Hey All,
Found a Solarpunk Book in the back of a weird antique shop in Herman Mo. I can't find any copies of it online or anyone who's ever heard of it, so I'm uploading it for the world to see. If the original authors ask me to take it down, that's fine but I ask that you make some version of it available to the masses. Even if it's just an ebook link through amazon.
This book is full of designs for building a world that's more sustainable, and notably living with less oil. While I don't think every idea in this book is doable, or thought out (damming the bearing straight) there are so many interesting ideas I've found inside it that it seems like a crime not to let anyone see it.
Here's the Introduction by the way.
By the late 1970s it seemed to many people that the earth was dying; or at least that part that had been favored by fortune- the United States of America.
As we look back from the vantage point of the first decade of the twenty first century, it's not easy for us to realize this. It is particularly difficult for young people. They have read and heard the reminiscences; but these seem almost as wildly exaggerated as the tales of senseless wars like the 30-year Indochina conflict, the "limited" struggles along the USSR-China frontier in the 1980s or the "lightning incursion" that took place in central Europe in 1992.
It is hard for us to understand the way it was then- the way the way people thought and acted, the motivation that gave rise to actions that now seem incredible to us. Nethertheless, it is true that many people thought that the earth was dying then, choking on it's own affluence and it's own effluents. And there was considerable basis for those fears. What was then called the 'ecology' - a term describing the relationship between water, air, soil, flora, and fauna -was turning to poison.
This book constitutes an effort to help the student of today to understand what was happening then- and what was done to reverse the damaging processes. This book covers a number of the major concepts and programs affecting the air, the earth, the water. It goes back as far as the 1970s - using the actual words and drawings of tinkerers of that time- to show the magnitude of the problems confronting the people of the earth and how they began to work towards solutions.
The viable existence of the human race seems assured in the twenty-first century. This book has been produced as a reminder of how narrowly that victory has won, and how close the earth came to disaster.
