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.

Some Things I've Written That Fit Here

I collect way more links than I can ever properly use, you can browse them at your leisure.

A Solarpunk Manifesto

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.

  1. We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.
  2. We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.
  3. At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.
  4. The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.
  5. Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.
  6. Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.
  7. Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.
  8. Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.
  9. Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.
  10. Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.
  11. Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.
  12. Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.
  13. Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.
  14. Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.
  15. Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.
  16. Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.
  17. Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.
  18. The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:
    1. 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)
    2. Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)
    3. Appropriate technology
    4. Art Nouveau
    5. Hayao Miyazaki
    6. Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world
    7. High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs
  19. Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.
  20. Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.
  21. In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.
  22. Solarpunk:
    1. is diverse
    2. has room for spirituality and science to coexist
    3. is beautiful
    4. can happen. Now.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Text from Ian Dennis Miller with reference to Adam Flynn.