Solarpunk Presents

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 all over the world to start checking off boxes on your life list. Or you could just sit and watch out the window at whatever birds are out there where you live. All birds are interesting! 

And, as Christina and Prof. Lee discuss in this episode, watching them is habit-forming in a way that makes people of all political stripes want to start protecting their habitats. This doesn’t need to mean lying down in front of tractors. Instead, it could mean working to improve small patches of nature within cities and in your own backyard to make them better for birds and the plants and insects the birds need to thrive. Before you know it, you’ll be heading up neighborhood or citywide initiatives to better the spaces around you for the sake of the birds.

Socials:

You can find Cin-Ty Lee at @CinTyLeeEarth on Twitter, at @cintylee on Instagram, and at http://www.cintylee.org/. Or check out his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/cintylee.

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter, Mastodon, or at our blog.

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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 building in a crisis. Also The Office. Trust us, it’s an important part of this whole conversation. 

In this episode, Ariel speaks with Joey Ayoub, host of The Fire These Times podcast and someone who’s been focusing his podcasting and thinking on solarpunk quite a bit in the last while. Joey is a Lebanese writer, researcher, scholar, editor and podcaster currently based in Switzerland since 2020. He is a research associate at the Center for Social Sciences Research and Action and a member of Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN), and Degrowth Switzerland, to name just a few organizations he is involved with, and he has been published in more places than I can list here. Join us for this thought-provoking and entertaining conversation.

Links/References:

• SP episode 2.3 on Beirut and the history of Lebanon with JD Harlock 
• SP episode 1.4 on climate grief and chaplaincy with Gabrielle Gelderman 
• Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher 
• A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit 

Socials:

Check out The Fire These Times website, as well as Joey’s personal site, and connect with him on Twitter, Instagram, and Mastodon.

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter, Mastodon, or at our blog.

Support the show on Patreon or make a one-time donation via PayPal.

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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 attaining net zero and going beyond it will take carbon capture and storage. This means capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and other point sources and from our agricultural activities before it gets into the atmosphere, as well as capturing carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. Then, we need to store that carbon somewhere safely away from the atmosphere for at least a few thousand years. 

Join us for this episode of Solarpunk Presents, in which Christina talks to Dr. Mike Bickle, professor emeritus at the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Cambridge. We’ll be discussing what methods for carbon capture and storage are the most promising (and the most likely for us to engage in), what some of the dangers are, what it would take to deploy carbon capture and storage at the scale required, and how long it might take us to bring an end to the global warming we’ve created.

Links:

• Overview of carbon capture and storage from the International Energy Agency
• European legal framework for carbon capture and storage
• Fact sheet for the Sleipner gas field carbon capture and storage project (last updated 2016)
• Scientific paper on 20 years of carbon storage in the Sleipner gas field. 
• The effects of a carbon dioxide pipeline leak in Mississippi
• A moving, informative article on the Lake Nyos disaster

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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 works in gender studies, and sees a lot of intersections between the way that we think about and treat animals and the way that we think about and treat minoritized subjects. Come join us for a thought-provoking and highly educational discussion!

Links

• Dr Chloë Taylor’s profile at University of Alberta 
• Peter Singer and Tom Regan
• North American Association for Critical Animal Studies
• Where Disability Rights and Animal Rights Meet: A Conversation with Sunaura Taylor
• Making Kin: An Interview with Donna Haraway 
• Auroch de-extinction and rewilding

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter, Mastodon, or at our blog.

Connect with Ariel at her blog, on Twitter at @arielletje, and on Mastodon.

Connect with Christina at her blog, on Twitter, and on Mastodon

Support the show on Patreon or make a one-time donation via PayPal.

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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, changes according to cultural context and locale), the Anthropocene and its multiple issues, mix-tape metaphors, Ursula K LeGuin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, aesthetics (of course), infrastructure as resistance, and a liiiiittle bit of academic theory. 

Join us!

Links

• Almanac for the Anthropocene
• "Solarpunk: A Container for More Fertile Futures" by Jay Springett in Solarpunk Magazine
• Listen to Season 1 here!
• Listen to Season 2 here!
• The Solarpunk Presents Pinterest has examples of solarpunk aesthetics we dig.
• Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz
• Posthuman feminism definition
• Postmodern linguistics / language plus a more philosophical definition of postmodernism

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter, Mastodon, or at our blog.

Connect with Ariel at her blog, on Twitter at @arielletje, and on Mastodon.

Connect with Christina at her blog, on Twitter, and on Mastodon

Support the show on Patreon or make a one-time donation via PayPal.

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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 giving half of the Earth’s land surface back to nature in a process known as rewilding. 

But how will we manage to share the Earth with the rest of the biosphere when history shows that we’re pretty terrible at sharing it with each other, with some states even going so far as to have used the preservation of wilderness as a tool of genocide and white supremacy? There are still those who would use environmental protection as an excuse to block immigrants, reject refugees, and expel “undesirable” people from the land. What will it take to value human and non-human life and the land all equally, without using one as an excuse to persecute the other?

