Solarpunk Presents

In this podcast, host Ariel has a chat with Aaron and Alicia, the team behind Solacene podcast in Montreal, Canada. They talk about the meaning of “Solacene”, their goals, the semester-structure of their show, zines, community, upcycled clothing, embodied reality, environmental positivity, and a sneak peek at what is next for Solacene in the future… just to name a few topics. Tune in on your favou...

If tech wasn’t such a central aspect of solarpunk, we’d all just be hippies redux. Yet not all tech, right? Because solarpunk is also about living the good life while building a just, inclusive, and sustainable society. So, what is solarpunk’s attitude toward and relationship with tech? How do solarpunks decide what’s worth it and what’s beyond the pale? And what’s all this about appropriate techn...

Why is solarpunk called solarPUNK? What is so punk about it, and does it have anything to do with the original meaning of punk… or cyberpunk, or steampunk, or any -punk for that matter?  In this episode, Christina and Ariel dive into the thorny question of what exactly it is that they are talking about when they say “solarpunk” … because as it turns out, they both have very different points o...

Classic, post-apocalyptic, dystopian fiction is a type of fantasy where we’re dreaming of starting over in an empty landscape from a societal and cultural slate wiped clean by some devastating event that we don’t have to feel guilty about having happened—at least, it is according to our very own Ariel Kroon, who does, yes, have a PhD in it.* Yet, at the same time, these fantasies generally suffer...

You’ve heard of NIMBYs and NIMBYism, and you probably are living with the consequences of neighbourhood planning or city policies influenced by landowners who say “Not in My Backyard” to new developments planned in their area. But what about YIMBYs? The name might be strange, but the homeowners who make up these groups say “Yes In My Backyard” to normalize the goals of affordable housing advocates...

Taking action on their solarpunk dreams, Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott bought a degraded agricultural plot and have been turning it into a food forest, an explosion of flowers, and a demonstration of regenerative farming that brings the local community together and creates a network of prosperity and opportunities for other farmers, creatives, and makers. Join us as we talk soils, how their proje...

Today Ariel sits down with Navarre Bartz to talk about solarpunk spirituality. Solarpunk’s emphasis on respecting and valuing human and non-human life includes the totality of a being’s existence, and that includes the “squishy bits” of the experience that we can’t quite quantify. Navarre recently hosted a series of guest posts on his blog, Solarpunk Station, all about the spiritual angle of solar...

In this episode, Prof. Jenni Barclay explains the importance of storytelling by scientists to themselves, other scientists, and the general public. Has that got you thinking, hey, wait, WHAT?! Everyone knows that scientists should never tell stories ! If we expect them to show up like Back off man, I’m a scientist! and guide us through difficulties, then they’d best stick strictly and dryly to the...

On today’s episode, we’re talking about board games! Ariel interviews Dr Sourayan Mookerjea, Professor of sociology at University of Alberta, about the game “Perfect Storm”, which he uses in his classes and beyond to teach players about the complexities of a sustainable energy transition in the province of Alberta, and Canada more widely. We talk about the different meanings of “energy”, green cap...

Have the inhumanity and environmental destructiveness of global supply chains got you down? What about the rapaciousness of multinational corporations who have twisted globalization into a nightmare for so many people on Earth? Here’s one thing you can do about it: you can support the growing movement known as distributed production. In Episode 3 of Season 4, researcher Sarah Hutton...

In this episode, Ariel talks to Hermina Joldersma, professor emerita at University of Calgary, about alternative housing arrangements, focusing on co-housing. They discuss not only Hermina’s experiences living in different types of housing, but the mindset necessary to co-housing and communal life, and the way that community often has to be intentionally created. Tune in now! Links: Hermina Jolder...

In this kick-off of Season 4, Ariel and Christina tackle the topic of housing. It is one of the central imaginings of solarpunk, after all. And it’s something we’re not doing very well in the present.  How could solarpunk expand its dreams of housing beyond the aesthetic and into the realm of the practical? Can solarpunk envision not just greenery and solar-panel-draped dwellings, but housing...

