zinger-begonia

[zinger-begonia]

It's incredible how people have been protesting pants and skirts not having pockets but not a single peep is heard over the fact that skirts no longer have underskirts by default. Underskirts (or lining) was a thing when I was a child, no skirt would be made without lining, you didn't have to think and check if your whole ass is visible in a skirt because lining was a thing!!!! Now most skirts don't and it's simply because it's cheaper, fuck the fact that a customer doesn't want their panties shown in broad daylight, it saves a couple of cents on material.

[zinger-begonia]

Guys I know Climate Change is super scary in the news. I know it's terrifying and seems like the end of the world. And it could be! But it isn't going to be.

I want to take this time to remind all of you how far we've come in the past twenty-ish years since "An Inconvenient Truth"

Fossil Fuels

We use less fossil fuels now proportionally than we did in 2009. Coal used to be 50% of the United States's energy production, but now is down to less than a quarter, and is expected to continue to drop in the upcoming years. This is including in traditionally anti-renewable areas that rely on coal heavily, like Wyoming's shift to wind and solar and Kentucky and West Virginia's shift to hydroelectric.

Most remaining coal plants are either shutting down or using filtration systems to reduce the carbon, methane, and heavy metals put into the air. Coal mines are shutting down - the era of King Coal is over.

Yes, many states are shifting to natural gas, but the carbon density of natural gas is lower than both oil and coal. Extraction of it is less dangerous. It's not better than renewables, but is a great alternative for developing countries that don't have the money for renewables - at least for the time being.

Oil and diesel are gradually being phased out as well. Desires to be economically independent from oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia have driven policy makers away from it. Areas like Alaska that rely heavily on diesel for heating are switching to renewable energy and less energy intensive heat pumps.

Fossil fuel companies are continuing to do their lobby thing, but it doesn't matter. Climate change isn't even the driving factor right now - it should be, but the increasing cost of fossil fuel extraction is slowly breaking the industry. In the US, it's just not as profitable as it was thirty years ago.

Nuclear

Nuclear energy is fast-growing. While it's somewhat stagnated in the US, countries like France, Russia, South Korea, Germany, and Japan are relying on increasing amounts of nuclear energy - in France's case, almost 4/5ths of their electricity comes from nuclear energy.

We've found ways to make the Uranium and Thorium last longer in the reactor, and in fact, nuclear power plants are among the safest in the world. The only emission is water vapor - not including the construction - and we have hundreds or thousands of years left of nuclear energy at our current consumption, even more if we can find out how to harness ocean Uranium and seafloor Thorium or harness nuclear fusion.

Nuclear power plants produce absurd amounts of electricity - a single 6 gigawatt power plant (high end, but do exist) could singlehandedly provide the entire electric requirements of New York City - think of what several of them across the country could do. They generate power incredibly reliably.

Nuclear disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl are far behind us. Fukushima was entirely preventable - they knew about the lack of safety regulations and did not fix them - and Chernobyl was 40 years ago. Technology has come a long way since then.

Hydroelectric

Hydroelectric dams that kill fish are out - tidal turbines and fish ladders are in. Fish ladders provide ways for fish to escape and not get caught in the turbine, though the reduced quality of life both up and downstream is an issue.

Enter tidal energy! Yes, really!

A startup in Scotland, MeyGen has proven that two-way off-shore turbines can provide significant amounts of electricity. Just four turbines were enough to provide electricity to over 4,000 homes. Tidal barrages have been used on bridges and coasts to generate hydroelectric energy from the incoming ocean waves.

There are no significant emissions beyond construction, AND the turbines and barrages *do not kill fish or sea creatures*. The turbines, at worst, caused dolphins and seals to simply avoid the area the turbines were in. They work when the ocean is flowing either direction, and can be put nearly anywhere - think about the power the Gulf Stream would generate!

Solar

Solar energy is fast-growing - and this part is my favourite. Homes are being designed with solar heating in mind. Not just in the panels, no - window placements, albedo, and materials have allowed homes to be heated by the sun in winter, but shielded from it in summer. A properly solar optimized home can cut on 75% of electricity use!

Solar panels are up to 46% efficiency now, which is insane. In parts of the western US, up to 8.6 kWh per m^2 of solar panels can be generated. For perspective, a single home uses about 30 kWh per day - a number that is decreasing. A home would only need about 43 square feet of solar panels to power their home, and lord knows roofs have more space than that.

Roofs are being designed to reflect heat, to reduce the heat island effects of big cities. Green spaces are being built for shade and cooling through transpiration. They've even invented a paint that reflects so much heat that it can cool your home by several degrees.

