Constructing New Appalachia
A VISION OF A SOLARPUNK FUTURE
Constructing New Appalachia is the final paper in the series of papers for the Social Analysis and Community Engagement class I was enrolled in this term. This paper builds on the work of the two previous papers, Dreaming of Solarpunk futures in a world on fire From Wakanda to the Commonwealth of New Appalachia, and The Reality of Ecological Overshoot. In this final installment I was tasked with writing an integrative paper that both demonstrates engagement with emerging understandings of key features in oppressive sociopolitical realities, and to propose a theory of social change and three strategies for transformative engagement that can bring about the alternative worlds that I have imagined.
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Toward Plan(et) B
“Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes that can affect us can happen in our lifetime in our world—not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature.”1
Despite Terra Mater providing for us a cornucopia of abundance on this planet, we, by our incessant need for domination, accumulation, and exploitation of the Earth's limited resources, threaten to leave her a vilomah.2 Or to put it another way, while the earth is under no threat of non-existence despite the continual environmental degradation of colonial-capitalism, humanity's future on this planet becomes increasingly more uncertain as we emit upwards of 33.1 Gigatons of CO2 into the Earth’s atmosphere every single day.3 During the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, offered gave a clarion call, “We are on a catastrophic path… we can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future,” though despite such candor, from Guterres and a deluge of others, all attempts to call the world to attention, to what was once only a looming crisis, have fallen on deaf ears.4 While everyone from environmental activist to billionaire Richard Branson are right to note that there is in fact no “Planet B” in which humanity can escape, we must by necessity develop a Plan B capable of resisting the myths of neo-liberalism that have manufactured widespread climate denialism, climate fatalism, and every shade of lukewarm green environmental awareness in between, as our failures to prevent this crisis become increasingly more apparent.5 What follows then in this paper is a brief examination of the root causes of our present crisis, an exploration of one possible future, and a modest proposal for finding a metaphor amidst the compost heap capable of cultivating rich fertilizer for the work of social transformation and learning how to survive in a world on fire.
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Bill Mckibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 1989), 7.
Mother Earth; “Vilomah: Origin & What It Means | Clocr,” CLOCR, February 24, 2022, https://clocr.com/blogs/vilomah/#:~:text=The%20term%20.
Liu, Z., Deng, Z., Zhu, B. et al. Global patterns of daily CO2 emissions reductions in the first year of COVID-19. Nat. Geosci. 15, 615–620 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-00965-8
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/oct/14/climate-change-happening-now-stats-graphs-maps-cop26
Richard Branson, “The Ten Island Renewable Challenge,” www.linkedin.com, September 10, 2013, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130910113234-204068115-the-ten-island-renewable-challenge.