Solarpunk as radical hope

Posted on June 4, 2023Comments Off on Solarpunk as radical hope

Here are just the first few paragraphs from a recent article in the Resilience and ZNetwork online periodicals – with a lot more interesting stuff in the full piece:

Dear Hope, a reply

Aren’t you also tired of headlines expounding yesterday’s news? Lines like, “The world is hurtling towards and past ecological tipping points while ghoulish inequality and waste continue to skyrocket”. If you’re my age or younger, which most of you are, you grew up on this ‘news’. Whatever your age, since you’re here reading about radical hope, I don’t need to alert you to ecological collapse and global inequality, nor impart the gravity of it…

 The only way to relegate yesterday’s news to the dustbin of history is to rebel today by re-imagining tomorrow. We must conceive, share, and engage with worthy vision to inform and fuel strategy, to provide structure and guidance for building the new, and to engender solidarity, commitment, and dare I say, hope…

Solarpunk Z by M.V.

What does Hope look like?

One such path towards the utopian imaginary, Solarpunk is a vision and aesthetic that elevates both human and ecological interconnectedness and reciprocity, quality of life, regenerative kinship, communal, and economic relations, play, creativity, diversity, participation, and a culture of abundance.

What is Solarpunk?

Solarpunk originated in Brazil in the early 2000s. In 2008, a blog named Republic of the Bees published the post, “From Steampunk to Solarpunk“, beginning the conceptualization of solarpunk as a literary genre. In 2012, a short story collection published in Brazil, “Solarpunk: Histórias Ecológicas e Fantásticas em um Mundo Sustenavel“, gained more public attention, followed quickly by Solarpunk’s morph into an online art genre.

These days, it is sometimes referred to as a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a genre, or a movement. Could it become an umbrella counterculture that fosters solidarity and visionary cohesion among diverse yet aligned movements? Like any culture, Solarpunk can be expressed in visual, literary, musical, social, and political terms, anything from housing to fashion to activism that seeks to answer and embody the question ‘what does a sustainable and just civilization look like, and how can we get there?’. As a popular Solarpunk facebook group states, “Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and for the generations that follow, extending life at the species level, as well as individually.”

Solarpunk: Radical Hope – ZNetwork

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