Anarchist Solarpunk Vision for the SF East Bay Bioregion
A proposal for ecological restoration and social equality - organized through local watersheds
In The Ohlone Way the East Bay Bioregion - before the arrival of colonialism and capitalism - is described as a landscape of remarkable abundance: salmon-bearing streams, vast wetlands, oak woodlands, grasslands, and thriving human communities. The East Bay once demonstrated that human communities can exist within a thriving ecological system. Remembering this inspires us to build a new egalitarian future.
Today, the SF East Bay contains enormous suffering caused by brutal inequality and entrenched hierarchies. Life expectancy varies by up to 25 years due to crippling injustice. Non-human species are stripped of habitat and threatened with extinction. Two hundred years ago indigenous villages in this area treated land, water, and food as common property, but today, every basic necessity is only available if you can pay the accelerating price. The laws that govern our communities are often formulated by distant bureaucracies far removed from our everyday lives, and non-human animals are defenseless in their ravaged and polluted homeland.
Green democracy needs to begin here, in the SF East Bay Bioregion. We believe political communities need to be structured inside ecological geography. This essay proposes the creation of a federation of watershed democracies organized around direct participation, economic equality, and ecological restoration.
Ecological Goals
Watersheds are geographical systems that deliver networks of life. The East Bay Bioregion is a federation of watersheds linked by shared ecology. We want our human communities to exist in collaboration with this environment. The health of the watershed will be a major measure of our social success. To accomplish this, we require the following:
Restore Every Creek and Stream - East Bay creeks are buried in culverts, channelized in concrete, diverted underground, or treated as storm drains. We seek to daylight Temescal Creek, Sausal Creek, Glen Echo Creek, Alameda Creek, San Leandro Creek, Codornices Creek, and Cerrito Creek. We want our local waterways to be ecological corridors and wildlife pathways.
Reforestation - we will plant millions of trees, prioritizing Coast Live Oak, Valley Oak, California Black Oak, Redwood, Bay Laurel, Buckeye, Alder, California Sycamore, Willow, and Cottonwood. This will reduce urban heat, increase biodiversity, stabilize hillsides, capture carbon, and improve air quality. We want urban forest and food forests. Every school should have an orchard, every park needs and edible landscape, every major street needs to be shaded by native trees, and we need extensive pollinator corridors. Oakland will enjoy massive native oak restoration.
Rewild Habitat Corridors - Wildlife will move safely across our landscapes. Deer, coyote, raccoon, river otter, skunk, beaver, fox, bobcat, mountain lion, owl, hawk, and turkey will roam freely throughout our watershed as we connect shoreline habitat to creek greenway corridors, and hill ecosystems.
Restoration of Shoreline - For over a century the Bay has been filled, industrialized, armored with concrete. Our goal is to restore wetlands, marshes, shorelines, and habitat for fish and migratory birds. Salmon runs can return here if we daylight streams, remove barriers, improve water quality, and restore spawning habitat.
Greenway Network - People will be able to walk or cycle throughout our East Bay bioregion via creek corridors, food forests, parks, and restored habitats.
Replace Lawns with Living Landscapes - Lawns consume water, fertilizer, and labor without producing food or habitat. We will replace lawns with food-producing landscapes, native gardens, orchards, and pollinator habitat.
In our East Bay Bioregion every creek will run clean, every neighborhood will be shaded by trees, every resident will have access to fresh food, and wildlife will be able to moves freely from hills to the shoreline - even salmon and steelhead trout will once again migrate through East Bay waters! In our bioregion, human flourishing and ecological flourishing will be seen as identical goals.
Food Sovereignty
Our bioregion will produce its own food. We will encourage community farms, rooftop gardens, edible streetscapes, food forests, neighborhood orchards, cooperative greenhouses. Our cities will have gardens, farms and orchards everywhere and all residents will live within walking distance of food production. Vacant lots, lawns, school grounds, rooftops, and public land will become productive landscapes.
SOLAR for all
Our bioregion enjoys abundant sunlight. Utilizing this, we aim to establish rooftop solar on residential and commercial roofs, plus solar canopies over parking lots.
We will also establish neighborhood micro-grids, neighborhood battery storage and community owned energy cooperatives, and electrified transit. We hope to reduce automobile traffic by 90 percent and to completely eliminate fossil fuel dependence.
Green Architecture
We will encourage green roofs and green walls with native and/or edible plants. Many streets and plazas will be pedestrian-only. Underground buildings and urban skyscrapers will liberate the topsoil for wild areas and agriculture. Rainwater harvesting and greyawater systems will be installed.
True Democracy
We need to end hierarchy in all its forms—economic, political, social, cultural.
At the smallest local level we want Neighborhood Assemblies of 5,000 to 10,000 people, who enjoy direct decision-making. There are no “representatives” - the people directly decide for themselves, determining housing policies, local infrastructure, community life, and ecological care. No issue is delegated upwards unless it is absolutely necessary.
Above the Neighborhood Assemblies are the Ward Councils representing approximately 100,000 people (10-20 confederated assemblies). This political body is responsible for education systems, transportation, and infrastructure shared between the neighborhood districts. Delegates from the Neighborhood Assemblies are sent to the Ward Councils - they are not rogue free agents; they are the messengers of decisions made in Neighborhood Assemblies. The delegates are strictly bound to carry out the decisions of their communities; delegates are recallable, and rotated quickly. The delegates do not speak for themselves; they transmit exactly what their Neighborhood Assembly has already decided.
Above the Ward Council confederations is the Bioregional Council, representing 7-10 Ward Councils (700,000 - 1,000,000 people). This council coordinates the decisions of the lower government bodies, and reaches decisions that impact the entire SF East Bay Bioregion.
