall as burdens to local communities whose survival depends on them.

As stated in an article from the Earth Law Center in 2017:

Due to the high cost of maintenance and safety, many of the world’s dams get more dangerous as they age. The Mosul dam in Iraq and the Kariba dam in Zambia rank among the world’s most dangerous. Should the Mosul dam fail, it could result in the death of 500,000 people and deprive millions more of power and water. The 58 year old Kariba dam could result in 3.5 million dead, leave 40 percent of South Africa without power and cause untold damage to surrounding wildlife, plus the destruction of another nearby dam, the Cahora Bassa. https://www.earthlawcenter.org/blog-entries/2017/12/dams-climate-change-bad-news

And according to a paper published by the International Institute for Environment and Development:

Disconnecting from government energy services to develop independent energy sources, such as micro-wind or biogas can help to build resilience for vulnerable groups.

The paper has a special focus on Vietnam, where fishermen face particular challenges when the electricity goes out. Lack of refrigeration and transportation options can cause great difficulties and losses getting their products to distant markets

The country's power grid as a whole is vulnerable to disruption and failure from extreme weather and flood events. This means that vulnerable populations are dependent on a system that is prone to collapse.

In Gorakhpur, India, and in the Philippines, local committees provide an opportunity for community participation in infrastructure design. After being left out of the conversations for so long and suffering the brunt of the consequences, these communities are eager to exert some control over their lives.

So what does that look like?

Kerry Scott, a social scientist, says:

The primary purpose of infrastructure and our built environment is serving the needs of communities, delivering better social outcomes and improving the quality of people’s lives.

He later adds:

Integrating social outcomes at the start is a must if we want to leave a social legacy.

Our prompt today deals with a legacy infrastructure project, one which clearly didn't take into account the present situation. It must either be maintained or decommissioned safely. It may require conversion to some new method or function. That may require technical skills they don't have, hence the need for outside help. But do these outsiders have an understanding if this place, this environment? Do they know the needs of this community?

One of our opportunities for tension and drama may lay between the community itself and the newcomers trying to fix the project. There may also be tension between these groups and the government or corporation originally responsible for the installation. This two-way or three-way intersection of communities can be very Solarpunk, but it can also easily fall into the style of other genres if we aren't careful.

If, for instance, the corporation responsible for the project is made to seem as an antagonist and the local community must throw off their oppressor in order to self-govern, that is just another form of cyberpunk. The struggle there is about technology being used for oppression rather than about it being used to find a sustainable civilization.

Be wary of blending genres in these stories as well. The atmosphere and aesthetic of Solarpunk can easily be diluted by other genres until it's unrecognizable. A cyberpunk/Solarpunk hybrid will just look like cyberpunk.

As a writer you may want to use that style of relationship between the communities, but be wary of how you frame it. Is the community your protagonist? Are they achieving their goals through Solarpunk ideals?

There is drama inherent to the infrastructure as well. Adding a time limit on action immediately increases tension, so maybe the infrastructure project has an imminent failure coming. The outsiders and the community must work together to save it from disaster even though they don't trust the other fully. The point here is to show some hands-on work with social stakes greater than just us vs them.

We can also zoom in on the specific dynamics of the incoming activists and engineers a bit more. Are they strictly a professional bunch? Do they set up a separate camp with their own rules, schedule, and daily order? Or is it a hodgepodge assortment of skilled people without a prior relationship who move-in to whatever is unoccupied? Perhaps they must stay and board with the locals in their homes. Or perhaps the outsiders are a sect of their own determined to save the locals even if they don't want it.

These decisions will affect how your communities must interact, especially if there's a higher need at stake. Naturally antagonistic relationships could be forced into reluctant collaboration due to circumstance. Such a story would be more difficult to align to the Solarpunk aesthetic, but if well done could act as a moral lesson and strengthens the ideals.

Finally, we should consider what daily life looks like in this small town. Is life oriented around the great infrastructure project or is it a backdrop? Perhaps the boom of construction jobs is over, the children left elsewhere. Is it one of dying cities, where people want to be left alone? Have they been asking for help but no one has answered so far? Are they already self-reliant and happy or working to get there?

One of the most difficult aspects of speculative fiction is the imagining of how everyday life might change due to some unrelated technological advancement. We'll discuss this concept more in further episodes, but for now, try to consider the great infrastructure this town is dealing with and what it does. Is it a power generator, or does it make goods, provide a service, or ease a difficult task. Then, take that purpose and scale it up in your mind. If it was a power generator, now it makes unlimited free power. If it eased a difficult task, now that task's time is reduced to zero. And finally, try to think about how that change would affect the unintentional, everyday things.

When the airplane was invented and fast travel between continents became a reality, nobody ever envisioned a future where you could pop off to London for a stag party weekend.

What is the equivalent mundane change in your world?

Have an interesting idea? Share it with me. This podcast publishes on Mastodon, a federated social network. Our address is in the show notes. Come join us and lets start a conversation.

Until then, I'll talk to you soon on the next Solarpunk Prompt.

Music in this recording is New Unity Dawning, by Bathroom Plants from Global Pattern's compilation Solarpunk: A Brighter Perspective

#solarpunk #writing prompt #solarpunk writing prompts #solarpunk loredumps #solarpunk here and now #solarpunk real stories #infrastructure is sexy #but there is no easy solutions #human/environmental context #not man vs nature

4 notes · View notes