Hello world, I'm Tomasino. This is Solarpunk Prompts, a series for writers, where we discuss
Solarpunk as a literary, artistic, and activist movement. Or, as Rowanna Silva describes it,
Solarpunk is a genre of ecologically oriented, speculative fiction, characterized both by
its aesthetic and its underlying socio-political vision. In each episode, we look at one story
prompt using that genre lens, offering commentary on the prompt, some inspirations from the world
today, and some considerations for writers. Most importantly, we consider how that story might
help us to better envision a sustainable civilization. If this is your first time here,
I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what Solarpunk is,
why you should care, and why this series came into being. This episode's prompt is titled,
The Refugee Camp. There is a full-fledged town built from a refugee camp, which was set up there
two decades ago. The inhabitants speak their own creole, a mix of more than five languages,
and a very shaky relationships with their neighboring communities or states, each of which
considers it a lawless territory, and might be plotting to take over. I think the refugee camp
is a fitting place to start our prompts. They are the standard setting in our world for communities
just coming through tragedy. When there is war, famine, flooding, or any number of challenges
to a people, they often find shelters in foreign lands, sometimes thrown together with other groups
fleeing their own hardships. Refugee stories are also plentiful in science fiction. Superman is a
refugee from Krypton, the Doctor is a refugee from Gallifrey, or Arthur Dent, a human refugee from
Krypton. These are all individual stories, though, and not the camp and community we're striving for.
Instead, we might look to Battlestar Galactica, or Babylon 5, or the Nantucket trilogy,
for example, of entire communities of refugees. And indeed, those are vibrant and capture a bit
of the colorful characters and internal conflicts that arise in such places. But Solarpunk can
depart from this view of refugee camps as places of despair. In our prompt, the camp has grown
into a full-fledged town. That suggests a thriving regrowth emerging from this mixed culture
and reflected in their Creole dialect. Is that a realistic vision to take, though?
Is this just Solarpunk being naive and blindly optimistic? Let's take a look to real refugee
camps in South Sudan and Uganda, where the rogue agency, a Berlin-based nonprofit, has been working
with communities to help them develop innovation hubs. Five of these communities have linked
together to form AskNet, a program that offers training in open source hardware and software,
entrepreneurship, media production, gender equality, and financial literacy. They also
run repair cafes, giving hands-on experience and learning, and reducing waste, and preserving
natural resources. And that's just one program that's built and run by small community organizations.
So how about Humanitaire? It was founded by individuals who saw the amazing rebuilding
efforts after natural disasters like the 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean,
which caused the deadliest tsunami in history. The world responded with one of the greatest
relief efforts in record time all at once, but then medicine spoiled before they could reach the sick
and food rotted before it could find the hungry. This failure of local logistics is what inspired
the organization. What do they do now? Well, they don't intervene. Instead, they provide spaces
where communities can implement their own plans and choose from a variety of tools and models that
Humanitaire makes available. They provide teaching, processes, toolkits, and most importantly, space.
They empower the communities to build their own futures. And now they're up and running in Haiti,
Nepal, Greece, and the Philippines. And these are both stories of information sharing and empowering
local communities. They succeed by building together both local talent and infrastructure
and focus on sustainability. They even mean sustainability in many forms. There's
environmental sustainability, processes that can work with a unique local environment.
There's also economic sustainability, processes that can continue without ongoing external funding
or donations, and cultural sustainability, respecting and empowering the local cultures.
When you start thinking of these refugee camps as places where people are building new things,
new homes, new lives, new opportunities, then the writing opportunities open up for you as well.
Gone are the two-dimensional sketches of a dirty camp full of broken people. These people are alive
and empowered. In a different genre setting, we might lean into the shantytown aesthetic or the
lawlessness of the area might become an easy setting for crime stories. But I challenge you
with this prompt. See a clear of these well trodden paths. Focus on the community as a vibrant
living thing. And speaking of shantytowns, I'm reminded of Cory Doctorow's setting in the book
Makers with its unique community of hackers and their unique way that they use language.
It brings us to our next aspect of this writing prompt, Creole. According to Collins English
Dictionary, a Creole is a language that has developed from a mixture of different languages
and has become the main language in a particular place. These are fascinating growths of blending
culture and can powerfully illustrate the fundamental aspects of a community,
who they are, what they believe in, and how they respond to a changing world. Think of the unique
flavor of the Belter language in the expanse. Every odd word choice or word borrowed from Chinese
or Indic or Slavic is a reminder of what these people are. In some cases, this unique language
use even extends to meaningful gestures with hands and shoulders. The way these languages
develop is so interesting in its own right that there's an indie card game where you can
collaboratively create one with friends. It's called Dialect, and it won IGDN's Game of the
Year in 2019, along with a host of other awards. In that game, you and two to four of your friends
will create what's called an isolation, basically a community set apart from others for some
interesting reason, and then play out their history across three different ages. The game
then ends with the isolation no longer being isolated, whether for good or for bad. As the
game description says, Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it
means for that language to be lost. It's a fascinating way to spend three to four hours
with friends and incredibly insightful into this exact process. Now, before we go,
let's take one more look at that prompt. The refugee camp. There's a full-fledged town
built from a refugee camp, which was set up there two decades ago. The inhabitants speak their own
Creole, a mixture of more than five languages, and have very shaky relationships with their
neighboring communities or states, each of which considers it a lawless territory,
and might be plotting to take over. Okay, it's time to wrap up. Let's review our
guidelines for solar punk writing one more time. Number one, community as protagonist.
Remember, there's no chosen one. Number two, infrastructure is sexy. And remember,
there's no simple solutions. And number three, the human environmental context.
It's not man versus nature. Thanks for joining me today. I hope you'll join me for the next
solar punk prompt. Music in this episode is from X memory solar grid from the album
solar punk, a brighter perspective.