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ysabetwordsmithalyaza has posted an excellent critique of solarpunk -- which can be an aesthetic / genre / movement / whatever -- to which I have previously added a couple of comments. Solarpunk is basically about challenging (that's the punk park) the idea of all-powerful fossiltech (that's the solar part) to create a different future than the one presently ahead of us. It's the "Green Future" out of four projected paths. The chewiest part of that post is a Chobani yogurt ad, which you can also watch on YouTube, that features a farming family. It's worth using the fullscreen view so you can see the details better. You need to use Pause and Rewind a lot in order to catch things because it's so densely packed. Helpfully, the voiceover text is printed in a letter on the refrigerator near the end if you want to copy that.Continue with Part 2: Things I Question, Part 3: The Most Interesting Part, and The Chobani Solarpunk Ad Part 4: So You Want to Live in Chobaniland.
Things I like about the Chobani ad:
* The animation is gorgeous. The colors are vivid, the scenery spectacular and full of detail, and the characters fairly realistic. The whole thing is just beautiful. Packing in that much detail without losing it is really hard.
* The topic and tone are charming, and the story entertaining. I would much rather watch this than ads for prescription drugs with potentially lethal side effects, which is a lot of the merchandising litter on the air nowadays. Once or twice a year, I find an ad that doesn't suck. This one is probably the best of the decade in terms of both quality and appeal.
* "So this place is yours now." A young brown woman owns, if not the whole farm, at least a part of it. At a time when young people, women, and especially people of color, struggle to obtain farmland, this is a hopeful vision. It seems to have been inherited from her grandmother, making this a multigenerational family farm (or share of a communal farm).
* The main characters are brown, and the rest of their community is diverse. Considering that intentional communities lean white in many areas (except those where people of color are the majority, like Mexico) because that's who can afford to live in one, this is especially nice. The characters aren't whitewashed, they show a range of skin tones, hair colors, and facial features with body types that are reasonably healthy instead of model-skinny.
* The farmers are dressed for farming! She's wearing overalls! With pockets. :D Contrast this with cottagecore and its popular implication that a fluffy white dress is an okay thing to wear in a field of flowers. (You will come home covered in burrs and bugs, regretting your poor life choices.)
* Yogurt is a healthy, probiotic food. Since not everyone can make their own from scratch, having decent brands to buy from is useful.
* Everything is so green and growing. There are healthy plants everywhere, and crucially, not monocrops but a mix of many species. Nature is good for human health.
* Waterwheels are excellent renewable energy technology. Admittedly that's waterpunk rather than solarpunk, but they overlap a lot.
* The water runs clear, which implies that the farm is taking care to avoid releasing agricultural waste or chemical runoff into the waterways. That's a huge improvement over contemporary farms.
* There are wildflowers for pollinators, and visible insect life, which given the current insect apocalypse is a pretty big deal. This strongly implies that the farm is either organic or some other category of safe-for-wildlife operation; and also that they're in a society that doesn't panic and raze a field because a bug landed on it.
* It actually shows solar panels, which helps qualify it as solarpunk.
* The kitchen is very cottagecore, but has practical aspects. Hanging herbs overhead can get in the way, but they are in convenient reach and some people like that. A mortar and pestle indicates that these are not decorative but used for culinary and/or medicinal purposes. Plus there's a bowl of fresh fruit. It looks like a healthy, happy kitchen.
* Yogurt and a cup of tea or coffee makes for a much healthier breakfast than the Standard American Diet of things like bacon or sugar cereal.
* The porch is gorgeous. It's full of more plants. The hanging pots are ceramic held up by macramé, and the wind chimes are bamboo, which implies that people in this farming community are making their own crafts. The bells might or might not be locally produced.
* The bicycle suggests that human-powered transportation is preferred and there are things within comfortable biking distance. Note that the city is about 3 miles away, the typical distance to the horizon, which is a short bike ride.
* Those huge windows on the barn imply passive solar heating for winter. Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea: you empty the hayloft starting at the windows and put black barrels of water there to trap heat in winter. You'd just need shutters to keep it from turning into a sauna in summer, and maybe a fan to move the warmed air downward in winter.
* The farm is clearly diversified rather than monocropping. The fields have different crops, there's an orchard, there are cows, etc. The landscaping is likely permaculture and/or forest gardening, in any case edible landscaping of widely varied plants. If you have livestock and plants that vigorous, composting is a logical conclusion.
* People seem to be harvesting crops communally, so this is likely an intentional community, possibly a farming cooperative. Interestingly, it doesn't look like a corporate farm.
* "It's a handful, but nothing worth doing is easy." True, and a useful worldview.
* There are solar panels on top of the houses and barns.
* There are sheep, possibly more cows or buffalo. They are at family-farm density not factory-farm density, which is better for everyone.
