The ideas driving the SolarPunk vision are going more and more mainstream. Now the latest edition of the New World/New European is keen to look at “Utopia, with solar panels”:

Solarpunk began as a sci-fi vision of a beautiful, sustainable planet. Now it inspires Hollywood movies and real-life tech. Can it change the world?

“What does a sustainable civilisation look like, and how can we get there?” As stated in the Solarpunk Manifesto, this is the founding purpose of solarpunk, a literary, aesthetic and cultural genre that portrays an equitable society sustained by renewable energy and living in harmony with nature. It hopes that fossil fuel’s extractive damage will be replaced by solar power’s renewable light, which will change not only how we power buildings and manufacturing, but how we design and organise our cultures.

Solarpunk was born online in the mid-2000s and thrived on blogs and in independent literature. Around the turn of the decade, it started to influence wider media. The depiction of Wakanda, the African city featured in the 2018 film Black Panther, was a joyful moment for solarpunks, showing how a civilization could combine the benefits of cutting-edge technology with living in balance with its environment…

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