If solarpunk is a new word for you like it is for me, Connor Owens will enlighten you at length:
Solarpunk is a rebellion against the structural pessimism in our late visions of how the future will be. Not to say it replaces pessimism with Pollyanna-ish optimism, but with a cautious hopefulness and a daring to tease out the positive potentials in bad situations. Hope that perhaps the grounds of an apocalypse (revelation) might also contain the seeds of something better; something more ecological, liberatory, egalitarian, and vibrant than what came before, if we work hard at cultivating those seeds.
Any speculative applications?
A solarpunk polity would replace centralised forms of state government with decentralised confederations of self-governing communities, each administering themselves through many forms of direct and participatory democracy, with countless kinds of horizontally-structured voluntary associations taking care of judicial, environmental, and societal issues in ways which seek to maximise both personal autonomy and social solidarity.
A solarpunk “economy of the commons” would dispense with both profiteering corporations and statist central planning in favour of worker-run cooperatives, collaborative exchange networks, common pool resources, and control of investment by local communities. The aim of the economy would be reoriented from production-for-exchange and industrial “growth” to production-for-use and increasing the bio-psycho-social well-being of people and planet. Production would be moved as close as is possible to the point of consumption, with the long term aim being a relative self-sufficiency in goods and manufacturing. Decentralist forms of eco-technology would be used to help make work more participatory and enjoyable – “artisan-ising” the productive process itself – as well as automate away dull, dirty, and dangerous forms of work wherever possible. After realising an appropriate degree of post-scarcity, local self-sufficiency, and labour automation, it may even be feasible to abolish money as an unneeded nuisance in the allocation of resources.
Other notations make reference to social anarchists; I ran across anarchists back in the good old days. As with the libertarians, there seems to be a disconnect between the ideal system and the people of today. Insofar as the solarpunk movement goes, I’ll settle on just one aspect: religious folks. There is little treatment, at least on this page, of how such a society would deal with the various and varied cults (a word I use in its non-derogatory sense) of today. As an agnostic myself, I can understand trying to gloss over this particular facet of human existence, but if you are going to propose the shape of tomorrow’s society, one must consider the centrality of supernatural divinities in many people’s lives – and how to transition them from that to your new society (along with everyone else who absorbed free market economics with their mother’s milk), or how to accommodate those cults in the new societal structure.
I see a blog is associated with this site, but entries stopped a year ago.
Hopes & Fears has covered solarpunk:
Solarpunk is the first creative movement consciously and positively responding to the Anthropocene. When no place on Earth is free from humanity’s hedonism, Solarpunk proposes that humans can learn to live in harmony with the planet once again.
Solarpunk is a literary movement, a hashtag, a flag, and a statement of intent about the future we hope to create. It is an imagining wherein all humans live in balance with our finite environment, where local communities thrive, diversity is embraced, and the world is a beautiful green utopia.
In the Guardian, writer Rebecca Solnit reflects on the uneven impact of climate change on poorer communities around the world. She writes: “Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.” If climate change is a slow violence on the Global South, then Solarpunk represents peace.
I wonder if Norman Spinrad is a proto-solarpunk, principally based on his novel Songs From The Stars. I get the impression that a typical climate denialist would never have even heard of a solarpunk, and would be quite puzzled by them. Author Kim Stanley Robinson claims some association with them, in this interview with NewScientist (10 June 2017):
Are you comfortable being the guy who pulls the world towards a plausible, not dystopian, future?
Yes. It’s a little bizarre. I have definitely done the hard work. I have taken the utopian road, the scientific road and ground out stories where it isn’t obvious why they should be fun to read. Most of my novels, I think, are actually fun because I’m doing realism in a way the world needs.
As for anyone picking up the mantle, there’s a group of young writers who call themselves solarpunk, and what they’re trying is all about adaptation.
As a philosophic matter, I wonder how to consider the whole of human history based on a solarpunk perspective. Consider this, from above:
Solarpunk proposes that humans can learn to live in harmony with the planet once again.
There is a naive, even maudlin taste to this suggestion which leaves me uneasy. I suggest there are some definite noir facets to the planet which we might consider before we embrace the concept, such things, for example, as whooping cough, scarlet fever, polio, and many other diseases which we now avoid through cures and vaccines, most or all of which were developed through procedures which PETA[1] will tell you are brutal and definitely not in harmony with the planet.
And that’s the sticky wicket for me. If your philosophical goal is to live in harmony with the planet, does that mean I have to sacrifice half my children on the altar of illness? Does our brutality towards other creatures such as mice, rats, and bunnies invalidate our hug of the greenways of the world. I am not mocking the sentiment; it’s an important philosophical concern, and parallels the same concerns we express towards the results of Nazi science experiments performed on helpless prisoners – can we accept and incorporate the results into the corpus of science despite the unethical procedures?[2] Similarly, can we use the results we obtained when we were in disequilibrium with the planet, or does this philosophical faux-pas carry costs which we should be unwilling to pay?
But I suspect the solarpunks see themselves as supreme realists. They see the world falling apart, but rather than advocate for, perhaps, extreme depopulation, or a wholesale embrace of capitalism with an unexplained faith that it’ll solve all our problems if we just get the regulators off the backs of corporations (and there’s definitely a strong undercurrent of that attitude among the libertarians), they prefer to look to the tools available and try to get to a stable state where the world we live on is no longer degrading.
I just don’t know if any such state exists.
1People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
2Last I heard, the science was rather incompetent, rendering the question irrelevant. But as a hypothetical, it retains quite a punch.
