It Could Happen Here - Why You Should Know About Solarpunk

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Today we talk with Saint Andrew, an artist, writer and YouTuber, about the revolutionary potential of earnest utopian thinking. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Is that the show? No, just keep going, though. Okay, well, it could happen here, is the show. That atonal noise is my introduction this week because i'm a hack and a fraud who isn't a hack and a fraud is uh is our guest this week saint andrew saint andrew you are a solar punk anarchist uh from trinidad um you have a youtube channel channel where you talk about solar punk. You talk about stuff like seed bombing. Yeah, I'm just very excited to have you on the show because I'm

a big fan of your YouTube channel. Thank you. Glad to be here. Big fan of your work as well. Andrew, I kind of wanted to start with why this why solar punk is important, because I think it's easy for folks who just kind of skim it to see it. It's just like, Oh, it's an aesthetic. It's maybe an art style or a fiction style. Um, maybe something that's neat, but not something that has like a lot of inherent value to people trying to change the world. And obviously you disagree with that. I disagree with it too. Um, a quote I keep coming back to again and again is one from Werner Herzog in the 1970s. And it was something along the lines of, I think that without better myths, we're destined to go the way of the dinosaurs. excellent book called the the truth about stories and i think what it really emphasizes throughout the book is the importance of stories and how stories impact how we navigate the world

which is why i sort of embraced solopunk you know as a story that we can work with going forward yeah i i think um i think it's incredibly important to have better stories, better myths, because for one thing, I think where the left falls down a lot is not having – is accurately diagnosing the problems without providing a better look at the future. And when the problems are – when the people who do kind of propose solutions, it's often not in a way people can feel. One of the benefits that the right has, that fascism has, is that they're very good at providing people with myths and providing people with kind of a fictional look at their idealized world that draws people in. You can laugh at the right you know they have a lot of people that work on like meta narratives and that's very very core to their ideology um so i guess where i'd like to start with you andrew because this is kind of the first time i think we've really talked about solar punk on uh on this show even though

from the beginning before any of these episodes dropped this was always a central part of our discussion about what the show was was going to be um would you kind of provide an introduction to to what solar punk is for our listeners sure sure so uh i would say that solar punk is a vision of the future that places emphasis on the existing world and how we get to that future from where we are now so it emphasizes the need for environmental sustainability for self-governance and for autonomy and social justice it emphasizes the need for you know human and egocentric ends to really be in sync. And it aims to really heal the current rift between humanity and nature.

It also recognizes, of course, that there isn't this binary between climate change happens and climate change doesn't happen. Rather, it understands that how we navigate it will have a variety of consequences. And some will be positive, some will be negative. But it's up to us to really shape that. Yeah, and I want to drill into a couple of facets of that. But I want to quickly plug one of your YouTube videos. that but i i want to quickly plug one of your youtube videos for folks who kind of want a more involved um explanation and and background you have a video called what is solar punk on your

channel saint andrewism like andrew ism um that i think is a fantastic introduction not just to like the aesthetics of solar punk but some of the practical uh some of the practical kind of expressions of it and in two of the ones you list is like examples of here's, here's what this is, is like actual praxis, you know, and not just an aesthetic is, is seed bombing.

And then you talk about this, this very interesting kind of like terracotta air conditioning, which I think is, I think is neat because it's, it's one of the problems that I think with kind of some versions of, of, of particularly kind of on the more liberal end of solar punk imagining is just sort of like ways of replacing, ways of gaining the same kind of consumptive benefits that exist. I guess not even solar punk, like greenwashing. Greenwashing, yeah.