Getting urgently-needed environmental protection and rewilding right requires facing the evils that have been historically committed in the name of conservation, so that we don’t repeat those grave mistakes, even with the best of intentions. As solarpunks, we need to learn from the past in order to shape futures that are intentionally better than our pasts and presents.

And that’s a wrap for season 2! Season 3 will be coming along in the last week of June for Patreon supporters, and to the public in the first week of July. Until then, keep dreaming, and keep up the good work!

Links

• Reframing Narratives with Ecocriticism, with Dr Jenny Kerber 
• Against the Ecofascist Creep webzine teaching resource and explainer
• Read about the 100-Mile Diet book and phenomenon on Wikipedia
• Read about the locavore movement on Wikipedia
• A great article on philosophical questions with The Sneetches from the Prindle Institute for Ethics
• Some articles on food forests
• The Half-Earth Project 

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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, it helps to have tools like ecocriticism at our disposal.

Join Ariel and Dr. Kerber to think through terms like “wilderness” and “nature” and “the Anthropocene”. How do we hold on to hope, despite critical engagement with the dark side of our environmental narratives? 

References:

●     A bit more about the WLU Land Acknowledgement

●     Dr Kerber’s profile at Wilfrid Laurier U

●     “The Trouble with Wilderness” by William Cronon

●     Elizabeth May

●     Kerber, Jenny. "Tracing One Warm Line: Climate Stories and Silences in Northwest Passage Tourism." Journal of Canadian Studies 55.4 (July 2022): 271-303.

●     Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment

●     Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human

●     David Huebert's Chemical Valley

●     Lord Byron's "Darkness"

●     Don McKay, Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness

●     Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

●     Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

●     Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures

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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 dropping temperatures, not to mention building an ice sheet or two. For the longer story of the last 50 million years of climate change, including some of the reasons why, catch this episode of our podcast with Dr De La Rocha! You’ll hear about plate tectonics and continental drift, silicate weathering, carbonate sedimentation, and the spectacular effects the growth of Earth’s ice sheets have had on Earth’s climate. There are also lessons here for where anthropogenic global warming is going and whether or not its effects have permanently disrupted the climate system. Fun fact: the total amount of climate change between 50 million years ago and now dwarfs what we’re driving by burning fossil fuels, and yet, what we’re doing is more terrifying, in that it’s unfolding millions of times faster.

Bonus content: If you want to see sketches and plots of the data discussed in this episode, you can do so here!

!!Nerd alert!! 

If you're interested in the primary scientific literature on the subject, these four papers are a great place to start.

• Dutkiewicz et al (2019) Sequestration and subduction of deep-sea carbonate in the global ocean since the Early Cretaceous. Geology 47:91-94.
• Müller et al (2022) Evolution of Earth’s plate tectonic conveyor belt. Nature 605:629–639.
• Rae et al (2021) Atmospheric CO2 over the last 66 million years from marine archives. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 49:609-641.
• Westerfeld et al (2020) An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years. Science 369: 1383–1387.

Connect with Christina at her blog and on Mastodon

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Although the battle lines have shifted down through the years from heliocentrism to evolution (and let’s not get started on the age of the Earth), it feels like there’s a fundamental conflict between science and religion, especially with respect to the Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam. I (Christina), the host of this podcast episode, as a scientist and atheist who tends to assume all scientists are atheists—because how could they not be?—am definitely guilty of thinking this.

Yet, there is a long tradition of curiosity, inquiry, and, yes, science within the Abrahamic religions and no shortage of devout scientists working hard to this day to understand the workings of the world and cosmos. I decided that it was time to confront my assumptions by talking to one of my religious colleagues. Thank you in advance to Dr Norm Nelson—an oceanographer whose Christianity is a core part of his life—for discussing whether or not there is a conflict between science and Christianity, and where the roots of that conflict might lie.

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Erin Alladin’s new e-book “Gentle Gardening: A Guide for Uncooperative Bodies” is transformative, specifically covering the issues of gardening with chronic fatigue and the other complex disabilities that can accompany it, and reframing gardening as an accessible and fun activity. Ariel talks to Erin in this episode about her journey with gardening to where she is now, the book, a bit about gardening on Turtle Island as a settler, and tackling the gardener’s mindset and impostor syndrome that may come with it. 

References:

• Native Land’s resource on what land acknowledgements are and why they are important, plus linked articles contextualizing and foregrounding Indigenous scholars’ and activists’ support and critiques of the practice
• Spoon theory
• North Bay and Parry Sound
• Erin’s post on chronic pain and permaculture principles is an excellent companion to Gentle Gardening.

You can visit Erin’s blog at EarthUndaunted.com to learn more, and check out GENTLE GARDENING: A GUIDE FOR UNCOOPERATIVE BODIES. You can connect with her at TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram @ErinAlladin.

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter, Mastodon, or at our blog.

Connect with Ariel at her blog, on Twitter at @arielletje, and on Mastodon.

Connect with Christina at her blog, on Twitter, and on Mastodon

Support the show on Patreon or make a one-time donation via PayPal.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.