They've even invented thin-film solar panels that you can use as windows. Yeah! Solar panels YOU CAN USE AS WINDOWS! So skyscrapers that are covered in windows on all sides - think about the power generation. An office building doubling as a power plant. It's incredible.

Wind

Wind turbines don't kill that many birds. They used to, but they don't anymore - at least in most areas. The myth comes from the old 1960s turbines that were low to the ground and spun fast like a fan, so birds had trouble seeing where the blades were. The high up turbines nowadays are really only a problem for high-flying birds of prey, but even that's still being worked on. Wind energy is becoming increasingly efficient and producing more power than ever before.

Geothermal

Geothermal energy is going crazy. Iceland uses it to heat their homes and keep their streets ice-free instead of using snowplows in Reykjavik. There are systems in production now that would be able to generate power year-round using the heat of the earth.

By using a special liquid with a lower boiling point than water, electricity can be generated easily and without any kind of toxic waste that would normally result from groundwater energy production.

Geothermal plants can also be used for temperature regulation - the ground stays a relatively constant temperature. Say it's 65 degrees Fahrenheit in an area. In summer, you can pump that heat underground instead of into the air, which contributes to heat islands. In winter, when it's colder, you can extract the heat back out again. Heat and cooling are the single biggest energy sink in the US and in most parts of the world, and it's about to become completely clean.

Energy Consumption and The Grid

While CO2 emissions are increasing, that's mostly due to population increase. The emissions per capita has actually gone down - the average person produces almost 20 tons fewer of CO2 emissions than in 1990, and that number is going to continue to drop.

As we shift more towards renewable energy and working from home, those emissions per capita are going to drop more and more. People buy more local now. They use electric cars. Their household appliances have spiked in efficiency. LED bulbs produce significantly less emissions than the incandescent bulb, and the number of LED bulbs across the world is rapidly increasing.

The Grid is changing. Normally, the reason power generation produces so much CO2 is that power plants can't shut down - they have to produce at all hours of the day to remain economical. They produce more in the evenings when electricity demand is higher, and less in the early morning when it is lower.

The new electric grid would have energy storage. If a home or a power source, such as solar, produced too much energy, it would be sent back into the grid and stored for spikes in demand later - the system would become more efficient, and overproduction of electricity would no longer mean wasting it.

Conservation and Restoration

We can un-desertify farmland. We've figured out how to bring back rivers and streams that have dried up from overfarming in sub-saharan Africa. We can plant trees, we can enrich the soil, we can undo the damage that we've caused.

We can bring back coral. We can increase the albedo of the Arctic and Antarctic. We can re-introduce extinct animals and bring balance to the ecosystem again. We've massively reduced poaching and needless hunting of endangered animals. We know how to make sustainable, permaculture farming practices.

We have everything we need to fix the ecosystems we've damaged or destroyed - and people are already doing it.

Why it's actually gonna be okay

Guys, we're past the worst of it. Maybe not the worst of the effects of climate change, but certainly the worst of the emissions. We are going to have a clean future. Young people support environmental regulations the most, and there are enough passionate young minds that it's going to get done.

I know I talked most about the US here, but it's changes all across the world. I focused on the US because it has the highest per capita emissions of any country on Earth. Don't be fooled though - everyone is going green.

Meat is being eaten less than ever before. Fewer people drive cars. Fewer people waste and throw things away. Don't let the scary news of private jets and mega-corporations disillusion you. GOOD CHANGES ARE HAPPENING!

Enough of the doomer apocalypse viewpoint of climate change. There is a hopeful future for all of us. Let's achieve it together!

#practical solarpunk #solarpunk

[zinger-begonia]

I really just want to live my life from a place of exploration and curiosity, not demand

[zinger-begonia]

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.”

― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

#oh damn

[zinger-begonia]

China’s massive rollout of renewable energy is accelerating, its investments in the sector growing so large that international climate watchdogs now expect the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions to peak years earlier than anticipated—possibly as soon as this year[!!!].

China installed 217 gigawatts worth of solar power last year alone, a 55% increase, according to new government data. That is more than 500 million solar panels and well above the total installed solar capacity of the U.S. [...]

Wind-energy installation additions were 76 gigawatts last year, more than the rest of the world combined. That amounted to more than 20,000 new turbines across the country, including the world’s largest, [...]

The low-carbon capacity additions, which also included hydropower and nuclear, were for the first time large enough that their power output could cover the entire annual increase in Chinese electricity demand [!!!!], analysts say. The dynamic suggests that coal-fired generation—which accounts for 70% of overall emissions for the world’s biggest polluter—is set to decline in the years to come, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency and Lauri Myllyvirta, the Helsinki-based lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.[...]