Yeah, greenwashing. Like here, let's get the same consumptive benefits we get from capitalism. Skyscrapers with trees on them. Yeah, skyscrapers with trees on them. Same level of consumerism, same level of destructive, extractive practices, but we have some flowers and some trees. Yeah, and that's not enough. But at the same time, there are things that aren't – like air conditioning contributes massively to climate change. It's also not a luxury. Like if you live in a place where it's 120 degrees a lot of the summer that's

not a luxury yeah this is coming from someone in a tropical country yeah definitely definitely a necessity yeah so i i wonder if you could talk about kind of those two i mean or if you would have different ones you'd like to pick but just kind of what you see as sort of the praxis expressions of solar punk sort of beyond the aesthetic, although we're going to drill into the aesthetic some too, because I also think that's important. Right. So I think some of my favorite manifestations of solar punk in a practical context, things like guerrilla gardening, guerrilla gardening is probably the biggest one because it's one that someone could literally pick up

and do today or tomorrow. As soon as they hear about it, learn about it, just get some clay, get some seeds, and put those things together. And as you're walking home or walking to the store, just toss them wherever there's some free dirt. So that's a fun one. There's also, of of course things like a little bit

more involved like community gardening and particularly forest gardening because that will provide a level of food autonomy and agency for people who have been alienated for a long time from the process of food production um there are also practices like coppicing or coppicing and it's like a way to produce lumber without chopping down a whole set of trees so you are able to get the wood from the trees but the tree remains alive. There is also things like, of course, solar-powered technology, whether it be algae-based windows that extract energy from the sun, or solar sails, or solar ovens, or like the terracotta air conditioning which by the way i learned recently can't really work in a human environment yeah but yeah there are a lot of

different opportunities there also there are things like you know tool shares and maker spaces and seed libraries all different ways to sort of bring it into fruition so the punk that is yeah and i uh i i i think a lot of that's really valuable um i'm interested in in part sort of your your attitude on um what uh uh let me think about how to phrase this um what do you think are kind of the things as we talk about sort of the things that can be at least potentially replaced um with with less extractive less consumptive methods as sort of an example of solar punk praxis is replacing those things there's also things that we're not going to be able to have if we actually want to live in a more sustainable future that doesn't contribute to some of the nightmares that we're all going

to be increasingly facing. And again, I think it's telling that so much of kind of the future fantasies of that are written by people who come from, you know, my part of the world, the United States, focus on like kind of post scarcity methods of guaranteeing the continuation of consumption just through, in some cases, like fantastic methods, you know, magical 3D printers and the like. You come from a very different part of the world very different perspective what do you see is the things that like we're going to have to give up coming from a country that is actually reliant on oil and natural gas production we have to get rid of cars yeah we definitely absolutely have to get rid of cars um freighter ships as well and really the whole way that you know global supply chains are structured right now not to say that there won't be any sort of global um sharing of resources in the future but the way that it's happening right now it can't continue to go on we can't continue to

structure our cities and our lives around cars you know and other methods of gas guzzling transportation because we're literally going to run out and we've known this for a long time but it's nearing the day is nearing closer and closer and um yeah we we have to find a way to do without it yeah and it's it's i i think tell like there's a couple of things that are important one of them is you can't just say we have to stop global trade because in global travel because the people have have sought and done that for as long as there have been people in one form or another it's it's a fundamentally human thing but there are aspects of it like you know expecting that every kind of fruit and vegetable will be available year-round which is

certainly a thing that we in the united states expect um that doesn't that that's not part of a realistic future um and if it's part of the future then it's only going to be part of the future for an ever shrinking chunk of of the country and you can see that in sort of um or of the of the west and you can see that in kind of um the the like what we're dealing right now with like the supply line shortages and failures and like one of the i think the symbols of how far we have to go in my country is the degree to which people are freaking out by the fact that Christmas presents might be late. Let alone being like, yeah, you might not be able to buy coffee ever or all the time. You know, you might not be able to get tomatoes in December.

