The Solarpunk Hermitage
A wood cabin on wheels at the far end of the field, bristling with panels, with sunflowers taller than the door and an aerial going up out of the quiet. This is my place. You are welcome in it, and nothing in here will ask you to say hello.
Solitude with the wire still attached
Every other room on this street is a dark ground with light put on it. This one is the morning. That is not a mood — a cabin that runs on the sun and reads as midnight would be an argument against itself, and the panels on that roof are the reason the reading lamp inside never gutters.
The pitch is the furthest one from the street, which for some people is the whole specification. Betsy Selvam calls it lone wolfing — being alone well, rather than being left out — and the distinction this place is built on is hers: the aerial is up, the laptop is on, and nobody out here is unreachable. They chose the reach.
Solarpunk, as our own glossary has it, is the future with humanity put back in: slower, more intentional, tied closely to the natural world. A future with a human face and dirt behind its ears.
What is inside
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The cave
Red velvet, even light, candles that are decoration rather than the supply, and books on every wall. Where you learn from yourself.
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The campfire
A green shag rug, three bean bags and one screen everybody is pointed at. Where you learn from a storyteller.
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The watering hole
A workshop with three tables on the go — a herbarium, a solar bench, and a table of Star Stuff. Where you learn from the people next to you.
Those three are not decoration and they are not ours. They are the primordial learning spaces David Thornburg named in From the Campfire to the Holodeck — the cave where you learn from yourself, the campfire where you learn from a storyteller, the watering hole where you learn from peers — which our own glossary documents at Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes. There is a fourth, Life, where you go and make something out of what the other three gave you. It is not a room in here. It is the door you came in by.
The cave
Heavy red curtain on every wall, no wood, no corners, and light that does not move — the panels on the roof pay for a reading lamp that is the same brightness at four in the afternoon and four in the morning. The candles are ornaments. This is the quiet half of a quiet place: a cave is where you learn from yourself.
Every book here is one our own library already argues from, and each one says which page of ours put it on the shelf. Press a spine and it opens. Every one of them can be borrowed — knowledge is infrastructure and access to it is mutual aid, so a borrow link is required here and a buy link is not.
The shelves
Parable of the Sower Octavia E. Butler
A girl with an unbearable gift for other people's pain walks north out of a collapsing California and writes a religion on the way. It is on this shelf because the cabin outside is the optimistic version of the same question — what do you build when the arrangements stop working — and because Butler refuses to let the answer be one clever person.
On this shelf because we argue from it on Octavia Butler on Positive Obsession.
The Fire Next Time James Baldwin
A letter to a nephew and a long essay about what a country does to the people it will not look at. Baldwin is on more of our pages than almost anybody, usually in the sentence where an argument stops being comfortable, and a reading room of ours that did not have him in it would be a reading room that had been tidied.
On this shelf because we argue from it on Allyship.
From the Campfire to the Holodeck David Thornburg
Where the cave, the campfire and the watering hole come from — the three primordial learning spaces this cabin is laid out around, plus a fourth, Life, which is where you make something out of what the other three gave you. The room you are standing in is named out of this book and says so.
On this shelf because we argue from it on Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes.
Emergent Strategy adrienne maree brown
Change as something you practise at the scale you actually have, borrowing its shapes from ferns, starlings and mushrooms rather than from strategy decks. Read it next to the sunflowers outside, which are doing the same thing without the book.
On this shelf because we argue from it on Resilience.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution Peter Kropotkin
An anarchist geographer goes looking for nature red in tooth and claw, finds beetles and horses and villages cooperating instead, and spends a book saying so. It is the oldest thing on this shelf and the reason a hermitage is not a bunker.
On this shelf because we argue from it on Mutual Aid.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Care as infrastructure built by sick and Disabled people for each other, on no budget, mostly without being asked. The book that makes it impossible to describe solitude as self-sufficiency, which is the mistake a cabin in a field invites.
Borrow or read it → Buy it from a bookshop →
On this shelf because we argue from it on Care Web.
Empire of Normality Robert Chapman
A history of how the normal was invented, who it was invented for, and what it costs to be measured against it. The book behind a lot of our glossary, and the argument for why a person might want a field between themselves and a street.
