I work in a tech role for a big tech company, so at first glance, not much. I like to believe that I’m good at planning stuff and figuring out how many hours by how many people it should take, which is a good skill for all kinds of issues.
I’m a repair engineer for lab equipment. There’s not specific fact that comes to mind, but I find myself thinking about gratifying it is that the job itself fits perfectly well into a solarpunk future.
You could remove the monetary demands of capitalism and in a day-to-day sense my job would still make sense. I spend my time driving to various job sites and labs where they need help setting up robotics and sample analyzers and things.
I think the main thing it illustrates is how fun and productive a solarpunk lifestyle can be. It reminds me of how my mom paid her way through college as a bike courier in DC (right during the Watergate years). I love jobs where you have to go on quests.
I know a fair amount about infrastructure. There’s A LOT of stuff under the ground you probably never even think about.
Water, sanitary sewer, storm sewer, chiller lines, cable, phone, fiber, natural gas, oil, electric, sprinkler systems, under ground vaults for most of these things as well. Some cities have underground tunnels for things like storm over flow, communications, electric and various other things.
I’m answering this from a parking lot and from here I can see, street lights, parking lot lights, storm sewer, sanitary, water, bunch of electric coming down a pole as well as cable and phone. I have to assume there’s gas as well.
wow, people really underestimate the ground! same with plants too, most of their life goes on below our feet…
I don’t know if I have an answer to this yet, but I wanted to comment to say this is a great question, OP. Thanks for asking it; there’s some really interesting stuff in the comments
Agreed. It also leads to some self reflection when the answer essentially amounts to: “Nothing”. As an automotive software engineer, I can’t say that I learned anything I can practice myself in daily life in the solarpunk spirit. But it did get me thinking whether I could try and further some skills I acquired to that aim. Thanks OP!
My self reflection actually led me to a legit good answer. I’m a biochemist and my developing research interest is in how we can coordinate and integrate “big data” methodologies and insights; one of the hype trains that annoys me is the idea that AI means we’re on the cusp of “agnostic science”, which roughly means “yay, let’s take the biased humans out of the science entirely and have MAXIMUM OBJECTIVITY”. So effectively, it’s looking like my career is shaping up to be “professional killjoy” — trying to derail scientific hype trains before too many board.
It’s hard to imagine how that could help me in a Solarpunk society, but it’s easier to frame it as “how can Solarpunk ideas help me in this quest?” because there’s actually loads of that.
A thing I love about Solarpunk after all is that it isn’t anti-science: Genetic editing is cool and awesome, but also biodiversity and ecosystems are super important; AI protein folding algorithms like AlphaFold are mindbogglingly good, but they’re most useful when we take a slice of humble pie and understand how much we have left to learn; Objectivity is a great scientific ideal, but also we need to recognise that in practice, we can’t extricate science from people and politics, and we should instead embrace the uniqueness of perspectives, which all have something to add to science.
These themes feel like Solarpunk vibes to me, and given that Solarpunk is still developing as an aesthetic, ideology and cultural movement, it’s a useful thing to ponder.
I was once tasked with designing automated greenhouses that were supposed to be very profitable, which means that they would use little energy and little labor.
The project did not go forward but I still do think that small units of automated, local, efficient food production is the future. I don’t think single-house size but maybe a dozen households could share one decently sized greenhouse and grow most of their plant-based needs.