Which reminds me, I think one benefit to guerrilla gardening and that's also the mindset is as you learn to sow, you also learn to reap, right? So a lot of people who get into guerrilla gardening also end up getting into foraging. And there are apps and stuff you could download that allow you to, you know, learn how to identify plants in your area. plants in your area and you'd be surprised the number of plants in your area that are you know useful for teas or for salads or for whatever purposes that can be used as replacements well i'm not sure if they could replace coffee but they could be beneficial um in recognizing how we have to live with our local ecosystems, basically. Yeah. And a big, you know, when you talk about learning how to live with our ecosystem, stuff like planting forest gardens and the like, or food forests, I think is the term. I think something that has to be discussed is the matter of indigenous sovereignty,

especially when we're talking about, you know, not just you know north america a lot of chunks of the globe indigenous people had spent you know in some cases thousands of generations setting forests up in order to sustainably produce food um and when uh colonialism arrived, that was often just seen as like, oh, this is this is these are wild places for us to for us to extract or tear down and replace with monocultures, you know, single crops. And so a big part of actually building back that capacity, the capacity of us to survive off of the food that can sustainably grow where we live, is looking back to those indigenous methods and also giving back land in a lot of cases.

And yeah, that's something you talk about in your videos that I think is really important to explain to people. important to explain to people. Yeah. I mean, there really is no way to separate the violent and oppressive institution of colonialism with the ecocidal nature of modern states. You know, those two are deeply intertwined, deeply married together. And so you can't fight climate change without addressing the issue of sovereignty of indigenous sovereignty and land back yeah it's um it's really interesting

i've been i've been up hunting on mount hood with a friend who is uh who went to school for like forestry management and as we were driving we had to drive through a chunk of the reservation in order to get to the BLM land where we're able to hunt. And he pointed it out. And once he did, it was immediately obvious just how different the land under indigenous control looked from the land, you know, just feet away that was being managed by the federal government in terms of like how much better the forest management was, how much smarter it was managed in order to reduce the chances of like a ladder fire that actually kills the trees and whatnot. There's this whole thing blowing up on Twitter right now where you've got a chunk of Marxists

who are trying to frame land back as just like shifting ownership of of resources which i think is really missing the point but i find interesting about twitter is that the exact same discourses are repeated over and over and over again so i remember this exact conversation happening around this time last year around april last year um earlier this year as well it's just the same discourses get recycled over and over again and it's reached a point for me where i realized that these people don't want to learn about land back what it really means because they are invested in the structure as it exists and they don't want to have to interrogate that so yeah this fall out to be an interesting thing of note yeah and it's um it's it's it's frustrating um i guess that

that acts as like a general uh uh description of of twitter discourse but certainly does yeah i think it's i think it's telling the degree to which people even on the left treat it as a fantasy as opposed to doggedly pragmatic um and and proven so like proven by like like you know like you can read un reports that will that will essentially say land back in the space of a 500 page, you know, study on how indigenous land management functions a great deal better than than a lot of the stuff that's like centralized by the federal government. We're like our federal government is terrible at land management. And it's part of the it's part of the problem. And it's part of the problem. I think one of the things that excites me about solar punk as an aesthetic and idea is getting back to this relationship with the land as opposed to talking about just preserving it as talking about managing it. Because none of the land that people live on is like wild in the sense that people mean it as.

It's been cultivated. And that's the thing, right? The whole philosophy of land preservation as was taken up by the US government with the whole you can stop forest fires kind of thing ended up leading to more forest fires down the line because we have a role in the ecosystem. We're not just there to stand back from afar and just observe it.

