I wrote a review of an excellent edited collection of solarpunk essays. You should read it here, and then go read the book.
Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures. Edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. West Virginia UP, 2022. 208pp. Paperback $26.99. Ebook $26.99.
On May 11, I’ll be participating (virtually) in a roundtable at “Situated Solar Relations: Rethinking scale for the renewable energy age” at Concordia University, hosted by the Solar Media Collective. Catch me at Roundtable 1: Art, Literature, & the Aesthetics of Hopeful Futures.
This is going to be a post about Canadian literature, because I just did a whole PhD on Canadian science fiction, and studying The Discourse ™ of CanLit during the 20th century was a whole part of it. So this lives in my brain now, rent-free, and I have opinions on it to share with folks.
This is an article that I wrote back in the spring of 2019 for publication in Geez 54, an issue dedicated to climate justice. It came out of my research and thinking at the time, much of which was informed by solarpunk.
In May 2022, Chelsea Miya, Nick Beauchesne, and I all collaborated on a podcast (which you can listen to here), and reflected on that in a paper that we presented at the SpokenWeb Symposium at Concordia University in Montreal. This ShortCuts episode was recorded shortly after that presentation and is a reflection on the archival audio and the process of collaboration across Zoom as academics.
Basically, what it sounds like. The author reached out to me over email back in December and we had a conversational back-and-forth and this is the result. Give it a read and let me know what you think.
New episode, feat. JD Harlock, poetry editor at Solarpunk Magazine and erstwhile colleague of mine.
Is there anything more solarpunk than public libraries? Serving at the heart of communities, they’re a place where anyone regardless of income, ability, race, class, or gender can go to read books, listen to music, use the internet, learn things, hear story hour, get out of the weather for a while, and ask librarians for information on just about anything, including what organizations to turn to for additional support in your life or endeavor. In Episode 2 of Season 2 of Solarpunk Presents, Christina talks to Don Gardner, a librarian for many years for the Salinas Public Libraries in Monterey County, California. Hear about how people rescued the library after the city council tried to close it down to save money, about what libraries can do for you and your community, and about what you can do for your local library.
Solarpunk Presents explores the people and projects working on bringing us a better world today. In this podcast, hosts Ariel Kroon and Christina De La Rocha interview people who are doing work in the here and now that will help us get to a solarpunk future and talk to each other about the visions of a sustainable equitable future integral to solarpunk and about issues we’re curious about within the movement or genre of solarpunk.
There seems to be a lot of silver-bullet thinking when it comes to the state of the world and any attempts to make it better: the idea that there can be one solution to all the problems of the Chthulhucene, or even that there can be a solution at all and that things will either get better or return to some sort of ideal state after that One True Solution ™ has been applied.