For years, Agartha lived in worldbuilding, articles, late-night group chats, and a slowly growing map of Solarpunk communities around the world. In our first podcast episode, we finally sat down to connect the dots out loud:
Why we couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off
Why we walked away from comfortable careers in tech
What we are actually trying to build
Why we believe a network of communities could be one real answer to the state of the world
In this episode, our amazing friend & advisor, Richa Parikh, interviews the two of us: Nico Shi and Jeremy Dela Rosa, co-founders of Agartha, and draws the whole origin story into the open.
Nico’s turning point came in living in Venice Beach, surrounded by kind, talented tech people and, a block away, a homeless encampment that everyone had learned to walk past.
You go out and you see a crazy homeless camp every single day. It felt really dystopic. The fact that everyone around me were kind of just normalized about it felt even more dystopic. I just felt like I needed to do something really radical.
That pull led her to Mars College, three months living off-grid in the California desert, building the internet, solar, and water from scratch alongside fifty people teaching each other everything from coding to baking bread.
Jeremy arrived from two decades in big tech and a Web3 nonprofit, carrying a vision that kept returning in meditation: regenerative villages, robots growing food, people living in warmth and harmony. For years he assumed it was fantasy. Then he met Nico, who had quietly built a map of exactly that.
The pathway towards regenerating the world and uniting humanity as a species is tied to how we live individually and how we live in communities. This vision constantly came to me around these regenerative villages, farms, and communities, and now it has crystallized into this Solarpunk Campus Vision.
Nico came into this disillusioned, and she says why plainly:
It’s really hard for these villages to still be connected to the rest of the world, which is why a lot of them just end up becoming kind of culty.
The answer, for both of us, isn’t to exit society. It’s to stay in it. Nico doesn’t think capitalism is the enemy: “capitalism is the system that’s still working”. Cutting yourself off from it also cuts your ability to make anything, or reach anyone. The more interesting problem is coordination between the communities already doing this well.
Jeremy explains how Agartha organizes its idea of Solarpunk around four key pillars:
Ethical Technology
Planetary Regeneration
Loving Community
Spiritual Growth
Plenty of places nail one or two of them. Almost none hold all four at once, and that rare, whole version is what we want to incubate. Nico’s framing is “Auroville and Harvard having a baby”: a college campus deep integrated in a permaculture forest, studying frontier tech and spirituality, integrated with a real community.
And yeah, there are aliens. Nico lays out a three-step arc in Agartha’s lore:
Mission aligned individuals living in true alignment towards their purpose
These individuals building a Solarpunk campus together, and spreading around the world as a network of nodes
Once we’ve reached a level of peace, inner-alignment, and planetary harmony… alien contact happens.
“If you think we’re crazy, that’s totally okay.”
We’re at the very beginning: “step one of step a thousand,” as Jeremy puts it. This year is about the small, concrete version: telling true stories of people building Solarpunk projects right now, and finding the people who have felt a little crazy for wanting a different way to live. If that’s you, welcome home.❤️
We’ve got some fantastic Solarpunk guests and conversations lined up! Follow along here: new episodes every other Tuesday.
💞 Thanks for watching! This podcast is a labor of love (and has been in the works for many months). If you’d like to support our work and see more of these kinds of conversations, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or contributing to our Artizen campaign! 🙏
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