by Max Barry

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The Grand Nation of Araraukar

“Do as I say or it's the last thing you'll ever do.”

Category: Corrupt Dictatorship
Civil Rights:
Below Average
Economy:
Weak
Political Freedoms:
Few

Regional Influence: Page

Location: Osiris

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3

OOC: Solarpunk? What's that? - WIP

Araraukar could be OOCly described as solarpunk, which is what my forum siggy says, too, and thus I have gotten some questions from people who don't know what it means. Here is one of my replies, which I intend to flesh out later into a "proper" factbook. Consider this a placeholder reply for now.

What is solarpunk?

You may know how many science fiction works that talk about environmental issues, depict a very dreary future where everything possible has gone wrong, basically, and the world as a result has become a dreary place. They're called dystopias.

However, rather than an utopia in itself, solarpunk is one type of "techpunk" (the first one to use that wording was cyberpunk, but there these days exists at least also steampunk and probably several more), which means using technology to solve one or more major issues that we're facing in Real Life right now.

Solarpunk tackles the environmental issues we have in RL in a way that would for the most part be entirely doable with existing technology, but not with existing society. As the name perhaps suggests, it focuses on so-called "green technology", with renewable energy sources (solar, wind, water, etc.), energy conservation and reducing human "footprint" on the resources of the planet.

But it goes beyond just the technology, because we HAVE that technology in Real Life, we're just not using it to the fullest, because RL societies are built on very different values. Solarpunk asks the question of "what if we could re-focus the values of the society on long-term survival instead of instant gratification?"

In Araraukar's case that means confining the population in huge cities (cutting down on people's need to travel far to reach all the services they need for a lifetime, as well as concentrate the ecological impact of human populations into more manageable areas - think as an example waste water management), with only rail lines (highspeed bullet trains and maglevs for human travel, more common for cargo) connecting the cities (trains are much more ecological than armies of lorries), with air travel having been banned entirely over the mainland (coastal sea areas have aerial search and rescue services, so they're excempt). All the cities also utilize all the green tech solutions I know exist in real life (and as I find new ones (or working old ones that have been re-discovered), I introduce the more viable ones into my RP), and have extensive public transport, which basically means no cars (there are some rental electrics, but they're confined to the cities).

Similarly food production is concentrated (the cities actually produce much of fresh produce themselves) into agricultural zones, which allow for preventing runoff of fertilizers, for example) and utilizes GMO plants and biological pest control methods in addition to smart watering solutions and applying fertilizer on the plants directly. And yes, the fertilizer is largely composted poo (from the cities' populations) and plant remains. Recycling nutrients.

It also helps that Araraukarians largely get their animal proteins from insects raised for that purpose, as well as fish farmed (inland, and they use a GMO hybrid species that has a very narrow salinity range, so that if a freak flood was to create a connection to the natural waters, the fish couldn't survive and become invasive), and though there is some milk and egg production, the animal remains from old production animals are utilized but not as food of humans.

Everything is basically geared for keeping human impact on nature as small as possible, utilizing RL technologies in a non-RL society.

And to keep the whole thing from falling into bickering citystates, there's a strong central (but distributed) government keeping things organized and running. This type of government is not part of the solarpunk genre as such, but is my personal reasoning for how you might get such a society to function.

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