Hello World, I'm Tomasino. This is SolarPunk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss SolarPunk, a movement that imagines a world where technology is used for the good of the planet. It seeks to answer and embody the question, what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there? In this series, we spend each episode exploring a single SolarPunk story prompt, adding some commentary, some inspirations, and some considerations.
Most importantly, we consider how that story might help us to better envision a sustainable civilization. If this is your first time here, I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what SolarPunk is, why you should care, and why this series came into being. Today's prompt is, The Experts. There's a community of very specialized experts. Only a handful exist in the whole world.
There are normally hermits focused on maintaining long, forgotten infrastructure, but their community exists across the internet. They consider themselves a family, even if each of them speaks a different language and comes from a different culture. But once in a blue moon, they can even physically visit each other.
Over the last three years, many of us have faced some level of undesirable isolation, and with that, barest taste, we can start to imagine the great sense of loneliness felt by those who work alone for weeks, months, or years of the time. you These people exist in our world today. Jesse Panazolo was a 26 -year -old conservationist with an honors degree from Adelaide University who had been working in conservation since she was 14.
After a particularly difficult six -month assignment, she returned home distraught, alone, and defeated. While having drinks with another friend from the conservationist community, she found a 300 -spirit suffering in the same ways. She thought, if I'm a lonely conservationist and she's a lonely conservationist, how many are out there in the world? And so she started a blog. It's called The Lonely Conservationists. And in that first year, it brought in 2 ,500 new members.
One member called it a global group therapy that you can always access. They share job postings, memes, mental health posts, and support. In a career of passion work, often for little to no pay, with grueling work sometimes in harsh conditions, these people provide a vital service to underfunded NGOs the world over.
Their staying power is built upon their compassion, and their personal drive, and the belief in their work, but even the most passionate person has struggles and doubts and experiences the draining loneliness of isolation. So communities like Jesse's are not just a place to relax or to talk about their work, they're a vital piece of the infrastructure of that domain. They're a scaffolding that allows connectivity to the unconnected.
Catherine Woodward writes from the Leonard Island light station near Tofino, British Canada. Here's a small excerpt from a piece she contributed to the globe and mail back in 2020. Since 2008 I've been paid to watch clouds, among other things, and the criteria for my reports are precise. Clear, partly cloudy, cloudy, overcast, partly obscured or obscured.
No mariner or aviator needs to hear about the white horses flying as high as the stars, or the grumpy giants I see in the Sirius and Cumulo Nimbus, or to know that I heard the first sa -sin, nu -chan luth, for hummingbird, among the Salmonberry blossoms yesterday. I file weather reports to Prince Rupert Coast Guard radio every three hours based on the state of the sky, the sea, the wind, intensity of rain, density of fog, and the possibility of showers glowering on the horizon.
But if we didn't have access to the internet I could not write and work at a lighthouse in the 21st century. That's my deal breaker. She's the author of Light Years, Memoir of a Modern Lighthousekeeper, a book you didn't know you wanted to read until this very moment. There are others. Rangers, anti -poaching activists, and so many more who live their lives in the fringes of society set apart alone, and for more and more they're finding new kinships and community within the internet.
The heart of this prompt isn't the isolation of these experts, but the way that they've created a new type of family across vast distances and in spite of differences in language and culture. In a science fiction setting we hear the word isolation and we think anti -weir. We think of the Martian or Project Hail Mary and how science triumphs in these lonely settings, but I caution you and remind you of our first guideline for Solar Punk. community as protagonist.
You see, community is community whether it's around a campfire or across a terminal. The opportunity for us as writers is to make that something the reader can feel. How do you feel close, intimate even, with people who rarely if ever see each other's faces? We can look to the gut wrenching personal blog post on lonely conservationists, sharing mental health challenges, eating disorders, financial struggles, and more. These posts are not just stories, they're counseling, they're therapy.
They give each other hope or cry together and in some cases survive because of one another. It's the shared challenges that unite them and the shared experiences of hardship. When we take that into a solar punk context and think about how this might be told, there are a few hooks that stand out. Any work that these experts are doing, which is oriented toward making humanity live in balance with their ecosystem, is totally on theme.
If they're establishing or maintaining infrastructure vital to this mission, then we see a direct illustration of our second guideline. Infrastructure is sexy, but there are no simple solutions. Like Caroline, you too can bring the poet to the machine, show the reader the sublime beauty in that work, in the mundane and in nature, and in their struggles we will see that cost willingly paid. The aspect of the story which holds the most potential though, is that internet community.
Play it straight and explore the house of the connectivity or the origins of why. Was it developed for something else, but now has been converted to this purpose? There's so much to explore. Or alternatively, we can play with our reader's expectations. Perhaps our future lightkeeper is leaving notes for the day shift, only for us to find out much later that the day shift is 4000 miles away. How does that community empower the individuals? How does it feel to be a part of it?
Thanks for being a part of my community and joining me for these episodes. How are they affecting you? I'll talk to you soon on the next SolarPunk Prompts. Music in this recording is Twin Dragon, hidden in brightness, from Global Patterns Compilation, SolarPunk, A Brighter Perspective. Are now!