Research

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A contradiction emerges: in order to do this we need to activate the techniques they taught us with other ends in view. To read, write, analyze, discuss. But this time not to pass exams, get a job, acquire social status, cultivate the admiration of others. No, here the effort is exquisitely selfish. Not an accumulation of data, but ideas to stimulate other ideas, questions to contrast facts. Roads towards action to be explored. Paths to be forged or meandered along, as we learn to recognise monsters behind their disguise and experiment the best weapons to confront them with, those that enhance our indefatigable quest for freedom.

Works mentioned: Ecotopia (1975) by Ernest Callenbach; Pacific Edge (1990) by Kim Stanley Robinson; The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) by Starhawk; "Speechless Love (2017) by Yilun Fan; "The Boston Hearth Project" (2017) by T.X. Watson; "Camping with City Boy" (2018) by Jerri Jerreat; "Once Upon a Time in a World" (2018) by Antonio Luiz M. C. Costa; "The Right Side of History" (2017) by Jane Rawson; "Xibalba Dreams of the West" (2018) by Andre S. Silva; "Dust" (2017) by Daniel José Older; Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers by Sarena Ulibarri; Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-speculation by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland; Suncatcher: Seven Days in the Sky by Alia Gee

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For those aware of this information, and of the fact that we are not on track to limit our warming to 1.5°C, it can feel as though the clock is ticking and we are willfully ignoring it.

I think it's worth acknowledging that it doesn't just feel like we're "wilfully ignoring it." We most certainly are because the people who can do something refuse to, which highlights the need to get away from this form of government as soon as possible.

And it's not that the shift will immediately fix things, but we need to make it possible for people and communities to make decisions because politicians actively reject the responsibility.

The contrast between the action-inspiring energy which comes from the IPCC’s report and the sheer immobility of our response mimics the energy of someone who knows they ought to stop procrastinating, but continues to do so regardless. How better to describe anxiety than energy in an actionless body? Thus, the contradiction between the idea that we ought to act, and the fact that we are not doing so, produces a special kind of anxiety.

I think we need to be more clear: People are acting and they are doing what they can. In fact, many (especially Indigenous people) are doing so in the face of violent oppression, such as enduring police brutality for protesting harmful oil pipelines.

So this is less like a person procrastinating and knowing they shouldn't and more like a bunch of us trying to do what we can and being met with inaction by those who "control" everything. This is an important understanding to have because, much like the recycling campaigns of the 1970s through to now, it is wrongfully placing the blame on people when it is companies and corporations doing the majority of the polluting.

This is an important distinction to make.

If we surpass 2°C of warming within the century, there will be some alive who will be able to recall a time when there was hope of averting climate disaster.

For the record, this is already happening. We could've averted this long ago, but ExxonMobil sat on their report from the 1970s. The fact that we could (and should) change has been well documented throughout my own lifetime, so we already know of "a time when there was hope of averting climate disaster." (I think this intro would benefit from a little historiography to provide better contextualisation for the climate crisis.)

How do we move toward a future that we cannot imagine? Inspired by this problem, there is a unique task which accompanies fighting climate change: imagining what the world looks like in which we do succeed. Without direction, we cannot make demands. Without an image of what a changed world looks like, where does hope lie? If we persist in thinking that positive change is impossible, we will prove ourselves right. If we are to commit ourselves to consequential change, we need a positive vision.

This is actually beautiful.

Though I do take issue with the belief that we can't move toward a future that we can't imagine, but I think that it's because we need to become better at imagining possibilities. Also, if we know what the world looks like now, I don't understand why we want to keep it that way just because we don't have "an image of what a changed world looks like" in our heads.

Not so much in viewing things through the negative but just being able to go "This sucks, but it can be better."

Solarpunk is a genre of ecologically-oriented speculative fiction characterized both by its aesthetic and its underlying socio-political vision (Sylva, 2015).

Pointedly, solarpunk has no commitment to “low tech” as such (as, for example, anarcho-primitivism does), but rather rejects technologies which are not in harmony with the environment. Indeed, many solarpunk stories imagine clever, high tech yet low carbon solutions to environmental problems (see Grzyb & Sparks, 2017).

However, it is the notion of solarpunk as forward-looking, counter-dystopian, and hopeful which persists most clearly in the descriptions of the genre (Grzyb, 2017; Ulibarri, 2018a).

