Solar punks

In 2007, Ole and Maitri Ersson bought the rundown Cabana apartment complex in the city and immediately began to de-pave parking spaces to make space for what today is a huge permaculture coliving space and urban food forest.Today, the Kailash Ecovillage has 55 residents who all help farm where there was once pavement, grass, a swimming pool, and an overgrown weed patch.

Grist for your Solarpunk retrosuburban/domestic/family/care worldbuilding mills

Urban Seed Shakers

Urban seed shakers Phoenix and Shalaco are scattering native wildflower seeds in San Francisco, California to help support butterflies and bees. Dedicated to restoring the land, they believe that anyone can be a gardener.

‘Horticultural disobedience’: Quebecer letting front yard grow naturally, despite risk of flouting local bylaw“This year, Dany Baillargeon is committing what he describes as “horticultural disobedience” by letting his front yard grow naturally —...

‘Horticultural disobedience’: Quebecer letting front yard grow naturally, despite risk of flouting local bylaw

This year, Dany Baillargeon is committing what he describes as “horticultural disobedience” by letting his front yard grow naturally — despite the risk of running afoul of local bylaws.The Sherbrooke, Que., resident describes his lawn as “beautiful chaos.” Its filled with plants such as wildflowers, clover and long grasses, and it is regularly visited by butterflies, bees and birds.

“I let nature take the space that it deserves,” he said in a recent interview.

(…)

Despite the advantages, it is still forbidden to grow vegetables or natural grass and flowers on front yards under local bylaws in many cities, which require residents keep lawns weeded and cut short.

(…)His message, he said, is summarized on the sign he installed on his lawn to explain his yard to his neighbours.

It reads: “It’s the cohabitation that makes it all beautiful.”

(Source: nationalpost.com)

China Plans to Feed 80 Million People With ‘Seawater Rice’“Jinghai district in northern China is hardly a rice-growing paradise. Located along the coast of the Bohai Sea, over half of the region’s land is made of salty, alkaline soil where crops...

China Plans to Feed 80 Million People With ‘Seawater Rice’

Jinghai district in northern China is hardly a rice-growing paradise. Located along the coast of the Bohai Sea, over half of the region’s land is made of salty, alkaline soil where crops can’t survive. Yet, last autumn, Jinghai produced 100 hectares of rice.

Known as “seawater rice” because it’s grown in salty soil near the sea, the strains were created by over-expressing a gene from selected wild rice that’s more resistant to saline and alkali. Test fields in Tianjin—the municipality that encompasses Jinghai—recorded a yield of 4.6 metric tons per acre last year, higher than the national average for production of standard rice varieties.

China has been studying salt-tolerant rice since at least the 1950s. But the term “seawater rice” only started to gain mainstream attention in recent years after the late Yuan Longping, once the nation’s top agricultural scientist, began researching the idea in 2012.

Yuan, known as the “father of hybrid rice,” is considered a national hero for boosting grain harvests and saving millions from hunger thanks to his work on high-yielding hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s. In 2016, he selected six locations across the country with different soil conditions that were turned into testing fields for salt-tolerant rice. The following year, China established the research center in Qingdao where Wan works. The institute’s goal is to harvest 30 million tons of rice using 6.7 million hectares of barren land.

Article goes on to speak about rising sea levels and how salt-tolerant rice will have big implications for coastline countries in the coming decades.

(Source: bloomberg.com)

Marimo are one of nature’s most alien spectacles. They are impossible-looking spheres made of algae, smoothed and toppled by currents in lakes, piling up on the floor like green puff balls. Marimo’s spherical form is what makes them so unique. Otherwise, sipping on faint sunlight beneath the water’s surface, they burp oxygen into our atmosphere just like any other plant.

…

Researchers from UWE Bristol’s Unconventional Computing Lab have proven that marimo can be harnessed to do more—autonomously roaming lake beds to monitor water conditions like temperature and oxygen content—if only they are outfitted with the proper super suit.

The team dubs their invention a “marimo-activated rover system,” or MARS for short. (…) The team fit marimo into a 3D-printed exoskeleton that’s roughly the size of a baseball. As marimo produce energy from sunlight, they exhale oxygen. Normally, this oxygen would simply float to the top of the water’s surface. But inside MARS, that oxygen bubbles up to get trapped inside a cage.The pressure of these bubbles hits the cage in such a way that they create torque, zigzagging the MARS forward much like a hamster ball.

Of course, the MARS design does propose that we voluntarily place more plastic into our waterways. Philips notes that this plastic is still of far lower environmental impact than building a more typical drone would be, and it could biodegrade over time. Plus, it’s hard to imagine any machine that could last as long as a MARS ball because the system has no moving parts, and its “battery” might last centuries: The oldest living marimo is over 200 years old.

“Unconventional Computing Lab“ “robots powered by algae” “the system has no moving parts“

Solarpunk AF

—

Check out the the latest issue of the Journal of Biological Engineering for more details!

(Source: Fast Company)

Based in the coastal town of Shoreham-by-Sea, England, artist Louise Durham creates towering wooden sculptures of reclaimed sea defense timber and vibrant stained glass. She embeds stripes and circles in a full spectrum of color within the totem-style works, which when illuminated, cast kaleidoscopic shadows on their surroundings. “It is all about the light,” she says. “That’s the magic of glass and the magic of all living things.”

Check out more of Durhams work on her personal site here

(Source: thisiscolossal.com)

NASA/GLENN RESEARCH CENTER: PROTOTYPE PHOTOVOLTAIC PV PANEL - 1977Image: NASA Images/Glenn Research Center Collection on Archive.org

NASA/GLENN RESEARCH CENTER: PROTOTYPE PHOTOVOLTAIC PV PANEL - 1977

(Source: archive.org)

So with all the cool different Solarpunk books that came out, do you know any that are being printed in Braille?

THIS IS A VERY GOOD QUESTION

We know some of the indie publishers who have put Solarpunk anthologies out over the years, will put the question to them.

A social ecological storytelling game where you and your friends build a better world.

It’s too easy to imagine the end of the world.

Much easier, sometimes, than imagining a pathway to a better world.

That’s why we made Solarpunk Futures — to practice collective visioning about our real-world struggles for a better world through a mix of sincerity, laughter, and creative storytelling.

Solarpunk Futures is a 10-minute rules-light role-playing game where players imagine the pathways to a desirable world from the perspective of a utopian future. Through dialogue and collaborative worldbuilding, collective and visionary narratives emerge of a new society, along with plausible scenarios for how to get there.

With your help, we can share the lush solarpunk aesthetic with more people and help inspire a social ecological politics rooted in care and freedom!

Solarpunk futures was created by Solarpunk Surf Club an arts collective who create and curate egalitarian platforms for surfing the waves of still-possible worlds.

(Source: kickstarter.com)

This, then, is the great challenge of climate discontinuity: to continue to act even in the midst of uncertainty and upheaval. With Earth systems unraveling at a frightening pace, the tasks before us are clear. We need to prepare and adapt for the worst, even as we continue to educate, agitate, and organize for the best future possible.

(Source: sierraclub.org)