The quick description of solarpunk that I originally threw up on my link roundup was "well it's a bit like all the other -punks, steampunk, cyberpunk, etc, where it's an aesthetic, it's a fashion option, it's a worldbuilding description, but it's also a loose collection of ideals and goals that can be used or aspired to in everyday life here. It has degrowth and gardening and permaculture, it has all the tech of cyberpunk but has an optimism that most of the punks don't have, an aggressive optimism but optimism none the less."
For me, the appeal of solarpunk is the *hope* built into it. In many ways it feels like we already live in the cyberpunk dystopia that William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson were writing about in the 80s and 90s, and I like steampunk and dieselpunk for stories but they're inherently situated in the past. Solarpunk, though, feels futuristic in a way that's achievable. Maybe. Hopefully? It seems like something that can be reached, and on an individual level, not just a societal level.
There's a solarpunk manifesto that I've seen a few places, though not as commonly as ten years ago. It's got a Creative Commons license so I put it below. I might end up editing it, but the outline there works pretty well for me.
There are two kinds of stories I see with a solarpunk vibe. The first are stories set in the "world of tomorrow" where it seems very close to the present, and the stories are about people dealing with situations that seem like they could happen in a week or two. They tend to have characters learning or figuring out things that I, the reader, can then apply to my own life:
The second type is more in the future, where the worldbuilding includes conscious choices to make worlds that are more utopian, where the people looked around and said "let's make this better". Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot series are the first thing that comes to mind, along with Ursula K. Le Guin and the utopian Wakanda that *Black Panther* showed even though that's placed alongside the "present".
Outside of fiction, though, solarpunk does a remarkable job of connecting other things I'm interested in: homesteading and self-sufficiency, intentional community, alternative energy, public transit and walkable cities... a lot of things I'd previously grouped away under prepping but didn't like the way preppers talked about them.
It does mean I tend to group my collapse links alongside my solarpunk links. I think I first heard the term "collapse-aware" from Mildew Amyx. The phrase just means being someone who knows that our current civilization is... precarious, let's say, due to climate change, peak oil, fascism and everything else.
On one hand, I see "collapse-aware" used by Doomers to describe living with the knowledge that civilization is going to end any time now, or at least in the next couple of decades, and we're probably going to die horribly in the process. They talk about stuff like cringing when their kids talk about what they want to be when they grow up. It's defeatist and depressing and frankly its got a first world privilege energy to it.
I understand depression, I deal with depression. What Doomers talk about isn't depression in the biochemical sense but something that looks a lot like giving up because you've decided you're not going to get what you were promised.
But across pretty much all of human history, people in situations that seem unthinkable to my experience have wondered if their kids will get to grow up, and they kept going *for* those kids. A lot of them are doing that right now. Providing what they can, doing everything they can to prepare their kids for the world. Continue to do anything they can to make the world kinder to their kids.
The collapse awareness I'm interested in is built on mutual aid, and the knowledge that we are safest when we have each others' backs. People who know how to help each other when the supply chain breaks down, people like Mildew who study herbalism so they can provide access to others.
That kind of collapse awareness, where resources are pooled and shared, that's solarpunk. Degrowth, reducing our footprint so there is more to go around and so we aren't caught off guard, understanding that modern capitalism's model of growth at all costs is deeply, deeply broken, that's solarpunk. Permacomputing, the effort to make computers and other tech devices last longer though repair and by creating software that requires fewer resources, that's solarpunk.
Solarpunk (and sometimes what's called lunarpunk) can be spiritual and even religious in a way that there just isn't space for in most prepper communities. This is where I put speculation about the apparent activity levels of various gods and powers, metaphysical influences on current situations, and magic used for social good, that kind of stuff. What John Beckett calls Tower Time goes here. There also tends to be a very Buddhist stream through it, in my opinion, where we can clearly see what is wrong with the world and we try to act with right words and right actions to improve it.
Alongside that Buddhist vibe and the degrowth there are also related topics like slow living, which is about simplifying your life and living in the moment rather than focusing on curating your life for others, about being willing to do things slowly instead of taking the fastest option and enjoying it while you do. It started out being about slow food instead of fast food, and people have applied the principles to other areas ever since as fastness is thrust upon us. It runs up against simple living, too.
I collect way more links than I can ever properly use, you can browse them at your leisure.
Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”
The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.
Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world , but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.
Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.
Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Text from Ian Dennis Miller with reference to Adam Flynn.