chapotraphouse

Separation from nature is the root of us not understanding our interdependence with it. When it's something we interact with daily and rely on, stewardship becomes an ethical cornerstone that people intuitively understand. Engels said the solution was an even population distribution, and while I think that's another form of over-development I think it hints at the best solution. High density, pedestrian-focused garden cities surrounded by common land. Heavy funding for rural communities and collectivised, nationalised resource extraction to decouple it from profit. Production for need between co-ops, home economy with the commons, state-sponsored public artisans, and nationalised industry. Healing the division of labour by blurring the lines between the office worker, farmer, scientist, and activist through how people engage with their landscape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqJJktxCY9U This video really captures the good part of solar punk for me. They're mastering nature but not dominating it. They need a tremendous number of diverse skills to maintain that homestead lifestyle, but that's a liberating education rather than one that forces them into some professional niche. The technology and surplus exist for need and community enrichment. That massive urban arcology is there in the background of the equally desirable rural life, but it's an urban forest with parks between dispersed skyscrapers. It doesn't do a great job of highlighting what a biocentric landscape would look like, but it at least shows biodiversity as beauty and agrovoltaics as eco-utilitarian production.

That and the 400~ page books by David Harvey or John Bellamy Foster reach the same conclusion for what 21st century socialism will have to resemble. If I made the anime version of the most radical environmentalist critique I can make it'd just be a prettier version of that.