So when we don't do our part to manage the underbrush and whatnot and clear it away and excise, you know, control fires, but we end up in the situation we're in today, you know, cultivation, not just sterile preservation. not just sterile preservation yeah now one of the things that you talk about well because because one of the more frustrating discourses this is not just a twitter thing this has been going on for years is the discourse around gmo crops and usually i would say like the two most commonly heard sides are gmos are bad because you know mons Monsanto, cancer, whatever, or GMOs are good in thought. And the thing that you point out, which is, I think, the accurate take is GMOs, the preponderance of evidence says that, like, there's nothing inherently dangerous about genetically modified crops, but the way in which they're often used in order to create these massive monocultures

is really toxic. So there's a lot of promise for GMOs in terms of keeping our existence on this planet sustainable. But what's not sustainable is the kind of industrialized agriculture where you have 10,000 acres of one thing, which just doesn't happen in nature. Exactly, exactly. doesn't happen in nature exactly exactly and if you look at how genetic modification took place prior to you know our advancements in genetic modification technology um i'm not sure how many people are familiar with the dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of varieties of just corn that were present in the americas prior to colonization a lot of those varieties were wiped out or were suppressed in favor of these monocultures. But if we're able to cultivate a diversity of these crops

and really bring some of them back through genetic modification, that will really help us with food resilience in a world with an increasingly unpredictable climate. Yeah, yeah. I think that, I mean, I think you said it perfectly. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to move back to kind of what I introduced the episode with, which is talking about the value of fiction and myth-making in a very pragmatic sense. I guess I'll start by saying I think one of the clearest signs of the danger that we're in and how toxic our society has gotten, and I am speaking from a primarily U.S.-centric standpoint here, but I don't think it's unique to the United States,

is the extent to which... me um as as the saying goes when the u.s sneezed turned out catch a cold so anytime there's some phenomenon happening in the u.s there are the copycats yeah as well so and i i do think this is pretty global i mean you see it in like south korean films and and it's all over i know what you're gonna say yeah the obsession with apocalypse and when we when we go to the future it's always a dystopia um there's a degree to which we've almost forgotten how to imagine utopia or even not just utopia just a way of living that is an improvement in a lot of ways a future that's better we've forgotten to do both utopian fiction and any just kind of like positive fiction in a lot of ways i mean yeah yeah it's understandable because the world is kind of terrible right now in a lot of in a lot of ways but there's also there's been utopian

fiction inside other terrible worlds as well i think just the modern interconnected media sphere has really rewarded this type of like dystopian and collapse based apocalypse fiction yeah and i'm sure that's that's worth interrogating why but it is a problem that needs to be solved yeah and it is and it and you're i think it's important it's not entirely based in how fucked up things are because like when the first star trek came out we were at like the height of the cold war things were terrible There was a lot of utopian fiction during World War II. Yeah, during World War II. I will always be impressed by the fact that Gene Roddenberry saw it as incredibly important both to be like, okay, well, in the future, like in the

middle of the civil rights movement, in the future, we will have overcome racism. But not just that, but I'm going to stick a Russian on the bridge too, because nations are going to end as a concept and this stuff won't matter. And that kind of utopian fiction, at least at the scale of popularity that Star Trek was in its time, just isn't present anymore. And that's tremendously worrying to me. And I see a lot of hope in, in solar punk for that. Um, I'm, I guess for starters, I'm interested in, in your thoughts on this and your interest in the Andrew, what you think is like the pragmatic value of, of,

of positive, uh, fiction that, that, that imagines a better world. that imagines a better world? Yeah, so I've done probably, I think I've done like two videos on Solarpunk so far. Two major videos on Solarpunk as well as a smaller video, two other smaller videos. And what I've seen in the comments and in the general social media reaction again and again

is solarpunk saved my life you know solarpunk has given me hope you know i was slipping into despair but this video really gave me a jump start to try something new and to start afresh and to pursue action as opposed to just lying down and taking whatever comes next and that that is it for me you know i think the fact that solopunk offers like an energizing vision it's not just a vision it's an energizing vision because in every step of the way, it shows what you can do. You know, when you show it,

when you look at solo punk art or you look at the small, but growing genre of solo punk literary media, or, you know, you look at, well, there's not that many solo punk video games right now, but hopefully there will be in the future. When you look at the various forms not that many solar punk video games right now but hopefully there will

be in the future um when you look at the various forms of solar punk media that are coming out and people's responses to them you see that it's not like as you're mentioning like star trek where it's all this far out technology that we can only aspire to for now yeah you know solarpunk is something that you can literally put in your backyard or your balcony or your home or your school or your community you know you could put these things in place like from now you know and you could incorporate it into your politics as you know as they are and they could also help to push your politics forward you know because through solunk, we can open up discussions about, okay, so how do we ensure that people live comfortably within the parameters of, you know, the earth's carrying capacity?

