Alexander von Humboldt: the first Solarpunk | Hacker News Reader

Alexander von Humboldt: the first Solarpunk

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102 pointsartpi59 comments

I'm fresh off a visit to the Technisches Museum in Vienna which has an absolutely superb collection of steam-age technology from the first and second industrial revolutions. It is a steampunk's playground. The collection also does an awesome job of putting the past 300 years of technical progress into a kind of perspective. I am an environmentalist, but the objections to heavy industry seem a bit quaint when faced with the weight and capability of all modern society.

Maybe I'm a bit humbled right now. It seems increasingly ridiculous that we could solve our pollution problems with solar panels and trees and equally ridiculous that we could put any of our magic back in Pandora's box. I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe there isn't one but to deal with the consequences as best we can.

Hey, OP here. The problem won't solve itself and we have to be wary of greenwashing.

But as John Carmack says, we need tales to inspire, not tales to condemn. If we set our goals as just mediating damage, that's what we'll do. Only by having more ambitious goals, we will find out what's possible.

Yes, we have work to do.

Per aspera ad astra.

I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aestheric, and literary genre.

Have you looked into the groups like permaculture, regenerative agriculture, Stamet’s work with mycology, Dr John Todd’s work on ecovats ? The earthship designs? What about the practices Cuba had to adopt when they were under embargo, and could no longer import oil or synthetic fertilizer?

There are a lot of things we can do. There are already solutions that work. People are doing them. They require a shift in how you view the world. By comparison, solar panels and wind turbines are simplistic solutions that do not adequately address these problems.

I am coming to the conclusion that more technology will not solve these problems because the world view and paradigm that spawned these technologies are what lead us here. That rather than viewing the world as if it were mechanisms that can be reduced to isolated, cause-and-effects, and solutions that come from acting upon things in the system through the application of some kind of force, one can see the world as a living system, that is capable of growth of regeneration. This not only includes ecologies and our individual bodies, but also organizations, businesses, communities, and technologies.

( OP here ). For me the core of Solarpunk is that we need to work with nature and we need to inspire people to do so. In my definition, your suggestions are very much in line!

Contrary to some communities, I consider "overthrowing capitalism" NOT a consideration of Solarpunk, and a detractor.

Thank you for sharing. You are the second person I have met who espoused that view of solarpunk. So maybe I should give it another chance.

I get the sentiment on “overthrowing capitalism”. Since encountering Carol Sanford’s work, I came to see that it isn’t capitaism per se as much as value extraction; and even there, there is a personal growth and developmental stage where someone or communities grow beyond value extraction to something else.

Sanford’s work have been very useful for me to understand how to identify and articulate the world view and paradigm from which people are speaking from.

As such, one of the things I think I see in art or discourse produced on solarpunk is clinging to a machine worldview while trying to work with nature.

Instead, if everything were seen as living systems, one finds the appropriate place for technologies and machines (and businesses and commercial concerns), then it isn’t even about working with nature as if nature were separate from our daily lives. Our role as humans are not about trying to save the planet, but rather, a _participant_ in the ecology as a steward. We’re not above and separate, but already interconnected.

I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aestheric, and literary genre.

Indeed. Solarpunk enthusiasts are by and large insufferable, being people who get off on the aesthetic of sustainably solving problems but don't ever feel like doing the hard math of planning on how to maintain a technological society while doing it. It's as if steampunk cosplayers were a voting bloc.

A lot of the problem is that when the lefties arrived, it went from artistic and creative to a really shoddy, greyed out political shadow of itself.

It was promising for a while.

> By comparison, solar panels and wind turbines are simplistic solutions that do not adequately address these problems.

Yes, that's exactly my perspective. The problems are enormously complex and will require a complete rethinking of every process lifecycle. Without that we will inevitably hit one carrying capacity limit or another. Today it's carbon, tomorrow it's water, the day after it's soil. Pasting solar panels all over everything is a gross oversimplification of the work before us as a species. We will find ways to reach for sustainability and settle for mitigation along the way, sometimes only when we are absolutely forced. The solutions will reach into thousands of seperate domains. If the first three centuries of industrial development were about building our capabilities, the next three will be discovering how not to lose them.

