It’s the time of year to look forward with hope.
Here are some excerpts from a recent piece by Alexandria Shana promising just that:
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 is a young and evolving concept, with various interpretations. Essentially, it rejects dystopian pessimism and, instead, puts forward regenerative aspirations that challenge us to alter our social habits. Appropedia’s Solarpunk page collects further political analysis and offers a selection of work from Solarpunk activists who are, “envisioning a positive future beyond scarcity and hierarchy, in which humanity is reintegrated with nature, and technology is used for human-centric and ecocentric purposes.”
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Solarpunks are building the future via projects like co-ops, community gardens, citizen assemblies, tenant unions, co-housing, care and resource sharing, free stores, bike kitchens, repair cafes, and establishing various circular and gift economies. Mutual aid is Solarpunk. Growing a food lawn instead of a grass monoculture, developing a communal “library of things“, fixing and mending and repurposing as opposed to buying and disposing are all Solarpunk. Embracing the kindergarten logic ‘sharing is caring’ is Solarpunk. Using technology that lets nature do its thing is Solarpunk. Living onboard a sailboat, I use simple low-tech solutions like a windscoop for cooling, sails for moving, and a rain catchment system for fresh water. Planting a shade tree near your home to use less air conditioning is Solarpunk. However, isolationism, setting up yourself to be perfectly Solarpunk without any concern for or efforts to engage with others, is not Solarpunk. Hope grows by sharing and becomes tangible by doing. Since the full benefits of hope are fully reaped only after its seeds have been sown, hope in action becomes regenerative.
What about bigger systemic applications? Too much traffic and pollution in your city? Expensive and difficult to get from home to work? Instead of building bigger highways or simply making more electric cars, a Solarpunk infrastructure project could be building up clean public transportation, transport shares and then transitioning to a commons of transport, reorganizing residential, productive, and communal spaces to become better integrated and more accessible, etc. Solarpunk compliments practical social vision and movements ranging from participatory society, to degrowth, to social ecology, to library socialism, to rebuilding the commons, to solidarity economies, to honoring and learning from indigenous cultures. Solarpunk’s values are rooted in the traditions of anarchism, socialism, ecological reciprocity, and human creativity, while it rejects the dogmas of history and seeks instead to imagine a new aspirational future.
What does hope look like? Can you show it to me? Yes. Solarpunk can help us see, hear, feel, and immerse ourselves in the future we are building. That is hope.
Solarpunk: Radical Hope – Resilience
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