I like the idea of being sustainable, growing your own food, and living naturally. I used to dream about starting a commune or homestead, but now I’m starting to think the idealization of it is petty bourgeois and part of the settler mindset. Starting some farm in the wilderness is very reminiscent of the western frontier, and the homestead act which I am myself a beneficiary of. We don’t need more socialists leaving society, we need more urban farming and an end to monoculture.
What do y’all think about it?
I wouldn’t really call it “problematic” to not know what nature actually looks like. Nature isn’t virtuous by itself. The only problematic part is the tragedy of the scope of environmental destruction needed for people to not know what nature looks like.
We absolutely should avoid monocrops and a colonization mindset, but the fundamental ideas of SolarPunk aren’t those things.
It’s problematic that settlers in a settler colony don’t know what the environment looked like before their ancestors colonized the land. I’m not saying nature in the abstract but the specific environments of the Americas that were destroyed due to homesteading and colonizing. They want a return to “green” but that “green” is imported flora and fauna.
They can brainstorm all day but when it comes down to praxis, if they are reproducing settler Colonialism of the environment, they are a problem. If Solarpunks in the colonies don’t have an intimate understanding of their local native species, they are just colonizers, not much better than people who keep their lawn green.
Edit: relevant image I just ran into
Okay, that makes sense, my anprim sensors were overactive there for a moment.
I’m sure there are better and worse self titled “solarpunk” ideologies.