Beamspun 11: 28th June 2020

Local sunrise / publish time: 0349 UTC (+3m)

Hello world. Can you believe we've made it to this side of the apex? The long nights and frost are drawing in and .. well, not quite yet. But summer solstice always reminds me a little of where I was 6 months ago, and a lot more about where I'll be in another 6 months. This week the thunder was loud and even the ants are flying.

“If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day." - Anthon St. Maarten

I've been falling into a permaculture rabbit hole recently, on the back of reading Looby Macnamara's book mentioned last week. So this week's links might have more of a garden and farming feel than usual.

Enjoy.

Links

• principles: Thinking a lot about principles as a way of guiding our actions this week. Some links on my radar are the three ethics of permaculture which I like because three is a good number, a new solarpunk manifesto, and six core elements of solarpunk.

• futures: Otto Scharmer on Coronavirus, humanity's response, and lessons for responding to climate change. "That choice between acting from ego or acting from ecosystem awareness is one that we face every day, every hour, every moment."

• mapping: Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps are a framework for "evaluating personal and social resilience" - by thinking through and plotting out all the stuff you depend on, you can get an idea of how connected and inter-reliant you are.

• re-use: Get bottles, get a stick, and ram waste plastic into the bottles... Then build what you want with an Ecobrick. So simple, I may have to try it out. The project also encourages you to track your plastic in/out ratio.

• permaculture: Having access to some spare logs recently, I'm very interested in trying out a Hugelkultur raised bed which is effectively self-composting and water-retaining. Here's another page all about them, with even more practical advice, including a video of them being built:

(I like the way each aspect of a mound bears particular flavours and qualities - yin and yang refer to the shady and sunny side of a mountain in the same way.)

• gardening: The keyhole garden is a raised, easy-to access bed which also allows you to easily 'drop in' compost, and was designed in Lesotho to help people suffering from AIDS to garden. This is another good page on keyhole gardens, including lots of examples:

• architecture: Layered gardens, education centres, marketplace, office, and a drone docking point. Oh, and it's movable? The Mashambas Skyscraper could be incredible: "It can be built in one place, stay there for a matter of months or years ... and then be rebuilt in a new location. After the structure is moved, a base layer remains, which can serve as a marketplace for villagers."

• architecture: The Wikkelhouse is a modular-design house made out of cardboard, rolled on to a template and then popped into place wherever you want. Nice.

• solstice: And I didnt' really put much solstice into last week's links. To make up for it, here's some info on Litha, the summer solstice as a festival. The Sun is on the move again and the days are getting shorted again, but there's still time to celebrate "by setting large wheels on fire and then rolling them down a hill into a body of water."

Get in touch

If you enjoyed this, then please spread the word and tell someone else that you think might be interested - https://beamspun.exmosis.net/ is the address to spread!

For any feedback, suggestions, broken links, comments, or general 'hi there' type stuff, leave a comment, or you can find me hanging out in any of these places:

• Mastodon: @scribe@mastodon.sdf.org
• Gnu/social: @6gain@loadaverage.org
• Twitter: @6loss
• XMPP: 6gain@xmpp.zone
• Email: beamspun (at) exmosis.net - until the spambots find me

I'm also documenting my own 'everyday solarpunk adventures' over at the 6suns blog.