Dr. Wesley Cox, Dr. Dani Haogue, and Zaria Smith all grew up in Altadena, CA. In the wake of the Eaton Fire which destroyed more than half of the city in January 2025, they share their personal stories and how they connect to the wider picture of Black history in Los Angeles, environmental racism, and the struggle for a brighter future.

DONATE to Dena Rebuild: https://denarebuild.co/

Mentions/Sources:

• Better Watts Initiative (Dani serves as research director): https://wlcac.org/community-service/better-watts-initiative-bwi/
• Mapping LA History (Wesley’s project at UCLA): https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/3defcb2c438343d58b035428e3b95fbb
• Eaton Fire burn map: https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025/1/7/eaton-fire
• NASA/JPL Pollution in Altadena:
  • https://www.toxicsites.us/site.php?epa_id=CA9800013030
  • https://www.latimes.com/socal/la-canada-valley-sun/news/tn-vsl-me-monkhill-20130620-story.html
• Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community (first environmental justice study): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1983.tb00037.x
• Association of Black Estate Planners: abepp.org

Support the show

Solarpunk Now! is hosted & produced by Luka Dowell. The solarpunk theme is by Red Keener, with additional music by Gabriel Rivas. You can follow the show on Instagram or Mastodon, and support my work at Buy Me a Coffee. Keep dreaming big, and keep up the good work!

As solarpunks, we have to consider the possibility of collapse. Matthew Azuley–aka EpicTomorrows–introduces us to collapse awareness, a view of the climate crisis which accepts the inevitability of societal collapse on some level. We’ll hear a bit about his forthcoming book, an anthology of global perspectives on collapse, as well as how this view might fit within a solarpunk perspective.

Buy the book on Arkbound

Mentions/Sources:

• EpicTomorrows on YouTube
• A Radical Guide
• Diamond, J M. (2011). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. London: Penguin.
  • Note from Matthew: I need to be very clear, some of Diamond’s scholarship has now been discredited, but this does not change his essential definition of collapse which I still think is the most useful one. Diamond defines collapse as, ‘A drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time’ (Diamond 2011: 3). He developed a single general formula outlining how many of the world’s great civilizations fell, a process he explains as ‘ecocide’. Ecocide, as the name suggests, describes a society that destroys the very environment upon which they depend, thus ensuring its own demise (Diamond 2011: 6).
• Total Societal Collapse by 2040? (MIT report summarised by ‘Down To Earth’ on YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE50z-C-gGA
• The Green Transition will not work as planned, what might we do instead? – Professor Simon Michaux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbnXMv19Hck&t=1s

Recommended Reading:

• An open access literature review of societal collapse
• All planetary boundaries mapped out for the first time, six of nine crossed, by Stockholm Resilience Centre
• Breaking Together free e-book, by Jem Bendell (assessment that collapse is already happening, with suggestion of ‘ecolibertarian’ response, with a nod to Murray Bookchin)
• What Is Social Ecology? by Murray Bookchin

Support the show

Solarpunk Now! is hosted & produced by Luka Dowell. The solarpunk theme is by Red Keener, with additional music by Gabriel Rivas. You can follow the show on Instagram or Mastodon, and support my work at Buy Me a Coffee. Keep dreaming big, and keep up the good work!

In 1995, Dr. Jess Ghannam was one of two psychiatrists for the entire population of the Gaza strip (nearly two million people). The typical Western model of mental health care isn’t equipped to address needs at that scale, especially in a population suffering from multiple generations of ongoing trauma.

Jess’s work centers around community mental health, a model that aims to deliver care at scale by integrating and working within the community. This includes developing a historical understanding and political awareness–the doctor’s office isn’t isolated from the rest of the world. When it comes to addressing global mental health needs, the challenges are great, but the insight Jess brings to this conversation points a way forward.

Note: Since October 7th, much of this work in Gaza has been destroyed. And the needs right now are much more immediate–food, water, shelter, and a ceasefire. If you have the resources to provide assistance, Jess recommends a donation to KinderUSA (http://www.kinderusa.org/), currently providing food support to the region.

Learn more about Dr. Jess Ghannam at https://profiles.ucsf.edu/jess.ghannam

Recommended Reading:

• Frantz Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks
• Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth

Support the show

Solarpunk Now! is hosted & produced by Luka Dowell. The solarpunk theme is by Red Keener, with additional music by Gabriel Rivas. You can follow the show on Instagram or Mastodon, and support my work at Buy Me a Coffee. Keep dreaming big, and keep up the good work!

This Earth Month, we’re looking back on the history of environmental radicalism. Brian Tokar is a teacher, activist, and writer who’s been involved in the movements he writes and teaches about since the 70s. We discuss how leftism and environmentalism came together, why ecology matters for the left, and what lessons we can learn from these traditions and put into practice today.

References:

• Brian Tokar – The Green Alternative
• Murray Bookchin – “Listen, Marxist!”
• Murray Bookchin – “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”
• Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary

Further Reading:

• Robert Gottlieb – Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement
• Chad Montrie – A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States
• Peter Kropotkin – Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
• A. Kauffman – Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism
• Douglas Bevington – The Rebirth of Environmentalism
• Robert Bullard, ed. – The Quest for Environmental Justice, Confronting Environmental Racism, Unequal Protection, Dumping in Dixie

Support the show

Solarpunk Now! is hosted & produced by Luka Dowell. The solarpunk theme is by Red Keener, with additional music by Gabriel Rivas. You can follow the show on Instagram or Mastodon, and support my work at Buy Me a Coffee. Keep dreaming big, and keep up the good work!