On this shelf because we argue from it on Empire of Normality.
Wild Therapy Nick Totton
What happens to therapy if you stop treating the outdoors as scenery and the human as separate from it. The most solarpunk book on this shelf: technology and nature are not opposites here, they are the same argument with the fence taken down.
On this shelf because we argue from it on Wild.
NeuroTribes Steve Silberman
The long, badly-behaved history of autism and the people it was done to, told with the autistic people put back in as its subject. Where a lot of readers first hear that there was a story before the diagnosis.
On this shelf because we argue from it on Cavendish Space.
Memory Craft Lynne Kelly
Memory palaces, songlines and the physical memory techniques of oral cultures — methods older than writing, tried out by somebody who actually learned to use them. On the shelf because a hermitage full of books should also hold the case for not needing them.
Borrow or read it → Buy it from a bookshop →
On this shelf because we argue from it on Spaced Repetition.
The laptop
Open on the arm of the chair, showing the street you walked in from. It is the real street and not a picture of one — you can go down it from in here.
Same site, same server, no third party — and it still waits to be asked, because a whole copy of the street loading itself into a room nobody opened would mean a second intensity dial and a screen reader walking the site twice.
The campfire
Green shag, three bean bags in three colours nobody agreed on, a wooden coffee table with rings on it, and one television the chairs are all pointed at. A campfire is where you learn from a storyteller, and the storyteller here is whoever is narrating.
THE SET IS OFF
Tuned to channel 1
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A basket of stim toys, and the dent of somebody who was here earlier
Stimming
Nobody in this room is expected to sit still. The chair is a beanbag because a beanbag lets you move and stay put at the same time, which is most of what a documentary is for.
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A half-finished thing, face down, keeping its place
Parallel play
Three chairs and one screen, and no obligation between them. Some people call it being alone together — both reading your own books in the same room, one doing a puzzle while another plays a game. Just existing together counts too.
That description is @neurowonderful’s, quoted on our own glossary.
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The remote, and a blanket that has been on this chair for a while
Stim-watching
Watching the same thing again, and again, and again, on purpose. The channel guide is right there and nobody is going to ask why you put the hummingbirds on for the fourth time.
Stim-watching is Jim Irion’s term and his account of it.
Turning the dial while the set is off just tunes it — nothing is fetched and nothing plays until you press play. Once it is playing, changing channel changes the picture, because by then you have asked for a television.
Channel Listing every channel, what it is, and how long it runs
Nothing here plays on its own. Pick a channel and it goes on the television above; the one that cannot be shown here says so and gives you a way out to it instead.
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CHANNEL 1
David Attenborough: Nature’s Most Fascinating Creatures | Free Documentary Nature
Free Documentary - Nature · 3:22:49
The longest thing on the shelf by a distance, and the one to put on when the plan is to not have a plan.
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CHANNEL 2
How to Live on Earth | Feature Documentary | Presented by Benedict Cumberbatch
Open Planet · 1:36:36
The closest of these to what this cabin is arguing: what living on this planet could actually look like, made by people who would rather build than warn.
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CHANNEL 3
David Attenborough Shines a Light on Glowing Animals | 4K Nature Documentary
Terra Mater · 51:26
Bioluminescence. Worth watching in a room you have turned the lights down in, which is the one instruction this campfire gives.
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CHANNEL 4
Inside China's Secret Jungle (Full Episode) | Hidden Kingdoms of China | Nat Geo Animals
Nat Geo Animals · 44:24
A jungle most people do not know China has.
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CHANNEL 5
Our Planet | Jungles | FULL EPISODE | Netflix
Netflix · 50:58
Jungles. There is a whole room on this street under a canopy; this is what it is a drawing of.
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CHANNEL 6
UNREAL AMAZON – Nature’s Most Dangerous Paradise (Full Documentary)
Travpedia · 1:14:54
The Amazon at feature length.
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CHANNEL 7
The Wonder of America's National Parks | MEGA EPISODE (Season 1 Full Episodes) | National Geographic
National Geographic · 3:40:16
Parks, at the length of an afternoon. Put it on and go and do something else in the room.
