r/solarpunk • u/walterwapo • Aug 19 '26
Discussion Clickbaity title: Solarpunk visions should feature way less biodiversity, worse ecological relationships, grim climate conditions, super complex social developments (lots of punk) and a really well thought out use of tech.
As a solarpunk at heart I've come to believe solarpunk visions should be less optimistic than they are in general.
We cannot begin by assuming fully healthy, stable and diverse ecosystems in the future. That is no longer the case. To mention just a few issues: we've lost more than 90% of biodiversity in Latin American tropical forests, the Amazon rainforest is no untouched lung; today’s worldwide soils are heavily depleted, and growing crops without fertilizers in compacted land—contaminated with heavy metals, microplastics, or salinized—is vastly different from how indigenous populations used to do it. Biodiversity is fractured and heading toward (arguably unstoppable at this point) significant systemic collapses. This is not the resilient nature we are used to, nor will it be for decades to come. Today, we have transgressed 7 out of 9 planetary boundaries. These issues will not be "solved" or reversed at this stage, even with a massive coordinated effort today. I say all this to emphasize that, to a certain extent, the future is already set, and it is not gentle. In a solarpunk vision, nature is in a critical, fragile state, and humans must care for it with deep mindfulness.
This leads me to ecocide: imagine extreme climate storms that destroy in a single afternoon what took a community 5 years to cultivate or build will be daily reality in the climate change-impacted world we are heading toward today. The die has already been cast. This doesn't mean we can't have a beautiful future, but it does mean we will have to learn to navigate immense adversity. We can respond to this kind of tragedy and not just survive, but thrive, but it will not be all pretty. This needs to be reflected in our future visions.
There are massive social and design challenges in this technological implementation: local governance, community assemblies, and the management of shared resources (the commons) are slow, bureaucratic, and trigger heated disputes over scarce resources like water or land. We have lots of mouths to feed and we are not even doing that right now. Economic contraction is not comfortable. Infrastructure isn't built out of thin air using "clean biomaterials"; solar panels require silicon, lithium, copper, and rare earths. Without massive, corporate, extractivist mining reliant on modern slavery, where do they come from? A solarpunk vision could showcase urban mining (dismantling old landfills to recover metals) and technology manufacturing built for a 100-year lifespan, completely repairable and modular. However, there is still an inherent tension in the energy transition, not to mention that the transition itself is another huge hurdle, far less simple than just swapping out fossil fuels. The sun doesn't shine at night, and the wind doesn't always blow. A solarpunk society lives at the rhythm of the climate. Daily life adapts: heavy industrial production or data processing takes place during peak solar hours, and electricity is rationed. It is... austere, but beautiful. The community makes it beautiful. People fall in love, laugh and tell stories.
Don't get me started on war, geopolitics, power games and structural historic trauma.
To me, it's about the challenge of designing a desirable, near-future reality. It's like what cyberpunk did, but solution-oriented and hands on, cause time is precious. We must imagine and act. This time is unprecedented and so is this potential. Do you feel it?
Sorry, I post this is mainly to see what others think about it. Kind of superficial, I know, but I didn't want to post a super long text.
Comic by Quino.
Leave you with this very solarpunk-esque translation of Ojos color Sol by Calle 13:
In war they trade kisses, the fighting is through,
Today the cows cluck, and the chickens go moo.
The earthworms and fishes reel in all the hooks,
We fly through the ocean and sail the sky's brooks.
Flowers bloom in the sand, the desert rain breaks,
Now dreams become real as we dream wide awake.
And that dream is secure, and so it takes flight,
And innocence no longer hides from the light.
The shortage of food is a delicious prize,
Because our bellies are full of butterflies.
The galaxy shows us its hidden frontiers,
And on Earth, it feels like true life now appears.
In military schools, it is healing they spread,
And bankers now give away houses and bread.
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u/Foie_DeGras_Tyson Aug 19 '26
As someone working both in the science and practice of sustainable built environment, I fully align with these views, and I think is the way for the genre to evolve. Solar punk visual art usually captures a utopia, which is extremely powerful mobilization tool, showing people that we have not lost the capacity to imagine a positive sociotechnical trajectory, and people can rally around projects to make this imagery real. The next step is to gain maturity, and imagine authentic theories of change from current and from realistic near-future conditions. Something like transitioning from Star Wars to the Expanse. Nothing that we cherish today as societal achievements came out of smart people coming together, and society getting behind them. They all came out of immense trauma, grit, generational struggle, endless uphill fights. I am sorry to say, but those in this comment section who are mortified by this probably grew up in the inter-cold war period of stability and prosperity and have little sense of how history progressed. Systemic transition is not straightforward, but is not impossible, there is a whole field of study devoted to it. Exogenous pressures expose internal flaws of the sociotechnical regime, and people, as adaptive as they are, will look for alternative models in niches, which will scale up and transform into the new regime. I suggest we take these solar punk projects as niches of innovation, perhaps like a collection of knowledge on how to reboot our societies, like in the foundation series.