You know, you open up the discussions about indigenous sovereignty you open up discussions about um the relationship between the global north and the global south and responsibility with regard to our response to climate change well you open up a lot of different discussions through the realm of solopunk it energizes people as i said and yeah i think that is its pragmatic purpose it doesn't stand alone of course but it is a driving force yeah would you kind of give out a list of if people are you know if this is someone's first introduction to the concept of of solar punk what is some reading you want to draw people towards? What is some fiction?

I know you mentioned The Dispossessed by Le Guin, right? Yes. Which often gets cited. Yeah, I'm interested in kind of other recommendations you might have for our listeners. Ari, that. Right. So I'm still getting into the genre myself, so I don't have too many recommendations. There are some decent short story collections like Sun Vault by a couple different authors.

There's also Multi-Species Cities, Solarpunk Urban Futures. And the one I read most recently was Ecotopia which is much older than all the others it's actually a book that was published in 1975 and not all aspects of its politics are things I agree with but I think for a first it was one of the really the first of its kind in that sort of eco-utopian genre that really laid out what this society would look like. by a journalist from the United States who has gone to this country called Ecotopia,

which is sort of where the Pacific Northwest states are. And he's basically breaking down, he's going to different parts of the country and breaking down how they have lived and how they have decided to structure their lives. to structure their lives um and even though not every aspect of it is one that i would want to see implemented i still think that it really sparks the imagination really gets you thinking well maybe i wouldn't do it this way, but how else could this be done? And I think the capacity for solopunk stories to just generate that thought and generate one's imagination is very useful in a world where we don't really get to use our imaginations much, not really since childhood. Mm hmm. And. Yeah, I. I think it's often understated the degree to which using your imagination is a vitally necessary part of actual radical politics. themselves radicals you know some of these some of these not to you know slam every marxist

leninist on the planet but certainly some of the ones who were coming up with these bad faith criticisms of land back it's like you're not a radical you're a conservative who wants to go back to a different kind of problematic thing um exactly the fact that the soviet union poisoned like the largest body of water in europe and you know all the different things that the soviet union did that were horrible for the environment and extractive and yeah i find it interesting that you know there are these people who call themselves radicals but at the very first encounter with a radical idea their first instinct is to shut down their first instinct is to shut down. Their first instinct is to just push back against it. Whereas, not to toot my own horn or anything,

but when I see an idea that I haven't encountered before that may seem strange to me, that challenges my preconceived notions, my first reaction is not to shout about how this goes against everything Lennon said, you know, my first reaction is to investigate it and to open space for it in my mind to really,

you know, turn it around and imagine what it might look like and how it might fit with what I have learned about before yeah yeah absolutely i mean i think that's that's that's great advice for radical politics it's also just good life advice yeah especially for engaging with ideas that you are less keen on at the moment or or just unaware of yeah i mean my whole thing is if i have like a strong gut reaction to something it might be because it may be hitting a part of me that might be benefiting from that system you know i mean i don't benefit from the system in a lot of respects you know as a black guy from the caribbean but as a man as in as a cishet man you know i do have privileges that

i must be aware of and i can't just like be so quick to shut down, you know, something that might be a bit uncomfortable, you know? Yeah. I think that's such a valuable thing to keep in mind, especially as a, a more or less cis white guy, like a, you know, a significant number of people listening are, if you're uncomfortable by a new idea, is it, is it because the idea is bad or is it because it, it strikes at an area in which you may not even have thought about being privileged? Like I'm uncomfortable even though there's no – I have no intellectual argument against it with the idea of ending our use of cars as they exist because I love to drive. But that's also heavily rooted in tremendous privilege on my behalf. American car culture.

