@solarpunks spoke with Elly Bluewho is the co-owner of Microcosm Publishing. Where she publishes books about the feminist bicycle revolution among many other topics related to self-empowerment. She’s the author of several books including Bikenomics; How Bicycling Can Save the Economy. She lives in Portland, Oregon, USA, which isn’t really the bicycle utopia everybody thinks it is.
SPS! What is it about physical publishing that excites you in 2017?
EB: Oh, I love it. Everything about publishing excites me. It’s a big, complicated puzzle and there is no limit to how much you can learn or what you can accomplish. My favorite part, if I had to pick one, is seeing the way people respond to our books and zines in our store and at events—like they’ve been hungry for a long time and have just spotted some really delicious food. That’s what’s most fulfilling: producing books that speak to people and help them imagine the world and their lives in different ways.
SPS! Your first kickstarter was back in 2010. Since then you have launched at least 23 campaigns to get various zines and books printed - It’s obviously a sustainable model to get things done/published:
Is your goal to build a movement, grow a community, or both?
EB: Both! My official job title nowadays is “marketing director.” For a number of years I was a bicycle activist in Portland, and marketing is nearly identical to activist movement building. For either one, the community has to exist first, or at least enough people who would be part of the community if they knew it existed. Having good literature that represents that movement and its debates and brings it to a wider audience can help a community grow and help members find each other and see the bigger picture.
SPS! If you were starting a zine for the first time in 2017 would you still use Kickstarter or use another platform - Patreon etc? or do something else?
EB: Funny you ask – I’m actually bringing Taking the Lane zine back this year. I gave it up for books for a while, but honestly, zines sell better. They feel more special, I think. People seek them out and are really stoked to get their hands on them. Publishing books is great, but the stuff I do under my feminist bicycling imprint doesn’t really fit on any shelf at a bookstore, so I’m dialing a lot of it back to the underground. But to answer your question, I’m planning to keep using Kickstarter to fund the zines. And I’m getting ready to open a Patreon later this month! Microcosm, my parent company, just launched one, and I’m learning a lot about how to use it. https://www.patreon.com/microcosm
SPS! Theoretically, do you think there is any utility in small scale niche publishers/zines who rely on their community for support to publish their accounts?
EB: Sure. But it’s the other way around—the community support is what demonstrates the utility and justifies doing this stuff in the first place. I see the zines and books as a service to the community and a way to focus it, amplify it, and grow it, rather than the community being a separate thing or an appendage of the publications. What I choose to publish, and who contributes, and how it’s positioned, all of that happens in response to what the community is doing, and also to looking at the community and thinking about who is and isn’t represented.
Feminism
SPS! Your first ‘Taking the lane’ zine was called ‘Sharing the Road with Boys’ with writing by you on sexist encounters in cycling and what to do about it. Apart from society’s background misogyny/sexism, how did that zine and subsequent series come about?
EB: I spent a year as the managing editor at BikePortland.org and one of the last things I did there was write up a big blog post about the overt sexism I’d encountered while covering the bike industry, particularly on the sports side of the industry but also in advocacy. The response was tremendous, and Jonathan Maus, the blog’s publisher, advised me to keep writing about that. I did keep writing, but I didn’t have anywhere to publish it—so when my partner, Joe Biel, invited me to join him on a book and zine tour, it made sense to flesh it out and turn it into a zine. I didn’t have enough money to print it, but a friend told me about Kickstarter and I was off and running. I had no idea what it would turn into.
The initial focus on sexism was a good way to start off the series. People were indignant and inspired to share their own stories and it was a rallying cry that was easy to put out there. But the reason I stuck with it is because when people started sending me their own submissions, mostly personal essays, they were almost never about sexism—they were about the hard work and challenges and joys and difficulties the contributors faced that they simply hadn’t had an outlet to write about because most bicycle-oriented publications are so macho and/or focused on professionalism and expert culture. So instead of having a publication focused specifically on “women’s issues” in cycling, it became a venue for writing that isn’t sexist or racist… it’s as simple as that.
SPS! Ever since I was a little hardcore punk kid, feminism and bicycles have gone hand in hand (at least for me). In your opinion, what is it about cycling that brings people passionately together?