Its rapid emissions growth long provided fodder for critics who said Beijing wasn’t committed to fighting climate change or supporting the Paris accord, the landmark climate agreement that calls for governments to attempt to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. Now, analysts and officials say Beijing’s efforts are lending momentum to the Paris process, which requires governments to draft new emissions plans every five years.

“An early peak would have a lot of symbolic value and send a signal to the world that we’ve turned a corner," said Jan Ivar Korsbakken, a senior researcher at the Oslo-based Center for International Climate and Environmental Research.

In 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged that the country’s emissions would begin falling before 2030 and hit net zero before 2060, part of its plan prepared under the Paris accord. He also said China would have 1,200 gigawatts of total solar- and wind-power capacity by the end of this decade. The country is six years ahead of schedule: China reached 1,050 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity at the end of 2023, and the China Electricity Council forecast last month that capacity would top 1,300 gigawatts by the end of this year.[...]

Transition Zero, a U.K.-based nonprofit that uses satellite images to monitor industrial activity and emissions in China, says the official data are “broadly aligned and consistent" with theirs.[...]

[M]oving China’s timeline for an overall emissions peak forward could shave off around 0.3 to 0.4 degrees Celsius of projected global warming if emissions started to decline next decade, analysts say.[...]

The most certain variable in the equation is the breakneck pace of China’s renewable-energy rollout, which analysts expect will continue to add 200 to 300 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity a year. The investments in renewable energy have become a major driver of the Chinese economy. The country’s clean-energy spending totaled $890 billion last year, up 40%. [...]

The adoption of electric vehicles is happening so rapidly that analysts say peak gasoline demand in China was already reached last year[!!!].

10 Feb 24

#solarpunk #hopeful

[zinger-begonia]

Daily reminder that we do not actually live in a dystopian movie put the apocalypse down and back away slowly. You know when your cleaning a room and you pull everything out of it's draws to sort through it and you're like "what the fuck have I done I'm never going to be able to tidy all of this" I think that's the stage we're at in the world. Thanks to social media we've pulled out all the messed up shit from the cupboards of the world, it was always there but now we can see it and we're going to have to sort it all out we made this mess and we can fix it. Falling to the floor sobbing will not clean a crusty room. A group of people working systematically (preferably with music in the background) will.

#hell yeah

[zinger-begonia]

I like solarpunk as a theme or concept, but most solarpunk art doesn't quite work for me. For the most part, you've got Manhattan, But With Lots Of Trees or Happy Cottagecore With Robots.

What's missing, for me, is a sense of connection with where we are now. Both of the standard solarpunk visions present a world that has already been completely transformed. There's no hint of what it took to get from now to then, no evidence of what people had to overcome, to sacrifice, to pull humanity out of its ecological nose-dive.

I'd love to see a solarpunk city depicted in the process of being rebuilt. Show me old buildings being torn down, and new ones being built from the salvaged materials. Show me a tower with hanging gardens and wind turbines that's clearly a modified, pre-existing structure. Show me a lovely green zone that's still expanding into a reclaimed industrial park.

Maybe it's just me, but depictions of good futures fell like pure, unattainable fantasy without a connection to the present. For me, hope comes with imagining the path that gets its there.

[zinger-begonia]

Okay, I know I acted silly about this, but the fact that there is 1 singular year round roller skating rink in the city of Philadelphia home to 1.6 million people is kinda fucking horrifying when you think about the broader implications of it.

[zinger-begonia]

I think one of the starkest illustrations of how incoherent Hasbro's goals for Dungeons & Dragons are is that they made the writers take out all the direct references to dragon-fucking in 5E in a bid to render the IP more advertiser-friendly, but still insisted upon keeping a bunch of stuff whose narrative context strongly implies dragon-fucking front and centre in the brand identity, so now the Player's Handbook has gotta play coy about where dragon-blooded sorcerers come from.

[zinger-begonia]

Mugshot of a teenage girl arrested for protesting segregation, Mississippi, 1961.

[zinger-begonia]

Remember, a solarpunk future without support for the disabled population is just green-washed ableism.

A solarpunk future that doesn't include (or purposely excludes) Indigenous/PoC populations is just green-washed white supremacy/colonialism.

A solarpunk future that doesn't feed the hungry or house the poor is just green-washed capitalism.

Solarpunk is more than just an aesthetic. It's a hope for a better future for everyone.

