Solarpunk and Imagined Futures
Fundamental to solarpunk is acceptance of the inevitability of climate change while remaining hopeful about our ability to mitigate it, utilising current technology coupled with structural changes to social systems. Importantly, solarpunks view the challenge of addressing climate change as an opportunity to restructure society to achieve the twin goals of ecological sustainability and social justice. Solarpunks refuse the fatalism of dystopian thinking. Defiant hope in the face of pervasive narratives about the impossibility of the task ahead allows solarpunks to continue imagining and working towards a more positive, equitable, and sustainable future.
Solarpunk has emerged as both genre and movement that focusses on the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” (Springett, 2017). Solarpunk encompasses stories that explore hopeful struggles to build a more just and sustainable world within the context of environmental destabilisation and capitalist upheaval.
Solarpunk aims for a way out of climate catastrophe through imagining ‘a future most people would actually like to live in, instead of ones we should be trying to avoid’ (Owens, 2016), thus serving as a counter-narrative to the imaginaries that reinforce the inevitability of the cyberpunk dystopia (Schuller, 2019). Solarpunk also resists static unachievable utopia as a viable alternative to dystopia, preferring a more pragmatic, contextual, and partial vision of sustainability and social justice as always-in-progress.
Radical Imagination and Alternative futures
Solarpunk imagines hopeful alternative futures through which to explore solutions to the current crisis. This is important because one of the outcomes of the so-called ‘success’ of the spread of the capitalist model around the globe has been a lack of ability to envisage alternatives. Those who seek to suggest governments intervene in the market to prevent environmental damage are labelled derogatorily as socialists, ‘radical’, ‘extremists’ or, alternatively, as utopian, or ‘dreamers’. At the same time, many view crises such as climate change as threatening the current global capitalist system. Clearly there is a need to seriously address climate change in order to avoid simultaneous economic, social, and environmental collapse. However, without an ability to think beyond the current economic system there is little hope of addressing the problems it creates.
Negative views of the present, as well as of likely outcomes for the future, serve as powerful motivators for engaging in social justice and environmental activism. Likewise, positive visions for the future are also important for maintaining motivation through shared visions of a positive alternative future grounded in current practice and conditions. Activists are driven to respond to critical understandings of structural conditions and the likely future to which these conditions will lead if the status quo is maintained. As a result, they become involved in political activity aimed at changing these conditions, and with them the parameters of the expected future. Positive visions can serve as an inspirational goal to work towards as well as a potential blueprint to inform contemporary practices such that the ‘means match the ends’.
One way in which activists sustain social movement engagement is through sharing alternative visions of the future, grounded in and built through the practices of the present. This process is conceptualised by Haiven and Khasnabish (2014), as engaging the ‘radical imagination’, which they define as:
the ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be … to build solidarity across boundaries and borders …[to] create, with those around us, multiple, overlapping … imaginary landscapes, horizons of common possibility and shared understanding (2014, p.3-4)
This speaks to the important role that shared imaginings of alternative futures can play for inspiring and informing the ways that individuals respond to social and environmental issues. In a similar way to which the imagination functions to construct social institutions, identities and obligations, it can also disrupt what might have previously seemed to be overwhelmingly powerful foundations of particular social hierarchies (Castoriadis, 1987).
Solarpunk as Movement
Solarpunk exists as more than just a fledgling speculative fiction genre. While the number of published solarpunk stories continues to grow, the largest growth and activity has been online and offline conversations about what solarpunk as a movement building upon these stories entails. Such discussions about the ideas and politics of solarpunk have grown and spread much more quickly than finished pieces of solarpunk fiction are published. Solarpunk has been described as: “a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism” (Springett, 2017); “a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are” (Hudson, 2015); and, “a kaleidoscopic manifesto, an argument in story and image” (Williams, 2018). Online discussion of solarpunk as ideology, manifesto, and concept pre-dates publication of stories officially labelled ‘solarpunk’.
Solarpunk draws inspiration from cli-fi, afro-futurism, post-colonial, and feminist speculative fiction to inform many of its stories. These stories explore questions of environmental and ecological concerns, race, colonialism, gender and sexuality, and capitalism. Discussions in online solarpunk spaces also cover ways that solarpunk’s principles overlap with social ecology, anarchism (and other anti-capitalist ideologies), feminism, anti-racism (such as the Black Lives Matter Movement), and a wide variety of other campaigns and issues. These discussions result from an understanding that environmental and socio-economic problems cannot be addressed only through technology, but require political engagement, resistance, and substantial cultural and structural change. Thus, solarpunk as a movement incorporates not only discussion about published solarpunk stories, but all of the contemporary social issues that must be addressed in order to achieve the sustainable and socially just future that these stories imagine.