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CHANNEL 8
NATURAL WONDERS: The Wildest Places on Earth
World Tour · 2:39:35
A tour of the places that are difficult to get to.
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CHANNEL 9
The Secret Lives of Hummingbirds | Narrated by David Attenborough | Nature Documentary
Terra Mater · 52:50
Hummingbirds, which are the most solarpunk animal available: tiny, iridescent, and running on flowers.
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CHANNEL 10
Our Planet | Forests | FULL EPISODE | Netflix
Netflix · 48:18
Forests, from the same series as the jungles episode above.
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CHANNEL 11
Wild Islands: Caribbean: The Jewel of the Tropics | Free Documentary Nature
Free Documentary - Nature · 52:02
The Caribbean coast and what lives on it.
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CHANNEL 12
COASTAL SEAS | Life, Waves and Secrets Along the Worldâs Shores | FULL DOCUMENTARY
The Unseen Earth · 3:00:33
Coasts, three hours of them. This is the one you have to follow out to YouTube rather than open here.
Open on YouTube · 3 hr 1 min →Plays, and its owner has embedding switched off — the watch page answers OK and playableInEmbed is false, and YouTube's oEmbed endpoint refuses it too, which is why the title and the channel here were read off the watch page instead. A screen would load and show a refusal where the picture should be, so this is a door out.
The watering hole
Three tables pushed together under the long window, with something half-finished on each of them. A watering hole is where you learn from the people next to you — so nothing on these benches is a lesson, and everything on them is somebody else’s work left out where you can pick it up. Every item says whose it is and which page of ours put it there.
The herbarium
Pressed sheets under glass, in no order anybody can defend. Every specimen is here because one of our own pages argues from it — which is why there is no sunflower on the table, although sunflowers are the plant growing outside the door: we have no page about them, so there is nothing to press. Nothing here is named to species. A Latin binomial typed from memory is a taxonomic claim nobody checked wearing the one kind of authority a herbarium sheet has, and half of these are groups rather than species in any case. Press a sheet to lift the glass.
Dandelion pressed whole, root and all
Low sensitivity. Comes up through tarmac, does not much mind where it is put, and is called a weed for exactly that. The first of the three sheets that sit together on this table.
Pressed because we argue from it on Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids.
Tulip one stem, one head
Medium sensitivity, and where most people are. The sheet nobody remembers, which is its own finding: a metaphor with a middle in it is harder to weaponise than one with two ends.
Pressed because we argue from it on Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids.
Orchid one flower, mounted separately
High sensitivity. Does badly in poor conditions and spectacularly in good ones — which is the whole point of the metaphor and the half that gets dropped. An orchid in a bad room is not a weaker dandelion.
Pressed because we argue from it on Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids.
Bamboo rhizome a length of running stem, laid flat
Not a root. A stem that travels sideways underground and sends up whatever it likes wherever it likes, with no trunk and no centre to cut. Helen Edgar named the Autistic Rhizome after it — a network with no hierarchy, where each person is an integral part and nothing depends on anything else's permission to exist.
The Autistic Rhizome is Helen Edgar's, at Autistic Realms.
Pressed because we argue from it on Autistic Rhizome.
Moss a cushion, dried
Take a tree as the definition of a plant and a moss fails six ways: no roots, no vessels, no flowers, and so on down. Our own zine went and checked and the list is backwards — holding your own water is the newer trick, and it is the tree that lost the older one. A deficit list is a list of things measured against the wrong standard.
Developed after Helen Edgar's Mossy Minds & Monotropism.
Pressed because we argue from it on Measured Against a Tree, Star Stuff zine No. 73.
Lichen on its bark, not removed from it
Not one organism and never was — a fungus and an alga, or a fungus and a cyanobacterium, living as one thing so completely that it took botany a long argument to accept it. The sheet on this table that is really two sheets.
Pressed because we argue from it on A Field Guide to Symbioses.
Fern frond one frond, whole
The same shape repeated at every scale, from the base of the plant to the tip of the smallest segment. It is the picture our glossary reaches for to explain a fractal, and the reason small patterns are worth taking seriously: what you do at the size you have is what the big thing is made of.
