10 Ways to Thoroughly “Solarpunk” Society
What does transforming a city like Berlin into a Solarpunk Mecca take?
In my previous article, I tried to lay out the argument for solarpunk as a deeply liberal, participatory movement for ecological sustainability / resilience / regenerativity. With its aesthetics, its design patterns, its budding architectural visions, its spirit of reconciliation between nature and tech, the solarpunk movement bears massive transformative potential. If we want societies that go beyond what we have known as modern, capitalist, liberal democracies (without sacrificing the freedoms and standard of living of these), visions of solarpunk societies may in fact be our best bet.
This is why I have called solarpunk a “gateway drug” into metamodernism, i.e., into the kinds of society that go beyond modern life as we know it.
Solarpunk can do what merely intellectual arguments of better governance, of democracy, even of ecological collapse and the natural sciences, cannot: entice the average person, in particular, the established and new middle classes from across the world. If this potential is not tapped into in liberal and democratic societies, wide swathes of global populations will likely begin to look towards the paternalist and authoritarian powers that are already beginning to cast themselves…
