[How the aesthetic, utopian yet pragmatic movement of Solarpunk
reimagines a future without a climate catastrophe]
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WHAT IF WE CANCEL THE APOCALYPSE?  
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Joey Ayoub
November 22, 2022
New Lines
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_ How the aesthetic, utopian yet pragmatic movement of Solarpunk
reimagines a future without a climate catastrophe _

Futuristic concept of cities in the middle of the ocean, Camillo
Pasquali, aka millisworlds

 

In the popular imagination, the future as we know it is currently
occupied by various apocalyptic scenarios, as we see in the ongoing
predominance of blockbuster movies along these lines. The doom and
gloom that is so common on social media (bringing us the term
“doomscrolling”) seem to be stuck in a repetitive loop that
provides no way out. It is indeed a very common recurrence on social
media to see reports on global warming followed by statements such as
“we are doomed” or “I can’t handle this anymore.”

What if, instead, we cancel the apocalypse?

Enter Solarpunk. By its simplest definition, Solarpunk is a literary
and art movement which imagines what the future could look like if the
human species were actually to succeed in solving the major challenges
associated with global warming, from reducing global emissions to
overcoming capitalist economic growth as the primary motor of human
society. These seemingly titanic tasks are actually pragmatic
necessities dictated by scientific knowledge. We know, for example,
that it is simply impossible to have infinite economic growth on a
finite planet. And yet, this impossibility is exactly where we are
still heading towards as a species.

We know, in other words, that we need to move towards a situation in
which there is some kind of equilibrium between our species and the
rest of the natural world. Some popular films already do this —
think of Marvel’s Wakanda in “Black Panther” or Hayao
Miyazaki’s films — but what is often missing; the gap which
Solarpunk is trying to fill; is a positive futurism grounded in our
present world. This is why Solarpunk emphasizes community-building and
mutual aid. Its imagined futures lie at the intersection of both
positive and negative scenarios, all of which are possible,
incorporating everything from degrowth or postgrowth to Indigenous
rights, feminism, racial justice and decolonization.

Solarpunk is therefore highly pragmatic, while maintaining a utopian
spirit. That is, its utopias are not rooted in a desire to avoid
dealing with the hardships of the modern world. On the contrary:
Solarpunk is a recognition that the modern world is oversaturated with
despair and helplessness, and in that context hope can be a radical
act. This is what motivated Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, the Brazilian editor
of the first (as far as I can tell) anthology on Solarpunk, published
in Portuguese in 2012. When asked by Sarena Ulibarri, who wrote the
preface to his edited collection “Solarpunk: Ecological and
Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World,” why he chose Solarpunk
instead of the more established Cyberpunk, he replied that Brazil’s
“fantastic literature biosphere,” as he called it, was already
“polluted” with coal and petroleum. In other words, we are already
highly familiar with dystopian and post-apocalyptic futures, and it
seems like they have run their course — or at least should have.

This reflects a problem climate scientists have been facing, namely:
How do we, as a species, actually effect the change we know is needed?
And why is it so difficult to imagine alternatives in the first place?
This is what motivated a recent public discussion I had with the
climate scientist Julia Steinberger, a lead author on one of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessment
reports. As a climate scientist, Steinberger knows firsthand that
there is a serious rift between what we should be doing as a species
to reduce the dangers of global warming and what we are actually
doing. It is why she suggested to the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in
Switzerland to hold this discussion on the theme of “from the IPCC
to Solarpunk.”

In our conversation, Steinberger emphasized that we currently have
“an incredible amount of knowledge about our situation and where
we’re heading.” This knowledge has been mostly obscured by decades
of lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, as well as the politicians
and media personalities who saw it in their best interest to deny or
downplay the urgency of global warming. This has led to two parallel
worlds: on the one hand, the world of climate scientists and other
experts, as well as climate activists, who are painfully aware of the
ever-growing presence of global warming; and, on the other, the
consumerist world, where it is still considered “normal” to, at
best, treat global warming as a long-term concern rather than one
deserving urgent action in the present. This is a world where we
continue to destroy rainforests to make way for livestock and oil
exploration, where flying everywhere for leisure is still considered
ethical, and where vegans are the exceptions rather than the norm. In
other words, if we accept the science, the only conclusion is that
there is a strong disconnect between what is and what should be
considered “normal.”