“Solar” is meant to evoke light, both the broad daylight in which life happens, and also the tone of the narrative.

“Solar” is itself a reference to solar energy, from photovoltaic cells to passive heating—clean, sustainable, renewable energies with minimal carbon footprint. In the darkness of climate anxiety, solarpunk is a beam of hope showing the way toward a livable future. “Punk” evokes the rebellious and countercultural aspects of the genre. Fundamentally, solarpunk imagines an overturning of the status quo—challenging ecological and social injustices. Punk has a long history of anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, and anti-capitalist thought. Solarpunk proudly carries this tradition into the twenty-first century. “Punk” also evokes individuality, although not individualism. By aligning with the marginalized, solarpunk resists the stifling taboos which promote uniformity. By depicting empowered, autonomous communities, neither the sameness of Soviet brutalism nor the false diversity of fifteen different potato-chip brands persist in a solarpunk world. Rather, communities are able to decide their own dress, speech, architecture, life-style, etc.

Aesthetically, solarpunk is heavily influenced by Afrofuturism, retrofuturism, and various strains of utopianism. From Afrofuturism, solarpunk takes an orientation toward diverse cultural forms (where the present, especially in the West, tends toward mass-cultural homogeneity), and acute concern for issues of racial and gender equality (see Goh, 2018).

I think it needs to be made more clear that Afrofuturism isn't simply a range of diversity across multiple intersections. Most specifically, a common defining feature of Afrofuturism is the centering of Black people from the diaspora, from Africa, etc. telling their stories from their perspective. It's not simply "diverse cultures" (even though Afrofuturist texts frequently include that); it's specifically about the stories (and experiences) of Black people.

(This article about Black women's work in Afrofuturism is pretty cool.)

Unique and diverse architecture and clothing, often reflective of cultures denigrated by Western hegemony, are elements of a solarpunk aesthetic with their roots in Afrofuturism.

This is true, but not all books or stories set in "multicultural societies" or including cultures "denigrated by Western hegemony" are part of Afrofuturism. (That doesn't make them less valid, but I think a non-Black creator would recognise their work isn't Afrofuturist just because it includes Black people.)

I don't take issue with saying that solarpunk includes or has inspirations from Afrofuturism, but I do take a lot of issue with not incorporating texts by Black people when discussing this. It's fine that you added other texts showing diversity of characters, but you really ought to have found something. (Nnedi Okorafor's Zarah the Windseeker could possibly have fit well as an example for a lot of the setting, even with the magical realism within the text.)

As speculative fiction concerned with ecological harmony, solarpunk stories often take place in worlds with a past (or a collapsing present), like our own, of mass consumerism, environmental degradation, and colonial exploitation that the characters must deal with (Ulibarri, 2018a). This, too, grounds similarities between Afrofuturism and solarpunk, with an in-universe or thematic reckoning with these injustices.

Yet solarpunk also shares a lineage with retrofuturism, in more ways than one. It is worth mentioning that retrofuturism was once simply futurism, until that future failed to arrive. What the people of the 1950’s imagined the future would look like is, quite often, the essence of retrofuturism. Similarly, solarpunk can be described as (one vision for) what the optimists of our time imagine the future to be. However, the stakes are much higher here. Adapting a phrase from Joel Kovel (2014), the future will be solarpunk, or there will be no future. Many of the aspects of the futures imagined in the 50’s, because they never arrived, can still persist in solarpunk futures: monorails, dominantly glass architecture fused with greenery, etc. Much of retrofuturism is rejected by solarpunk: all things nuclear (both family and energy), the reliance on individual transportation (i.e., cars), and the glorification of consumerist culture.

I find it interesting how much of retrofuturism is actually rejected by solarpunk, and that the rejection of a lot of that is actually a bigger inspiration for the genre (in this regards).

Also, the nuclear family is a garbage concept.

One of the greatest influences on solarpunk is the utopian tradition: it imagines what the future can be, beyond what it is today. In this sense, it shares much with the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, perhaps the most oft-mentioned influence on the solarpunk genre (Heer, 2015; Ulibarri, 2018b).

This is a good way of highlighting an example of what you're talking about and showing how it bridges toward solarpunk. (The mentioned story is The Dispossessed, which is very utopian and wonderful.)

