An interview w/Solarpunx

Firstly, who are you and how do you fit into the beautiful web of Solar Punx?

My name is Reverie Arens (she/her), I’m the founder and one of many community members in PDX Solarpunx. I’m a transgender woman, lifelong naturalist, and deeply encrusted with soil at nearly all times (much to my partner’s bewilderment).

For folks who aren’t familiar with the group, what is Solarpunx? What are some values and ideologies of the group?

PDX Solarpunx is a community of neighborly plant nerds combating the crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food sovereignty through native plant guerilla gardening & plant based mutual aid. We work together to create gardens, save seeds, pool resources, and grow plants for free distribution to our neighbors. We derive our name from the solarpunk genre, an aesthetic and ideological movement which imagines a world post-climate catastrophe where humanity lives in balance with the earth. I would say our core ideology as a group is a curiosity and kinship with living things, and a desire to share and grow that passion to benefit all human and non-human communities. We also enjoy teaching each other new skills, connecting with mutual aid networks, perving on novel native plant species on iNaturalist, and all around having a good time.

How did you get introduced to LGL? Can you talk about the Solar Punx and LGL partnership?

One day a few years back when I was studying plants at PSU, I was taking a walk through Brentwood Park and happened to wander into the Learning Gardens. Greenspaces like LGL have a natural draw on people, I think, and I was not immune. I got to chatting with Sugan, a past LGL employee, who was wrist deep in a bed of potatoes. As a guerilla gardener, I’m used to being chased out of green spaces or approached with a well meaning but ill intentioned “Can I help you???” meant to shoo me away. Sugan gave me none of that. He was open, friendly, and excited to share the space and explain it was open to PSU students like me. “Wow!” I thought, how come I’d never heard of this place? I knew immediately I wanted to spend more time there, and later that year I took a class with Heather Burns where I met Mariya, Camila, and Gil. We’ve been buds ever since.

Solarpunx is a horizontal, decentralized community group. We’ve distributed more than 3,000,000 native seeds into the Portland area, and currently maintain a seed library of about 5,000,000 more. We are not a nonprofit, and as of now there’s no grant funding behind what we do. We’re completely community supported and financed, so we tend to be creative, scrappy, and ingenious in how we get things done. Building cold frames? Time to rip apart some wood pallets. Need seeds? We’re asking backyard habitat growers. Looking for garden tools? We’re looking on Buy Nothing – not Amazon.That’s one of the Solarpunk movement’s main ideas: to make use of what you already have, and support circular economies within our communities.

With this ethos in mind, our partnership with LGL has been nothing short of symbiotic. Solarpunx has an abundance of highly motivated, seed-laden dirtbags willing to mobilize at a moment’s notice, and LGL has an abundance of garden space, site knowledge, and plant projects. Although we maintain our identity as a decentralized network, the Learning Gardens Lab is about as close as us crusty soil punks have to a home. We immensely enjoy our monthly Tending Days on every first Saturday together.

What inspired you to start Solarpunx?

Solarpunx was really not the kind of thing I ever imagined myself doing. As a settler living on stolen land, I was conditioned with a very strong plant blindness that a lot of us settlers experience and reinforce. There’s just no reference, no understanding, and no reverence for anything around you. The grammar of animacy and kinship is simply not in place, and no one had ever spoken to me about these things differently. To me, plants were just not that interesting or important, and they didn’t have much of a place in my life besides what I could grow on the windowsill of my apartment. God, do I feel embarrassed telling you that now.

I got introduced to native plants through the PSU Indigenous Traditional Ecological & Cultural Knowledge (ITECK) Program, then led by Judy Bluehorse Skelton (Nimiipuu & Cherokee) & Emma Ruth Johnson (Cowlitz). They were the first people who really instilled an understanding of the social, emotional, cultural, and ecological importance of plants – that the story of this place, and all places, is inextricably linked to the stories which humans and plants weave in mutuality over time. That was something of an awakening for me, and I wanted to explore those relationships more deeply, but as a college-poor renter, I had no idea where to start.

