Solar energy at a human scale - what happens?
Skander Garroum
I really loved this piece — “Why Solarpunk is Already Happening in Africa.” It’s one of the most hopeful things I’ve read in a while. Across Africa, millions of people are building modern infrastructure — including solar, payment, and irrigation systems — from the ground up, without waiting for governments or legacy utilities to get around to it.
What’s impressive is how much of this progress comes from not being tied down by the old, centralized systems the rest of the world is still trying to protect. These are educated, inventive communities that get to start fresh — with tools that are modular, digital, and designed for local reality instead of inherited systems.
It makes me wonder what kind of societies emerge when hundreds of millions of people grow up with that kind of autonomy and technical fluency — and how they’ll manage to avoid the social media outrage traps that have hollowed out so much of the public conversation elsewhere.
Perhaps that is changing...
Noah Smith
