Solarpunk Presents: Season Two

Rural Versus Urban Solarpunk | RSS.com

I cohost a podcast! Last season, we were with Solarpunk Magazine, but this year we’ve spun out on our own. You can check out season one here on our blog. Here’s the official spiel:

Solarpunk Presents explores the people and projects working on bringing us a better world today. In this podcast, hosts Ariel Kroon and Christina De La Rocha interview people who are doing work in the here and now that will help us get to a solarpunk future and talk to each other about the visions of a sustainable equitable future integral to solarpunk and about issues we’re curious about within the movement or genre of solarpunk.

Connect with us on Mastodon at https://climatejustice.rocks/@solarpunkpresents or Twitter https://twitter.com/SolarpunkP

Pretty neat, huh? This first episode is about rural vs urban solarpunk, which is a treat – I live a very urban life, whereas Christina lives in rural Germany, so we discuss some of the solarpunk #aesthetic circulating that invokes a lifestyle in a future that is either very cottagecore or full of skyscrapers (with plants on them).

Do you have a solarpunk vision for the future? Are you working on making your location a more sustainable, livable place in the now? Let us know!

On public writing / writing for the public

(In January 2018, I found this in my drafts folder from August 2016; I’m posting it now)

I’m currently in the midst of reading Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, and I just finished Sina Queyras’ contribution – “Public Poet, Private Life: 20 Riffs on the Dream of a Communal Self”. I really like it. It’s vulnerable and defiant, a quasi-autobiographical account of her struggles with engaging with a public voice. It touched a chord in me.

On writing

When I was in high school and undergraduate studies, I used to keep a LiveJournal – pseudonymous and locked, of course, so that only those in my friends circle who also had LJ accounts could access my posts. It was like keeping a diary in plain sight, where I would record my thoughts and feelings and accomplishments and failures, and have a group of sympathetic and supportive individuals cheering me on or sharing my sorrow or indignation, and giving helpful advice and input on situations that frustrated me.

Last week, my friend gave me a copy of How We Write, edited by Dr Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and it reignited my drive to write non-fiction – both often and online.

PRIVATE – KEEP OUT: On digital / writing platforms and internet security

In one of my courses this semester (“introduction to digital humanities”) we are asked to make biweekly blog posts to “think aloud”, rant, engage in debate, etc. Several of my classmates balked at this (citing issues of security and privacy, mostly), and others were excited, especially with regards to the ease and informality of web publishing. Plus the tantalizingly dangled carrot of getting known in internet circles, publishing work on well-read sites, possibly leading to alt-ac* jobs in the future.

None of these debates and hesitations over issues of security and privacy ring especially new to me, as I hold them myself. When I first started blogging, on ye olde LiveJournal back in 2003, my journal entries were locked to “friends-only”: only other LJ users with accounts that I had approved could view my posts in their friends feed. Neither security nor privacy seemed to be a huge issue; the terms of service seemed legitimate to my grade-10 mind, and besides, I was fifteen: who would hack me? Or so went my thoughts.