The idea of a “normal” is what Solarpunk can challenge, by means
of such actions as strikes, protests, campaigning and so much more.
Take, for example, “The Boston Hearth Project,” a short story by
T.X. Watson featured in “Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and
Eco-Speculation” (edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher
Wieland), published in 2017 and set in 2022. The protagonist, Andie
Freeman, is applying to a university and has to answer the following
essay question: “When have you worked well as part of a team?”
Instead of the usual answers — working in an NGO or a private
company, for example — Andie tells the story of how a group of
people took over a building in Boston to shelter homeless people and
protect them from the winter. The context is set at the start of the
story: Climate change has made weather patterns more erratic, which in
Boston has translated into homeless people dying from exposure to the
cold. Rather than dealing with the issue, the city of Boston opted to
build a “custom-engineered closed system” called the Hale Center,
where rich people could go to avoid dealing with the misery of the
outside world.

The Hale Center is a “smart building,” meaning it functions as a
self-sustaining ecosystem with water filters, oxygen scrubbers,
carefully-controlled algae population and so on. It has huge triple
gates that can slam the building shut to “manage its climate
internally in extreme weather.” This is meant to keep
“undesirable” people out — the homeless, in this case — but
the activists used that technology against its intended purpose, i.e.,
for the homeless and against the police and government.

The plan was to occupy it, take over system control, let homeless
people in and fight off the cops who would inevitably seek to take
back the occupied building. The story shares similarities with popular
movies and series like “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Casa de Papel”
(“Money Heist” in English). The differences, however, are crucial.
First, climate change is the problem that the protagonists are trying
to tackle. Second, rather than stealing money to enrich themselves,
the activists are taking a taxpayer-funded building being used for
exclusive purposes and converting it into a functioning public space.

After successfully entering the building and kicking the guard out,
they let in 200-odd homeless people to find shelter from the cold.
When the police inevitably arrive, the activists trap them between two
of the gates and use the building’s heating control to increase the
temperature to 115 F (46 C). This forces the cops to remove their
armor or risk heatstroke. At that moment, ten activists who were
waiting in a different, cooler room, allow the cops to enter in small
numbers at a time, disarm them, destroy and throw their weapons away,
then let them go out in nothing but T-shirts and underwear. The irony
of the situation is hard to miss: In the Boston winter cold, the cops
cannot survive without going back to their homes, a right denied to
the homeless. Only through direct confrontation was that made
apparent.

The Solarpunk element of the story is the idea that climate-related
challenges are going to increase, yet by thinking and organizing
together we are able to arrive at concrete solutions to specific
problems. Unlike the more common climate-related apocalyptic stories
we’re all familiar with, agency is given back to humans who, when
sufficiently organized, are able to change their living conditions.
Another important Solarpunk feature is the fact that Andie is disabled
and a wheelchair user, which in no way prevented them from achieving
their goal of creating a better society. Rather than being referred to
in a passive way as someone devoid of agency, Andie is one of the
leaders of the operation, using Augmented Reality to guide in teammate
Juniper before three other organizers pick them and their equipment up
to follow Juniper into the building.

The group successfully withstands a 49-day siege by the police, partly
thanks to a social media team that was able to build popular support
and bring the city to the negotiation table. After the siege, the
Boston Hearth Project is officially recognized by the city and renamed
the Boston Hearth Homeless Shelter. New York and Portland followed
suit, turning over building projects to activists to avoid similar
hostile takeovers. As the building was designed to protect the indoors
against the outdoors elements, the Boston Hearth Project led to a 92%
decline in deaths by exposure in winter. Andie finishes their
university application by saying they hope this experience in
team-building makes them a great candidate.

The story is an example of why Solarpunk came out of, and was a
response to, Cyberpunk. Unlike Cyberpunk futures, famously defined by
the author Bruce Sterling as a “combination of lowlife and high
tech,” Solarpunk futures are stubbornly positive visions of a world
of “highlife,” where tech is neither necessarily high nor low, but
rather adapted to the needs of humankind and the natural world. In
“The Boston Hearth Project,” “high tech” such as Augmented
Reality and the “smart” building are used as tools needed to fight
for a greater good, but they are just as important as the “low
tech” equipment such as Andie’s wheelchair. Solarpunk refuses to
accept that Cyberpunk futures are the only ones capable of motivating
change in the present. There are only so many ways one can be told
that the future is going to be dark. At some point, there has to be
concrete imaginaries readily available for anyone who wishes to cancel
the apocalypse. Solarpunk can provide a much-needed critique of the
hegemony of apocalyptic visions of the future.