That’s where guerilla gardening came in. At the time, I had no yard to cultivate plants, and no money to buy them even if I did. I also had no car, so forget about getting to any wilderness for a plant ID hike. I was thoroughly frustrated, until one day I saw a little patch of Yarrow sprouting out of a sidewalk crack. I was floored. They call Yarrow the “boundaries plant” because of this very affinity for neglected margins, and for their ability to dry and reinforce the leaking boundaries of our bodies. Here was the solution to my problem! I didn’t need a yard or a car, I just needed the right seeds in the right patch of soil. And so, for just a few dollars, I bought some native seed packets and slid into my long-forgotten ecosystem niche of seed disperser. The next spring, my route to the grocery store, the paths to my friend’s houses, the planter boxes all around campus were laden with native blooms. I knew then that something important had happened, and that the little bit of generosity and love shown to me by my teachers Emma and Judy had been made manifest on the land through the very plants which had taught them. That’s what plants do – they give, and they give, and they give, all the while creating resilient systems of reciprocity, care, and change. That was the beginning of Solarpunx. 

Y’all have grown so quickly since the groups inception!! Why do you think that is? Why do you think so many people gravitated towards the group?

Many people, especially elders in the native plant community, have told me, “wow, where has this been my whole life?” I always just laugh and say, “I know, that’s why I wanted to make it. How lucky are we to have this together?” We’re all so starved for contact to soil, to living things, and for kinship. Solarpunx is a community that is so rich in those things that it makes me emotional. I have so much freaking fun with these folks. I have so much freaking optimism working with these plants. The plant community is such a hopeful space because we spend so much time learning about the capacity for living things to change, grow, and adapt. And over time, you’ll learn a trick or two from them. Every time we get together, Solarpunx just feels more and more like a gift you have no right to receive, but was given to you anyway, so you might as well enjoy it. I think mostly everyone feels that way too, so it’s hard to stay away 🙂 All of the free stuff doesn’t hurt.

What is a project y’all are working on that you’re excited about?

Currently, we’re working on expanding the Living Seed Library, a community run native plant nursery using horticultural techniques to grow and distribute native plants for free. We’re starting this season with about 2500 plants using seeds, live stakes, and roots procured for no cost. This includes several rare species, including the endangered pensteom hesperius, or Tall Western Penstemon, which is endemic only to the Portland area. We spend most of our time guerilla gardening in the margins, so this project is exciting because it’s a chance for us to experiment in a more predictable, protected fashion, and educate folks new to native plants about how grow and care for them yourself. We have Tending Days for this project and more every first Saturday of the month at LGL from 10am-3pm, and encourage anyone interested in getting your hands dirty to join us. We’re also always looking for more seeds to add to our collection!

What does the future hold for Solarpunx? What are all your dreams and fantasies?

The Solarpunk genre at its best centers active imagination and direct action to create a more sustainable, just, equitable world. It shouldn’t be just a tumblr blog full of green skyscrapers (although who doesn’t love looking at those?), it’s also community action and care, it’s also revolution, it’s also mask up, and Landback, and Free Palestine, because we wouldn’t be living in a Solarpunk world without those things. In our future, I see more of both: spending time dreaming really, really big together, and collectively holding each other to a path where we all get there through the modes currently most pressing. So to do that, we really want to meet those people who are thinking globally and acting locally, invite them to spend time with us, and work together on our shared areas of interest relating to climate catastrophe, ongoing mass extinction, and plant agnosticism. If we do that, my the time I’m old there will be as many people ripping up concrete and putting native plants there instead as there are postmen (and there’ll be 3x as many postmen). 

I’d also like to build a wildlife pond, learn how to make inoculated biochar, and build a catio using reclaimed materials 🙂 maybe I’ll even stick a solar panel on top.

Anything else you want to share? 🙂

If you’d like to get involved with us, please check out our linktree where you can follow us on Instagram, join our groupchat on Discord, email us at solarpunxpdx@gmail.com, and connect with creators who make Solarpunk content we love. We’re always accepting, plant, seed, material, and financial donations. Most of all though, we want you to come see us! We’ll be attending LGL’s Wreath Making Festival on 12/6 if you’d like to drink eggnog with us. We host several events a month, which can be found on our socials. If you’d like us to seed bomb your neighborhood or home, don’t hesitate to ask – the answer is always yes.

Read about PDX Solarpunx