SolarPunk Media
Media with solarpunk themes. In progress.
Cool tech:
Movies that actually align with solarpunk values are really, really, really thin on the ground.Most give you fragments of the philosophy but lack the inherent optimism. In an interview, Gordon White and Jay Springett comment on the problem with so much scifi and specifically dystopian movies, observing that while the articulate the problem, they fail to offer solutions. They’re inherently pessimistic and like so much fearmongering news media, serve only to amplify distress and helplessness. They also perpetuate a ‘savior complex’ in which we wait for superheroes to save us. Gordon White invokes Joseph Campbell in observing that we actually are our own superheroes. And this speaks to the punk emphasis on individual capacity for action. Solarpunk explicitly rejects pessimism and embraces personal action.
Movies about gardening: list
Movie about gardening in space: The Martian
Aesthetic: Studio Ghibli.
Avatar: I’m including this reluctantly: it’s a simplistic, cliche-ridden action movie, but there are elements of tech and nature that are kind of nice. It’s a pity, really: with a little more nuance it could have been great.
Wall-E: another problematic movie, with an anticonsumption message that comes along with a dose of ‘tech bad!’. It’s sweet and funny, though.
Children of Men: Ok, this one isn’t solarpunk really; it’s dark and dystopian rather than hopeful and utopian. But it’s a work of art, and there are little moments in the movie that offer insights into other ways of being and doing.
from the movie: Jasper and Strawberry Cough
Nerdwriter’s analysis
Arrival: because of the language, the themes of time and connectedness, of listening, of the sanctity of life and death as a part of life.
Nonfiction
Organic Rationale:
Kiss the Ground movie – https://kissthegroundmovie.com/
This is a must-see movie that introduces the fundamentals of agronomy, soil biology, and the problem with pesticides. The usual argument runs that organic agriculture doesn’t produce the yield required to feed the world. But this argument overlooks the damage that industrial agriculture does to soil: the short-term boom in production is associated with long-term soil degradation. There are other ways to approach farming, and this movie looks at those, including no-till, organics, and crop rotation.