I love Solarpunk so fucking much. It’s the most late 2010s ass genre humanly possible. A genre consisting entirely of Pinterest concept art boards and a yogurt commercial. Aggressively political with no actual political stance or statement other than “climate change is bad.” genuinely incredible levels of sucking
Solarpunk started out as a concept of imagining a sustainable future without capitalism cooked up by Brazilian anarchists, to my understanding. (There's a whole timeline I found here if anyone wants to flip through it.) Something of a humanist/naturalist contrast from transhumanist and singularity/"rationalist" views of the future. And, of course, contrast from the gritty dark hypercorporate crapsack worlds of cyberpunk. A few novels were written, but overall the literary movement fizzled out because it turns out writing compelling stories in utopian settings with solely interpersonal conflict is pretty hard, actually.
From there the political aspect of it got picked up by climate doomerist types who pushed it as an antidote to the impending apocalypse. Alas, being fanatically worried about climate change seems to have fallen out of fashion since COVID for whatever reason. I believe a lot of these people have moved on to walkable urbanism and anti-AI movements.
And the aesthetic side of it started off with a particularly influential Tumblr post from 2014 that had quite a few neat ideas. All of those were sanded down over time into a vision of skyscrapers with moss and solar panels, coupled with some recycled cottagecore material and a bunch of Ghibli screencaps.
And then Chobani comes in and makes a yogurt commercial that's just futurist luxury automated cottagecore in a Ghibli aesthetic, complete with some vague handwaves at a spunky DIY attitude and a whole bunch of small-scale renewable electric generators. And from there the movement, whatever it was, merged with "Frutiger Aero" and completely fell apart into bland nothingness.
I suspect the Brazilian anarchist sci-fi writers who were hoping for some kind of cultural counterpart to thinking that Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" was literally going to come true are rather disappointed in this turn of events.
It turns out that praxis leading to solarpunk future and solarpunk presence is million skills with million names and acquiring and practicing these skills don't look particularly like solarpunk aesthetic. It looks punk. But to give it a distinct visual language, both consistent and recognizable at a glance, you need to put a strictly aesthetic effort on top of everything else.
Praxis itself? It looks like disability activism. It looks like attending local town council meetings. It looks like diving into super specific debate on local law requirements on water-permeable surfaces percentage. It looks like keeping in contact with local priest to snoothly distribute furniture from well-off middle class finishing renovation to 18yo orphans ageing out of the system. It looks like negotating with local cultural activity center how to organise half-illegal craft workshops because paperwork for fully legal ones excludes the most neglected demographic. It looks like lobbying for health insurance to put "replacing batteries in the implant surgery" on the list of covered medical services, so people don't need to surgically replace whole implants. It looks like million other specific things.
People who got inspired by solarpunk tend to spend some time looking at art, then turn around, ask "okay but what can be done now that I can engage with" and then go do it. And then what they do stops looking like solarpunk aesthetic.
Of course there's also that thing that before Covid, lots of climate collapse containment issues were literally "we know that business-as-usual is cheapest short-term but can we focus on how it's killing us long-term". Covid era showed that business-as-usual is unsustainable now, mid-term and short-term and today and yesterday; and also that goverments can simply decide to act and it create tangible effects. Suddenly, it wasn't "solar would be better if your gas import was ever endangered", it's "we build all the solar for yesterday because we cannot afford keeping to gas". Creating inspiring narratives is optional when cost of business-as-usual is visible to naked eye. Lots of people who used to share inspiring pictures of solar on background of green hills either went to install solar and negotiate specifics of grid inclusion, or moved on to the next issue.
Central idea of solarpunk aesthetic was to give people tools to imagine sustainable future; to create visual and narrative shorthands allowing people to engage with vision of non-apocalyptic future.
Central idea of solarpunk philosophy is that apocalypse is anything but inevitable and the main challenge isn't lack of means and tools, but widespread cultural pessimism. You cannot change anything if you believe change is impossible. Therefore, for change to be possible, you need to envision the world that can be changed.
Basically, if solarpunk art convinced anyone that there is achievable alternative to doom, it have already succeeded.
You absolutely can merge in one all the issues ever discussed in context of exploring how sustainable climate-proofed non-capitalistic world can work and how it can be achieved, with the attempt to design a distinctive and consistent visual language for it.
And you absolutely can blame whichever aspect of that merged entity for the fact that detailed fact-based solutions are difficult to derive from visual language or using visual design tools.
You can! Totally! You're just going to sound silly.
To a certain extent, and if you widen the definition of solarpunk to be any type of action against destruction of the earth and toward sustainability in defiance of custom, law, and profit, then solarpunk has been going on in counterculture since 1962 at least.
