Solarpunk is the speculative fiction genre that replaced dystopian doom with solar panels, community gardens, and radical hope. A complete introduction to the genre's origins, subgenres, key writers — Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Ursula Le Guin — and how it compares to science fiction, dystopian fiction, fantasy, and horror.
This video does a great job explaining the practical usefulness of the ‘Collective dreaming’ that Solarpunk provides. In short, it gives us a collective goal to aim toward, which then prompts us to figure out what the best way of achieving that goal is with the tools at hand.
In that way, I would put forward that Solarpunk provides a useful framework to address the issues we face today. At its core it encourages decentralized grassroots community building to address problems (the ‘punk’ part), which is generally more effective than spinning our collective wheels trying to reform political machinery that is fully corporate captured, and I would consider a form of prefiguration.
And the ‘Solar’ part encourages adopting practical and ecological technology to address the issue of our planet becoming uninhabitable from our current political and economic models; adopting renewable energy (which often scales down really well, helping out the decentralized part), viewing a healthy ecology as essential infrastructure to a prosperous existence, stopping consumerism with Degrowth, etc.
In practice, Solarpunk basically lets us collectively see a plausible outcome if we embraced Eco-Anarchism (basically combining what Catalonia was able to achieve in the 30’s, along with a distinct focus on restoring our planet’s ecosystems).
That it isn’t some impractical sci-fi concept needing yet to be invented tech, but instead an achievable goal even with our existing technology, is a very encouraging and motivating concept, IMO.
This video does a great job explaining the practical usefulness of the ‘Collective dreaming’ that Solarpunk provides. In short, it gives us a collective goal to aim toward, which then prompts us to figure out what the best way of achieving that goal is with the tools at hand.
In that way, I would put forward that Solarpunk provides a useful framework to address the issues we face today. At its core it encourages decentralized grassroots community building to address problems (the ‘punk’ part), which is generally more effective than spinning our collective wheels trying to reform political machinery that is fully corporate captured, and I would consider a form of prefiguration.
And the ‘Solar’ part encourages adopting practical and ecological technology to address the issue of our planet becoming uninhabitable from our current political and economic models; adopting renewable energy (which often scales down really well, helping out the decentralized part), viewing a healthy ecology as essential infrastructure to a prosperous existence, stopping consumerism with Degrowth, etc.
In practice, Solarpunk basically lets us collectively see a plausible outcome if we embraced Eco-Anarchism (basically combining what Catalonia was able to achieve in the 30’s, along with a distinct focus on restoring our planet’s ecosystems).
That it isn’t some impractical sci-fi concept needing yet to be invented tech, but instead an achievable goal even with our existing technology, is a very encouraging and motivating concept, IMO.