The Fall quarter of my senior capstone provided me with many opportunities to work on small-scale projects to test my skills. For the second round of these projects, I decided to be a part of the Solarpunk project. Our guidelines were to create concept art or writing for a solarpunk future of the Monterey Bay region while focusing on an assigned sector. Solarpunk is a hopeful, eco-friendly movement of speculative fiction that is better defined in this manifesto.
My group and myself were assigned to focus on kelp farming. In the three weeks of this project, I wrote 3 short stories that explored what kelp farming could mean for this kind of future while also speculating on the lives of those who would call this time their own. I emphasized the importance of community, respect towards the environment, and the commitment to waste little.
In A Giant Kelp Harvest, we see the kind of work to help sustain communities in a solarpunk Santa Cruz. The group of four reflects the power of a tight-knit community toward a task. When developing this short story, I wanted to make sure to allude to the "normals" of that time; sea otters and divers working together, fog rigs, sunskiffs, and a natural seaweed wall.
Pages: 3
Words: 1058
You can use the link to the Google Drive document here to read the rest.
