There’s some really good research and info on this site: https://www.anourishingharvest.com/

When it comes to chemical pollutants and health I think it’s the concentrations that are more relevant than the scale. Grams of toxins spread over a vegetable garden could easily be worse than tonnes of toxins spread over a big farm.

It’s laborious to measure the amount of known toxins in your soil and even more laborious to measure the health impacts of them, so I just stick to using things that I know the soil can process naturally. Apart from not wanting to poison myself I also don’t want to poison future generations or create a dystopian problem for them to have to fix.

To be honest though, in my experience mulching is a bit overrated and ends up being pretty much the same amount of work/hassle as doing a bit of a digging here and there. Also, digging, weeding and tidying help you to get to know the life of your garden and become more intimate with it, with I think is totally solarpunk :)

If you’re thinking of using paper or cardboard make sure that the inks and adhesives used in it are biodegradable and non-toxic.

In the short term we need more like this. In the long term we simply need to stop producing and using plastics on this scale. Recycling is good but by the time plastic gets to this stage in its ‘life-cycle’ much of the environmental damage has already been done through production, manufacturing and transport.

Ah OK, please accept my apologies. Could you recommend somewhere where this sort of discussion would be more appropriate? Your active moderation is appreciated by the way :)

Awesome. Massive Attack are really well-respected in the Southwest and beyond.

I think this makes sense as the majority of people in ‘developed’ countries live in urban places. I live rurally and I find it interesting to think about solarpunk visions of this way of life, particularly how our social lives could be enhanced.

Porn is probably the most pirated visual work that I’m aware of and I’ve noticed that one of the responses by the people who make it is to move their business model away from restricting access indefinitely to producing custom/bespoke pieces at a relatively high one-off price to compensate for cases where it immediately gets proliferated without further gain for themselves. If someone pays them to make the clip and then shares it with others it’s OK because the producer has been rewarded in full at the point of sale. This is roughly equivalent to a piece of art being bought or commissioned and paid for in full by a museum or gallery, who put it on public display and make digital copies available for people to make their own prints from.

From an artist’s POV this is much simpler and more economical than trying to gather royalties on an ongoing basis and enforce copyright to create false scarcity.

In my solarpunk future though, I will be an artist whose basic needs are met by machines and nature and who receives a universal basic income which I can give away to other artisans as a way to say thanks and to encourage them.

Legend!

This looks awesome! I’m definitely going to download and check it out. Thanks for sharing :)

There are loads of fantastic personal benefits to living like this, like having choice of fruit and vegetables that aren’t possible to find in supermarkets, no plastic residues from packaging on your food (and no plastic waste to dispose of), getting exercise, fresh air and vitamin D from working in the garden, less carrying groceries around, less need for refrigeration (many veg goes straight from garden to kitchen), health benefits of contact with soil and seasonal diet just to list the first ones that come to mind. Also if your children have contact with animals (even hair and dust left behind by animals) they are less likely to developed allergies. And you’re also not helping already wealthy shareholders of food corporations to further out-compete working class people in the market.

It’s an absolute winner.

I think the idea is that is an alternative to lawns, patios, driveways etc on already residential land, not a replacement for crops on already agricultural land. In fact, if all farmland was replaced with plots like this I don’t think there would be enough people on the planet to live on them!

Don’t forget that wax is super useful in a self-sufficient setup for prolonging the life of leather and wooden items. I’ve even used to protect my bike chain!

Lol I remember this kind of thing happening

Fantastic video

Mesh networks are so cool. We should all be doing this.