Hi, hope this is okay - for the last year I’ve been working on a solarpunk fiction project that heavily features deconstruction, environmental restoration, rewilding, and phytoremediation and I’d very much like to run it by anyone who actually knows this stuff before we publish.
It’s a solarpunk premade TTRPG campaign and hopefully soon-to-be Choose Your Own Adventure book set in a mostly abandoned town where basically the whole place is being deconstructed and rewilded. The players are tasked with tracking down a hidden industrial waste dump so the blast furnace slag and fly ash buried there can be reused in the production of geopolymers. In that time they can visit deconstruction sites, an unlined town dump in mid-excavation, a once-badly-damaged rewilding zone, phytoremediation sites (including one where they’re rebuilding a wetland contaniminated by bad fill), beaver dam analogs on rivers, an enclave of fuel-engine mechanics, former sandpits, and more. Watersheds and groundwater movement play a fairly big role in the story, as do salvage and reuse.
I’ve learned a lot from posts on this community and I’ve tried to get the details right but though I’ve helped with some land conservation projects I don’t have any experience at all with restoring damaged habitats with anything but time. If you’re familiar with this kind of work, or even if this project just sounds interesting to you, I’d love to get your feedback!
You can find the document here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_Ih5SXHQ6r5rQIAkPCzNjVEh921O3ceSN7FuYzEQ6aU/edit?usp=sharing
With a list of relevant sections on the first page after the cover.
And for those of you who would (quite reasonably!) prefer to avoid google services you can find an etherpad version here: https://pads.slrpnk.net/p/Buried_Treasure
Though I’d be happy to exerpt those sections in the comments if you’d prefer to avoid google services.
This sounds cool! I don’t know so much about reclaiming urban landscapes and dealing with the pollution other than letting the forest grow back and lock away toxins in the wood, but maybe someone else could fill in the details for you. Does reforestation already play a part in your story?
I recommend hosting the document on the SLRPNK Etherpad rather than the non-free google docs.
Thanks! Yes reforestation plays a big role - basically things are moving in stages but they’re deconstructing abandoned buildings to salvage as much as possible, then filling in any cellar holes and rewilding the lot. It’s a rural exurb so it was fairly sparsely settled even at its peak. New Hampshire wants to be trees so just leaving a clearing alone will generally grow a forest but I go into detail on succession species and how different site histories impact the regrowth. One section is pretty heavily based on a post about rough mounding from this community and I wrote about a project reintroducing eastern hemlock and talking about the Hemlock Wooley Adelgid.
It’s almost 200 pages with a lot of formatting for sections, text boxes, charts, etc, so I don’t think I can port the whole thing over, but I can certainly copy the sections that deal with phytoremediation, habitat restoration, etc for anyone who wants to read through (not sure how commenting works on etherpad). It’ll be published as a free PDF once I’m done but for the moment I’m so close to finished I’m kind of stuck with the google doc. But anything I can do to make sure it’s accurate will be worth it.
basically things are moving in stages
New Hampshire wants to be trees so just leaving a clearing alone will generally grow a forest but I go into detail on succession species
Respect for natural succession gets a big thumbs-up. 👍
It seems like you’re really putting a lot of thought into this, and I for one appreciate that. These are the types of stories that can motivate people to make real change in the world.
Regarding moving (parts of?) the document to Etherpad, you could let people make edits in place, but you could also just share the read-only link so that people can read it and then comment here with their suggestions.
