Our Supernuclear experience running Island Time
A traveling neighborhood adventure in Puerto Rico
Greetings fellow Solarpunks, please enjoy this musical greeting from my heart to yours:
For the month of February in Puerto Rico, we ran a ‘traveling neighborhood’ in collaboration with Gillian Morris from Supernuclear - a movement dedicated to spreading the joy of living with friends. Casa Chironja, a vibrant co-living community, served as our home base. 60+ Friends and collaborators gathered to host workshops, share knowledge, cook family dinners, and organize excursions together.
We called this fun little experiment…
Kicking off with the Vision Weekend
The event began with a gathering of brilliant minds and change-makers at the Foresight Institute Vision Weekend Conference. There were talks, networking events, and pitch competitions around longevity, AI, bio-tech, cypherpunk, space innovation, and other areas of frontier science & tech. Nico represented Agartha with a talk on our ecosystem project SolarpunkOS, check it out!
Co-living Adventures
Each week of Island Time had a central theme, and our residents organically organized relevant activities:
The ‘big house’ at Casa Chironja was always popping: scrambled eggs with music jams, lightning talks, morning yoga, and collaborative workshops. There was flow in the space - a living, breathing container of laughter, hugs, idea exchanges, and deep work.
The community also came together to clean and beautify Casa Chironja
The house was also our launch pad for Solarpunk excursions:
Perhaps the most heart-warming part of being in Puerto Rico was experiencing the friendliness and openness of the locals. Kindness was common, strangers freely joined in on conversations, and sharing food was a love language. Art, music, dance, and celebration was blossoming everywhere like spring flowers.
Grounding fantasy in reality
However, these expressions of abundance stood in contrast to other elements on the island, such as economic inequality and fragile infrastructure. Power and water outages are unfortunately a regular occurrence - in our first 2 weeks we had to be cautious and ration our cistern water. A stark reminder of the stability many of us take for granted.
As we explored more of Puerto Rico, signs of economic struggle and disparities among groups was also evident - abandoned homes and crumbling roads stood in defiance amidst colossal cruise ships and luxury superyachts parked in the harbor. A result of myriad historical, monetary, ecological, and political forces at play. As much progress as we could see, it was sobering to observe the scope of challenges in front of us.
But what gave me hope was witnessing the incredible work of so many brave souls: building from scratch, maintaining systems, experimenting with regenerative technology, and growing food through sustainable means. Their dreams of a better life, a better home, a better world glowed in their eyes as I listened to them.
What can we do?
The experience has given us a more focused lens on the kinds of problems we need to solve in order to make our mission of a global Solarpunk network a reality. At Agartha, we see the opportunity to work on tangible, basic, scalable solutions that every community requires in order to experience abundance and thrive.
How can we create fertile soil to grow our food while reducing pollution?
How can we grow our own healthy food predictably and at scale at the local level?
How can we teach the world that it’s possible to live sustainably and intentionally in community?
Here are some amazing Solarpunk projects we’d like to highlight who are trying to solve these very things:
Supernuclear by Gillian Morris: also check out her fantastic article in the NY Times
MakeSoil by Josh Whiton: a social network for composting and regenerating our land
Grand Frontier Farms by Brian Lio: open source, decentralized, hyper productive farming systems
Treehouse by Winter Ku: A co-living, co-parenting community in San Francisco.
Intentional community journalism and rockbottom podcast by Christopher Morello
What is Agartha doing?
Growing our research database and connecting people and communities on agartha.one
Running events and workshops to educate and build Solarpunk tools - some of which we’ll open-source and publish soon!
Doubling-down on incubating and partnering with Solarpunk products and businesses that are solving real-world problems - SolarpunkOS.
Running residencies to supercharge founders and builders
Creating awesome Solarpunk stories, art, music, and vibes
And we’re launching a podcast soon!
We’ll have more to share on the work we’ll be doing on the ground in upcoming posts.
Reflecting on the Residency
Stephen, a new and dear friend, shared this brilliant insight as we were reflecting on our month together. Despite all of the peak experiences we got to share (and there were many!), what ultimately stood out most was the gift of connecting with so many wonderful, inspirational, kind, and fun people. Hearts open, ideas flowing, hugs, healing, and laughter - that is the miracle of community, and what is meant for all of us here on earth.
Coming up next…
We are getting ready to attend:
Mar 6-7: Parallel Society
Mar 30 - Apr 2: EthCC
Apr 5 - May 3: House of Games
Join our Telegram group and let us know if you’ll come hang with us!
Until then, sending you love… 💕
✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is an R&D Lab on a mission to build a global network of solarpunk communities. 💕 Join us as we chronicle our journey through residencies, co-living places, pop-up cities, regenerative villages, and Solarpunk lifestyles. ☀️
such a good time
Looks amazing! Keep on building guys!