The Background for my Project

Humanity is faced with the wicked problem of climate change. Globalised society has been shaped by processes of colonialism and capitalism, which drive structural inequality and have pushed our eco-sphere to crisis point. Hopefully everyone should be aware that everything is pretty hecked up right now. Conventional responses to these issues tend to fall into either pervasive fatalism or optimistic expectations of high-tech fixes without disruption to the current socio-economic system. Despite this there exist perspectives that aim to resist fatalism without relying on a ‘magic bullet’ future technology.

A common thread in activism is that it is easier to achieve sustained and effective campaigning when it is informed by a vision of a possible positive future to work towards, alongside an understanding of what you are fighting against. While it is important to have a detailed understanding of negative conditions and how they arise, focusing just on the negatives often leads to burnout and lack of effective impact. As a result, many groups draw upon anarchist and socialist perspectives – which advocate radical restructuring of socio-economic systems – to inform their understandings of both positive future alternatives to the current crises, as well as the most effective means to achieve the social and structural changes required to make those alternatives a reality.

As part of the work of imagining positive sustainable futures, and as a response to the saturation of dystopian visions that reinforce the inevitability of ever worsening social and environmental conditions under capitalism, the nascent genre and social movement of solarpunk is emerging. Solarpunk has developed through decentralised online platforms over the last decade or so in response to the specific contemporary context of looming climate change and increasing debates about the socio-economic status quo.