By David Calloway, Pennsylvania Chapter and Southeastern Pennsylvania Group Outings Co-Chair and ExCom Delegate
Author’s note: The present situation calls for hope, resilience, and organizing opportunities; we’ll get plenty of those in coming months. Reading Solarpunk can help us keep the struggle fun, and starkly clarify distinctions between current reality and possible futures.
Solarpunk is a literary subgenre of speculative fiction that, per the website fully-booked.ca, "shows you a world full of nature, reducing or undoing climate change, and advanced technology that works with the world instead of endangering it." Much of this article is drawn from Alexandria Shaner’s 2022 article Solarpunk: Radical Hope, in the online journal Resilience
Why is it called "Solarpunk"? “Punk” implies positive alternatives to the mainstream. And "Solar" may be a collective term for ecological salvation. Until (and if) the world becomes woke and we end the environmental devastation (before it ends us), Solarpunk’s authors provide an enlightening array of use cases for recognizing ourselves in possible futures, in the hopes we may implement them.
Solarpunk has become one of my favorite topics to seek out and read. Writing this, I realized that novels such as StarHawk’s 30-year old novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, that I was reading Solarpunk before it had a name. That book describes in great detail a future egalitarian, progressive city-state, threatened by the hostile, repressive oligarchy that surrounds it. How that oligarchy rose to power eerily foreshadows today’s creeping take-over of our federal and many state governments, empowered by an electorate deluded by their empty promises.
Is an apocalypse necessary?
Two Solarpunk examples I've read in the past year are Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry For The Future, and Stephen Markley's The Deluge. Although both (spoiler alert!) arrive at a somewhat positive outcome, considerable death, suffering, and devastation occur along the way.
So, we must ask: Is all Solarpunk post-apocalyptic? It seems to lean that way. Does 90% of humanity have to perish before we wake up and save ourselves? Does Solarpunk advance the ecological cause, or just make life after the coming climate collapse look appealing and...well, normal, in a way? As in, "Oh, we were the lucky few who made it out! Aren't we special?"
While there may be a vicarious thrill in reading the stories of plucky survivors, we're not likely to be among them. And, reality does not bear out the pluckiness part: In the real world, most survivors carry lifelong, debilitating trauma and guilt, instead of relief at having not perished with their loved ones.
Here are a few key take-aways from Alexandria Shaner’s 2022 article, along with other sources as noted:
Solarpunk is a young and evolving concept that "essentially, rejects dystopian pessimism and, instead, puts forward regenerative aspirations that challenge us to alter our social habits."
We can hope that “Solarpunk becomes an umbrella counterculture that fosters solidarity and visionary cohesion among diverse yet aligned movements.”
“The only reason we don’t live in a solarpunk world right now is that no one has bothered to make it yet,” states The Reddit Solarpunk wiki (https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/new/). And collective action, more than individual heroism, is central to these visions: “We’ll have to make it ourselves, and we’ll have to help each other make it. That’s why it is called "Solarpunk.”
A popular Solarpunk group thrives on facebook here. A lot of diverse content is also available in Facebook under the hashtag #solarpunk.
Shaner's colleague Michael Alpert asks, "who is Hope?" positing that "she is us, the youth." (No, not me! Hopefully some of you?) He asks if Hope can create "a surge able to construct lasting movements, lasting organizations, lasting vehicles of outreach; and able to construct carefully conceived and truly inspiring examples and messages." (My emphasis added. Is this a call-out to communicators?)
Appropedia’s Solarpunk page "collects further political analysis and offers a selection of work from Solarpunk activists who are 'envisioning a positive future beyond scarcity and hierarchy, in which humanity is reintegrated with nature, and technology is used for human-centric and ecocentric purposes.' "
Liberation beyond environmental devastation
Projecting forward: Whether it's called Solarpunk, or Hopepunk or whatever-punk, I'd like science fiction and fantasy to explore scenarios that go into broader liberation questions that underlie environmental devastation. A few that occur to me are:
- An Afghani girl who wants to share with the world her imaginative visions of a future that lacks oppression and repression by a Taliban-like theocracy, or even a Western, Chinese, or Russian oligarchy
- A Central African village youth who escapes a corporate-funded warlord, and begins organizing other “escapees” to turn their villages against both their corrupt government and murderous militias
- Whether, and how, organized religion can exist without driving out independent thought and dissenting views
- Whether, and how, an egalitarian, participatory anarchic democracy can function with a central government that exists only to provide essential services...fairly, equitably, and universally.
- And perhaps most basic: How can middle class Westerners like me, and most of you, stop consuming several times more than the global average, per capita?
Any more you can think of? These are just a few off the top of my head.
Solarpunk is not Cyber or Steam.
Social activist/author Elvia Wilk (https://elviapw.com/) asks us not to confuse Solarpunk with Steampunk and Cyberpunk, which the Facebook page intro calls “nihilistic” (Cyberpunk) and “quasi-reactionary” (Steampunk). "Pleasant green architecture means nothing if it becomes an extension of colonialist fantasy via the narratives of the same heroes that much Steam and Cyber abound with." In being colonialist, such fantasies lack the moral compass to consider the fate of those whose names are not listed in the dramatis personae. Solarpunk will have to walk a fine line between riveting adventure and a calloused heart.
This blog was included as part of the March 2025 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!