![]() Guest Blog by BrightFlame My story in Solarpunk Creatures, “Thank Geo,” is set in the Threads, the interconnected communities I write, and where I’d love to live. I first glimpsed the Threads during a trance journey led by my dear friend Starhawk—author, activist, permaculture designer—amidst a weekend workshop we co-taught. Participants worked with narrative to craft their stories for bringing forward just, resilient futures. We toured those futures during the imaginary journey, and I saw bits and pieces of what I’ve since fleshed out and named the Threads. Everyone is considered kin in the Threads since mutualism and interconnection across the Web of Life are foundational. While I picture the Threads in the far Northeast of Turtle Island, they could be anywhere. I’ve written more than a dozen stories set in the Threads, each exploring different timeframes and different problems and aspects of community. “Thank Geo” takes place about 150 years from now and brings in a very different character than the other stories. Humans connect to all kin through the Forest’s communication network courtesy of mycorrhizae. So all of my Threads stories have non-human characters, often trees and mycelium. “Thank Geo” is the first to bring in this particular form of kin. Indeed, “Thank Geo” explores the question, Who do we humans call kin? I’ve continued offering similar Storying the Future workshops to mundane and magical audiences because in order to create our desired futures, we need to first imagine them. I hope Solarpunk Creatures helps you tap into the solarpunk future you long for and inspires you to action. By the way, Starhawk has inspired me for decades. Have you read her novel The Fifth Sacred Thing and its sequel, City of Refuge? These are solarpunk from before we used the term. Starhawk not only writes solarpunk, she lives it. See Earth Activist Training. BrightFlame (she/they) writes, teaches, and makes magic for a just, regenerating world. Her fiction appears in Solarpunk Magazine and in several acclaimed anthologies, and her debut novel, The Working, is forthcoming from Water Dragon Publishing (Summer 2024). She’s known for her teaching in the worldwide pagan community and co-founded the Center for Sustainable Futures at Columbia University that features her nonfiction. Musings, doodles, and more at https://brightflame.com
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![]() Guest Blog by Jerri Jerreat Don’t go near there; it’s buggy (translation: rich in insect life) and dangerous (translation: fear of the unknown). I grew up afraid of wetlands, and thought swamps, bogs, fens, peatlands and marshes were all the same, hiding quicksand or crocodiles. Yep, here in Canada. One day I was portaging in a provincial park, Ontario, Anishnabeg territory, crossing a wood plank over mud. I glanced left. Between some willows was a ghostly area of trees, shrubs and wild grasses growing directly out of water, silvery green mossy plants hanging. The light fell differently in there. There were sparkles on reeds, birds racing across, splashes. Small voices spoke in keys and languages I did not know. It was where the fairies of my childhood lived. ![]() “A swamp, eh?” commented the person behind me. “That’s a swamp?” I let them pass and stood, riveted. Recently I learned that over 40% of all plant and animal life begins or lives in wetlands. I saw a webinar by Toronto’s “Remediation Action Program,” (RAP.) They’ve been quietly restoring wetlands across the region. RAP has built rocky shoals, attached logs for turtles to rest on, planted indigenous marsh plants. They’ve worked on city streams and gullies, replanted the sides with native shrubs to hold the soil, removed invasive species, tires and plastic. One wetland had been drained and farmed for over a century. The new owner donated the field. RAP researched, then unblocked the original creek. Water flowed back in. By the end of the summer the field was a full, diverse wetland, a mix of heritage native plants. Seeds had lain under that field for over a hundred years, but had burst into life. By fall, researchers had spotted many species of water insects, and birds arriving. Imagine their wonder when they spotted the first frog, and then fish! Fish! Volunteers pulled out invasive plants, monitered it, and went further north to help the source creek. It made me want to dance. I’m a terrible dancer, lots of hand waving and hip shaking, no understanding of “what looks good on a dance floor.” But I love it, and regret that for adults, there aren’t enough places to dance. Community centres need to hold dances monthly. I digress. Last year the swarmy Premier of Ontario and his rich cronies nixed the position of the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, (a non-partisan watchdog to uphold the Environmental Bill of Rights.) Then he cut the power of our Conservation Authorities and opened up the Greenbelt to allow for faster “development,” over areas that had been protected. Wetlands too. In Kingston, a rich forest had grown up bordered by a gorgeous wetland on a large property within walking distance of City Hall. Over 70 years ago a nasty factory had closed. The forest, it seems, has been healing the soil slowly. The City sold it all for a dime to a developer who wanted to clearcut the forest, (about 2000 mature trees), truck the topsoil away, cover it with clay and cement, and part of the wetland too. What for, you ask? Riverside condos and a yacht club. I protested to both levels of governments, of course, and was in a flotilla of canoes waving signs. I took many blurry photos of birds, turtles, the beauty of the area, and wrote letters. A group of scientists from Montréal suggested the paths be raised, and