It is utopian, yes, but does not simply wish away its problems. It contains an critical reflection on what a society espousing economic and gender equality looks like—utopian, but not perfect. This notion of an “ambiguous utopia” is also something that solarpunk shares. A shift in relation to the environment, and even the socio-economic system, does not ameliorate all of the conflict in the human condition.

We honestly need more stories that deal with this.

With its concern for ecological harmony, solarpunk is often defined by its sustainable architecture—indeed, the solarpunk-architecture movement is well-established in concept-art.

Mentions Bosco Verticale in Milan as an example of real-life inspiration for what buildings in solarpunk cities can look like. I agree and think that we could be including plants in many more of our urban designs, especially as they can help offset the temperatures we're currently facing. But more than just "including" plants, we need to ensure that it's possible for people to decide which plants to grow. While having a building covered in trees and shrubs is nice, we really need to provide spaces for community gardens everywhere.

(One of the modern problems with Bosco Verticale, however, is that it's a building for the wealthy, with starting prices in the early millions and a penthouse that had been valued at $17.5 million.)

In imagining a sustainable world, solarpunk emphasizes sustainable materials and an efficient use of renewable resources.

Where solarpunk depicts urban settings, surfaces might be covered in plants (ideally crops) or solar panels. Both of these components reduce carbon consumption through a combination of passive cooling, renewable energy, and locally-sourcing food. Buildings may be constructed mainly from glass, as this enables passive heating and lighting and can also accommodate “solarglass” (Goh, 2018, p. 115): translucent, stained-glass-esque solar panels.

Solarglass is honestly amazing, and we genuinely need to incorporate more building-integrated photovoltaics.

The solarpunk aesthetic is not limited to the architectural. Natural colors, bright greens and blues, along with flowers of all kinds, often adorn the bodies of those living in a solarpunk world. Clothing reflects diverse cultural origins, or is homemade (or homemended) rather than mass produced. Musically, anything upbeat or acoustic can be solarpunk, especially if it is hopeful, ecological, counter-hegemonic, etc.

One strength of solarpunk is its insistence upon promoting and including the voices of those who are so often excluded in the present.

While solarpunk is described here as an aesthetic, it is just as substantially a vision of the society of the future. By engaging issues related to the environment, urbanism, and representation, solarpunk stories—implicitly or explicitly—take positions on political issues. The growing awareness of the relationship between overproduction, hyper-consumption, and economic growth on one hand, and environmental degradation on the other encourages people to recognize capitalism and environmental harmony cannot coexist (Klein, 2014). With its utopian influences, it thus makes sense for many solarpunk stories to take place in a post-capitalist world, or to contain explicitly anti-capitalist elements (Hudson, 2015). When it comes to the environment, the infinite growth on which capitalism depends becomes an enemy rather than an ally. Where the logic of capitalism centers on growth at all costs, solarpunk fits much better with an ethic of compassion and temperance in economics.

Wherever growth is fueled by environmental degradation, domestic and international exploitation, or a disregard for the well-being of humans or animals, solarpunk rejects growth. The rejection of infinite growth opens up the possibilities of an unconditional income (in kind or in cash), of ten-hour work weeks, and an approach to economics which generally puts people before profits. A solarpunk world might be lighter than our own because its people are not crushed by the demands of the corporate world and are free from the alienation of modern life. In a sense, the compassion which marks a solarpunk world is inherently antithetical to the logic of capitalism—for example, it is hard to imagine homelessness in a solarpunk world. Solarpunk, recalling the “punk” in its name, encourages depictions of autonomous communities (often urban) with non-hierarchical organization (Solarpunk Anarchist, 2018).

Building from real-life examples, these take the form of urban-garden communes and energy co-ops, recognizing the relationship between community control of resources and environmental harmony. Incorporating the insights of social ecology, solarpunk tends to reflect an ethos that “the very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human” (Bookchin, 1982, p. 1).

The vision of solarpunk is one which mirrors the growing sense that the issues of climate change and environmental degradation are interrelated with all other social issues. When imagining the future, is there any reason to imagine a future with such massive technological and cultural change while preserving old prejudices? Given the inherently political nature of environmental justice—especially its anticapitalist elements—it often becomes impossible to imagine progress in one sphere without extending it to others.