Solarpunk’s envisioning of a future that we’d like to live in isn’t just about providing a vision for us to aim for, it’s also about changing cultural norms in the present so that we can actually get to that future. Solarpunk storytelling is in no small part about normalizing the things we want to support and develop, such as sustainability, wild and productive gardens, social justice, and cohesiv...

In this episode, Brianna Castagnozzi, one of the editors-in-chief of Solarpunk Magazine , is here to give up the solarpunk artist’s eye view on solarpunk art and AI; a very different take than the solarpunk hacker’s view given to us by John Threat in season three episode seven. As much as I (Christina) was convinced by John’s advice not to stick your head in the sand but to master the tools of you...

This week, Ariel chats with Paul Heersink, cartographer and Program Manager for the Roads and Addresses program at ESRI Canada. Formerly, he was Production Manager of the Community Maps Program: an initiative that is aiming to build a seamless topographic basemap of Canada using contributor data, and the Roads and Addresses program aims to do the same with community-sourced data, building a naviga...

Between September 15 to 24, 2023, you can go be a part of renowned hacktivist, writer/director, and creative futurist John Threat’s Zukunft Garden—a solarpunk future garden—that’s part of Vision2030’s Earth Edition festival at CalArts, in Santa Clarita, near Los Angeles. Join us for this episode, where John talks to Christina about this social art installation, what it means and can signify for pa...

What is petroturfing? What is an energy imaginary? If, as Thomas King says , we are all stories , how can we make sense of which stories are leading us to an understanding of things as they are, rather than misrepresenting reality or persuading us to take a biased view? And what can we do when we learn to critically interpret the world around us? What are some concrete actions we can take as regul...

Birdwatchers. They’re both easy to envy (They know so much!) and laugh at (What nerds!). Yet birdwatching is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to connect with nature. Yes, as we discuss with Cin-Ty Lee, professor of geology at Rice University in Texas and author of the Field Guide to North American Flycatchers: Empidonax and Pewees , you could go buy all the books and gear and then book trips a...

Why is it easier to imagine a zombie apocalypse than it is a generative, sustainable future? This question drives Joey Ayoub, host of The Fire These Times : in fact, this season of his pod is partially about solarpunk and generative futures. Tune in today to listen to Ariel and Joey discussing imaginative expansion of solarpunk, the “realist” impulse, climate anxiety and grief, and community build...

Conquering climate change for our survival and that of much of the rest of the biosphere calls for more than attaining net zero emissions of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. We also need to actively remove much of the 140 extra parts per million of carbon dioxide currently up there in the atmosphere thanks to our burning of fossil fuels and destruction of so much of Earth’s biosphere. Both att...

Today’s episode is all about animal ethics—or do we mean critical animal studies? Ariel discusses this linguistic nuance and the difference between them (and much, much more!) with Dr Chloë Taylor, professor of women and gender studies at the University of Alberta. Dr Taylor has been involved in a five-year-long project researching the “Intersections of Animality” and is a trained philosopher who...

Ariel and Christina open Season 3 with a chat about what solarpunk, or, at least this solarpunk podcast, is setting out to achieve… according to how Ariel sees it. With her occasionally curmudgeonly devil’s advocacy, Christina provides the nuance we need as we push through topics, including the definition of solarpunk in a time of slippery postmodern language (that, in true solarpunk fashion, chan...

There’s no question that the biosphere is in crisis right now thanks to human-driven global warming, our hostile takeover of most of Earth’s land area, and our pollution and overfishing of the seas. Slowing down—never mind outright stopping—the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystems and the mass extinction currently gaining pace calls for aggressively protecting the environment, or possibly even givin...

In this episode, Ariel discusses the topic of ecocriticism with Dr Jenny Kerber, Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. What is ecocriticism? Why is it important, especially for environmental activists and solarpunks, as a narrative reframing device? Solarpunks work very closely with speculation and imagination and as architects of the narratives by which we live our lives,...

Have you ever thought about how dinosaurs lived on a warm, swampy Earth and how we live on one that’s cold enough to keep pretty much the entirety of Greenland and Antarctica buried under kilometers-thick sheets of solid ice and wondered, hmm, how did we get from there to here? The short answer is that it took 50 million years of declining atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and droppin...