Story Seed Library

Imagining a better future in the face of climate change is hard whether you use words - or images, as I have written extensively before. With no proper alphabet, let alone a dictionary, conveying the meanings such as degrowth or sharing economy requires a lot of careful, intentional work.

In the recent years, with the advent of generative AI we could see more and more articles on Solarpunk - or virtually anything - being illustrated by such mindless AI creations, wasting resources and stealing artstyles, while conveying nothing but vibes. Flooded by the sleek "trees on buildings" aesthetic we slowly lose any idea of what the better climate future ideas can actually be.

That's why together with almost a dozen artists, on the April 29th 2025 we launched the Story Seed Library - a new platform with intentional, human-made Solarpunk art licensed under a variety of Creative Commons licenses.

Now every person looking for an illustration for their essay, zine or event poster can make use of the artworks generously donated by artists such as Aerroscape, Astral Requin, Commando Jugendstil, Honora, Jacob Coffin, Karl Schulschenk, Lindsay Brown, Lino Zeddies, Loop-chan, PannaN, Scandinavian101, Sean Bodley, SolHaelan or The Lemonaut.

For anyone interested in joining, the submissions are open!

My goal as the curator of the SSL is to create a good starting point introducing newcomers to the idea of Solarpunk as a realistic climate future. I'm still thinking what would be the best way to provide a space for more experimental - or fantastical - visions.

The Library also supports a tagging system and a simple search, allowing users to browse by license type, theme, image orientation or style.

It's not only a place for visual art, but a new home for the Story Seeds, Solarpunk scenes / ideas you know from the Solarpunk Prompts podcast and this blog! You can even find a few which haven't been made into proper podcast episodes yet!

The code generating the Library's webpage is freely available on both Codeberg and Github, ready to take pull requests - or to form a base for another instance in case this one stops working. It has been created using the impressive blowfish theme for Hugo.

I'd like to extend my gratitude to Natalia Vish (mastodon) who created the beautiful logo you can see above!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to creation of the library, especially (not in order): Scandinavian101, The Lemonaut, Clockwork and Martyna Łysakiewicz!