Yes! Because:

Three issues that solarpunk is particularly well-suited to address, to be discussed here, are: environmental racism, ability and disability, and representation. To say that solarpunk can “address” these issues is to say that it offers a depiction of a future where these concerns are recognized and then tackled by the communities affected by them.

Environmental racism:

In particular, this often occurs at the intersection of racialized housing and urban planning, where environmental hazards are relocated away from wealthier, primarily white neighborhoods toward poorer communities of color. Because these communities often lack the institutional power of white neighborhoods, hazards such as factories or waste facilities will often be constructed near these communities. The utopian and architectural background of solarpunk infuses an imminent concern for urban planning, particularly the distribution of access to resources and/or exposure to hazards. High-quality, safe, and clean-energy public transportation is a mainstay of the worlds solarpunk evokes.

Other topics addressed include food access and food deserts (solved through gardens built into infrastructure, added onto existing buildings, or in empty plots of land).

Thus, in the Global North solarpunk may manifest as a detechnologization, as a transition away from an addiction to fossil-fuels or amenities such as air-conditioning and always-on electricity.

And:

In the Global South, however, solarpunk might appear as (ecologically and economically) sustainable industrialization, brought on by some combination of reparations for colonialism, debt-reversal, and monetary compensation for the disproportionate impacts of global warming (Islam & Winkel, 2017).

Solarpunk demands the reorganization of an entire lived-space, which allows for the integration of questions of accessibility at the level of the basic structure of society.

And:

The rejection of the automobile means there must be robust accessibility accommodations on public transportation for people with visual impairments and mobility-related disabilities. These are the requirements of any just society, not simply a solarpunk one, but they are made solarpunk by the fact that they additionally intertwine with the vision of eco-harmony.

It's also worth noting that single-person transport should be made available, but we need to think about how to do this. It's not merely about everyone having electric cars, but there are times where single-person transport needs to be thought about (along with placement of clinics, hospitals, etc).

Few genres have as one of their core principles the topic of representation (Afrofuturism being a notable exception), yet if any do, solarpunk is one of them.

I'm not so sure that I see Afrofuturism having the core principle of "representation" because I do not think it seeks to represent. Perhaps this may be out of boundaries for me, but I see it far more as centering Black people within their creations than as merely representing them.

I feel "representation" is the one category that I bristle at because of how co-opted it has become. This isn't to say that it's not important, but the way representation is used seems to be neglecting authenticity. (And that's what I think genres like Afrofuturism actually have.)

Solarpunk, as a genre imminently concerned with justice, makes representation central to its structure and message—representation of various levels of mental and physical ability, of various genders, races, and sexualities.

Personally, I think we need to go beyond representation and recognise that these characters should always exist within our stories (as they exist within our world). Representation keeps leading us to tokenism and stereotypical inclusion; we need something beyond that, with a range of characters who have different personalities. We need authenticity, not merely representation.

Solarpunk can (and definitely should) do that.

For young people today, there is a persistent and creeping threat. This threat is, paradoxically, not climate change, but climate grief. That is, a well-organized and conscious society could quite easily address the issue of climate change in the next few decades—by transitioning to all renewable energy, dramatically cutting down on consumption, and shifting away from an economic system that glorifies limitless growth. However, a society which believes that climate change is inevitable—that “things cannot be otherwise”—is a doomed society.

We are definitely living in a "do as little as possible" society, and that is infuriating. I feel like another threat (in addition to "climate grief") is perpetual rage.

Sustainability education seeks, among other things, to encourage the “development of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes necessary for transitioning to a more sustainable and just society for all” (Evans, 2019, p. 11). That this could be considered the mission-statement of solarpunk itself is no accident.

And:

Indeed, the promise of prefigurative fiction is not simply that it may predict the future, but that it will produce it.

This is a virtue which can be brought out either through reading solarpunk fiction or writing it—indeed, writing solarpunk demands that students consider what aspects of the socio-economic structure contribute to environmental harm and imagine how they can be overcome or improved.

Fiction can teach us what the future might be by showing us that, against the “trickery and deceit” which makes it difficult to imagine a better world, things really can change. Fiction offers understandings of the world (or its possible future) which are novel, which have never been expressed before. In this sense, fiction offers a new vocabulary in which to understand the present and the future.