Creating the Commons
Land reform is needed in the SF East Bay Bioregion. We seek a transition from private ownership of land toward a system of shared Common Land. We want land in our bioregion to NOT be owned in the way that capital owns commodities. Our Common Land will be shared, and extraction of resources from our bioregion will be replaced by stewardship. Factories and workplaces will also become common property, controlled by worker cooperatives. All production will be reorganized around social public need / community welfare - rather than individual capitalist profit.
There will be no landlord class, no rentier class, no vast accumulations of wealth, and no poverty. Our new economy will be organized to provide everything for everyone, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs
Gift Economy Transition
Our eventual goal is to move from exchange to “gifting.” From currency costs to free access, from greedy competitive aquisition to free circulation. The Gift Economy we want is not barter, or vouchers, or hidden accounting. It is social life organized around generosity, reciprocity, and mutual aid. People giving and receiving based on need, capacity, and solidarity. We want a moneyless society, replaced by relationships and care.
UPCYCLING
We will establish neighborhood workshops that encourage the repairing and re-fabrication of commodities. This will hugely reduce landfill and teach people the valuable, creative skills of sewing, carpentry, and bicycle and electronics repair.
Justice
Punishment is not rehabilitation. Today's prisons rarely repair the harms they claim to address. In our new society we will not outsource conflict to violent, private institutions. Instead, we will address harm directly, offering mediation instead of coercion. Our goal of justice will not emphasis punishment. Instead, we will promote restoration, accountability, and reintegration into community life.
Our POLITICAL Strategy
Our ideas can steadily infiltrate and replace the present destructive system. Authoritarian power can shift to horizontally-led institutions. Representative democracy can be replaced by direct participatory institutions. Hierarchies can be dismantled.
The transformation will occur through democratic participation, cooperative development, and the gradual expansion of commons-based institutions.
Summary
In the SF East Bay bioregion that emerges: Wildlife corridors link Tilden, Redwood Park, and San Francisco Bay. Lake Merritt is fed by visible streams rather than buried culverts. No one is homeless. No one is a billionaire. Neighborhood assemblies meet beneath restored oak groves. Governance is coordination among equals and economy is sharing the local abundance. Hierarchy is replaced by egalitarian relations among equals. People live in a beautiful, restored landscape, sharing the region with thriving forests, clean waterways, returning wildlife, and one another.
References
Peter Kropotkin — commons, mutual aid, gift economy
Elisee Reclus - anarchism, geography
Murray Bookchin — assemblies, confederation, social ecology
Starhawk - urban greening
Ernest Callenbach - upcycling, transit
Rojava — democratic confederalism
Kerala — decentralized governance
Solarpunk — ecological restoration, renewable energy, food sovereignty
Bioregionalism — watersheds as political geography
Practical Steps for Transition
Democracy
Determine map-lines for neighborhood assemblies - they will be primary governing bodies.
Organize neighborhood assembly monthly meetings
Develop community constitutions
Train facilitators and mediators.
Create youth councils and elder councils.
Publish neighborhood websites and create neighborhood newsletters.
Encourage participatory budgeting.
Federate neighborhood assemblies into wards.
Assemblies send recallable delegates to ward council meetings.
Ward council meetings coordinate services between neighborhood assemblies
Establish watershed councils to manage manage ecological systems.
Hold watershed congresses to coordinates large-scale issues.
Mutual Aid
Circulate the resource guide Everything Free in the SF East Bay
Create mutual aid networks
Create emergency support teams - street medics.
Create free food programs
Set up community fridges
Establish free stores
Launch time banks (if we’re doing reciprocal ‘mutualism’)
Create skill-sharing networks
Set up repair clinics
Establish tool libraries.
Food Sovereignty
Develop multiple neighborhood farmers markets.
Support urban farms & gardening classes
Convert lawns to habitat.
Establish food cooperatives.
Build cooperative kitchens.
Plant community gardens
Plant public orchards & Food Forests
Plant edible schoolyards.
Establish seed banks and libraries
Set up greenhouse cooperatives.
Organize composting projects
Schedule gardening classes.
Ecology
Map all local watersheds
Map buried creeks.
Organize creek cleanups
Daylight creeks.
Remove invasive species.
Plant native trees
Plant pollinator gardens.
Install owl boxes.
Create biodiversity surveys.
Restore riparian corridors.
Restore wetlands.
Restore shoreline habitat.
Reconnect wildlife corridors.
Expand oak woodlands.
Expand redwood groves.
Restore steelhead habitat.
Restore salmon habitat.
Reintroduce beavers
Wildlife corridors connect hills and shoreline.
Economy
Launch worker cooperatives
Set up childcare cooperatives
Establish elder cooperatives.
Set up credit unions
Land is common stewardship.
Housing is a social guarantee.
Utilities are community-owned.
Necessities are universally available.
Production is organized around need.
Gift institutions are normal.
Libraries of things are universal.
Knowledge is freely shared.
Convert vacant buildings into housing
Develop eco-villages.
Establish housing commons.
Cooperation and social provision is the accepted culture.
Energy
Create solar cooperatives.
Build neighborhood microgrids.
Install community batteries.
Electrify public buildings.
Electrify transit.
End fossil fuel consumption.
Solarpunk Future
All energy is renewable.
Cities are shaded by trees.
Greenways connect communities.
Most daily trips are walking, cycling, or transit.
Buildings generate energy.
Waste is minimized.
Ecological literacy is universal.
The health of the watershed is a primary measure of success
Human flourishing and ecological flourishing are mutually reinforcing.