About a year ago, a Chobani brand Greek yogurt commercial took ‘Solarpunk‘ from its social media platform petri dishes (digital art posts on Tumblr and Instagram, niche short-story publications and subreddits) into wider public consciousness.
Solarpunk is an Internet aesthetic category. Not quite a subculture, it is nonetheless more explicitly programmatic than equivalents like the agrarian traditionalist Cottage Core or the occasionally Alt-Right, 80s-futurist Vapor-Wave.
For now, it is principally a fiction sub-genre functioning as a ‘cope,’ or therapeutic tonic for young people who believe human-caused climate catastrophe is relatively imminent but do not want to wallow in despair.
Solarpunk uses ‘punk’ the way modern fiction does, as a suffix to denote a possible future (Cyberpunk, Steampunk, etc.). Beyond this, it is meant to signal rebellion against pessimism and dystopian fiction—much the opposite of the anti-optimism of the original punks, lashing out against the hippies and their fantasies of precisely the sorts of eco-friendly communal living Solar “punks” champion.
But the term is protean and can be utilized for its energy, its edge and rebellious pose, however impotently nihilistic the history of punk has proven. The deeper resonance and meaning of a subculture is often only apparent in a few of its best exemplars, being a denatured caricature everywhere else, so maybe new genres can take this almost catch-all term for the decadent West’s rebellious youth culture and extract what noble instincts it might have denoted.
But it remains to be seen whether the genre will live up to the ideal of noble rebellion.
During a conversation about climate change, Russell Brand mused as follows:
I feel that the climate change argument is probably benefiting some kind of Big Tech digital surveillance type of billionaire oligarch elite, and the anti-climate change [argument] is benefiting fossil fuel energy elites.
Following this intuition, Solarpunk would tend to service the “Big Tech surveillance,” albeit containing ideas that could break from these.
For now, its artistic depictions leave something to be desired. The integration of technology and nature is usually clumsy, as when rural living is presented as if it were a utopia to be engineered through robotics (see the Chobani commercial), or in the over-zealous packing of urban escarpments with greenery. Abundant filigree seems oddly transplanted, out of its element, against a glossy, metallic, digital-art-scape lacking in grit and texture. Otherwise, when the greenwashed buildings look like they’re made of concrete, one fears for their integrity on account of humidity and roots.
Narrative-wise, we find similar shortcomings, as in Sunshine State, winner of the 2016 Arizona State University Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative fiction contest, whose co-author, Adam Flynn, was a principal contributor to the Solarpunk manifesto (or the most cited one, as there seem to be several). The story makes a real effort to present some of the background science involved in its characters’ tackling of global warming, but the world-building cum environmentally-friendly urban planning, and the descriptions of sustainable local economies which should be the bedrock of Solarpunk, are scant.
Given the critiques of capitalism and systems of domination one finds in Solarpunk fiction, we may suggest a good-faith outline of how this genre perpetuates contemporary social hierarchies and hegemonic discourse. Without denying its virtues, Sunshine State, for example, is soaked through with contemporary U.S. prose-as-screenplay tropes, conforming its characters to bourgeois-liberal elite cultural categories.
Its deus ex machina salvation for Floridian communities from the consequences of global warming comes through the innovative ideas of a blue-haired, female college-educated genius of immigrant background and a beer-drinking retired military woman with “weapon’s grade emotional intelligence” and experience in community liaising, together with her male colleague. Local peoples are clay to the college-educated, cosmopolitan, military elite. This is not to condemn a woman for excelling in the military, or people for dying their hair. However, it does seem that the stock, formulaic character features the American managerial class uses in its media are always conspicuously subversive of the once-stable cultural identities and aesthetic canons of that country’s working and rural strata. Subtle destabilization of a culture is the hallmark of colonialism and renders communities less resilient in the face of challenges. To the degree that fiction teaches people to expect catastrophe, and to defer to authority for salvation, they are being conditioned for tyranny, not liberation.
We encounter a related tendency in the genre’s poor engagement with history, one made explicit in its principal manifesto (my italics): “Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future … Our futurism … avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies.” Of course this isn’t true, the same text cites “1800s age-of-sail/frontier living,” “Art Nouveau,” and “Hayao Miyazaki” as influences, but the sneer at the past is important for readers to situate the authors’ temperament.
For his part, Adam Flynn has more interesting things to say about the genre than either the manifesto or his award-winning 2016 short story. In an interview with blogger Mary Woodbury, he refers to practical cases of solar energy being used by lower-income people, expresses skepticism towards how “‘positive futures’ are framed in terms of technological megaprojects, which has a whiff of the Promethean about it,” and suggests that the “onset of the anthropocene” might be identified in 1945:
That postwar flush of high-modern confidence that led us (mostly Americans) to intervene massively in ecological and human systems we didn’t fully understand. Some of that “doing big things” came out of an overconfidence in our abilities, and an inability to appreciate the dynamics of exceedingly interconnected systems.
He relates Solarpunk to “localism, transition towns, resilient communities, solidarity economies, social ecology” and identifies it with
Pushing back against a system that encourages efficiency at the cost of fragility, wealth extraction at the cost of ecological collapse, and self-replicating sameness over the local and particular. (I once referred to solarpunk as “the futurist equivalent of Slow Food.”)
References to William Morris and Thoreau are also edifying, as in the case of the following quote from the latter’s Paradise (To Be) Regained:
How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature! Could we not have a less gross labor? … Can we not do more than cut and trim the forest—can we not assist in its interior economy, in the circulation of the sap? We do not suspect how much might be done to improve our relation to animated nature even; what kindness and refined courtesy there might be. There are certain pursuits which … suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature … The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the sunbeams.
And yet, much of what Thoreau was calling for is already known, and one has only to speak with people in parts of the world where the commons endure or endured until recently, and learn how local communities optimize the wilderness to be sustainably harmonious with human affairs.
In future related essays, I will explore the history and psychology of ‘solar utopianism’ in literature, the best of the Solarpunk aesthetic, and specific technological and localist economic solutions to environmental challenges worth exploring in Solarpunk (or Solarpunk-adjacent) fiction.