the small contaminated areas be fenced and planted to phyto-remediate them. Signs could teach people how bio-remediation works, and point out tree species, the nesting sites of a hundred turtles, and the names of the hosts of birds and creatures living there. The wetlands, absolutely teeming with life, should never be capped. In September 2022, after our many protests and petitions, Kingston City Council voted down the clearcut and condo scheme. I woke up one day with a sassy Wetlands dancing in my mind. She loved those geese and ducks, painted turtles and salamanders, and her friend, the Forest. She could be any Wetland threatened by developers. Maybe one near you. Maybe you could help her out. Jerri Jerreat’s writing, from Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee territory, appears in Grist/Fix: Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction; Flyway: Journal, Alluvian, Feminine Collective, Yale Review Online, The New Quarterly, Glass & Gardens Solarpunk Winters; Solarpunk Summers, & others. She has a growing pile of protest signs by the door & directs YouthImagineTheFuture.com. https://jerrijerreat.com/ Instagram: @jerrjtree
![]() Guest Blog by Ana Sun Not long after I moved to the South Downs, a local friend told me how he used to associate the call of seagulls with summer holidays—but not since he’d lived here. It didn’t take long for me to grasp why: the novelty can wear off very quickly when you’re regularly and rudely woken up at 4 a.m. by avian disputes. Our seagulls—or just “gulls”, to be accurate—are notorious for their chip-stealing reputation. While there exists a good variety of birds in Brighton and Hove, gulls are possibly the most visible; they are certainly far from shy. They strut down Brighton streets, parade on the roofs of parked cars, scrutinise any passers-by carrying food with an accusing stare—as if you’ve taken what’s rightly theirs. You might also see carrion crows perched on lamp-posts or patrolling the beach, clusters of jackdaws and rooks in the parks, pigeons just about everywhere. The starlings on the Victorian remains of the West Pier are a wondrous sight to behold. ![]() Brighton and its surrounds are one of the most progressive places I’ve had the privilege of living close to. It is presently the only place in the United Kingdom with a Green MP in Parliament; one of its constituents boasts the highest percentage of LGBTQ+ residents (20.11%) in the UK 2021 census. Unfortunately, it’s not a place untouched by inequality. Brighton also has a long-standing issue with drugs; until 2017, it had been one of the highest capital of drug deaths in England. Even such a progressive, inclusive city cannot be shielded from a failing national Conservative government that has run short of ideas—a government depriving local councils of much-needed funds by pitting them against each other, paralysing systems of social support. For me, being Solarpunk means doing the tough, emotional work of dreaming of a better world, a chance to explore possible futures that don’t shy away from the hard questions—such as how we might balance power within a community. I prefer grounding my Solarpunk stories in real places so we can imagine how an actual, physical location may one day be transformed. If you’ve lived within the vicinity of Brighton for some time, it’s impossible to escape the stories about the Whitsun weekend clash between the Mods and Rockers in 1964. (Even today, there are still popular shops selling Mod attire in the North Laine.) The iconic battle on Brighton’s beaches was just one of a series of fights that exploded in seaside towns across the south coast of England that year—an event seared into local imagination and lore. Painted as the “turmoil of contemporary youth” by the media of the time, the general perception now seems to accept that the coverage then may have exaggerated the scale and extent of the conflict. In one of my random rabbit-hole tumbles, I came across a video where a Mod recounted his memories of the period. His choice of words when describing the Rockers is riveting: “we saw them as being greasy, uneducated, unpleasant—they knew that.” A classic example of “us” vs. “them”—a study in tribalism. When I began writing “Night Fowls”, I was trying to process whether our ingrained storytelling mechanisms—especially the requirement for conflict—inevitably leads us to narratives that people who are unlike us can be reduced into obstacles that we must overcome. I also wanted to play out the challenges of a local government selected by sortition, unpack what happens when people have the best intentions, but still struggle to get it right. One day, it occurred to me that I could explore these themes with a story that harks back to that senseless 1964 Brighton battle—through the lens of our local birds. After all, they don’t always get along, certainly not at four o’clock in the morning outside my window. And then, there’s the question of our place among nature: what right do we have, to consider ourselves the most exceptional species in comparison to all others? This plagued me for months, while the ending of the story hung unfinished, useless and unsatisfying—until I found myself face-to-face with a red deer skull and antler headress from about 9000 BC. Seeing ourselves as separate from nature is a relatively recent phenomenon. Like us, the flora and fauna that grace us with their presence—are also made of star-stuff. Ana Sun writes from the edge of an ancient town along the River Ouse in the south-east of England. She spent her childhood in Malaysian Borneo and grew up living on islands. In another life, she might have been a musician, an anthropologist—or a botanist obsessed with edible flowers.