In other words, solar panels and wind turbines are where we start the work. They still need to happen.

We can't just get from here to sustainability in one jump. Even if we could figure out how a sustainable civilization looks - which we can't, because it's too complex a challenge - we still couldn't just make all the changes happen at once. It's not how human societies work at scale.

Moving from more abstract to more concrete, it starts with philosophy and arts (what is desirable), then engineering and business (how to get to the desirable situation).

Now that the world has mostly established that the ecosystem is both important and interconnected, I think it's a matter of time before we come up with the technologies and business models to act accordingly

What exactly is your criticism? Saying "more technology will solve it!" is not really the point of solarpunk.

Most of the solarpunks I know, including myself, are also broadly described as anarchists. "A shift in how you view the world" is something that happened to us long ago.

I was talking about a shift from a Machine Worldview to that of a Living Systems Worldview. You can be an anarchist with or without that kind of a shift.

Perhaps you could share your views of solarpunk. Maybe I don’t really understand it and I just see it as slapping a bunch of solar panels on houses.

I kind of dig the visual of solarpunk just being a bunch of millennials slapping solar panels on houses and Ive shared some version of the same concern I think.

In any case sorry to tag along on the thread but Im a dev and visual artist trying to find some way to get more involved with part of the solarpunk community. Binge-reading Kim Stanley Robinson right now but totally isolated.

Anybody have a discord or irc suggestion or anything?

A decent video on the topic: https://youtu.be/u3aauiR9M88

Just to add my +1. I have also never seen Solarpunk as a "just slap solar panels on houses" but rather using the minimum possible technology to enhance what nature has to offer and live alongside it. Kind of like mixing the practices indigenous peoples with minimalist tech. The Cuba example you used is nice. After my family fled Cuba they worked hard to ensure our household kept many of the same cultural practices. That partially informs my view of Solarpunk as well.

So there's a climate apocalypse coming. I spent a while being blackpilled on it until I tried to hurt myself because of the stress that put on me mentally.

I view solarpunk as being the things that you mentioned (some of which I wasn't aware of, thanks!) plus a general attitude of "yes, things are very bad, and they're gonna get worse, but we'll work now so we can live later, we'll meet the challenge in some way, we'll fight capitalism and kyriarchy, we'll build community, we'll build resilient structures, we'll live."

Are these foolish hopes? They might be. But I'd rather hope foolishly than be a collapsenik who truly believes there is nothing left to live for.

I'm not sure where you see your personal role at, but I think if you spent any time being blackpilled then you really need to step back and reconnect to your own sphere of influence. These are huge issues and they are way beyond us individually. They are not yours to solve unless I am unknowingly talking to a head of state.

I say this as someone who has spent most of my career working with environmental nonprofits and have been on the ground and in the room on these issues many a time and with many of the people who influence US policy. Finding a way to act is helpful, despair is not.

I appreciate Solarpunk as a budding eco ideology, it just feels pretty early for it to have any real solutions or influence. But if its proponents keep sharpening it then I hope to see it enter the arena of serious ideas about how we get ourselves out of this mess.

> broadly described as anarchists

This is a bit much. From what I can tell, most solarpunks are mostly just social anarchists (in the sense of anarcho-socialists) and not individualist anarchists. It's a bit frustrating to see this split glossed over by anarchists who think their anarchism is the "true anarchism".

This seems like a place to plug for the study of social ecology: https://social-ecology.org/

Liberatory technologies, like the ones you mention, are just a piece of the puzzle. A tenant of social ecology is that "humans problems with nature come from humans social ills".

> I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aesthetic, and literary genre.

It's nascent and formative. I mean, even the "Solarpunk Manifesto"[1] is a cluttered mess. The best is yet to come.