* The fields have fencerows everywhere! This is awesome for many reasons: it provides wildlife habitat, maintains predator/prey balance to minimize need for chemicals, breaks up harsh wind flow, manages water runoff, reduces soil erosion, provides ideal hunting space if you're into that, and suggests that people can afford to set aside a little room for these purposes instead of plowing it all.
* Some areas are clearly contour-farmed to minimize erosion and improve irrigation of crops.
* There are no suburbs! There is a high-density city and then there are farms. That's actually the historic pattern, which means that city is probably solvent instead of broke like local-American cities, which is impressive. It looks new, and that makes sense -- perhaps somewhere built because of rising coastal waters.
* The city has ample greenspace, and from the pattern of that, likely a good municipal water-handling system instead of a badly maintained sewer dumping into the nearest waterways. Neighborhoods likely have green infrastructure like the diagram on the right.
* Hard to see the details, but that might be a utility-scale solar bank which would fit with the rest of this scenario.
* Birds are flying, admittedly not large numbers, but given the good habitat there are likely more around. This may help counteract the bird apocalypse. That's good because birds make people happy.
* "The land is more than just dirt. If you look after it, it will feed you forever." Totally true, though opposite from basically all of modern Western society.
* The rainmaking system is something farmers have wished for as long as there have been farmers. It's science fiction, but not wholly improbable. Is it better than ordinary irrigation? If it can pull water out of the air, instead of the ground, quite possibly yes.
* That feast! OMG, now I'm hungry. From the looks of the spread, that is all fresh local produce, mostly fruits and vegetables, probably vegetarian. It is not vegan as it includes both yogurt and honey. Interestingly, I don't see any eggs, and chickens are usually the first livestock a family or diversified farm raises.
* The people are multigenerational and multicultural. One woman even has a nose ring, and another person has tattoos. A boy has a pen behind his ear, which implies creativity. They look happy; they're enjoying each other's company; it's a safe and tolerant community. Food is bonding. Also they're all still dressed in practical farming clothes.
* It looks like there are birdfeeders and/or birdhouses hanging from the tree. The more diverse birdsong, the better human health and happiness.
* "Remember, a business is only as good as its people, so treat them well." True, and excellent advice, if largely against mainstream practice. Given Chobani's choice to make a reasonably healthy product, hire refugees, etc. it may be an ideal they hold -- although how well a large corporation lives up to that is harder to assess. It does score high in worker satisfaction. At least this is a huge improvement over corporations who have their ads or packages encouraging outright vices like "Don't share, eat it all yourself!"
* The wagon says "Donations" across the side. Possibly the farm is doing well enough to send some excess to the less fortunate, such as a soup kitchen in the city, although the city didn't have any visible ghettos. This suggests that the farmers are making at least a living wage.
* "Our job is to plant seeds, so our grandkids get to enjoy the fruit." An excellent worldview, popular in many traditional societies, but not in mainstream Western society.
* People are playing together and being physically active.
* From the kitchen of the house, we can see into the living room or sunroom, which has passive solar capacity and will warm itself nicely in winter. Hopefully they have shades for summer. The room is beautiful, full of houseplants and comfortable furniture. It's a cozy, inviting home.
* Pipes run around the corner of the doorway between kitchen and living room. These may allow the stove to heat water for plumbing the house, or may be part of an active solar heating system that uses the sun to heat water which is then circulated to warm the house.
* Like the table, the refrigerator is full of mostly fresh whole produce -- and of course yogurt since that's what the ad is selling. This is much healthier than a typical American refrigerator.
* A picnic is an excellent way to spend time together as a family.
* Overall, this scenario seems to do a great job of meeting human needs. They have food, shelter, clothing, clean air, clean water, land ownership, a worthwhile job, a diverse community, and so on. They live in a beautiful place. They spend their time raising and preparing food, socializing, and enjoying nature. They eat mostly fresh produce with some probiotics. This is a much healthier lifestyle and diet than the vast majority of the mainstream has today. It seems to be a place where it's easy to live a happy life. And while some of the elements shown are fanciful, there is a great deal of concrete detail that viewers could choose to pursue themselves.
Thoughts
Date: 2024-10-17 05:35 pm (UTC)Exactly. The scene is beautiful, the tone is hopeful, and it actually shows a lot of concrete things that people could be doing if they prefer to move in that direction than the one the world is headed. And what if everyone did that? We'd actually solve climate change and the ecological crisis to the extent possible with the technology we have or could invent along the way. Not completely, but enough to make something very similar to that scenario.
>> That's something important to hold onto when you're staring down the barrel of climate change apocalypse and on the wrong side of 55 in age. <<
Sooth. Climate despair is a serious problem; envisioning a hopeful future with concrete steps is a good coping method. It's especially crucial because choices of diet, career, lifestyle, and peer group are things individuals can usually sway without needing to budge an indifferent government.
>> (I'm too freaking old to find the idea of a Mad Max style future appealing.) <<
Yeah, it's not good. There have been roving road militias for years in many countries, but now we have actual gasoline thieves in a few places. 0_o