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Title: What is Solarpunk? Author: Saint Andrew Date: Dec 16, 2020 Language: en Topics: solarpunk, eco-anarchy, post-civ, Breadtube Source: Retrieved on June 8, 2021 from https://youtu.be/hHI61GHNGJM
One of my favourite fusions of art and politics. Solarpunk is everything
from a positive imagining of our collective futures to actually creating
it. It derives its name from the cyberpunk genre, and all the other
punks it has spawned.
Rell quick, there’s steampunk, which focuses on the Industrial
Revolution and steam-powered tech. It’s one of the most popular after
cyberpunk. There’s dieselpunk, focused of the designs of the interwar
period. There’s atompunk, focused on atomic power. Steelpunk, focused on
late 20^(th) century hardware. Stonepunk, which is neolithic. There’s
even nowpunk, which is set...today.
Solarpunk is a shining vision of a positive future, grounded in our
existing world, that emphasizes the need for environmental
sustainability, self-governance, and social justice. It’s a movement
dedicated to human-centric and eco-centric ends. It looks beyond the
limitations of capitalism and beyond the current rift between humanity
and nature. It’s a futurism that focuses on what we should hope for
rather than on what to avoid.
Solarpunk recognizes that climate change, the consequences of centuries
of damage, aren’t averted in the future. Yet it still manages to
incorporate hope. A future where we’ve got a lot of work to do, but
we’re doing better. We’re using technology for more uplifting ends. Like
seed bombing drones and solar ovens. Solarpunk emphasizes real-world
application. It’s all about what we do here and now, from DIY projects
to larger organization. Solarpunk is also very aesthetic, as I’m sure
you’ve realized. It uses a lot of nature motifs and takes inspiration
from art nouveau, upcycling, and Asian and African styles and artistic
movements.
Sidenote: lemme talk real quick about what isn’t solarpunk. It isn’t
slapping flowers and trees on concrete buildings or steel skyscrapers
with some green on it. That’s greenwashing. It has the appearance of
sustainability, but it’s actually really damaging to the environment. A
lot of water is used to maintain those “green” buildings and they often
aren’t built with sustainable or durable material. Don’t get mamaguy.
In the short time it has been conceived of, solarpunk has found a place
in contemporary media. It’s a literary genre, after all, but it has been
retroactively assigned to other things, since the term was really
popularized in 2014. Solarpunk, for example, includes films like
Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke or literature like Starhawk’s The Fifth
Sacred Thing.
Cyberpunk might be grim and depressing, exploring a world of unchecked
corporate power, but solarpunk rejects it entirely. It emphasizes
collective living and the fulfillment of both nature and humanity in a
mutually beneficial relationship.
There’s a full history of it linked below, but basically, around 2008 a
blog named Republic of the Bees published the post, “From Steampunk to
Solarpunk”, which conceptualized solarpunk as a literary genre inspired
by steampunk. There were a few articles and works here and there, but it
gained more steam, or should I say solar, with Miss Olivia Louise’s
Tumblr post in 2014, establishing some of the aesthetics of solarpunk.
Quote:
“A world in which children grow up being taught about building
electronic tech as well as food gardening and other skills, and people
have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from
stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in
between.”
Her post was later referenced by Adam Flynn, in his Notes Toward A
Manifesto in late 2014. He describes the difficulty of being a futurist
under 30, watching the world dive down the path of cyberpunk, with the
ever present existential threat of climate change. Solarpunk, to him, is
the only alternative to denial or despair. It rejects the
individualistic, unsustainable approaches of some futurists, who refuse
to acknowledge the limits of energy on our Earth. Solarpunk is about
“ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.” It’s suffixed by
punk because it opposes our existing world. It creates local resilience,
authorities be damned, from rooftop solar to guerilla gardening.
Finally, a group called The Solarpunk Community published Un Manifiesto
Solarpunk in 2019. It’s a short article, written in Spanish, that
basically reiterates some of the previous ideas, albeit more succinctly.
As for my relationship with solarpunk, I’ve been into it for a pretty
long time. I can’t remember exactly when I first heard about it, but it
was probably on Tumblr. It was also on Tumblr where I was first
introduced to the basics of revolutionary and progressive politics.
Although solarpunk never had a particular political ideology assigned to
it, it’s been embraced by liberatory ideologies of all flavours. From
social ecologists to post-civ anarchists to green socialists.
The philosophy of solarpunk and the politics of anarchism are
practically built for each other. Anarchism emphasises personal freedom
and collective liberation from hierarchies, authoritarianism, and
exploitation. It seeks, as an ongoing project, common ownership,
voluntary cooperation, horizontal organization, and mutual aid.
Anarchism has generally been ahead of its time on many political issues,
from queer to women’s liberation, and its approach to ecology has been
no different.
Solarpunk can easily be synthesized with anarchism, and many of its
various strains, as it explores the possibilities of liberatory
technology, the localization of production, an end to destructive and
wasteful consumption, and a reorientation of our relationship with
society, work, nature, and ourselves.
It all sounds pretty gooey and feel good. But I want to briefly address
those that have lost hope in a better world. Who are stuck thinking that
this, largely, is the best that we can do. There’s this idea in politics
these days that imagination has no place in our “pragmatic”, no-nonsense
world. Which is just false. Humans are flexible creatures, capable of a
whole range of social arrangement. If everyone limited themselves to the
confines of what is, we wouldn’t be where we are today. It’s time to
take some steps forward, with a variety of tactics in hand.
One of which is art. Art has a tremendous influence on us. Music, books,
paintings, TV shows, movies, etc, they shape our ideas of what humanity
is and what humanity can be. While there haven’t been many major
examples of solarpunk art and entertainment yet, I think we can change
that. There are interesting stories to be explored and debates to be
had, through art. Imagine a novel that explores the different sides and
dimensions of the debate on meat consumption in a solarpunk world or a
comic that follows a community’s journey as it seeks to rewild and
resuscitate the surrounding ecology.
Or picture this. Maybe alongside a game that imagines a horrifying
endgame that maintains capitalism, like Cyberpunk 2077, we imagine an
uplifting, yet still challenging game that exercises our ability to
balance the needs of our local ecosystem and deal with the difficult
decisions and conflicts that arise as we reorient our place in the
world. Could call it Solarpunk 2033 or something. There’s a free idea
right there.
Anyway, there are so many ways to incorporate solarpunk in your life and
in your movements. It’s pretty compatible with prefiguration, which I
realize I need to create a video about cuz people still seem to have
some weird assumptions about what I, as an anarchist, want to do. More
to the point, solarpunk is truly something you can put into reality and
practice and spread. Solarpunks can help create the future they want in
various ways, from basic DIY living to maker workshops to creating and
expanding eco living and local autonomy in our towns and cities.
Solarpunk is a key piece in a mosaic of possibilities that center human
adaptability and the protection of nature, which our present world is
organized to destroy, but our future world must prioritize.
“Solarpunk is a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears.”
Peace.