Yes. Every manager has responsibilities, because when shit goes south the meeting in the corner office wants to know who to blame, or even in less punitive cultures, where mistakes were made — where the opportunities to learn are. Corporations mask people from most personal criminal liability, but not all of it.
Allowing people to avoid responsibility by pinning it on a machine would be a big mistake.
Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction is still a solid read on this stuff.
If you think of solarpunk as a future utopia that could (or could have) existed, that sounds about right.
If you think of it as attitudes/ways of life people can and do hold and act on, right now and whenever, whether we are pre-, post-, or during apocalypse, then its heft becomes clearer. For me the centers are the centering of and working cooperatively with life (including us human beans), the kind of social awareness and care that tends to go along with that, and appropriate tech (generally seeking/preferencing simplest thing that could work, most local, understandable & repairable. but not to the point of shooting ourselves in the foot).
The most convincing thing for anyone who actually likes driving is to have them try an EV. The difference in responsiveness when accelerating (if it's any kind of decent EV) is like night & day.
Hard to get a solid sense with a lot of projects, until you meet the actual people involved and get a clearer sense of where their focus and values are, and how well they've worked out the things they're talking about. Also, smart contracts ≠ cryptocurrency, though it's an understandably unsavory association. :-)
Learning how to leave things alone, in our ecosystems as well as our built and social systems, is invaluable. Being able to just be with such things, observe, see how things develop on their own, how some wounds heal naturally and others do not. And, the results of that kind of learning in my experience include plenty of callings, ways we can and do participate actively to make life more wonderful.
In general, so much human activity is so frenzied and disconnected, that "Just do less" seems like generally applicable advice but it's more like one-sided advice which is good on average given our current society, but obviously is not on point 100% of the time.
It's not that I can't find any, because I can. It's that I was hoping to learn about more.
Thanks I am very, very familiar with our destruction of much of our ecosphere, even inching our mess towards the heliosphere! This post was seeking out additional inspiration/information.
I'm with that the question of scale is very, very important. [edit: LOL, forgot I'd already mentioned it!] Graeber & Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) pulled together a bunch of research on there being plenty of past, larger societies which did not yield self-/other-destructive habits. But we certainly have a lot to learn about living together, especially in the large groups/networks/etc. we now have. Participedia is a good source for things in that direction. Mini-publics, citizen assemblies, sortition, a variety of good facilitation methods, online tools such as Pol.is, are all ideas/areas that explore how to do better at this. Healthy Democracy is one of the larger organizations working on related stuff in the USA, a smaller one I'm involved with is https://www.co-intelligence.institute/
This is basically our challenge, finding ways to organize large numbers of ourselves in ways that are far less exploitative of other humans, and other life, than the systems we have going now. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything suggests it's not quite as hopeless as many believe.
Yup. And it's not just white people! In a very international course I took with Bija Vidyapeeth about 20 years ago, at least one of the non-white participants shared the view that any human engagement with the rest of the natural world was going to be a negative. I knew less then, but did recall and share about research in the Amazon which documented an increase in local biodiversity where humans were, over ecologically similar areas which were left alone.
The elites of many countries have absorbed the same Western-dominated views that those of us living in the West are bombarded with.
Haha yeah in no way was I trying to say that, "humans are being good caretakers of the planet" because as an overall statement that would obviously be false. However, it is true that there are countless examples, even today, of people being good caretakers of specific ecosystems, or of social/political systems which can impact some ecosystems.
videos or documentaries…about specific conservation efforts that focus on the actual project and what it accomplishs
Yes. Every manager has responsibilities, because when shit goes south the meeting in the corner office wants to know who to blame, or even in less punitive cultures, where mistakes were made — where the opportunities to learn are. Corporations mask people from most personal criminal liability, but not all of it.
Allowing people to avoid responsibility by pinning it on a machine would be a big mistake.
Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction is still a solid read on this stuff.
If you think of solarpunk as a future utopia that could (or could have) existed, that sounds about right.
