Earlier this year, Stephen Gossett and Brennan Whitfield writing for the builtin website gave an excellent overview of the Solarpunk movement.

Here are a few choice excerpts:

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 an online aesthetic into an ideology that some want to see applied to our real world.

What Is Solarpunk?

Solarpunk is a sci-fi subgenre and social movement that emerged from the internet in 2008. Solarpunk’s aesthetic visualizes collectivist, ecological utopias where nature and technology grow in harmony.

Search “solarpunk” on Pinterest, scan the #solarpunk hashtag on Tumblr or look at the r/solarpunk subreddit and you’ll likely encounter art, creative stories, mood boards and think pieces on the speculative fiction genre. You may find dramatically geometric towers dotted with rooftop forests or tree-sprouting condos, or even 3D renderings of gargantuan green cities, far easier imagined than built. 

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.

Image: Shutterstock / Built In

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Will Solarpunk Be a Reality?

The foundations for a solarpunk future are essentially here: The climate crisis is recognized as real, and technologies to help solve it are being funded. That said, it’s easy to doubt that an incremental approach to climate politics will come close enough to aligning with the radical, overhauling vision of solarpunk.

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 Cyberpunk 2077’s release. Even the long-gestating decentralization push seems to be meaningfully emerging from the shadows.

Such a tradeoff 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 Wilk 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 Environmental Art Movement. | builtin.com

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