[1] https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/

I think you meant to say "Maybe I'm a bit Humboldt right now" ;) couldn't pass up the chance.

I am almost finished with a book about Humboldt (Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf). It's been a fantastic read, and I was surprised/ashamed that I hadn't known anything about Humboldt until earlier this year.

That's where all quotes in this article come from! Fantastic book.

Humboldt is strangely forgotten these days. He was an enormous figure in his time and soon after, in the 19th century. An ideal heir to the Age of Enlightenment. There's places named for him all over the world. But now his name mostly gets a confused shrug.

IIRC this was addressed in that book: his repute was tarnished by the wave of anti-German sentiment stemming from WWI.

+1 on Wulf's book. A good weekend read!

So … what about the numerous indigenous people who saw the world in interconnection and lived in an ecologically balanced way?

Humboldt was very impressed by them. His one beef with Jefferson was over slavery. He considered colonialism the biggest stain on humanity's record.

He sound like he was ahead of his time for someone from the colonial culture.

Certainly, but I think it's important to consider that the Prussian landed gentry did not utilize slaves as did the land owners of Jefferson's fellow Virginians. Jefferson's writing often show someone ahead of his time, but his actions contradicted them in many ways since he was clearly addicted to the financial security of slavery (he also owed a lot of money throughout his life). Von Humboldt had no such ties to slavery in his affairs or those of his family or Prussian neighbors.

Name three.

I can't think of a single society in the history of the planet that "saw the world in interconnection and lived in an ecologically balanced way". It would be hard, given that it's only for about a 100 years that we actually have any clue about ecological balance, and have both biological knowledge and theoretical tools[0] to think about the environment as a whole.

Known groups were usually expanding as much as they could and strip-mining their immediate environment, and their main limits were manpower and wars with other groups.

[0] - Such as feedback loops, courtesy of cybernetics, and calculus underlying it.

Have you seen the movie "The Gods Must be Crazy"? I don't know if they're a good example but the !Kung seemed to live an idyllic life of ecological and social harmony.

I haven't, I'll check it out. From what little I read about them, they were at times committing infanticide, so their life probably wasn't as idyllic as it would seem.

ncmncm could be right in that sib comment, it's not an anthropological documentary.

> they were at times committing infanticide, so their life probably wasn't as idyllic as it would seem.

I'm not sure how to respond to this. Infanticide is tragic, but they don't have condoms nor doctors who can perform abortions, so...?

They live in a harsh environment (in the Kalahari Desert) so the ecological effects of overpopulation would be pretty evident to them, I imagine. They're not "expanding as much as they could and strip-mining their immediate environment", eh? But (if the movie is not a fable) they seem pretty happy.

"Idyllic" primarily means "pertaining to everyday rural life", and there's no reason infanticide is incompatible with that.

That was not about any actual !Kung, although it had some in the cast. It was just a fable.

That movie was fiction. Don't reason from fictional evidence. It makes you look like a fool.

Sure, in general, but the first third of it is pretty much a documentary, or seems to be. It may well be a fable as ncmncm says in a sib comment, I don't know.

No, none of it is a documentary. The people in it are all actors; the main character is actually San, but in his everyday life, he was a cowherd, not a hunter-gatherer.

The Hopi and the Mohawks off the top of my head. There is a documentary about the regenerative and restorative practices from the Native American tribes. Permaculture is a synthesis of modern ecological science and drawing deep from indigenous practices.

And yes, I would say a history of civilization is a history of value extraction, exploitation, and fighting over resources.

You don’t actually need the science to live in a way to see things in wholes, but the science can help.

Thank you for two specific mentions. I can't find any "dirt" on them off the bat, so I'll try to find where I've read about pre-European contact Native American tribes being not as sustainable as it's commonly held.

Incidentally, I've just found a 2020 paper claiming they did not have a noticeable impact on ecology before European arrived[0].

I currently have two competing hypothesis if it turns out I was wrong, and the various tribes did in fact lived sustainably. The first one is, they understood nature enough to live in a balanced way on purpose. The second one is, they just weren't large enough as a group to meaningfully upset the ecosystem around them.