Pressed because we argue from it on Emergence.
Mycelium a mat, lifted on card
NOT A PLANT, and on this table anyway — a fungus is closer to you than to the moss two sheets along. It grows the way knowledge does here: no trunk, no centre, many doors, and most of the work happening in the dark where nobody is watching.
Pressed because we argue from it on A Mycelium and a Rhizome, Star Stuff zine No. 26.
A seed that did not come up loose, in a paper envelope
Planted, watered, waited on, and nothing. Some seeds do nothing at all when you plant them and are not broken; dormancy is a plan rather than a failure, and the plant is waiting for a signal you have not given it yet. The only sheet here with nothing pressed on it.
Pressed because we argue from it on Seeds That Wait, Star Stuff zine No. 93.
The solar bench
Books and videos about the thing on the roof, spread out with the manuals. The videos came off our own Solarpunk entry and the reading off Electrify Everything, which is ours and is the only thing on any of these three tables that we wrote. Nothing plays until you press play, and every button says how long it runs first.
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How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future Right Now (ft. @Andrewism)
Our Changing Climate · 13:28
Where our glossary's definition comes from, and the line this cabin is built on: a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears.
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What is Solarpunk?
Andrewism · 8:30
The shortest thing on the bench, and the one to start with if the word is new.
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In Defense of Disney’s Strange Solarpunk World
Pop Culture Detective · 16:10
Solarpunk arriving in a place nobody expected it, and taken seriously there.
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Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future
Saul Griffith · a book
The arithmetic under the roof outside. Griffith's argument is that the machines are the problem and the machines are the answer: electrify the house, the car and the heat, and the rest follows. He is the one our own page names.
Off our own Electrify Everything.
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Handbook
Rewiring America · reading
What to actually do to a building, in order, with the numbers. The practical end of the same argument.
Off our own Electrify Everything.
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A Solarpunk Manifesto
ReDes — Regenerative Design · reading
Short, and the thing most often quoted when somebody asks what solarpunk is for rather than what it looks like.
Off our own Solarpunk.
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Electrify Everything: Decarbonization Requires Electrification
Stimpunks Foundation · reading
Ours, and the page the rest of this bench came off. The only thing on these three tables that we wrote.
Off our own Electrify Everything.
The Star Stuff table
All of this belongs to Star Stuff, the sibling site, and none of it is reproduced here — these are doors to it. Three of them are where the herbarium’s sheets came from, which is what a workshop with three benches in one room looks like.
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A Field Guide to the Ways of Being Alone
Twelve ways of keeping your own company among our Terran kin. A lone wolf is not an outcast, it is a disperser — young, deliberate, crossing empty ground on its way to founding a pack.
The keystone of this whole pitch, arriving from the sibling site rather than from us. Read it next to Betsy Selvam.
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A Field Guide to Symbioses
Mutual aid written into biology: fungi feeding trees, bacteria making soil, a fish that cleans the teeth of a predator that could swallow it.
Where the lichen sheet on the first table came from. Interdependence is the rule and not the exception.
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A Mycelium and a Rhizome
Star Stuff zine No. 26: how neurodivergent knowledge grows — no trunk, no centre, many doors.
The mycelium sheet's source, and the best short description of why this site is a street rather than a hierarchy.
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Measured Against a Tree
Star Stuff zine No. 73: six ways a moss fails as a plant, and the finding that the list is backwards.
The moss sheet's source, and the clearest thing either site has published about what a deficit list actually measures.
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Seeds That Wait
Star Stuff zine No. 93: some seeds do nothing at all when you plant them, and they are not broken. Read-aloud science for four to eight, with every source kept on the page.
The empty envelope on the first table. The only thing on this bench written to be read out loud to somebody small.
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The Garden and the Stars
Star Stuff zine No. 18: on knowledge gardens, the commons, and how star stuff comes to know itself.
The argument for keeping a workshop like this one at all.
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
The field outside has nothing for this dial to turn up. In here the candles gutter at Regular and above and stand still at Gentle, which is the whole difference a pitch is allowed.