Solarpunk in 2023: An Introduction to Solarpunk
In 2016, I wrote this article. In it, I talked about an emerging speculative genre and community called solarpunk, one firmly rooted in the idea of humanity responding to the consequences of its ecological misdeeds not with denial, or fear, but with sleeves rolled up. It was a vision of sustainability and optimism that was already poignant in that moment, offering a concrete alternative to the paralysing fear that many already felt about climate disaster. I was firmly convinced that solarpunk was breaking through, that its cloud of ideas was imminently about to solidify into creations for people to engage with.
Almost seven years have passed since then. I could say, with some justification, that the passage of time alone would justify a sequel article, talking about solarpunk’s journey in the intervening years and its current state. But my desire to reconnect with this topic is also firmly rooted in cumulative grief. Both my own, and the grief we have experienced as societies and communities over the past seven years. Solarpunk is, at its core, a speculative conversation about healing, rebirth, and restoration, one that doesn’t involve retreat into nostalgia or imply that you must become a better type of being to experience a better type of existence. Amid such grief as we have already experienced, as we grapple with the problems of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, I think exploring solarpunk is more important than ever.
To look at solarpunk in the kind of detail I think is necessary, a single sequel article isn’t enough. The genre and movement are large enough at this stage a seven minute read isn’t going to cut it for what I have in mind. Instead this is the first of a series of articles looking at different aspects of solarpunk in 2023.
At times I will raise comparisons with other genres where it seems relevant and appropriate, but I am not going to constantly measure or define solarpunk by a more widely known genre. My focus is instead on presenting as much of the solarpunk movement’s own perspective and context as I can manage, whilst still providing my own commentary and analysis.
What is Solarpunk?
Solarpunk is a political movement and creative genre that imagines sustainable human existence through an optimistic lens. Most deliberately created solarpunk stories are set in the near future, and examine versions of human living in which we as a species act far closer to being the environment’s gardeners and caretakers rather than its masters. These modes of living differ by author and interpretation, but are unified by their shared focus on environmentalism and sustainability, and by their rejection of mass-consumerist solutions and ideologies.
The full documentation of solarpunk’s origins is complex, and the subject of a separate article in this series. To summarise, whilst tentative explorations of similar concepts can be documented online since 2008, what is now recognised as solarpunk was first explored by a Brazilian anthology called Solarpunk: Histórias Ecológicas e Fantásticas em Um Mundo Sustentável published in 2012. Various small scale movements began to coalesce almost immediately. This nascent genre then attracted much wider notice in 2014, after a tumblr post about the concept went viral, to the point where some incorrectly attribute the origin of the solarpunk genre in its entirety to that post. The genre has continued to grow ever since.
Many core ideas of solarpunk are collected by this document, helpfully titled ‘A Solarpunk Manifesto’. This is not the only plausible interpretation of solarpunk, nor does this manifesto itself as the sole source of solarpunk’s core ideals. Instead, the document is a kind of distillation of multiple perspectives on solarpunk, and even in so doing freely acknowledges at the very beginning that the genre ‘is not yet clearly defined’. That this manifesto acknowledges its limitations, cites its source material, and does not presume to own the concept of solarpunk or means of defining it is, hopefully, representative of the genre in its own right. Inclusivity, adaptability, and at times decentralisation are all crucial aspects of the solarpunk movement as articulated by its most active proponents. This likewise means that solarpunk refuses to impose a unitary aesthetic or ‘correct’ set of solutions on either the genre itself or the societies that are imagined by its authors.
However, on the whole solarpunk tends to specifically reject retrofuturism. Retrofuturism, in this context, is speculative work that creates alternate presents and futures by borrowing the materials (and aesthetics) of how past societies imagined the future would look, and at times the most outlandish-seeming elements of that past society. Steampunk is a clear example of a retrofuturist aesthetic and genre, for instance. Solarpunk is instead focused on possible futures. It does not imagine our present as something to be rejected in totality, in the way that other speculative genres often prefer to wipe the slate clean of contemporary communities and people. Its proponents are concerned with imagining how to make things better for us, the people of today and tomorrow. There have been individual solarpunks who have delved into past aesthetic movements for inspiration, and in my 2016 article I had imagined solarpunk attached to an art nouveau revival. However, this is not the same as retrofuturism’s forward-projection of yesterday’s futures.
Solarpunk has evolved to aim for more than simply thematic inclusivity, and began to actively seeking to carve out spaces for, to quote Jay Springett;
indigenous sovereignties, reproductive justice, and radical queer politics
This is fundamentally a statement about what we can and should be doing in this present moment. This is also, to my mind, what separates solarpunk as a movement and as literature most strongly from what I’d call ‘traditional’ cyberpunk and steampunk, the earliest of the self declared -punk genres.