EB: I love that you connect feminism, bicycling, and punk! It’s funny, because I always felt the same way and it didn’t occur to me that someone wouldn’t until I dipped into that sports side of bicycling. That’s where I first had the experience of talking with someone who was just as passionate about bicycling as I was, but for completely different reasons—like competition or athletic achievement or signalling of wealth—and who wore different clothes, biked in different places and at different times for different reasons, and even rode entirely different types of bikes. Meanwhile, I would show up to cover the race in my jeans and t-shirt on a clunky cargo bike and have to leave early to go to a meeting about organizing a traffic safety event. There are so many reasons to be into cycling that sometime the basic form of the bike itself is the only common denominator… well, that and the fears of what can befall you on the road. One of the things that amazes me about publishing—either a blog or print—is that it has so much power to bring these widely divergent groups together into common cause and help them see into each others’ worlds.
SPS! Historically, cycling was seen as an emancipatory technology for women. In an intersectional sense do you think the bike is still an emancipatory technology, helping people escape the implicit politics and unseen assumptions of their local infrastructure and built environment?
EB: In the 1890s, bicycling is famously remembered as an emancipatory technology… for upper class white women. The lesser known piece of that history is that this first golden age of cycling wasn’t pushed aside by the automobile—the craze ended when safety bicycles became widely affordable and “wheeling” was no longer a compelling elite pastime. So today, in an intersectional sense, I see bicycling as having emancipatory potential—and also the very real potential to reinforce social divisions. We’re seeing a lot of city leaders embrace bicycling for its enhancement and symbolism of gentrification—and we’re seeing a lot of pushback against that as well. At the same time, a very large number, maybe even the majority, of people who use bicycles as transportation in the US aren’t having their needs met by even the most bike-mad planners and advocates. The good news is that we’re seeing more and more bicycle groups that represent communities of color and marginalized neighborhoods, and it hopefully won’t be possible for them to be ignored by the powers that be for much longer.
Bikes
SPS! In your book Bikenomics you have the phrase: “Food, bicycling + changing the world are a great combination”. What other combinations of interests get you excited about the future?
EB: I get pretty excited about bicycles and dismantling capitalism.
SPS! Galina Tachieva in her book Sprawl Repair stresses the importance of accessible infrastructure, the return to walkable neighbourhoods and that these plans be integrated into policy at the city scale. How can activists of all kinds engage with their local municipalities to ensure they have a voice?
EB: By talking to and listening to each other, building strong coalitions, and putting the needs of the most disenfranchised among us front and center—that’s often the missing piece, but it’s how we win.
SPS! We just posted about worker-owned composting collectives that collect food waste by cargo bike. In Bikenomics you have a whole section on reducing traffic and pollution etc in urban areas by encouraging bike freight use to solve ‘last mile’ delivery problems. Are there any other collectives or businesses the solarpunk community should check out?
EB: I really enjoyed that post. It reminded me of a little kid in Traverse City, Michigan who had started a compost by bike business. Now he’s 10 and has a staff of other kids. https://carterscompost.com/ In my opinion, the most solarpunk bicycle operation out there is the loose global network of bicycle collectives / bike projects / bike coops. It’s this incredible ecosystem of businesses, organizations, and people just building bikes in a shed, all with the mission of helping people no matter what their income or background get bikes and learn to work on them for free or super cheap. A lot of them are led by the communities they serve and combine bicycle repair education with youth outreach, violence prevention, community activism, and other social services / social justice work.
Scifi
SPS! Biketopia! is the 4th volume in a now more-or-less annual ‘bikes and sci-fi’ series. How did the series get going and has the genre’s popularity surprised you at all?
EB: It started as an issue of Taking the Lane. Someone asked for a fiction issue, which I didn’t love until it occurred to me that it could be sci fi. I loved science fiction and fantasy as a kid—it was really formative—and getting to work on it as an adult has been really satisfying and fun. It’s not the bestselling thing I do, but it’s definitely the thing that reaches the most people outside the “bike bubble,” and I enjoy it the most so that’s worth a lot. The first two volumes were published as zines, #3 and #4 were books that are being sold into bookstores, and I’m bringing them back to zines with #5 – which has a call for submissions open till March 1, by the way.
SPS! Biketopia! will feature the solarpunk story “Riding in Place” by Sarena Ulibarri. From what have seen, what’s your opinion of solarpunk as a genre?
EB: I did a bunch of research on solarpunk when I was planning this book, and what I found is that the genre is still mostly underground—there aren’t a lot of comparative titles by mainstream publishers. So that’s exciting, it makes the discovery of new books and blogs more of an adventure, and it makes us pioneers to some extent. A year ago I would have predicted that we’d see a lot more of it in the future—you’d be wading through some dubious offerings by major houses by 2020—but now with Trump’s election it seems more likely that science fiction will take an even more dystopian turn. Solar panels feel so, I don’t know, Democratic.
