What Solarpunk Means To Me
"...under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being."
- Robert Anton Wilson
I've never liked utopic literature. It's not really my thing, and where it's not unrealistic I find it painfully out of reach.
But.
For almost all of human history, more than 50% of children never reached adulthood. As recently as 1800, the lowest child mortality rate of any country in the world was over 30%. It was not an expectation but a fact of life that every parent would experience the trauma of losing a child. The rare lucky few who didn't experience it directly would still be traumatized indirectly, in the fear they felt when their children got sick and the vicarious grief of seeing siblings, cousins, and other extended family die. To have a child was to live with the knowledge that you would likely lose them as you first held them in your arms.
This trauma was endemic to the human condition. A world without that trauma was the realm of science fiction, or divine heavens.
Even today our world is far from utopic, especially where the topic of child mortality is concerned. According to the last statistics I read, 400,000 children have died in the last year specifically because of how Elon Musk and Trump have cut USAID. The maternal mortality rates of black women and the childhood mortality of black children continue to be disproportionately extremely high in the United States. We have an anti-vaccine movement which is killing children. I don't think a single person living today would call the current state of affairs of child mortality a utopia.
And yet.
The average child mortality rate worldwide is just over 3%. The highest national child mortality in the entire world is in Angola, and since the chart above was published in 20q3 the infant mortality dropped by almost half, until the USAID cuts reversed that. But even with the USAID cuts infant mortality is still 50/1000 in 2025, compared to 57/1000 in 2013. Think about that for a moment. The worst child mortality rate in the entire world, recently made worse by a cruel and massive cut to aid, is still less than half of what the best used to be 200 years ago.
There are nations with child mortality rates under 1%. There are places in the world where the death of a child is such an anomalous horror that people don't even plan for it. That people don't know what to do when it happens. There are nations where most people have never personally dealt with the death of a young child in their families.
That would have been unimaginable for almost all of our ancestors. There was no amount of wealth, privilege, or power which could earn you relief from this particular flavor of human trauma for almost all of human history. Now we can take that absence for granted. Now even one of the most vile cruelties of our age doesn't even begin to approach the same level of omnipresent children's death that the safest place in the world used to boast.
That's what solarpunk is to me.
It's not utopia. It's not even better stewardship of nature or more renewable energy, though those are genre staples for a reason.
There's a reason that when I wrote a solarpunk story about a world which gives us more room to handle grief and where child abuse is dealt with infinitely better, I still wrote a story were a neglected kid in a traumatizing household dies in the opening chapter. I don't want to write a story about a world where children never die. I want to write a story where that's such an exceptional tragedy that people don't know what to do about it, and yet their society still handles it better than we would.
Robert Anton Wilson's quote, about how we have never seen a truly sane human not deranged by anxiety and grief, undoubtedly applies to parents losing their children. And yet. That did not turn out to be an inherent part of the human condition. It turns out that you can have a world where the worst child mortality is better than the best used to be. You can have a world where people have never even heard firsthand of somebody losing their kid. We may not have fully fixed that trauma yet, and we may never, but it is a trauma which can indeed be fixed. It does not have to be.
That's what solarpunk is to me. Whether it is set in the present, in the near future, in the far future, or in a totally alternative universe. Whether it's about confronting traumas in the now, dealing with their culmination, heading them off, recovering from them, or the state of having already built a better world. Solarpunk is a set of stories which look at some of the traumas of the human condition and say, "This does not have to be".
Typically those are the anxieties and griefs of capitalism, the hopelessness many people feel about climate change, and the isolations many people feel from their communities. But the unifying thread of solarpunk is simply that it says things can be better. That one day, we can have a graph like the child mortality one above, but for resource inequality and industrial externalities instead.
Not perfect.
But better.