I find the second slightly more likely given the information I have. But even if the first hypothesis is correct, there's still the question: would we like living like they lived? Are the lessons we could apply to lead sustainable lifestyles without abandoning the progress of science, and all the health improvements it brought?

> You don’t actually need the science to live in a way to see things in wholes, but the science can help.

I kind of disagree. Without the science, any kind of "seeing things in wholes" is limited to very small, local wholes, and/or lucky guesses.

[0] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200122123700.h...

> Are the lessons we could apply to lead sustainable lifestyles without abandoning the progress of science, and all the health improvements it brought?

I have met very few people who try to live sustainable lifestyles but actively deny science. I agree that science can help inform and enhance how we live sustainably, but the way this question is posed makes it seem that those who live sustainably also deny reality. (I dont doubt they exist, I know a few, but they are the minority of folks who live this way).

I meant something else: I meant, could we take the sustainability lessons of the Native Tribes in such a way that we both live sustainably and keep furthering science? I.e. it's not about denying reality - it's about continuing to learn more about it, and to apply it.

In the past centuries, most important of scientific discoveries required having an industrial civilization. So implied in my question is, can we keep the progress of technology going (at least the non-abusive parts of it), because it's a flip side of scientific progress - they feed on themselves, and you can't have one without the other.

Yeah I don’t see why not. I’ve collaborated with a handful of scientists of indigenous backgrounds who still practice their culture. That’s never even been a contradiction in their head. Living a sustainable life doesn’t impact or hinder science whatsoever.

Science is useful and has its own epistomology ... but it is also not the only epistomology. It's commonly assumed that science is capable of learning anything and everything, but I think science, while useful in many context, is itself limited.

Maybe someone will surprise me, but there are matters of consciousness, sentience, sapience, awareness that I have doubts the scientific method will ever come to understand.

For me, exclusively using science to understand everything is as foolish as completely denying science ... but I also get that each person are navigating through life in their own way.

North American tribes kept the forests burned off to provide forage for game animals, particularly the bison, which ranged all the way to Louisiana. When Hernan de Soto released pigs during his exploration, initiating a continent-wide smallpox epidemic, the practice was perforce abandoned, triggering a little ice age as the new forests absorbed a huge slug of CO2. A century later, forest stretched from the Mississippi River all the way to the east coast.

This is not to assert that they lived out of harmony with nature, whatever that might mean, but it does mean they had a different relationship with it than is commonly assumed.

That doesn't itself imply anything about the Hopi or Mohawk people. There were a lot of native cultures in North America with radically different practices.

I don't think we know how the Mohawk lived before the Eurasian plagues wiped most out. But do we know the Hopi, anyway, weren't burning forests.

In several interviews and in her books, Carol Sanford would recount how her half-Mohawk grandfather taught her how to see the world, in a way that is different from mainstream, modern cultures.

I would tell a friend of mine what I learned about permaculture, and when he talked with his father, his father would recognize those ideas as something his grandfather said the Native Americans would tell him. This was in Alabama.

It's not how they lived so much as how they saw the world.

Anyway, as much as was left of how they saw the world after 80% died in one generation, and descendants of the survivors were forcibly relocated.

What is remarkable is that anything remains. What was lost, we will never know.

There were North American tribes that used proscribed burning as a way of land management. There were also Native American tribes that cultivated what are now called perennial food forests. There were examples of such food forests in Oregon that are still producing foragable food, even left untended.

My understanding was that the forests from the East Coast to the Mississipi were almost park-like, unlike the dank, dark, scary forests the colonials were used to. Someone was tending them.

There are evidence of such food forests in the Amazonian jungle. Those had to be cultivated with _terra preta_ (what is now called biochar). Without that, the constant rain would wash away the nutrients. Yet with that, there were also long-lasting perennial food forests supporting a fairly advanced civilization.

