The Place Of Disability In A Solarpunk Future
What is Solarpunk?
Solarpunk is a literary, artistic and activist movement that strives to envision and actively bring about a future for humanity of independent, innovative and sustainable communities.
Solarpunk envisions a world where technology works together with nature rather than against it, and to serve humanity's long-term well-being and needs over short-term desires. More immediately it advocates for innovative dissent as a means of achieving said future. This means creating solutions here and now that go against the capitalist world we live in to sustainably meet the needs of our communities and fighting against systems of injustice that disempower our communities from achieving these solutions.
Solarpunk is strongly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and of course environmentalist.
To learn more about Solarpunk I highly recommend the channel Saint Andrewism on YouTube as well as the newer channel Think That Through.
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Climate Activism & Disability Recap
Climate activism is deeply intertwined with disability justice. Yet climate activism has also been used to push the eugenical narrative that people with disabilities are too "resource intensive" and thus not worthy of life or dignity. My post: "Need-based distribution and disability friendly climate activism" addresses this topic more deeply but the summary is this:
Ableist free climate activism provides a stronger argument for reducing our consumption because it contrasts our wasteful consumption with the places we should be prioritizing limited resources to save lives.
In concrete terms: climate activism says don't use the air con unnecessarily. Disability-informed climate activism says don't run the air con unnecessarily BECAUSE it increase deadly heat waves that kill disabled people who cannot survive without temperature-controlled environments.
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Advantages of Solarpunk as a Climate Solution for Disability
So why do I think solarpunk is an ideal ideological platform for bringing disability-informed climate justice into reality? Here are 4 key reasons why I think solarpunk is well suited to anti-ableist climate activism.
Solarpunk:
-Embraces Technology
-Bottom Up & Community Driven
-Diverse Practical Solutions
-Needs Driven
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Embracing Technology
For any environmentalist movement to be disability friendly it must embrace technology. Medical advancements like port-a-caths, electric wheelchairs, biologic medicines, temperature control, and more are essential to the lives of many disabled people. Not to mention the value of smartphones, internet connection, and other modern technology to those who are housebound or bedbound.
Disabled people cannot just go become subsistence farmers, our bodies would not allow us to survive without modern technology. Solarpunk acknowledges the massive benefits of innovation and allows for a world where this technology is not just used but advanced and developed specifically towards the goals of enriching human life. Solarpunk not only supports the use of technology in our environmentalist utopia, but specifically prioritizes the use of that technology to meet human needs.
In other words, solarpunk is able to distinguish between developing technology for health and happiness and developing technology for its own sake. In this way, a solarpunk world is one where lifesaving medical technology not only exists but is prioritized and abundant.
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Bottom Up & Community Driven Activism
Individualism perpetuates ableism. Read my post under that tile for more specifics but in summary, none of us are truly independent. Humans do and always have relied on our communities. The narrative that people should strive to be as independent and individualist as possible is only helpful in a capitalist world where it is necessary to justify deep inequity.
Solarpunk is deeply community driven. Its ability to work in tandem with maker spaces, mutual aid, community gardens, and similar direct action networks is perfectly suited to helping disabled people. These organizations are the most likely to be able to provide help with everything from procurement and customization of mobility aids to the food and shelter disabled people need to survive. In return, many disabled people form core parts of these organizations because we truly understand their value.
As people with disabilities, we must exist communally. Without community, we cannot survive. Without survival, we cannot give back and participate in the world. This is why without the ability to envision a communal future fascists and liberals alike can only see disabled people as a burden. Because both our survival and our value comes only with community.
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Diverse Practical Solutions
Solarpunk empowers autonomous communities who share knowledge. It supports diverse solutions that mirror the diversity of the ecosystems we live in. This is essential to true disability accommodation.
Every disabled person is different. The solutions that suit one will often not suit another, even with the same diagnosis and the same situation. Individualized solutions are essential. Accommodation of disabilities must be done through this lens of community adaptation and practical problem-solving.