What happens when a solarpunk world is suddenly visited by aliens?

Ruthanna Emrys has long been known to the weird fiction community for her reimaginings of H.P. Lovecraft. She writes stories for monsters – stories that challenge the role of the monster as something “other,” something to be feared, something we can’t build social relations with.

Her latest novel, A Half Built Garden, begins with a classic scenario: an alien spaceship landing. But we learn pretty quickly that, strange and incomprehensible as these aliens are, fear is not the only response we can have to the unknown. A Half Built Garden is a story of high-stakes interspecies negotiations, of hope and progress despite immense challenges, and of bridging the divide between the familiar and the alien.

Ruthanna Emrys (website, and links to buy the book): http://ruthannaemrys.com/

Support the show

Solarpunk Now! is hosted & produced by Luka Dowell. The solarpunk theme is by Red Keener, with additional music by Gabriel Rivas. You can follow the show on Instagram or Mastodon, and support my work at Buy Me a Coffee. Keep dreaming big, and keep up the good work!

The editors of Strange Matters Magazine want your reading experience to feel like meeting a grad student friend for coffee. Meaning: they explain the most exciting parts of their research, give you all the hot gossip in their field, skip the jargon and elitism, and still deliver the information in a rigorous manner. Strange Matters is thoughtful yet playful, broad in scope yet deep in its analysis. They publish articles in a variety of genres and from a variety of viewpoints, all committed to their mission of “a new culture of open-minded inquiry on the Left.”

I first came across Strange Matters back in 2022, when they launched their successful crowdfunding campaign for Issue 1. Their editorial, “Words for our Present Reality,” spoke to the disillusionment I felt as a leftist in the face of the pandemic, climate change, reactionary politics, economic crisis, etc. The piece also pointed the way forward in what I think is a really promising direction. Strange Matters is an exciting project, and a great example of a successful Left media project. In this episode I chat with two Strange Matters editors, Kyle and Frances, to discuss the magazine, the process of developing it, and what makes the project so exciting.

Links:

Strange Matters Magazine

Strange Matters on Twitter

Strange Matters on Instagram

Articles Mentioned in Episode:

• Words for our Present Reality
• Bloodless Board Games
• Do Interest Rate Hikes Worsen Inflation?
• Barry Jenkins’s Cinematic Technique
• Chastening the Past (critique of Dawn of Everything)
• Consider the Dinosaur

Support the show

Solarpunk Now! is hosted & produced by Luka Dowell. The solarpunk theme is by Red Keener, with additional music by Gabriel Rivas. You can follow the show on Instagram or Mastodon, and support my work at Buy Me a Coffee. Keep dreaming big, and keep up the good work!

To kick off the New Year and a new season of Solarpunk Now, I’m bringing you a conversation with some other creators in the solarpunk space.

In June last year, I presented a panel at the Solarpunk Conference alongside Andre of HydroponicTrash, Ariel of the Solarpunk Presents Podcast, and Elia of The Fire These Times podcast. Our panel, From Capitalist Realism to a Solarpunk Reality, discussed the thought and action necessary to bring solarpunk to life. We got together after the conference to expand on these ideas and find connections between our related, but distinct areas of research.

This conversation originally aired on The Fire These Times in December, but it gets to live on my feed too, because Elia is awesome like that. Andre, Ariel, and Elia all have their own projects, so if you’d like to hear more from them, check out the links below!

Links:

• The Fire These Times podcast (Elia)
• Solarpunk Presents podcast (Ariel)
• HydroponicTrash (Andre)
• The Solarpunk Conference

Support the show

Solarpunk Now! is hosted & produced by Luka Dowell. The solarpunk theme is by Red Keener, with additional music by Gabriel Rivas. You can follow the show on Instagram or Mastodon, and support my work at Buy Me a Coffee. Keep dreaming big, and keep up the good work!

AI already poses an immediate danger to our freedom, livelihood, and even our very survival. We don’t need to wait on the singularity for AI to become existential – the resistance starts now. A conversation with Dan McQuillan (Goldsmiths Department of Computing).

Find Dan on Twitter, Mastodon, or visit his website

Sources:

• Dan’s book – Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
• Dan McQuillan – Mental health and artificial intelligence: losing your voice
• Miranda Fricker – Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
• Achille Mbembe – Necropolitics
• Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz – Science for the post-normal age
• Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile
• The Cybernetic Brain – Sketches of Another Future
• Radical Technology (illustrated by Clifford Harper)

Further Reading:

• María Puig de la Bellacasa – Matters of Care
• Isabelle Stengers – Cosmopolitics I
• Donna Haraway – Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
• Using ChatGPT in mental health care (Koko)
  • Startup Uses AI Chatbot to Provide Mental Health Counseling and Then Realizes It ‘Feels Weird’
  • Controversy erupts over non-consensual AI mental health experiment
• The Lucas Plan
• Articles on GKN factory occupation in Italy:
  • Italy’s Longest-Ever Factory Occupation Shows How Workers Can Transform Production
  • An Eco-Revolution of the Working Class? What We Can Learn from the Former GKN Factory in Italy

Support the show

Solarpunk Now! is hosted & produced by Luka Dowell. The solarpunk theme is by Red Keener, with additional music by Gabriel Rivas. You can follow the show on Instagram or Mastodon, and support my work at Buy Me a Coffee. Keep dreaming big, and keep up the good work!