And so, yeah. And, um, you know, we, we, we did talk about that a bit in the opening episodes of season two, the idea that like a more, you know, when we, we kind of had our little utopian ending, the idea that like, well, maybe you'd have a car that's communally owned and used for certain tasks. But, you know, the idea of car culture as the center of a city is death. It's just death. When we talk about getting past cars,

it's not to say that, like, people will never use vehicles that move again. Like, obviously we will. They're necessary for some. We're not all going back to horse-drawn buggies. going back to horse-drawn buggies. Yeah. Sonora, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think one of the last things on, like, Solarpunk, kind of tying into the whole kind of nature of the show, is I really liked, Andrew, your point on, like, how Solarpunk

is, like, an energizing force. And I feel like we have very few of those on the left and especially on the anarchist left um like i've i've i've had my decent stint of like anarcho-nihilism and the problem with that is like it's very easy like anarcho-nihilism is one of the easiest ideologies to to to grasp onto because it validifies all of your bad feelings yeah um but it also it most of the people who i know who are like real into endocrinolism they're generally not very happy people like no because it's kind of it's kind of miserable all

the time um and sure they'll like scoff at like solar punk is like some like greenwashed yogurt commercial like you know like a utopian thing but also like it's actually lots of solar punk that we've talked about it's like actually about doing specific things like it's actually like actually going to do something rather than just being an insurrecto kid um or just just you know talking about nihilist zines and books on twitter for all day. I think one of my favorite videos of yours is your video on the psychology of collapse. Yeah, I think that's one of my favorites as well. It's really just like a masterpiece in how deep you get into every different type of collapse thinking. Because it's not just on the right, it's not just on the left,

it's not just whether you're more anarchist, more authoritarian. It's like you get into every specific type of thinking that plays into this idea around collapse. And I think if... I recommend everyone check out your channel, especially watch your Solar Punk videos, but specifically on the topic of collapse.

Part of our show, we were trying to kind of be a little bit like anti-collapse um and i think your your video really shows the depth of that topic um and how to approach this because collapse is a feeling like it's a feeling we all have and it needs to be interrogated and i think your video does just a magnificent job interrogating that feeling right thank you i can't overemphasize how important that is, because I one of the major failings, there were a number of victories for kind of anarchist thought, particularly within the United States during the the insurrection last year. One of its tremendous defeats is that it has become characterized in a huge number of people's eyes as breaking windows and starting fires.

And yeah, a lot of that is because the media is trash and is trash at reporting on all of this stuff. But some of it is because a lot of people have let that be their primary praxis. And that, again, I don't care about people breaking windows. I don't care about people breaking windows i don't care about people lighting dumpster fires but if that's what you're presenting to the world as your praxis that doesn't appeal to people and you have to um because you have to remember that yeah anarchism is not just destructive it It is also constructive. Yeah. It's the constructive part we need to be boosting more than ever. And there were some, you know, from the context of Portland, some really strong examples of that last year.

The incredible amount of mutual aid that was put together in a very short period of time. Yeah, during the fire relief was incredible. And the Red House, the eviction defense occupation was a really good riposte to the disaster that was the Chaz in Seattle that this was like – this was an area that was temporarily autonomous from the police that did not collapse into violence that succeeded in its goal and that cleaned up after itself and presented an option for people like this is how it can look when we try to evict people. This is what can happen um so i think there i don't want to like be too negative but i think that a lot of folks because of um for a variety of reasons you know the the there's been so much focus on kind of the insurrection not even that because i think that building can be insurrectionist i think that seed bombing guerrilla gardening can be profoundly insurrectionist. It's like destruction has an immediate result of making you feel better, right?

