A real problem facing young people is that the future stinks.
Solarpunk visions offer something tangibly positive for the future – starting with fiction:
The ‘solar’ is all about seeing technology, not as a panacea, but as tangible positive way forward:
SolarPunk, AI and envisioning a sustainable future – Sidmouth Solarpunk
The ‘punk’ is all about creativity and determination:
Solarpunk stories: “stubborn hopefulness” – Sidmouth Solarpunk
Primarily, it is about countering the cyberpunk/dystopian view of the future:
SolarPunk: ‘just the antidote we need for climate doomism’ – Sidmouth Solarpunk
Here’s a great piece from Bryan Alexander – showing how young people can be given hope:
Solarpunk as a way of redesigning higher education for the climate crisis
One well-known risk of working on climate change is depression. The topic presents so many terrible futures that dwelling in it can be mentally brutal. In response to this grim issue, people have been offering hopeful ways of thinking about global warming. One of them became a design movement which strikes me as an antidote, and I’d like to introduce it and its implications for higher education in this post. The design movement is called solarpunk…
I’d like to bring this design movement to bear on academia as we wade ever more deeply into the climate crisis. My intuition is that solarpunk can inspire us to interesting and useful ways of rethinking colleges and universities. Some AIs agree. Claude.AI had some thoughts, starting with the physical campus…
Solarpunk as a way of redesigning higher education for the climate crisis | Bryan Alexander