SPS! Our Tumblr’s tagline is “At once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, and an achievable lifestyle. In progress…” Do you think if everything we need to do gets done. Is there reason to be optimistic about humanity’s future?
EB: Yes. I’m optimistic, but that’s mostly because I try not to have a fixed idea of what needs to happen for the future to be worthwhile. When I put out the call for submissions for Biketopia! it was for stories that were either extremely utopian or dystopian. And interestingly enough, the utopian stories were the ones that scared me the most. Reading them, I wondered: where were the non-perfect people? Whose stories weren’t being told? Whose labor built these shining solar structures? One thing I love about Sarena’s story, and the reason it opens the book, is because she gets into those complexities. There’s another story, by Cynthia Marts (she talks about it a bit in the project video), that focuses on one of the worst dystopias in the book, but if you read between the lines you can see it actually was conceived as a utopia by its founders, and probably still is by the husbands of the main characters. Meanwhile in all the dystopian stories, there are real heroes—scrappy fighters, people working together and finding commonality across their differences in order to survive and create their own life. And maybe this is fucked up, but I find that way more hopeful for the future of humanity.
I keep seeing people asking ‘is solarpunk really punk?’ because it’s too happy and optimistic and stuff
and I’m picturing a perfect moment in a solarpunk community – the neighborhood mayor standing with a shit-eating grin on her face when the cops come and cut them off from city power, and nothing turns off
Right now, the future seems dark and frightening and it is precisely now that we must continue to imagine other worlds and then plot ways to get there. In the midst of multiple global crises, the only truly ridiculous proposition is that things are going to stay exactly the same.
Human societies are going to change beyond recognition, and from the conference table to the streets, our best shot at surviving that change starts when we have the courage to make impossible demands – to face down ridicule and say: ‘We want more.’
Okay so I’m a theatre person and so I’m wondering what y’all think about solarpunk theatre. I don’t really have much in the way of ideas but this is what I’ve got:
big influence from brechian theatre and theatre of the oppressed, especially in early stages
STREET THEATRE I just read this great anthology of essays called Radical Street Performance y’all should check it out
lobbies and non performance areas of theatres having lots of solar glass, both as windows and ceilings. theatre lighting takes a lot of electricity (tho things are changing as LEDs become more common)
feel free to add your own ideas!!
Oooh, good question. Here are my ideas:
It’s more common to have theater-in-the-round/arena style theaters than those with the more “traditional“ configuration
Audience participation is not only more common, it is often welcomed by the performers (even - or especially - when it’s not written into the script)
Adaptations of classic works are common - whether they are changes in location, in gender of characters, in language style, whatever
Experimental and developing performances are pretty frequent - you don’t just get to see the final, “finished“ version of the performance, you can see the rehearsals, the practices, early versions of the script, etc.
I love that last point. One of the essays in Radical Street Performance discussed a group in South Africa (I think?) that rehearsed publicly as well as performing, as the typical model of rehearsing in what is basically secrecy before revealing the final product promotes the idea that actors, writers, etc are just naturally gifted and that it isnt the result of tons of work.
the book put it much more eloquently lol
Couple of thoughts here to add onto this:
1) theater and human-based performance is a lot easier to make carbon-neutral than many forms of entertainment, and more dependent on the focused development of human potential. (This is particularly important if we are considering futures of automation, basic income, and the question of what to do with one’s time/money.)
2) If you look at some of the most exciting work being made, the future of theater is not in theaters. Site-specific works have a TON of potential, particularly when it comes to the creative re-use of existing infrastructure. The We Players do a lot of interesting stuff thanks to a close relationship with the park service, or the venues that underground theater groups in Iran have come to use.
solarpunk focuses heavily on things like how urban spaces can be restructured to be green and modern and sustainable and beautiful. Suburban spaces are generally not focused on (and in a lot of ways, argued against) in favour of better green space and more efficient city planning and the elimination of the unsustainable american dream of everyone owning their own huge house with its own yard and its own car and all that jazz.
So what about rural environments? Obviously farming communities are integral to solarpunk, with greenhouses, ideal farming spaces, shaded hanging irrigation systems, round-the-year farming when feasable, and maybe even large scale community gardens, but I’m drawing a blank on what else can be done. Communal farming equipment sharing? Solar panels on greenhouses? How do we bridge the gaps between the solarpunk cities and the farming and green space created and required by these cities? Where do we draw the lines between modern environmentally friendly, efficient farming and the questionable factory farming? How can we strike the balances between efficiency and humanity?