[zinger-begonia]

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024

#solarpunk #fucking awesome #practical solarpunk

[zinger-begonia]

“You don’t know whether people relate to the breakfast program, because you’ve never fed anybody. You don’t know anything about the free health clinic because you never asked anybody. You don’t know anything about the good that a gun does you, because you never tried one. And we say that if you was born and if you said you didn’t like pears and you never tasted pears, you’d have to be a liar. You don’t know whether you like pears, but you can’t claim that you don’t like pears. The only way that anybody can tell you the taste of a pear is if he himself has tasted it. That’s the only way. That’s the objective reality. That’s what the Black Panther Party deals with. We’re not metaphysicians, we’re not idealists, we’re dialectical materialists. And we deal with what reality is, whether we like it or not.”

— Fred Hampton speaking about how you must practice your theory, or else it’s irrelevant, 1969.

[zinger-begonia]

"We don't exactly live in a world built for humans, do we? There's no guidebook for happiness or success or a sense of place in the world, and the people claiming to have one for you are really just trying to sell you something. We spend most of our little lives struggling to make these feelings fade away or find something to placate them. It's either ennui, or being… on weed. I know it's a little pretentious, but we're all searching for a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, and those things are hard to come by. There's a little bit of nothing in all of us. And we'd like to fill it with something. I feel like I know who I am, and how to live my life, and that makes me feel happy and somewhat complete. And I don't think I'd have ever found myself if I was trying to chase someone else's sense of completeness. Basically, no one knows how to live your life, and you might not either. But the only person who's gonna figure it out is you. And you won't find that by trying to be the next… that person. You can only be the first of whoever it is that you are."

hbomberguy, Plagiarism and You(Tube)

#solarpunk life

[zinger-begonia]

Ink Artwork by Endre Penovác

[zinger-begonia]

Angela Davis & Ursula K Le Guin, visionary women for a hopeful future

[zinger-begonia]

It’s Time to End the Hero’s Journey

I don’t know about you, but I’ve absolutely had enough of it: the story structure known as the hero’s journey.

It’s everywhere, from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark to just about every Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise movie you’ve ever seen even through to Barbie and The Hunger Games. A hero is called to action, refuses the call before begrudgingly accepting it, has adventures in which (generally) he is repeatedly tested, receives assistance from mentors and other helpers, is brought low by a nemesis shortly before (generally) ultimately succeeding, and comes home an enlightened person.

Brought to public awareness as a common pattern in myth by Joseph Campbell in his books, like The Hero With a Thousand Faces, it has irritatingly come to take over western, industrialized movie making and mass market fiction. We have even, to a frightening large extent, internalized our own personal narratives as hero’s journeys thanks, in part, to the self-help industry.

But this is all laziness and a terrible failure of imagination. On top of being egotistical and self-indulgent, the hero’s journey is far from the only structure possible for stories. Worse, its sharp focus on the individual and the male experience of heroism, instead of on community or other ways of moving through life, it has us longing for strong leaders of single–minded, masculine vision. And it has us dreaming of ourselves rising the occasion in the fight against tyranny and catastrophe instead of imagining ourselves working together with other people to solve systemic problems before they plunge us into exactly that sort of catastrophe and tyranny.

Oh, Have You Ever Heard This Story Before

Even if you haven’t been formally introduced to it, you encounter the hero’s journey all the time. Lifted from myths like the wanderings of Odysseus, the story of Jonah, the life of Buddha, and many fairy tales, the hero’s journey has morphed into what feels like our default mode of storytelling.

Take the “save the cat” rules for script writing, which are just the hero’s journey template. Just about every Hollywood blockbuster now follows this formula. Not just just about every Bruce Willis and Tom Cruise (and the Rock and Vin Diesel and Liam Neesen and etc) movie ever, but all the super hero movies. Even female protagonists are frequently shoehorned into the hero’s journey template (see: Angelina Jolie in “Salt” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”; Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games books and films; Mila Jovovich in all the Resident Evil movies; and even the little girl at the heart of the story of “Spirited Away”), as if the only way to be interesting is if you’re a hero just like the guys.

But This Is Not Great

While these stories make for great escapism, they’re not great for actually changing the world.

Look at the sort of places the hero’s journey goes…

At the end of the movie Edge of Tomorrow, it becomes clear that the whole point of Tom Cruise’s character’s saving the world from alien invasion is that he’s learned to be a brave, bold hero, rather than a selfish coward. This doesn’t make him less arrogant, but it means he gets the girl, the satisfaction of knowing he has saved the life of anyone he will ever meet, and a magical fresh start that wipes away the negative consequences of his previous insufficiently heroic behavior.