![]() Guest Blog by Commando Jugendstil and Tales from the EV Studio There are plenty of stories, from Space Odyssey, to Terminator and the Avengers, in which AIs are a threat to humanity, and a fair amount in which AIs are the salvation of humanity, instead, deity-like caretakers who make choices on behalf of humanity for their own good. Collectively we dislike both options. The first one is a bit cliché at this point, and the second one is too closely aligned with the techno-utopianism proposed by many AI peddlers, made of technocratic solutions imposed on people by "experts" with no democratic oversight, with the underlying idea that humanity is too stupid, selfish or evil to be left to self-govern and that society must be optimized according to "scientific" and "rational" lines with a hefty dose of surveillance and manipulation. We're not buying what they're selling, thank you very much. There's plenty of good stories to be written about the resistance to such "benevolent caretaker" AI, but that was not the kind of story we wanted to go with for this anthology and so we ruminated and procrastinated, until one Saturday afternoon. The idea of this story came to us all at once in a café in Oxford. The main members were having a break with one of our silent partners, who is a researcher in the humanities. We started talking shop about our respective day jobs, about grant proposals, projects and coursework, and eventually the discussion started to veer towards digital humanities and the slow creep of AI into everything. From there, between scones and absolutely killer mocha coffee, the conversation devolved into giggles and speculation: why did Ultron flip the lid as soon as they saw the Pope online? What is the relationship between Ultron and Futurama's PreacherBot? What would happen if consciousness emerged not in an autonomous weapons system or in a resource management entity, but rather in an academic AI? And a digital humanities one, at that? Our silent partner provided the name, a good Arcadian one, and the rest of us retrofitted a plausible acronym. Soon LIN.C.O. was born, with their deep love for poetry and sheep, and their desire to "be a real person" to fulfill their dreams of nomadic pastoralism. Part Wall-E and part Pinocchio, LIN.C.O. is a relatable little ball of anxiety and innocence, who, like every other person in the world, is trying to figure out what they want from life and what is their place in the grand scheme of things. What we really wanted to write about was a quest for self-actualisation, and a society where every person, human or not, is allowed to self-actualise and become what they want to be, without discrimination and economic barriers, and we enjoyed every moment of it. While in the real world machine learning algorithms (incorrectly called AI) are tools of capitalist appropriation of the digital commons, of surveillance, and of commodification of human cultural production and creativity, wielded by techno-feudal corporations, we can imagine a different future where they are used to the benefit of people and under their democratic control and oversight. And yes, even one where people come in all shapes and sizes, not all of them necessarily made of cells and carbon, and yet everyone has the same rights to enjoy life to the fullest. We would say we deserve this. Commando Jugendstil is a solarpunk creative collective. Their projects merge technology and art with the idea of transforming the city into its sustainable version, while focusing on co-designing solutions with local communities, to stimulate a just transition that can spark from the ground up.
Tales from the EV is a small collective of storytellers. They fell in love with solarpunk while helping the Commando write Midsummer Night's Heist. Their collaboration has been going strong ever since. Members of TftEV are involved in climate justice activism with XR UK and the GNDE campaign. |
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February 2024
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