There are lots of fabulous visions of the future coming out of the broad solarpunk project – but how will it work in practice?
This is from an excellent piece this month from Built-in, “the online community for startups and tech companies”:
What Is Solarpunk? A Guide to the Environmental Art Movement.
The sunny, internet-born solarpunk aesthetic continues to evolve online — but what about in real life?
Solarpunk, a science fiction subgenre that visualizes the successful combination of nature and technology, has since grown from online aesthetic into an ideology that some want to see applied to our real world...
So why, when I ask Jay Springett — longtime co-administrator of solarpunks.net — about what solarpunk looks like in practice, does he talk about an old phone box that was converted into a seed library? “That wouldn’t be out of place in a solarpunk story,” Springett said. “But also it’s real life.” The humble example gets to the true crux of solarpunk. It centers ecological responsibility and the actionable practicality of “what can be done in this moment?” It also maintains a fundamentally do-it-yourself impulse — community-minded, self-sustaining and importantly, hopeful...
As solarpunk inches its way further into the mainstream, it might become more difficult to keep the parameters open. Subcultures tend to lose, rather than gain, nuance as they hit mass culture. And that arrival has certainly begun to happen, from solarpunk novel reviews in major publications to a call for solarpunk-inspired games in the wake of the Cyberpunk 2077 debacle. Even the long-gestating decentralization push seems to be meaningfully emerging from the shadows.
But such a tradeoff is probably inevitable. And it might ultimately be worth it for a speculative movement that’s so uniquely fixated on how things manifest in practice — one that makes some space for the fantastical but remains rooted in, as Elvia Wilk [“Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?] described it, “technological realism.” “I have always considered solarpunk to be focused on the practical as opposed to the wishful thinking,” Springett said. “And it’s a discussion that’s becoming more and more prominent.”
What Is Solarpunk? A Guide to the Practical Movement. | Built In
…