Cultivation of the land does not have to be at odds with the land. People have been in "harmony with the land" while still purposefully practicing agriculture. It just wasn't agriculture that colonials were used to seeing: cleared fields, tilling, monocropping, maximizing yields for cash crops. I think the permaculture ethical principles of "care for land", "care for people", "fair share" would find alignment in many indigenous cultures, and you can do all of that while practicing agriculture.

> My understanding was that the forests from the East Coast to the Mississipi were almost park-like, unlike the dank, dark, scary forests the colonials were used to. Someone was tending them.

This is the kind of odd B.S. I often hear from people who don't know history, particularly European history, yet they feel so confident making stuff up.

Forests in Europe were tended since the middle ages. It was a profession. The same for England. Where do you think the timber came for to support the cathedral building boom of the 1000s? It came from well managed forests, not dark, dank places that no one tended. They were used for food/hunting grounds, for picking mushrooms and berries, hunting birds, and the forests were controlled, expanded or trimmed by royal decree that balanced the need for hunting grounds and food provision with the needs for wood. They were well mapped out, with hereditary positions of people who lived in the forests and keep them clean and well-ordered. This was the case for hundreds of years before any colonists set sail for the Americas, and was carried over by the colonists who had even more need for food and wood than their ancestors in Europe.

"Prescribed" burning.

As I understood it, the Pacific Northwest orchards that still maintain balance after centuries untended are in B.C., Canada, not Oregon.

Amazonians were breeding trees for desired traits all of 10,000 years ago; the whole Amazon jungle is a mixed orchard left untended. Their long sophistication is all that can account for the intricate methods necessary to prepare curare, ayahuasca, and manioc. They must have had hundreds of other equally impressive recipes, now lost forever.

Pretty cool. Just listened to a podcast where they talked about solarpunk. I appreciate the movement for its optimistic outlook of integrating humanity with nature as opposed to the dystopian cyberpunk narratives we see where everything is techno-centric and completely apart from the natural place we originate from.

The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf is a fantastic, highly recommended read. It covers Humboldt’s life as an adventuring proto-scientist as well as the impact he’s had on the world’s great scientific and artistic minds (Darwin, Goethe, many more). Despite his huge impact, the world has mostly forgotten about him, sadly.

Some books about and by Alexander von Humboldt at the Internet Archive:

Lives of the Brothers Humboldt, Alexander and William (1852)

https://archive.org/details/livesofbrothersh01klen

The Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt (1857)

https://archive.org/details/travelsresearche00humb

The Life, Travels and Books of Alexander von Humboldt (1859)

https://archive.org/details/lifetravelsbooks00stod/

Darwin and Humboldt: Their Lives and Work (1883)

https://archive.org/details/101597985.nlm.nih.gov/

Researches Concerning the Institutions & Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America: With Descriptions & Views of Some of the Most Striking Scenes in the Cordilleras! (English translation, 1814)

https://archive.org/details/researchesconce121814humb

Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (English translation, 1866)

https://archive.org/details/sketchofphcosmos01humbrich

https://archive.org/details/sketchofphcosmos02humbrich

https://archive.org/details/sketchofphcosmos03humbrich

https://archive.org/details/sketchofphcosmos04humbrich

Many more here:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Alexander%20von%20Humbo...

How is this "movement" more than a rebranding of the tech optimists of the past? It reads as a pathetic response to the meagerest of efforts to go back to the tech optimists and technofuturists, or whatever these industrialists and capitalists pretentiously called themselves, to show them how wrong they were. Now you're all just trying to turn that frown upside down with greenwashing masquerading as philosophy. Anything to keep the capital flowing through the door and down the drain.

What in the world is Solarpunk?

"Solarpunk is an art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability problems such as climate change and pollution. Solarpunk describes a multitude of media such as literature, fine arts, architecture, fashion, music, tattoos, and video games in a similar manner to adjacent movements such as steampunk and cyberpunk as well as more established art movements like Baroque and Art Nouveau and Impressionism. The iconography of Solarpunk focuses on renewable energies such as solar and wind power."

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