I think it's important to acknowledge and understand that people before you have wanted change. Silent Spring was published in 1962 and the effect was unlike anything that could happen today. Carson, the author, wrote it while working conservation in the 1950s and was the person who communicated to the American public that pesticides were harming the environment, and killing animals. The title refers to her warning--that if we didn't stop using DDT, we may live to see a silent spring, i.e. with no birdsong, because all the birds would be dead.
That was a spark that lit a fire under millions of people. It was followed by more books, by more researchers, by more efforts to conserve, to save, to reverse extinctions. And you know something?
A lot of it succeeded. Like... MOST of it succeeded. All over the world, too, even though Silent Spring was from the US.
Just solely off the top of my head, here's some things that I consider solarpunk that happened well before the 2010s:
Lead removal from gasoline
Smog emission laws
Environmental protection government agencies being created
the ICUN Red List (i.e. the Endangered Species List) being created, with
Regulations and bans on hunting, trapping, or molesting endangered wildlife in various countries
Changes in home design (look up "earthships" and "geodesic dome")
Changes in religion (look up Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, who cemented the modern neoPagan idea that "The Goddess" is an earthmother way back in the 1960s)
Electric cars
renewable energy efforts
restoring reefs by various methods including lab-breeding heat-resistant corals, sinking sculptures that coral can latch onto, and putting textured tiles shellfish and coral can latch onto on sea walls
Removing dams
Invention of energy-saving materials that insulate buildings better
Laws that regulate and control pollution
Creation of actual penalties for polluting (in the US, a site being assigned Superfund status means those responsible have to clean up the pollution and the status is not lifted until the water and soil test clean for a number of years in a row. Because this affects realty prices, you get people to mobilise and care VERY quickly!)
Mass cleanups of rivers--both Chesapeake Bay and the waters around NYC are safe enough to swim in for the first time in decades.
Technologies and methods that work with wildlife, such as using clams to help regulate water supply due to clams being so good at signalling water quality.
Changing Settler public attitude about our relationship with the Earth from "we can do whatever we want, it'll always be fine" to "we have to be careful and respectful". You may say this one isn't true, but I mean regular degular people. I have watched it change. My mother has watched it change too. You may not be able to see it from where you are, but talk to an elder about how people thought of the environment when they were little, versus now.
Animal Conservation efforts deserve their own list:
In 1988, when I was born, there were zero condors in the wild. The only California Condors--the largest vulture in the world--were captive. There were only a dozen or so left. A few dedicated zookeepers had a crazy idea: what if they started trying to raise the babies to be wild, and release them back into the wild? They did what all scientists do, and applied for federal funding.
The condor conservation effort would be expensive. It had never been tried before. "It's never going to work" said many, many people.
But they made condor puppets to feed the chicks with, and they tried anyway.
Today, there are over 300 condors flying free.
The condor conservation effort is the flagship of conservation efforts in my country. It was one of the first conservation efforts to put an animal extinct in the wild back into the wild.
And they did it despite odds, despite struggle, despite pessimism and discouragement. They did it because they imagined a future where condors flew free.
How about the whales? Did we save them?
Well, yes. Yes we did--particularly the humpback whale, whose numbers have rebounded enormously, and who is the poster species for whale conservation. International efforts were (and still are) made by activists to make people care about whales as animals, to get people to understand ecosystem and to get people to care about the ocean being clean and unpolluted with materials (we're still working on sound pollution but I have faith we can do that one too!). One by one, countries banned commercial whaling. We're not all the way there yet, but when was the last time you met someone that was for it?
We learned that whales cause a trophic cascade too--in the open ocean, whale excrement is fertiliser that helps spark a positive trophic cascade of algae, plankton, fish, and keeps the nutrient-scarce open ocean supplied with critical nutriment.
And the bees? We saved those too! Recently, scientists even found out how to make supernutritious food for bees. While honeybees could be considered invasive in the Americas (Indigenous people had native species of bees they used when they kept bees), honeybees are beloved by Settlers, making them a good poster child for overall bee conservation, and learning how to prevent colony collapse has helped all bees. Now, the conversation about bees can and is shifting toward helping native species of bee. It is common for people to be encouraged to put up housing for mason and carpenter bees, for example, as a fun craft. People are more friendly toward ALL bees because of the massive effort to "save the bees!" with honeybees being the first bee in question.
What about larger land animals? Glad you asked.
Wolves got reintroduced to Yellowstone and something amazing happened--the degraded river healed! Wherever wolves get reintroduced, environments begin to heal and go back to their healthy wild selves. They keep the deer population down, and keep it avoiding open areas, which lets those areas heal and grow strong--without deer constantly eating their new growth. And no, wolves do not go after humans or their animals--American wolves are like most predators, very cautious. Besides, why go after that stuff when there's seventy squillion deer that are much easier to hunt?
