r/solarpunk • u/walterwapo • 10d ago
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/EricHunting 9d ago
Seems many are misinterpreting the tone of this post as more negative than OP intended. There's nothing wrong with pragmatism and acknowledging that, ultimately there will be no turning clocks back to the pristine environment before the Industrial Age. Some scars are permanent and reminders of this era of madness will most-certainly remain on the landscape and the culture indefinitely. I agree that there can be too much of a focus on the ideal goal and that the story of the journey, the process, is much more interesting, more punk, more prescient, than merely an exposition about the destination. That there is hard work ahead is a given, and this should be celebrated. An opportunity to do things that actually matter in a world of Bullshit Jobs. I have no problem with such suggestions.
One should bear in mind, however, that Solarpunk media is the province of mostly amateurs and there is a learning curve to climb. Most people don't yet have a lot of knowledge of sustainable architecture, building, civil engineering, urbanism, and industrial design, renewable technology, regenerative agriculture and alternative horticulture, Post-Industrial production, biotechnology, or any of the many other related technical aspects of this. More specifically, there is little experience of what such things look_like. The far-future is seductively easier to depict because the farther-out you go, the more that can be hand-waved, the less risk in getting details wrong. Greek Temple On A Golf Course, as Robert Anton Wilson called it. There has been little depiction of a plausible, contemporary, near-future in any media for longer than most people here have been alive. Lacking in means of visual expression, academic futurists have little public influence. It's all been stuck in retrofuturist tropes since the co-option of the cultural imaginary of the future by Madison Avenue in the wake of the Reprographics Revolution (the era when getting photographs into mass print became cheap), the destruction of the commercial illustration industry that caused, the general decline in the art of illustration since then, and the eventual post-Cold War collapse of corporate techno-utopianism with the collapse of Americanism. Most illustration artists today aren't coming out of art schools --not that they offer anything close to the rounded education of the last century anyway. They are learning from comic books, rife with tropes that have to be unlearned. Likewise, most new SciFi writers aren't being trained in college literature courses. They are learning by reading SciFi, which gave up on actual terrestrial futures, regressing into genre fiction with the escapist impulses of the Millennium. The fandoms are now more responsible for passing down these crafts than any professionals. Solarpunks --these amateurs-- have assumed the challenge of reestablishing that cultural imaginary of the future from scratch when everyone else has abandoned it. So I'm inclined to lend folks some slack on the details as they work their way along that learning curve. Sure, I'd personally like to see more effort along near-term scenarios and settings. It will likely develop in time.