This does not mean that we should pretend everything is fine. The
growing awareness of terms such as “climate anxiety,” “climate
grief” and “ecoanxiety,” usefully explained by the French Green
politician Melanie Vogel as the result of experiencing the climate
crisis yet simultaneously seeing nothing done to tackle it, is a good
indication that everything is not fine. Rather, Solarpunk is merely
the conclusion that daily anxiety and grief are simply not sufficient.
They more often than not lead to paralysis, which in turn can lead to
a learned helplessness and despair and render us unable to handle the
realities of an increasingly warming world. With global warming
already making so much of our world worse, recognizing what we have
and what we can build is a must. As Kevin Kahakula’akea John Fong
writes in a different context, “Finding joy in the struggle requires
us to look, hear, feel, and receive deeply … to hold onto them, and
let them be a salve of comfort and respite as we struggle to fill the
void left by the loss of loved ones, of work, school, our connections
with family and friends, our daily routines, our communities, and even
life as we once knew it.” The worse the suffering and pain caused by
climate change get, the more Fong’s words ring true.

While a blog post titled “from steampunk to solarpunk,” notably
published amidst the 2007-2008 financial crash, may mark the first use
of the term, it also seems to have been coined independently in many
other places and in different languages at different times. This is
likely owing to the widespread understanding of the term cyberpunk,
and a subsequent need to respond to it with something positive and
seemingly sustainable. Indeed, in these spaces, sibling genres such as
ecopunk, greenpunk, hopepunk, eco-speculation and others are also
imagined, written, drawn and talked about, and they are sometimes used
interchangeably with Solarpunk. It is only in recent years that the
term Solarpunk has become a way for people to self-identify. Clearly,
all these terms, and the many ways and places where they have arisen,
reflect a desire expressed by many around the globe to, as it were,
cancel the apocalypse.

Andrew Dana Hudson’s book “Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five
Climate Futures” is an example of a book that is not Solarpunk, but
serves a similar purpose. (Hudson has also written Solarpunk stories
as well as an analysis of the political dimensions of the genre.) The
book consists of five different stories set in Buenos Aires, 2056,
during yet another round of the UN climate negotiations known as
“the Conference of the Parties,” or COP. Each of Hudson’s
stories adapts one of the IPCC’s five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
(or SSPs), scenarios of projected socioeconomic global changes up to
the year 2100, better known as SSP1 through to SSP5. We can simply
think of them as different scenarios of what our world could look like
in the coming decades based on the different actions we do or do not
take today and in subsequent years. Though climate scientists have
questioned the usefulness of SSPs in terms of accuracy, what Andrew
Dana Hudson does in the book is a helpful exercise in thinking through
future possibilities.

Each of the five SSPs requires certain actions to be taken for it to
become more likely. For example, SSP1 projects a world of
sustainability-focused growth and equality, while SSP3 projects a
fragmented world of “resurgent nationalism” and SSP5 a world of
rapid and unconstrained growth in economic output and energy use. The
SSPs alone, however, don’t say much. They are just projections,
after all, which depend on actions taken in the present and
near-future. But achieving the better scenarios rather than the worse
ones requires a vision of the future which is able to encompass the
required complexities. In other words, we have to actually have some
idea, or multiple ideas, of what it is we are trying to build, not
just in terms of wishing for a more just world in a broad sense, but
also in terms of visualizing the textures, colors, smells, sounds and
emotions of this future world we need and want. What does housing look
like in a greener city that is oriented towards the commons and which
allows and even encourages its inhabitants to live in dignity? Is
there room for rewilding projects in cities? Are people generally
happier in this future? If so, why? What has changed in their material
reality that makes such happiness more reachable?

This is one reason why we need a multiplicity of genres, as Solarpunk
alone cannot supply the entire human species with enough stories and
imaginaries to tackle a problem as multilayered and complex as global
warming. Our Shared Storm shows how a certain Solarpunk “spirit”
can permeate non-Solarpunk stories and serve the same purposes. The
goal is similar but the paths taken can be different. As Solarpunk
stories are meant to find ways to cancel the apocalypse, being able to
picture that apocalypse and its various permutations is obviously
useful.

