SolarPunk is essentially apolitical – but at the same time very political, challenging and provocative as it is…
Here are some excerpts from a piece over the weekend from Carlos Perona Calvete writing in the European Conservative – giving some fresh perspective to a genre which is clearly gaining some attention:
A futurist fiction sub-genre promising to unite Art Nouveau, Hayao Miyazaki, and 1800s Age of Sail aesthetics with implementable green technology, Solarpunk has yet to rise above its present state as a therapeutic tonic for climate change fears.
For his part, Adam Flynn has more interesting things to say about the genre than either the manifesto or his award-winning 2016 short story. In an interview with blogger Mary Woodbury, he refers to practical cases of solar energy being used by lower-income people, expresses skepticism towards how “‘positive futures’ are framed in terms of technological megaprojects, which has a whiff of the Promethean about it,” and suggests that the “onset of the anthropocene” might be identified in 1945:
That postwar flush of high-modern confidence that led us (mostly Americans) to intervene massively in ecological and human systems we didn’t fully understand. Some of that “doing big things” came out of an overconfidence in our abilities, and an inability to appreciate the dynamics of exceedingly interconnected systems.
He relates Solarpunk to “localism, transition towns, resilient communities, solidarity economies, social ecology” and identifies it with
Pushing back against a system that encourages efficiency at the cost of fragility, wealth extraction at the cost of ecological collapse, and self-replicating sameness over the local and particular. (I once referred to solarpunk as “the futurist equivalent of Slow Food.”)
References to William Morris and Thoreau are also edifying, as in the case of the following quote from the latter’s Paradise (To Be) Regained:
How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature! Could we not have a less gross labor? … Can we not do more than cut and trim the forest—can we not assist in its interior economy, in the circulation of the sap? We do not suspect how much might be done to improve our relation to animated nature even; what kindness and refined courtesy there might be. There are certain pursuits which … suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature … The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the sunbeams.
And yet, much of what Thoreau was calling for is already known, and one has only to speak with people in parts of the world where the commons endure or endured until recently, and learn how local communities optimize the wilderness to be sustainably harmonious with human affairs.
In future related essays, I will explore the history and psychology of ‘solar utopianism’ in literature, the best of the Solarpunk aesthetic, and specific technological and localist economic solutions to environmental challenges worth exploring in Solarpunk (or Solarpunk-adjacent) fiction.