Quotes from this article:
As we percolated through our respective nations’ education systems, we were exposed to WorldChanging and TED talks, to artfully-designed green consumerism and sustainable development NGOs. Yet we also grew up with doomsday predictions slated to hit before our expected retirement ages, with the slow but inexorable militarization of metropolitan police departments, with the failure of the existing political order to deal with the existential-but-not-yet-urgent threat of climate change. Many of us feel it’s unethical to bring children into a world like ours. We have grown up under a shadow, and if we sometimes resemble fungus it should be taken as a credit to our adaptability.
It does feel strange to remember back to my days in high school and remember all the messages of positivity that we were flooded with; it's even more strange when I remember that, during my first year of teaching in 2010, the same messages were being broadcast to my students. The school was trying to get me to buy into them, too; they wanted me to push that on my students, even though I had graduated straight into the 2008 economic crash from university. They wanted me to provide that positivity, despite all the war crimes that were so blatant in my lifetime (in Iraq and Afghanistan).
I do like that this person, thankfully, hasn't mentioned overpopulation. So many of the other solarpunk pieces from 2014/2015 do, and that myth has been debunked for years. Overpopulation is racist Malthusian nonsense that keeps getting repackaged and needs to stop.
Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century “destroy it all and build something completely different” modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.
There’s an oppositional quality to solarpunk, but it’s an opposition that begins with infrastructure as a form of resistance.
This also feels like something that could easily lend itself to disability, and it's something I've mentioned repeatedly. Build the shit everyone needs in the safest way possible.
Solarpunk draws on the ideal of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, Ghandi’s ideal of swadeshi and subsequent Salt March, and countless other traditions of innovative dissent. (FWIW, both Ghandi and Jefferson were inventors.)
I don't know enough about Ghandi's ideal of swadeshi, but Jefferson can get fucked. You cannot tell me this is a broadly diverse and inclusive genre and then tell me it draws on Jefferson and his ideal of the white man that he believed was typical of the era. If solarpunk draws upon white colonisers, then what's the point?