Similarly, Solarpunk is in conversation with and can encompass Afro,
Indigenous, disability and queer futurisms, feminism, anarchism and
other anti-authoritarian leftwing currents, decolonial practices, and
any movement or school of thought which seeks to better our living
conditions while respecting planetary boundaries. In an article
titled, “In Search of Afro-Solarpunk,” Rob Cameron argues that
neither the “arc of history” (to quote Barack Obama’s adaptation
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) nor science fiction naturally bend
towards justice, which is why “both must be bent.”

“There is no just future,” he continues, “built atop (or buried
under) the dystopian wreckage of an environment in freefall.” In
other words, canceling the apocalypse can only be done with the
acknowledgment that justice can only be achieved through human action,
and such action can be informed by Solarpunk futures.

For that reason, it is normal to see conversations around Solarpunk
stories turn into mutual aid tips, self and collective care,
unionizing and so on, reflecting “a fundamentally DIY impulse.”
One example is “permablitzing” guides. The Trinidadian YouTuber
Andrewism, who incidentally also has a “What is Solarpunk?” video,
has a useful guide to the basics of permablitzing and how to do it.
Essentially, permablitzing is an informal gathering of two or more
people dedicated to learning how to grow edible gardens, share skills
regarding permaculture and sustainable living, and create communities
in the process.

In a Solarpunk world, it is not enough to learn how to garden alone,
even though it can be a healthy and meditative process in itself.
Instead, knowledge should be shared with the intent of building
community and the commons, thereby posing a challenge to the
aforementioned combination of “lowlife and high tech” that already
saturates current imaginaries of the future. Permablitzing is a form
of Solarpunk in action. It is not sufficient to tackle global warming,
but it can help provide a space for empowering individuals to see the
future as their own, something to be acted upon and shaped. Those who
cannot, for various reasons, take part in the act of gardening itself
can still participate in a permablitzing through conversation,
assistance or moral support. They can help design the garden, pick
which vegetables to grow, spread the word, bring in funds and so on.
There is always a role to play regardless of one’s abilities.

This is why I say that Solarpunk is both pragmatic and utopian. It has
to incorporate the latter because that allows us to push the
boundaries of what is considered possible. At the same time, being
pragmatic is a way of bringing back the reader (or listener) to the
present after temporarily escaping into a Solarpunk story. For
example, a Solarpunk story set in Gaza in the year 2040 could imagine
climate change-related challenges that the Palestinians there would be
facing then, and imagine ways of solving them. This would be told in a
story in a setting with its own specificity which differs from, say, a
story set in Paris in that same year. A Solarpunk story set in Gaza
2040 would therefore have to respect the specific history of that city
while also trying to imagine what it could look like free of
colonialism, apartheid, patriarchy and other forms of oppression. In
that world, are there still two nation-states (Israel and Egypt)
restricting the freedom of movement of Palestinians in Gaza? What is
the access to resources such as water like? Could permablitzing be one
tool against societal atomization brought about by an oppressive
state? What are the heatwaves like? Are they dealing with droughts? Is
the Mediterranean a source of recreation and abundance, or an
intimidating body of water rendered more dangerous by global warming?
How are relations with their neighbors?

I chose a less usual example to argue that Solarpunk should — and,
to some extent, already does — challenge the centrality of cities
such as London, Paris, New York and so on, simply because those cities
already receive a lot of attention in our collective imagination.
Think of how frequently stories are set in those cities versus a
Kinshasa, a Tripoli, a Cuzco or a Port Moresby. Global warming is
already affecting our world, and we know the impacts are being felt
disproportionately on the peripheries, in the Global South. The Middle
East is already the world’s most water-short region, while states
like Qatar and Saudi Arabia remain among the world’s most prolific
producers of global warming-inducing fossil fuels. The region’s
water supply has shrunk to a quarter of its 1960 level and there are
real risks that the area historically known as the Fertile Crescent
(from Iraq to Israel-Palestine, taking in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan)
will, according to the Arab Forum for Environment and Development
(AFED), “lose all signs of fertility if the situation continues as
it is.”

As the challenges won’t be the same, neither can the Solarpunk
stories aiming to provide different frameworks for those wishing to
affect the present. The myriad of futures require a myriad of
imaginaries able to deal with them. Solarpunk both tracks and guides
our responses to climate change, giving us a way out of apocalyptic
despair which only hampers our ability to deal with what is, after
all, already an emergency.

* Solarpunk; Future Solutions to Climate Change; Global Warming;
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