Bison have been returned to parts of their prairie home, healing the environment and acting as natural gardeners with their selective browsing behaviour, eating plants that compete with the prairie's characteristic species. Their way of digging hollows while roaming the land creates hollows that other animals use as shelter and lekking grounds. Their droppings are fertilizer. And their meat and other products are just as good if not better than european cows, and obviously they have a positive impact on their range, rather than a negative one--because they are a native species!
There's research out now that hunting cats--big and small--are the natural predator of prion diseases that have been quietly plaguing wildlife, especially deer. This is a huge deal, because nothing humans can do can kill prion diseases. They can survive chemicals, heat, dessicants, and that's all we've got against diseases! Prion diseases have no treatment or cure, and don't have species barriers, so this is a VERY big deal!
And doing all of this gradually built up the knowledge that the way to fix the biome might just lie in reintroducing the largest animals, rather than thinking we have to fix everything smaller ourselves, first. Because the big animals cause what we call a trophic cascade--a good one!
And what about the efforts of individuals and groups?
Well, let's start with the Sea Shepherds! You want punk? They're punk as FUCK, chasing down whalers and harrassing them, ruining their efforts, protecting the whales in an active way that put their personal lives at risk, speaking truth to power about the injustice of commercial whaling, putting their actions where their mouths were. I admire them greatly.
What about the "tree-huggers", who chain themselves to elder trees and face down people with chainsaws and corporations, who risk being shot in the woods where there is no protection or witness, who climb up and refuse to come down? What about people doing research to make blight-resistant chestnut and sycamore? @headspace-hotel is out here having decided she wants to save the canebrake and educates hundreds of thousands of people about it, and I'm sure that has sparked hundreds of people to get involved in their local biome.
And let's not forget the efforts of one man who has been here a century, elder of the conservation community, David Attenborough, whose single efforts I think have had an enormous impact on the entire world and changed millions if not billions of people's attitudes toward nature, toward animals, and toward ourselves. He has spent his entire whole life trying to educate everyone about animals and about the impact of destructive human activity, and I think I am correct to say he might be the single most effective agent of changing people's ideas and feelings about the world we share with the other millions of species.
What about the hundreds of Indigenous nations who have led conservation and fighting against what is Allowed, what is Normal, what is Legal for goddamn generations? What about the water protectors? What about the Spirit of Aloha who tracked down a rich tourist trying to hurt an endangered seal "because I can afford the fine" and beat the shit out of him, regardless of whether that was Done or Allowed or Legal? What about the efforts of generations of Māori? What about the Choctaw, the Lakota, the Wampanoag, the Hopi, the Diné, the Cherokee, the Chumash and the Salish and Inuit and Aboriginal Australians and the millions of others that fight and even bleed and die fighting to defend the Earth? Are they not solarpunk?
What is Solarpunk?
It's all of this. It's punk because it speaks its truth with no regard for what's The Done Thing, for what is Allowed, for what is, even, Legal. We tack "solar" as a shorthand for living as equals within the Earth, rather than living as conquerors. That's how I interpret it. That's the shorthand it means to me.
And I don't know why everyone is objecting to us having art for that. If we can't imagine what the ideal, what the end goal looks like, how can we make it become? If we can't enjoy imagining fun parts of maintaining a solarpunk future, what fuels our efforts through the slog and the danger of fighting in the not-fun solarpunk present? Would you have everyone be miserable all the time in order to have... what, legitimacy? Sorry no, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
I suspect "Hopepunk" derives from this, as well, but is less specific to any one form of how we make it through the impending catastrophes than Solarpunk, which is more about specific conservation, alternative power, and other related anti-establishment paths (including anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, as with all punk movements) to a hopeful future
Solarpunk aesthetic in fiction and other art forms serves double duty, too, by "showing, not telling" details of how we arrive at this world: those food plants growing in the walls and roofs of buildings? not only do they provide food to the inhabitants (showing both positive aspects of self-supply and communalism and perhaps a collapse of the wider capitalist economic system), but they absorb waste solar energy that would otherwise heat up the structure and require additional cooling. and so forth for the other aesthetic choices
(PS: if you'd like to see more thoughts on the subject - particularly for writers and such - back when it was first emerging I wrote this analysis of how Solarpunk fits into the broader science-fiction discussion and history here: X)
I'd say Solarpunk is still very much alive, but like all movements in the larger genre it's become just another refined tool, setting, set of themes, and perspective for creators to use for telling relevant stories that not only critique today's society but also offer ideas and hope for a better future - if only we can learn from the past and imagine a different way to live
