Season 2 of the Book Club Podcast starts now! This season, we are reading Solarpunk. Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions building a sustainable, technological future interconnected with nature and community. The "solar" represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the "punk" refers to the countercultural, post-capitalist, and decolonial enthusiasm for creating such a future.

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The first three books of the season are Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, and The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk.

Ecotopia is about a part of the United States that split from the country to form Ecotopia, an ecological utopia. The story is about a journalist visiting Ecotopia for the first time in twenty years where he learns how to genuinely connect with the people around him and his natural self.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built takes place on a distant planet that formerly was an industrial economy but has since been re-wilded, resulting in small, dense, creative villages and towns scattered among towering wilderness. A monk and a robot travel together to ask, “What makes a meaningful life?”

In The Fifth Sacred Thing, post-apocalyptic San Francisco has created a whole new society: cooperative, diverse, tolerant, with all four things–fire, earth, air and water in balance. But an oppressive regime looms to the south, and the coming battle will be peace against violence, love against war and magic against despair.

With Solarpunk, we are confronting the questions: What makes a good society? How are the sick, the poor and the old treated? Is there a connection between how the environment is treated and how people are valued? What is the value of a person? What can be owned? What would you be willing to give up for a new world?

Solar punk is about what is possible, and how imagining new societies is the first step to achieving them.

Read Ecotopia for our first book discussion, to be released in one week. You can get your copy of all the books using our affiliate links here:

Ecotopia | A Psalm for the Wild-Built | The Fifth Sacred Thing

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The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin Book Club