Yeah. It has an immediate rush of endorphins and hormones. It makes you happy when you do it. It is an exhilarating act and you feel like you're accomplishing something. Allegedly. What's harder is to like have that same feeling by doing seed bombing right by actually like improving your community slowly through these types of like solar park ideas they don't have the same immediate emotional reaction so a lot of people like when they you

know think about what insurrection is they can default to this destructive tendency which destruction has its time and place um but if that's your only praxis you're we're not gonna improve the world at all like right that's not gonna do anything uh there's a helping through you know giving out food helping through giving out socks and clothes helping through all of these solar punk ways these are things that actually like are gonna improve things on a tangible level yeah and they're gonna make more people be like oh hey what what are these anarchists doing? That's actually interesting versus, oh, what are these anarchists doing? This is stupid.

Ignore everything they say. Yeah. You have to remember as well that, you know, there are seeds of solo funk in Kropotkin's writings, you know, from The Conquest of Bread to Mutual Aid. And those are sort of things that should be just as emphasized as the destructive, exhilarating aspects of anarchism. Yeah. There's a line in a Frank Turner song, a couple of lines actually, in a song called 1933 that I go back to a lot. But one of them is, you can't fix the world if all you have is a hammer.

I guess what I see is the primary practical benefit of solar punk, just as an aesthetic, as a piece of fiction, is getting people to expand their toolbox. Yeah, get yourself a trowel, some screwdrivers. Yeah, keep the hammer. You need that sometimes too, but let's grab some other tools. Expand the toolbox thing is a really great metaphor for all of this type of thing. predates the solar punk but it it uh i think feeds into some of what i think it emotionally feeds into a lot of what we're talking about here it's an essay from david graber called the shock of victory um which i think is really useful that's a good one yeah um and i would also recommend um uh cory doctorow's new fiction novel, Walk Away, which I think is a really wonderful piece. That was a wonderful, wonderful book. I should have included it in my recommendations, but it was really great. Yeah, I read it recently and it made me feel the way,

like as a fiction writer, that a great piece of fiction should, which is like, i felt bad uh i felt bad about some of the things that i had written because there's there's there's such there's so much more courage because i wrote a piece of fiction that has some solar punk elements has some quasi utopian elements in the dystopia but i didn't have the courage to kind of go as far as as cory did and to imagine a kind of pacifism that he he has the courage to kind of put into the hands of his protagonists. I really respect that about the book. I mean, the book goes in some very interesting AI directions as well. Yeah, it's got some great shit.

And I always enjoy Corey's love of burning man um of what it could be as kind of what the what what some of it's turned into but yeah um andrew is there anything else you wanted to get into before we uh we close this out i just want to remind people to check on your friends you know um we are all going through various stages of collapse, as I outlined in my video. I know we shift between them from time to time. So try not to go through it alone. You know, there's no, there's no I in solarpunk. Yeah.

Yeah. Check out St. Andrew on YouTube at St. Andrewism. Andrew, is there anything else you wanted to kind of plug from your own personal work? Yeah. So other than the, you know, the solopunk videos and the collapse videos, I want to remind, sorry, I i rather i want to shout out my video on black anarchism uh i think that is a pretty essential look into uh the history of black anarchism in the united states and in the world i also want to recommend um my video on the psychology of authoritarianism.

I know a lot of people have family members who are conservative or on the right or maybe leaning fascist. And I think that might be helpful for helping them to, or rather helping you to understand where their mindset's at. And also, check out my video on Puma Blitzing. I think that was a pretty fun one as well. It breaks down a lot of, it breaks down how you can go about implementing food forests or Puma culture gardens

wherever you find yourself. Awesome. Thank you very much for being on the show, Andrew. Thank you all for listening. We'll be back tomorrow or if this comes out Friday, we'll be back, you know, another day. We'll be back at some point. You know, you know how this Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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