Many formative cyberpunk works placed a scaremongering fear about western society being insidiously transformed, ‘invaded’ economically and culturally, by Japanese culture at their heart, whilst also fixating on the notion of bionics, prosthetics, and other body modifications as fundamentally dehumanising. Likewise, steampunk very quickly grew to elide the immense human cost of Victorian-inspired industrial societies, eliding the impact on working class members of those societies, eliding the immense colonial extraction networks required to gather many of those industrial resources, eliding the genocidal reach of European imperialism. At its worst certain steampunk communities essentially became British Empire cosplayers with a few extra cogs and gears thrown in, pith helmets and all.
Solarpunk, by contrast, is a movement that actively seeks multiple perpectives, that aims to connect ecological catastrophe with the wider injustices of society rather than treating ecocide as the sole arbiter of humanity’s fate, and that (theoretically) isn’t using exploration of the future to avoid confronting the injustices of the present. In solarpunk struggles for racial equality, reproductive rights, and many other causes that impact people right now are not secondary to the goal of sustainable life, they are placed at the heart of imagining what a possible future should look like. Solarpunk has, I feel, sought to grow by actively inspiring people, by providing something meaningful, rather than appealing to pure curiosity. It has sought to provide a community, but also a framework to provide grounded optimism. I do often have a sense, however, of a pressure within the community to prove worthy of these ideas, to meet expectations, that sometimes overcorrects into abstention from contributing to the growing body of solarpunk creative work.
The Solarpunk Community: Who are Solarpunks?
Solarpunk is, at its heart, a decentralised movement. Nobody with any credibility claims ownership over solarpunk, or to be its leader. The elder generation of solarpunks, those who became attached to the movement in its earliest days, will at most refer to themselves as stewards, usually in the context of explaining the movement’s history to outsiders and newcomers. They do not, to my awareness, ask for special status or credibility within the modern movement as a result of their relative longevity. Neither is there a single formal space or organisation to which solarpunks are expected to belong, or in which they are expected to make an appearance.
The end result is that the solarpunk community is maybe best understood as a network rather than a definable entity, a network that at times nests smaller, more ‘definable’ sub-communities within. This network bridges diverse pre-existing communities and movements. The solarpunk community has strong overlaps with environmentalism, futurism, sci fi fandom, and ecological science, which you would correctly call fairly ‘obvious’ connections to an ecologically focused genre of speculative fiction. However, it also has equally strong overlaps with queer communities, anarchism, and hacker subculture, as well as afrofuturism, indigenous activism, and other communities of colour outside of these specific movements.
Through the community’s quite deliberate decentralisation the solarpunk movement has very soft edges, to the point where there are people who would call themselves solarpunks who are not necessarily greatly familiar with any of the genre’s recent fiction or its specific history. Likewise, several significant contributors to the genre and the community are not ‘full time’ participants, with established roots in other genres and whose most prominent work is often not within solarpunk as a whole. For example, Jaymee Goh, Daniel José Older and Cory Doctorow are all important contributors to solarpunk that are not necessarily known primarily for those contributions. Even the editor of the very first solarpunk anthology, the prolific Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, is best described this way, having many more famous works within Portuguese-language sci fi than the Solarpunk anthology. That 2012 anthology is one of seven such genre-focused anthologies that he has edited to date, and to my knowledge Solarpunk remains his only direct contribution to, well, solarpunk.
This is not an accusation directed at either the genre or at those authors. If anything it’s very important to the health of solarpunk that these kinds of intersections have taken place and continue to take place. If they hadn’t, the very first published literature terming itself solarpunk wouldn’t have appeared in 2012, and numerous of the published solarpunk anthologies to date would either not have come into existence or been left poorer for the absence of numerous poems and stories produced by authors with that kind of relationship with the genre. Solarpunk’s soft edges are crucial. For a genre that is still at a formative stage, where there are still far more people talking about the solarpunk they’d like to see written than writing it, the more contributors become involved the merrier, even if they don’t necessarily dedicate their creative lives purely to this one genre and movement.
My hope, both for the current state of solarpunk communities and for its success in the future, is that its soft edges are not maintained at the expense of any of the sub-communities it shelters. One of the single most destructive forces that can be applied to any movement dedicated towards a vision of social justice, decentralised or otherwise, is the harbouring of those who loudly claim that they follow its vision but who, in reality, are harming others through toxic behaviour or even bigotry. This is already a lesson that has been drilled into me through lengthy personal experience, but which has been further emphasised by, well, gestures at the 2020s to date, we’re experiencing a period in which the language of social justice is frequently co-opted to feign innocence by bad faith actors, or clung to by those incapable of perceiving that they are acting against their stated beliefs. Likewise, every community brought together by enthusiasm and a general belief in goodwill will have its moment of innocence lost, where some dispute or moment of personal behaviour will shatter prior harmony that was previously taken for granted. In these moments stewards, to borrow Jay Springett’s term of choice, are vital. Care, after all, is not just passively being nice to people, it also involves defending them from those who are doing them harm.
In the next article in this series I’ll be looking at the literature and creative works the solarpunk community has produced to date, along with its reception.
