Plug in Solar, Heatwaves. No. The Real Story Is Us.

With a population waking up to the opportunity to harvest solar from balconies, after a summer of beating sun. It's what's changed inside us all, that, is the big news.

What's Changing? - Rediscovering Agency

Depending on how your social media and news feed is curated, you might be forgiven for being depressed by the visceral experience of world events. Rather than the restorative effect they are having. That's ok.

On your doorstep. This is happening.

Landlords, tenants and small home owners without the budget for rooftop solar array can now take a few hundred watts of solar from a plug in system. Which is great news. The announcement has come as a balm to the burning pain caused by incessant energy price increases. It's not going to fix too much to start, but it's a message. And a conversation, which is being had in the aisles of Lidl and the pub gardens around us.

Energy generation from solar is not new news, but the possibility, the opportunity is. So with school runs starting, end of holiday bank holidays, University freshers - they're just a hint of places where we can briefly ignore world calamities and discuss what could work for us. Here, now. You can buy and plug it in. Today.

And that feels like action. Taking action. Having agency.

Community energy is the same feeling, permitted on a larger scale. Slower but still working, taking action, feeling like change is possible.

The acceleration of this process occurs when everyone starts to become exposed to weaknesses in our existing support structures.

It's counter intuitive to think. But the stress of the heatwaves of this summer, are now a learned experience, which will nudge our next steps.

Weakness Is Power

The terrible mis-truth peddled in modern society is that we, as individuals are so very important and powerful that our singular choice about an energy supplement, or bicycle or even worse, life hacks - can make us stronger - impervious to the challenges of living. These individual choices do not make communities change.

This story disguises the essential interdependence of human experience. You cannot be born without a mother. Women are essential. You cannot learn about the mistakes to avoid, to stay alive, without your elders knowledge and experience. A community cannot drive forward with vigour and vim unless youthful exuberance is harnessed.

So it is with some irony, that all of these sources of human power, the young, the old, the women. Are the ones that have been most exposed and least protected by the failures in our experiences of this summer heat.

They have bore the brunt of the arrogance of self belief. And we have bled, and lost them.

Technology is sold as the agent of change, of resilience of fortitude.

It isn't. It's a tool to facilitate, not a salvation.

The strongest indicator of our future potential is the growing network of humans, is that we recognise to keep us all alive - we need each other.

Climate stress, is creating climate resilience and action.

History Repeats

The often cited study of the Chicago heatwave of 1995 featured in “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,” by New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg - demonstrated the societal, governmental and community based actions that can be started. It's not hard to see the lessons which have yet still to be applied in todays accelerating, heating climate.

Rest

After the exhausting heat. We can take time, if for a moment, to rest.

Rest is not surrender. It is what humans have always done between periods of effort: stopped, talked, shared what happened, learned and prepared for what comes next. This summer exposed weaknesses in our homes, our energy system and in the idea that resilience is something we can simply buy for ourselves.

But it also showed something rather more hopeful. People are looking around, talking to neighbours, putting panels on balconies, joining community energy schemes and asking what they can do next.

Technology is not going to save us. But rediscovering that we can act, together, might.