Not only is SolarPunk going very mainstream – it’s being seen in a very positive, promising light.
Here’s a reposting of an excellent overview of the cultural and environmental phenomenon that is SolarPunk from a recent edition of Readers Digest:
Is solarpunk’s utopian dream the answer to climate doomism?
Becca Inglis 22 April 2023
What is solarpunk, and can it really save us from the climate crisis? We explore the sci-fi art movement that’s preaching radical optimism and politics
Cyberpunk’s eco successor
Solarpunk is a reaction to the more dystopian cyberpunk, which dominated sci-fi in the Eighties and Nineties. In films like The Matrix, Bladerunner and Ghost In The Shell, mega metropolises stretched out for miles, crammed with forbidding towers, cowboy hackers and robots with dubious motives. The more that humans plugged into the disembodied web, the more cyborgian we became, and further from our grounded, pastoral selves. Rarely do you see a plant flower in cyberpunk, let alone a sprawling forest.
Not so in solarpunk, an alternative vision emerging on the internet, which dreams of a more hopeful future for people and planet. Solarpunk’s central premise is that there are ways for nature and tech to exist in harmony—we just need the imagination and motivation to make it happen.
Solarpunk’s radical utopia
“We’re solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair,” Adam Flynn writes in a seminal essay that sketches out some of solarpunk’s core principles. Rather than give in to dystopian pessimism, solarpunks preach radical optimism. It’s a solutions-focused movement that concentrates, in Flynn’s words, on “finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and more importantly for the generations that follow us”.
Head to the r/solarpunk subreddit and you’ll find reams of posts sharing new innovations in renewable energy, vertical farming or sustainable architecture. Key to the solarpunk mindset is a belief that today’s threats to humanity’s future, no matter how seemingly insurmountable, can and will be fixed.
Unrelenting optimism might seem naive, given the IPCC’s latest report. With researchers predicting a higher than 50 per cent chance that global temperatures will rise by more than the (already disastrous) 1.5°C threshold, you’d be forgiven for thinking that solarpunks are just burying their heads in the sand. But solarpunks would tell you that their attitude is just the antidote we need for climate doomism. Climate doomism is the belief that it’s already too late to solve the climate crisis, which leads to inertia—exactly the opposite of the proactive attitude we need to transform society.
The solarpunk aesthetic
SolarPunk Singapore: “Solarpunk incorporates the sinewy lines and earthy colours of plants, just like Art Nouveau“
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