If you think of it as attitudes/ways of life people can and do hold and act on, right now and whenever, whether we are pre-, post-, or during apocalypse, then its heft becomes clearer. For me the centers are the centering of and working cooperatively with life (including us human beans), the kind of social awareness and care that tends to go along with that, and appropriate tech (generally seeking/preferencing simplest thing that could work, most local, understandable & repairable. but not to the point of shooting ourselves in the foot).
Maybe they're pivoting to rockets? https://global.honda/en/topics/2025/c_2025-06-17ceng.html
The most convincing thing for anyone who actually likes driving is to have them try an EV. The difference in responsiveness when accelerating (if it's any kind of decent EV) is like night & day.
Hard to get a solid sense with a lot of projects, until you meet the actual people involved and get a clearer sense of where their focus and values are, and how well they've worked out the things they're talking about. Also, smart contracts ≠ cryptocurrency, though it's an understandably unsavory association. :-)
I'm guessing you even have a particular graphic novel did you have in mind?
Really appreciate this, you can count me as on board. (obviously, see username)
Right?
Learning how to leave things alone, in our ecosystems as well as our built and social systems, is invaluable. Being able to just be with such things, observe, see how things develop on their own, how some wounds heal naturally and others do not. And, the results of that kind of learning in my experience include plenty of callings, ways we can and do participate actively to make life more wonderful.
In general, so much human activity is so frenzied and disconnected, that "Just do less" seems like generally applicable advice but it's more like one-sided advice which is good on average given our current society, but obviously is not on point 100% of the time.
It's not that I can't find any, because I can. It's that I was hoping to learn about more.
Thanks I am very, very familiar with our destruction of much of our ecosphere, even inching our mess towards the heliosphere! This post was seeking out additional inspiration/information.
There, I learned some things!
Le sigh
I'm with that the question of scale is very, very important. [edit: LOL, forgot I'd already mentioned it!] Graeber & Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) pulled together a bunch of research on there being plenty of past, larger societies which did not yield self-/other-destructive habits. But we certainly have a lot to learn about living together, especially in the large groups/networks/etc. we now have. Participedia is a good source for things in that direction. Mini-publics, citizen assemblies, sortition, a variety of good facilitation methods, online tools such as Pol.is, are all ideas/areas that explore how to do better at this. Healthy Democracy is one of the larger organizations working on related stuff in the USA, a smaller one I'm involved with is https://www.co-intelligence.institute/
Their Wise Democracy deck: https://www.wd-pl.com/
Deck about group patterns: https://groupworksdeck.org/
Suzuki is a leading climate activist, worth learning more about. https://davidsuzuki.org/story/pipeline-blockade-is-a-sign-of-deeper-troubles/
Ding ding ding! Yeah, I was inspired to ask by this tweet: https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1940596143932768717
This is basically our challenge, finding ways to organize large numbers of ourselves in ways that are far less exploitative of other humans, and other life, than the systems we have going now. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything suggests it's not quite as hopeless as many believe.
Yup. And it's not just white people! In a very international course I took with Bija Vidyapeeth about 20 years ago, at least one of the non-white participants shared the view that any human engagement with the rest of the natural world was going to be a negative. I knew less then, but did recall and share about research in the Amazon which documented an increase in local biodiversity where humans were, over ecologically similar areas which were left alone.
The elites of many countries have absorbed the same Western-dominated views that those of us living in the West are bombarded with.
A little confused by this, but maybe it was intended to respond to one of the comments?
Haha yeah in no way was I trying to say that, "humans are being good caretakers of the planet" because as an overall statement that would obviously be false. However, it is true that there are countless examples, even today, of people being good caretakers of specific ecosystems, or of social/political systems which can impact some ecosystems.
Yeah, that kind of stuff. Any you'd recommend?
The Nazis called it amtsspracht. (trigger warning, racial epithets) https://www.listeningway.com/marshall-yes-interview.html
Kleya can help you find the right frequency.
Looking forward to more open source ecology news!