Or, look at Katniss at the end of the fourth Hunger Games movie (Mockingjay, part 2). She’s sitting in a sunny meadow with her husband and young children. On the one hand, oh, I get it know. This is why ordinary people pick up arms and go to war in the face of a terrible threat. She fought so hard and sacrificed so much, not just for her own survival, but so her as not yet even conceived of children could grow up in freedom. It was all worth it. On the other hand, she’s been transformed from being a fearless warrior, skilled hunter, revered leader, and the chosen one who fomented an entire revolution by staying true to her ideals and made the world safe from not one, but two tyrants into a harmless young mother, utterly unthreatening in a faded, modest calico dress, tending to her husband and young family. The whole point of her journey is that the minute she she doesn’t need to be a strong, fearless, rousing warrior anymore of unprecedented skill with a bow and arrow she can happily settle into domesticated bliss, aside from a bit of PTSD? That, deed done, she can now settle into the fate she was truly made for, that of being tame and ordinary and enjoying her subservient place in the patriarchy? I mean, ARGH!

And then there’s “Oppenheimer”, which took the incredible story of everyone and everything that converged to create the atomic bomb, drop it on Japan, and start the Cold War and turned it into the personal hero’s journey of one man. So ridiculous and, frankly, so meh. Go read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes—which is one of the best books ever written—if you want your mind properly blown by this story. Sure, his story of the endeavor is way more challenging to the reader—you’re going to be exposed to actual information about atomic physics— than the celebrity biopic approach. But you get so much gain for your pain if you push through the reading of the story. You’ll learn so much of the history of the chemistry of the elements that make up existence, of the various genius scientists (all of whom were some pretty interesting characters) involved in the advancement of nuclear science and the Manhattan Project, and you’ll truly feel the horror of the scientists when the military comes along and takes the product of their hard work to save the free world and doesn’t give them any say on how it will be used. But Oppenheimer (in the movie about him). Oh, poor guy, gets his name drawn through the mud by a political nemesis and is a bit sad when all the people die when the bomb is dropped. Sheesh. Doing its sad little treading of the boards in the shadow of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Oppenheimer is the perfect example of how limited, narrow minded, narcissistic, and shallow the hero’s journey approach can be compared to other ways of telling the story.

We Should Be Telling All Sorts of Stories

Honestly, these hero’s journey stories aren’t the only kinds of stories we should be telling—either within in the genre of solarpunk or not. Not only is all this heroic journeying getting boring, there are major downsides to locking ourselves into this single vision of story. Like becoming fans of authoritarianism and monarchy.

David Brin had some great words about how Star Wars’ use of the hero’s journey results in main messages that are authoritarian and undemocratic, leading us, for instance, to forgive—and even fete—great evil, despite the millions of death that person (Darth Vader) has caused, so long as he performs a personal act of redemption in the end. Star Wars and its hero’s journey involving the Skywalkers has us cheering on people with a magical hereditary right to power, as if we’re fine with consigning basically everyone else to be followers.

Jo Walton and Ada Palmer also touched on the down sides and limitations of the hero’s journey, at least adjacently, in their editorial in Uncanny Magazine that called for more stories that don’t center on a single protagonist, called to action, from whom all change unfolds. Using history as their example, the point out that events generally happen because of the actions of the many, not just of one special single person. I might add, when big outcomes do hinge upon the actions, leadership, and unique talents of one single person, it’s generally someone despotic, like Hitler or Stalin. And, as pointed out to us by one of our listeners, Jon Ronson has a great podcast with one episode in particular about how trying to understand your own life as a hero’s journey can lead you to brainwash yourself straight down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, until the call to action you hear is to undermine, if not actually overthrow, democracy.

 To the Typewriter Computer, Solarpunks!

Here’s my call to action by you. Let’s let solarpunk stories dump the hero’s journey, even as a means to explore life in a solarpunk future. Let’s use all the other story structures instead.

Let’s tell stories about endeavors—like the making of the atomic bomb—not about a person undertaking an endeavor—like Oppenheimer herding his cats at Los Alamos.

Let’s tell stories about relationships between people, or between a group of people and the natural world.

Let’s tell stories where the actions of an individual on his, her, or their own never advance the plot.

Let’s tell stories about moments, or about conflicts, where what’s interesting is the development of the moment or conflict, not of the protagonist and antagonist’s paths through them.

And when we do tell stories about a single protagonist, let’s not keep religiously following the structure laid out by Joseph Campbell and copied by save the cat.

Not every protagonist needs to be a hero! There are so many other arcs to follow.

#solarpunk #imagining a better world #through better stories