I’d argue that the answer to all these questions is the cities. Like, I think it should be possible to live a rural lifestyle – it would be unambiguously dystopian to ban people from heading out far away from the cities, and those folks who choose that deserve the extra effort of social support necessary to extend to them basic post-industrial resources like internet access and reliable transportation.
But it’s not exactly ecological, you know? A huge part of the environmental harm done by mass farming is done in transporting the product; the answer to that is just to grow the food where the people are – in the cities. Sharing structures like those you’re alluding to suffer exponential losses in utility as the population density surrounding them decreases.
Besides, we could really afford to let a hell of a lot of populated or farmed land return to a forested state – we could really use the additional carbon sinks.
We bridge the gaps between the Solarpunk urban area and the green spaces sustaining them by putting the green spaces in the cities. Vertical farming and near-city farms cover large-scale staple production, and individuals and small groups manage their own or their collective lots however they like – building food gardens, community farms, personal projects in their own space, etc.
To me, the lines between environmentally friendly and efficient farming and questionable factory farming is obvious: it’s a matter of the harm literally done. A corn field in the middle of nowhere the size of a small city, running on fossil fuels and exploitative labor and shipping their product by truck to industrial meat producing farms to feed cattle, and a vertical corn farm in the middle of a city, the size of a city block, powered by solar and wind and owned by its laborers, selling their product on the first floor of their own building, may produce the same amount of corn, but they’re astronomically different in consequences.
The differences aren’t in any kind of easy-to-identify flags – nothing other than the harm itself will be visible exclusively in harmful farms and never apparently present in positive-impact large farms.
People should have a right to distance themselves from the urban centers – but we need to understand that as a personal choice people have the right to make for themselves, because no individual is obligated to serve the machinery of civilization, regardless of how good a job we think we’re doing of making that machinery helpful and positive. We can’t afford to think of rural living as a viable environmental solution. Rural living is, by definition, spreading out, and spreading out increases the energy cost of every act of engagement.
To be clear: It’s not okay for us to cut off those who choose distance from anything we can manage to offer them in terms of technology and participation; and it’s not okay for anyone to treat people who make that choice as bad people for doing so. It’s no individual’s job to inflict pain upon themselves to shave points off the carbon ledger; environmental solutions have to be about large-scale interventions, not shaming individuals for being inadequately green.
I know a fair number of people who would be utterly miserable if they were forced to live in a city for the rest of their life. Their happiness matters, and their experience is just as worthy of protecting as those of us who’ll be comfortable-to-ecstatic to live in carbon-negative megacities.
But distancing ourselves from dense populations is environmentally counter-productive, and on a large scale that can’t be the Solarpunk agenda. –Watson
Thinking about this, I’m wondering if you might pull in thoughts from rewilding and the wilder sorts of ecoscaping and agro-forestry. You end up with patient, thoughtful interventions in order to foster thriving, highly biodiverse systems that just so happen to provide us with a useful products. There’s some evidence that native Americans practiced these sorts of efforts for centuries before Europeans arrived, decimated the population with smallpox, etc, and then thought they had stumbled into ‘virgin paradise.’ So I guess what I’m envisioning is like Brautigan’s “cybernetic meadow,” but a little wilder and less about human enjoyment. There’s lots of measurement and subtle systems for keeping the ecosystems healthy, and a few humans, here and there, minding the shop. That’s where your urban-allergic go: not farms, but wilderness.
Think like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: “We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”
So perhaps in a solarpunk society, the mass of humanity are living in cities, doing lots of face-to-face interaction and making society work. (Solarpunk cities might also have a lot more ‘nature’ in them than our current versions.) But you probably have misanthropes and introverts who might not want to be stuffed cheek-to-jowl, mystics in need of dangerous wandering, or hungry energetic sorts whose ambition might lead to problems. Abbey was a misanthrope and kind of a nature-bro, but he’s exactly the sort of person you want out there watching the backwoods.
We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?
Laudato Si, the papal encyclical on climate change.
The wooden semiconductor is a real thing, thanks to researchers at
the University of Wisconsin working in partnership with the US
Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory. The new device,
which basically just acts like plant fertilizer in the environment, is described in the current issue of Nature Communications.
The
UW researchers, led by electrical engineering professor Zhenqiang Ma,
note that the average usage life of cell phones and portable electronics
in general hovers around 18 months. The Electronics Takeback Coalition
estimates that up to 50 million tons of electronic waste are generated
each year worldwide, much, if not most, of it involving precious metals
and dangerous contaminants like lead, cadmium, and beryllium. The same
organisation estimates that some 142,000 computers are trashed every
day.
