The Solarpunk Revolution
Imagining Tomorrow with a Solarpunk Collective Vision
3 years ago a video called “Dear Alice” took the internet by storm. It depicted a family living in a world of diverse plants, futuristic technology, and a society in harmony with the environment. The video was an animation produced by a company called “The Line” and had an accompanying musical score by Studio Ghibli legend Joe Hisashi.
There was only one problem, the video was an ad for the yogurt company Chobani.
The irony of such a beautiful animation that envisions a world where human technology synthesizes perfectly with mother nature, being created by a single-use plastic yogurt company wasn’t lost on the public.
Entire internet tirades and a spinoff fan video that edited out the company’s ads popped up in days. There was an overwhelming consensus: the world the animation depicted was desirable, but Chobani wasn’t.
Dear Alice is possibly the most famous project of Solarpunk, and despite Chobani’s ties to it, the animation accomplishes its purpose. Showcasing an earthy yet futuristic region of cows, meadows, and advanced technology working in harmony. The scene was rare, at a time when most futuristic works peer into the realm of dystopia.
Videogames like Deus Ex, Cyberpunk, Cloudpunk, The Ascent, Detriot Become Human, and Stray. Movies like Bladerunner, Ready Player One, The Matrix, Robocop, and Akira. Cyberpunk dystopias are all the rave these days, with audiences and artists alike embracing this grimdark style to its limit. You can count on one hand the number of major projects that opt for a Solarpunk imagining.
That is not without reason: doom-scrolling has shown us the many present factors that push us toward dystopia. The images of wildfires, bombed Palestinian children, migrants living in cages, flooded island nations, NYPD robot cops, barren ecosystems, polluted oceans, and much more. For the modern human, it isn’t hard to envision a dark future where the world has deteriorated to its cruelest state. But how easily can you imagine a bright future, to hope for a world drastically better than the current one? Especially as our technology rapidly advances toward AI and a virtual hellscape from our nightmares.
It’s about time this narrative changed. That we embrace a Solarpunk counterfactual to a fossil fuel techno dystopia, artistically and physically. To wish for our world to progress in ways that co-live with the environment, that intersect nature and humanity. Creating a planet for all life, not just our own.
Embarking on this journey towards a sustainable future, we must first repaint our collective imagination.
Welcome,
I’m The Librarian and you are reading The Garden Library. This is a blogcast that tackles a variety of topics with a skew towards climate and environmental policy. This is Chapter 1, Page 3 and we are discussing a Solarpunk collective imagination.
Anarchism and the Spirit of Solarpunk
Solarpunk is a movement that imagines a world where the environment and community are one. Interestingly, the artistic/literary movement itself is only a few years old, but the principles and world of Solarpunk are deeply rooted in historical philosophies and practices.
For centuries people have theorized what a post-capital world would be: socialism, communism, nationalism, degrowth. While many of these have been heavily stigmatized by the hegemonic powers that be, no one school of thought instills fear quite like anarchism. While I’ll be saving a deep dive into anarchism for Chapter 2, it’s worth summarizing in brief to understand Solarpunk.
Anarchism believes in a decentralized world, void of the hierarchies of nation-states and institutions. Within the spectrum of anarchism exist many different sub-theories and deviations that each claim a better world. While Solarpunk doesn’t go so far as anarcho-primitivism, rejecting technology and civilization, it does take the spirit of anarchy to imagine a world without borders. Importantly, anarchism serves as the underlying radical critique of traditional dystopian imaginings of the future that progress systems of oppression.
Systems of oppression marginalize certain populations and grant privileges to others: racism, sexism, ableism, classism, ageism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the list goes on. At the root of these structures is foundational oppression in modern society, capitalism.
Capitalism desires profit, profit requires exploits, and exploits impose conditions on people to be exploited. There exists no reality where capitalism can thrive without a population purposefully made to be disadvantaged. Workers, the “third world”, children, and indigenous populations are just a few examples. The current technological revolution that advances a virtual world relies upon this principle, wherein the capitalists develop this technology off the carbon-polluted waters and airs of marginalized groups.
If Cyberpunk is a technological dystopia of hyper-late-stage capitalism where the artificial has exacerbated inequality and eliminated the natural, then Solarpunk is environmental anarchy where artificial power dynamics have fallen allowing community to flourish and nature to be embraced. While both imaginations envision a future of a drastically progressed society, one portrays a grim authoritarian dystopia, the other portrays a hopeful community-oriented utopia.
This difference is important as we segway into how Solarpunk is a useful framework for building a better world.
Imagination as a Catalyst for Change
The people who run the world, the nearly 8 billion humans living on Earth, all have will. The will to do something, or not do something, is what makes our society turn. Be it a community deciding enough is enough and ending a historic injustice, an inventor putting an idea in her brain into a blueprint and creating something never seen before, or the salaryman who finally decided to quit his job and kickstart his music career. Within our civilization: will is way.
Therefore, the factors and methods that influence will would in turn influence the function of the world. Of all the different possible stimuli to will, imagination is queen.
Martin Luther King Jr. needed to dream long before reality could catch up. Children who wish and dream for a better life, often find themselves living those childhood drawings upon growing up. This is not just supernatural speculation: society is pulled in the direction humans imagine it to be.
Oscar Wilde once said:
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life
Imagination is the fuel for our wishes, the reasoning behind how we move, and the willpower to do so. When you wish upon a star, it’s not that you’re manifesting a far-flung future, you’re declaring that you’ll stop at nothing to achieve it. The subconscious decisions you make from that dream, that wish, onward will be per that declaration.
So imagine our state, when the art that future life imitates is dystopian. If our paintings, songs, and novels, are all based upon an apocalyptic undesirable end, likely, we unknowingly subscribe ourselves to that grim fate.
Understanding this, we can see why Solarpunk is so needed: Solarpunk is the radical redirect that repaints our fate. To dream of a better world, one of biodiversity, sustainability, and a tinge of futuristic technology. An anarchist society where systems of oppression and authority are no more, in favor of community-oriented living. This is the art we want our life to imitate, but it’s not the art we currently create.
Liberating Our Creativity and Ourselves
We creatives have to dramatically rework our relationship to this, to create Solarpunk art is to turn the tide of our fate. Not spiritually, or metaphysically, but concretely reshape what we will ourselves to do. When we subscribe to the AI hellscape of cyberpunk, we confine our creativity to a dead end. But when, like Dear Alice, our imagination takes a utopian approach, we can liberate our creativity and ourselves.
Alone this won’t be enough, there’s very tangible grassroots organizing and legislative work needed to be done. But if we can liberate our minds and dream a better future, just maybe we can “will a way” forward through this climate storm and not get lost within it.
For our life to imitate that art, let us write, draw, and dream Solarpunk.
I appreciate your time here at The Garden Library. I invite you to subscribe and explore all of the different offerings.
Until the next page unfolds.