Solarpunk embraces solutions of all technological levels. High-tech solutions like medical advancements are welcome, but the focus is always on improving human outcomes. That means simple accommodations like resting more, eating well, using mobility aids, if these can accomplish the same quality of life improvements as pills and surgery they are equally encouraged.
Community and societal solutions are valued over individual solutions. In a solarpunk future, we do not stop at developing antidepressant medication, we work to transform your community into less depressing place.
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Needs Driven
Solarpunk is anti-capitalist. Instead of valuing people's short-term desires it values our long-term needs and well-being. This is exactly what disability justice requires. Disabled people have complex and unique needs. Solarpunk offers diverse community-driven solutions to meet those needs.
Disability-based climate justice centers around moving from want to need. This means both pairing down what it is we truly need as humans in many ways as exemplified by the degrowth movement, but also expanding what it is we need to find community and philosophical fulfillment. Solarpunk envisions a future where your "need" for a Starbucks latte and avocado face mask is replaced by meeting your need for quality time and deep connection with friends and family in a human-scale natural environment.
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Bringing Solarpunk and Disability Together
Solarpunk is a very new movement. Its principles are still being fleshed out and it is in constant dialogue with its community. It is an actively evolving ideology. I believe the natural synergy between disability justice and a solarpunk future means that these two ideologies will be natural allies, but it is up to disability advocates to firmly cement disability justice as a core value of solarpunk.
Likewise, it is up to the solarpunk community to bring disabled voices into your network. While solarpunk ideology is naturally inviting to disabled people, solarpunk spaces and communities will need to make an active effort to provide accessibility in an ableist world.
The changing climate will only create more pandemics, trauma, and disability and the people most equipped to help build resiliency to this are the disabled and chronically ill people who have been living with these challenges for years or decades. Our deep compassion and expertise in building community outside of the capitalist system will be invaluable to bringing about a solarpunk future. We hope that you will help us and let us help you.
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Solarpunk & Optomism
The first two lines of the solarpunk manifesto are
"We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.
We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair."
I believe as disabled people these lines are especially powerful. To live with disability so often comes with tremendous pain, exclusion and suffering. Depression is common and is circumstantial. Denial is also common and leads only to burnout and postponed despair.
Self-care cannot only consist of momentary relief. Meditation, massage, funny memes, coloring books, these distractions may be necessary coping skills for survival, but we also need a deeper form of self-care. We need hope and purpose. Solarpunk provides a vision of the future that disabled people can find hope in and tangible ways of building that hope.
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Disability justice and solarpunk are natural allies. Let's help to build community and envision a utopia inclusive of disability and chronic illness.
All opression is intertwined. Medical racism and medical sexism mean that disability advocacy must be anti-racism and anti-sexism. Likewise, climate change and environmental destabilization will most affect the most marginalized communities including disabled and chronically ill people.
Disabled people are literally abandoned during fires and floods. We are the ones to die when the heating or air con goes out. We are the ones who die when hospitals are overloaded by zoonotic pandemics made ever more prevalent by our clear-cutting of forests and unsustainable factory farming processes. We are the ones to die from antibiotic resistance made more and more common by those same factory farms.
At the same time, we have so much to offer the solarpunk community. We know the power of community organization and mutual aid because we must rely on these things to survive. We know how to find hope and purpose outside of capitalism because we are so often excluded from capitalism. We know how to fight despair in a dystopia, because for us the world has been dystopian from the day we became disabled.
Solarpunk offers disabled and chronically ill people a chance to contribute to a community that values
-Community
-Innovation & Creativity
-Meeting Needs
-Inclusivity
-Sustainability
A movement that is completely in line with our values as disability advocates. Sustainability and accessibility are not rivals we are allies.
PS: please see my post on disability-friendly climate activism and the post by @envirobite on eco-ableism for more on how we were taught the lie sustainability and accessibility do not align.
