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The First Sustainable Generation?
I’m thinking a lot lately about the connection between aesthetic and hope: the world you visualize is the world you are building. I have to admit, I visualize a pretty dismal future and have a “salvage punk” aesthetic — as humanity creates a dystopia, I see myself in a remnant eking out an alternative from scraps and DIY skills. It’s a bit cottagecore meets Mad Max.
But lately, I’m wondering if I should become solarpunk? Does it really have to go so badly. Well, I’m really wrestling with my eschatology on this I guess. And maybe I should be listening to Hannah Ritchie: https://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_ritchie_are_we_the_last_generation_or_the_first_sustainable_one?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
frankenfiction.com
Salvagepunk is an idea and framework I’ve been toying with for a couple of weeks, and which I borrow loosely from Evan Calder Williams’ Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (2011). In this bo…
Cara8 Comments-
This is reminding me of this article I read a while ago, about how fiction (Star Trek in this example) has power to shape the real world as it unfurls. Lots of power in speculative fiction and the stories we tell ourselves!!!! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-books/2023/09/08/star-trek-and-3-d-printing/
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@ThisisthePlace
I grew up on Star Trek: The Second Generation, but then drifted more into the cyberpunk/junkpunk of Star Wars. Guess it felt like a galaxy ruled by an evil empire was more real than a floating utopia with food replicators. From there it was more punk and dystopian — mainly into anime.I’d have to say that I saw the Gospel as distinctly punk — a disavowal that the mainstream would be our salvation. But the other day, I read this on solarpunk and it made me wonder a bit: https://aeon.co/essays/in-solarpunk-cities-of-the-future-tech-follows-natures-lead?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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@Ben I guess I’ve never given much thought to what punk actually is, but that makes a lot of sense— in what you’re saying about the Gospel as punk and also how it shows up in “Solarpunk”. Solarpunk is totally new to me- I love the phrasing of “the patience to evoke beauty” in here. It seems like making maple syrup, as a way of harnessing the power of photosynthesis and evaporation through human technology, is possibly an example of solarpunk, especially when it’s done with ecologically-minded sustainable practices!
This article’s mention of the Symbiocene reminds me a lot of a book I read called “Staying with the Trouble”… which proposed this idea of “sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making… Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures.” (This is from the book’s synopsis).
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I love the line “how to repeat differently” from the Salvagepunk article!
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@ThisisthePlace
That’s how to blend the prophetic with humility. We need to own our human patterns — rather than disown them and stumble into new mistakes — but we need to always change our patterns to the good.Some people describe science as the discipline of being less and less wrong. That mixes in that kind of humility.
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@Ben That vision of prophetic is so compelling to me. Sounds like Matthew 16:2 a little bit.
I don’t know that I fully agree with that description of science, but BOY do I love it, and I think it’s at least in the spirit of what science is meant to be —something beautifully humble and brave and human.
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@ThisisthePlace
I like to distinguish description (setting out the line) from definition (setting the limit). I think “the discipline of being less and less wrong” describes science, but truly not all of it or even the heart of it. But it definitely doesn’t define science. I think your description “something beautifully humble and brave and human” is closer to describing a center of a philosophy of science based on WONDER — a generous empiricism which allows an experiential participation usually prohibited by the non-determinism of scientific reductionism.In as much as people who exclude themselves from nature miss the essential intimacy required for real stewardship, those who exclude the human from science loose the intimacy necessary to see what it really means. They discover the machine in the cell and turn it into a biotechnical monster. But those who stare down one tube of their microscope — while God stairs down the other tube cheek-to-cheek with them — discover the marvelous genius of twisting and throbbing molecules that calls them into the dance of life.
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WOW. I didn’t even know about Solarpunk, but I think I am one. This makes so much sense and fits much more closely with the Creators design.
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