Move over cyberpunk. Make way for solarpunk, the defiant ecosocialist answer to dystopian doomerism.
By accepting as inevitable humanity’s demise by its own hand, post-apocalyptic fiction places no responsibility on the living to course correct.
Solarpunk looks towards a post-capitalist future of renewable energy. It rejects climate “doomerism” and shows what our collective future could look like if we heal our relationship with the natural world.
Far from Star Trek’s “full luxury space communism,” where humans race across galaxies via endless sources of energy, the technology in solarpunk is imminently achievable. In the anthology Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, science fiction writer and democratic socialist Kim Stanley Robinson describes this genre as rejecting “the inevitability of the machine future.”
Instead [solarpunk] asks, “What is the healthiest way to live? What is the most beautiful?”
Rather than Elon Musk’s tent cities on Mars, these fictional worlds “cobble together aspects of the postmodern and the paleolithic, asserting that we might for very good reasons choose to live in ways that resemble in part the ways of our ancestors.”
A new initiative invited student groups to design and plant gardens that will promote wildlife, and cultivate their visions for the future.
Tending a garden is about as hands-on as climate solutions get. On a basic level, putting plants in the ground helps sequester carbon. Vegetation can reduce stress and tension for the humans around it, and it provides habitat and sustenance for pollinators and other wildlife. Gardens can provide spaces for education, and, of course, sources of food. But the act of designing and planting a green space serves another, more metaphorical purpose: It gives the gardener agency over a piece of the world and what they want it to look like — and a role in conveying of all those aforementioned benefits.
That’s the premise behind Wild Visions, a challenge launched in the DMV area (that’s District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, for the uninitiated) in January. The project invited university students to design gardens with all sorts of visions and themes, then bring them to fruition this spring with native seedlings from Garden for Wildlife — an offshoot of the National Wildlife Federation.
For every plant the company sells, it donates one to a community project, said campus engagement lead Rosalie Bull. This spring, around 2,000 went to Wild Visions.
“We’ll be creating in total nearly 6,000 square feet of new wildlife habitat in the DMV,” Bull said. “And that’s just this year. We hope to do it year after year.”
In Bull’s view, this project has a distinctly solarpunk framing — celebrating a literary genre and art movement that conjures visions of a sustainable future, where nature is as central as technology. Although part of the goal was to get more native flowers in the ground, the challenge also hoped to “activate the solarpunk imagination,” and let students offer their perspectives on what the gardens could accomplish.
For instance, a group called Latinos en Acción from American University wanted to focus on monarch butterfly habitat, as a symbol of the migrant justice movement. Others, like the Community Learning Garden at the University of Maryland, were interested in exploring culinary uses of the plants they received, which included sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, milkweed, goldenrod, and aster.
Cities like Ahmedabad have always had hot summers, but now they're nearing the threshold beyond which exposure for more than a few hours can
“Sometimes it gets so hot, I can’t think straight,” said Chunara, sporting a black smartwatch that contrasts sharply with her colourful bangles and sari.
Chunara is one of 204 residents of Vanzara Vas given the smartwatches for a year-long study to find out how heat affects vulnerable communities around the world. The watches measure heart rate and pulse and track sleep, and participants get weekly blood pressure checks.
Data collector Komal Parmar, right, talks with Sapnaben Chunara to get heat related information in Ahmedabad, India.AP Photo/Ajit Solanki
Researchers also painted some roofs with reflective paint to reduce indoor heat and will compare them to homes without so-called cool roofs using indoor heat sensors. Along with the smartwatches, this will help them understand how much cool roofs can help poor households deal with India’s scorching summers.
A man applies reflective paint on the roof of a house to reduce indoor heat in Ahmedabad, India.AP Photo/Ajit Solanki
Chunara, whose home didn't get a cool roof, said she's happy to participate by wearing the watch, confident the results will help her family, too.
"They might paint my roof as well, and they might be able to do something that helps all of us in this area cope with the heat better,” Chunara said.
An increasingly hot planet, due largely to burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas that release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, means already hot regions are getting even worse.
A 2023 study estimated that if the global mean temperature continues to rise to just under 2 degrees Celsius, there would be a 370 per cent rise in heat-related deaths around the world, and most would happen in South and Southeast Asia and Africa.
“This is a big concern, and it also shows the heat divide” between the poor and wealthy, said Abhiyant Tiwari, a climate expert with the Natural Resources Defence Council and part of the group conducting the research in Ahmedabad.
In the summer of 2010, the city witnessed nearly 1,300 excess deaths — how many more people died than would be expected — which experts found were most likely due to high temperatures.
Following the 2010 tragedy, city officials, with help from public health and heat experts, devised an action plan to warn citizens when the heat is at dangerous levels and prepare city hospitals to respond rapidly to heat-related illness. The plan has been replicated across India and other parts of South Asia.
I studied design in Ahmedabad's National Institute of Design. Reading this helps explain the design of our campus, architecture that emphasized air circulation and natural cooling. Mind you, I was there umpteen million years ago in 1989-1990.
I'll be going back into the cave before next weekend.
I'm topping up my queues as much as I can.
But if I cannot make it back soon I'll definitely be back in the first week of December.
In the meantime, if you send me links and reblogs here and to @solarpunkbusiness I'll try to update at least once a week.
I dare not log in more frequently once I'm back into writing because otherwise I'll never get the thesis submitted by the deadline of 5th December
PhD UPDATE
My SECOND research article just got accepted by a high ranking design journal (just as highly ranked as the first acceptance in August) - this CHANGES everything for my thesis in a good way!! I get to take more time to rework some chapters now, extending the old deadline of 5th December to the week after Christmas. Here to celebrate with y'all on 18 Nov 2025
Now that I am on the Dean's payroll to finish writing my thesis I can't put it off anymore and have to dive into this work. My deadline for submitting my PhD dissertation is November 2025. I'm not going to be able to keep surfing for content as regularly as I do - your contributions will help us keep the blog/s alive while I disappear into the writing cave.
My research conclusions presented day before yesterday were so well received by my supervisor that I've been offered the Dean's scholarship for completing my thesis this year!
That's my excuse for the last few days of no posting :D
It started out as a sci-fi genre, but some believe solarpunk holds the key to solving some of humanity's most pressing problems.
Solarpunk is a futurist movement that began in speculative fiction and sci-fi films and has since spread to architecture and design. Practitioners envision a clean and green future built on principles of sustainability, social justice, and collective action.
The name spells it out.
"Solar" signals optimism and a strong association with renewable energy, while "punk" reflects a DIY ethos and an anti-capitalist philosophy.
