SOLARPUNK
No. 12
We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair.
—Adam Flynn
“Solarpunk wants to save the world,” writer Ben Valentine summarises, “Solarpunk is the first creative movement consciously and positively responding to the Anthropocene. When no place on Earth is free from humanity’s hedonism, Solarpunk says that humans can learn to live in harmony with the planet once again. Solarpunk is a literary movement, a hashtag, a flag, and a statement of intent about the future we hope to create.”
In a widely shared 2014 tumblr post that has been debated but is nonetheless emblematic, user Olivia Louise described her Solarpunk vision:
Natural colors! Art Nouveau! Handcrafted wares! Tailors and dressmakers! Streetcars! Airships! Stained glass window solar panels!!! Education in tech and food growing! Less corporate capitalism, and more small businesses! Solar rooftops and roadways! Communal greenhouses on top of apartments! Electric cars with old-fashioned looks! No-cars-allowed walkways lined with independent shops! Renewable energy-powered Art Nouveau-styled tech life!
Solarpunk will not and cannot mean one thing, no matter how meme-ified it becomes; it is forever open for adoption and appropriation… Solarpunk’s wide-ranging influences are far beyond the Art Nouveau often readily associated with it: Saudi architect Sami Angawi’s updates on traditional methods of climate control in Middle Eastern architecture; permaculturing traditions around the world; Singaporean high-rises with living facades. Importantly, the first compendium of self-described Solarpunk fiction has come from Brazil. This is not enough in itself—there is always the potential for the old patronizing “learning from” attitude that Western architects are known for—and “Solarpunk should be careful not to idealize either the gothic high tech or the favela chic,” as speculative fiction writer Andrew Dana Hudson rightly cautions. But these manifestations of Solarpunk ethos hold political promise far more than tired Eurocentric idealisms.
… Solarpunk’s aesthetic is partly a negative one, defined by what it needs to avoid: Apple’s white-box futurism on one end, and on the other, scary anarchist hackery—as in, the non-utopian possibility if the order of production breaks down. Solarpunk neither wants to fantasize about the Dove-soap-commercial whiteness of the wealthy space settlement in Elysium (which looks a lot like Apple’s Cupertino HQ) nor the wretched, biohacker-ridden, reggaeton-pumping Los Angeles the movie depicts on Earth below. Between the horror of total technological white-box opacity and that of total technological transparency, this particular version of Solarpunk finds a semi-transparent, stained-glass solar panel.
Solarpunk highlights contemporary crises. While Steampunks could afford to be dilettantes, Solarpunks anticipate necessity: you’ll have to learn to weld when factory production inevitably breaks down and the flood waters rise. In this sense it bears similarities to its more recent cousin, Cyberpunk (discounting, for the moment, seapunk, dieselpunk, atompunk, teslapunk, splatterpunk, spacepunk, cattlepunk, and what Bruce Sterling suggests all contemporary sci-fi should be called: nowpunk). Cyberpunk turned away from nostalgia and undermined technological progress narratives, “introducing as it did the corporate dystopia and a strong sense of class struggle.”
Solarpunk intends to wrench science fiction from both Steampunk’s magical tech fantasies and Cyberpunk’s tech-gone-wrong. If the energy substrate of the Steam era was coal, and that of the Cyber era was oil, Solarpunk foreshadows and aims to anticipate environmental catastrophe by skipping to solar. As Solarpunk manifesto-writer Adam Flynn writes, if “steampunk is ‘here’s yesterday’s future that we wish we had,’” and “cyberpunk was ‘here is this future that we see coming and we don’t like it,’” then “Solarpunk might be ‘here’s a future that we can want and we might actually be able to get.
Solarpunk understood as “dislocative” fiction might be able to explicitly uncouple sustainable technological advancement from the purview of Western history entirely. This would not be, as Adam Flynn rightly emphasizes in his manifesto, by proposing technological leaps into the future, nor by taking wistful glances at the past, but by looking laterally at what’s already in the world, or what has been historically overlooked. As Jared Sexton defines it, “Speculative: not only about possible futures, but also possible pasts and presents.”
…Online, coolness can mutate. Solarpunk lives in the very cyberspace (maybe now post-cyberspace) that Cyberpunk emerged alongside. The internet may be increasingly sterile and homogenized, but there are still cracks where unexpected greenery grows… The trick for the self-defined stewards is finding a way to gather and harness discourse without policing, claiming, or normalizing it. This is vital because, as opposed to Solarpunk’s still-non-normalized imaginary, “what is normalized,” says Springett, “are the shit corporate images which are the future aesthetic of global capitalism. Green Cities of new concrete and glass with no people in them.” And these the world certainly needs alternatives to. In the end, defending the possibility of non-apocalypse is hard and necessary work. - Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime? Elvia Wilk
“ There’s an oppositional quality to solarpunk, but it’s an opposition that begins with infrastructure as a form of resistance. We’re already seeing it in the struggles of public utilities to deal with the explosion in rooftop solar. “Dealing with infrastructure is a protection against being robbed of one’s self-determination,” said Chokwe Lumumba, the late mayor of Jackson, MS, and he was right… In the long-term, solarpunk takes the images we’ve been fed by bright-green blogs and draws them out further, longer, and deeper. Imagine permaculturists thinking in cathedral time. Consider terraced irrigation systems that also act as fluidic computers. Contemplate the life of a Department of Reclamation officer managing a sparsely populated American southwest given over to solar collection and pump storage. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.” - Solarpunk: Notes Toward A Manifesto, Adam Flynn
“Solarpunk is better characterized as a kaleidoscopic manifesto, an argument in story and image, the song of a community both inchoate and coalescing, simultaneously committed and finding its feet. There’s no guarantee this will lead anywhere, that it will grow or thrive or influence culture and thinking as a whole. But the Solarpunk community and its stance make up a positive force in the current struggle… Here’s to the light.” - Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future, Rhys Williams (2018)
“this shining confluence of technology and magic” - Synthesis, Bogi Takács