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my issues with solarpunk
Alyaza Birze (October 14)
since about 2017, i've been loosely in the orbit of solarpunk. for the unaware, solarpunk is variously an aesthetic (perhaps thought of as the antithesis of cyberpunk), a genre (primarily of speculative fiction) and a movement (in a broad sense seeking to make real the aesthetic and bring into being what is prescribed by the genre). taken at its most charitable, you might say for instance that "Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”" i think that's pretty interesting; i think it's also very important. we're in a climate crisis and an ecological disaster of our own making—our future will be sustainability or catastrophe. a "solarpunk" future might be what we need, especially if you subscribe to a vision of the future that involves degrowth and a reduction or redistribution of technological availability.
the trouble, i find, is that solarpunk the aesthetic and genre almost completely define solarpunk the movement—for the worse. with extremely scattered exceptions: there is no real "solarpunk" and likewise no real solarpunk "movement". unless you overfit what solarpunk is (which we'll get to) or define it by vague platitudes like "ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community" (we'll also get to this) it is far more of a vibe than a praxis. and this leads to interpretations that totally defeat what i presume should be the point of solarpunk.
the Chobani ad
take, for instance, the Chobani solarpunk ad—perhaps the single most defining work of solarpunk to exist so far. from a media critique perspective? it is genuinely a very good ad—it is hopeful, it is beautifully animated, and it presents a world you would want to live in that is unlike our current ecologically devastated and climatologically harmed world:
but: is also an ad. it's an ad for Chobani, one of the largest yogurt companies in the world. it exists to sell products and induce good feelings for a brand. do you think Chobani particularly cares about solarpunk or even global sustainability generally? and do you think they would stand by these things if the aesthetic became more real and began to impact their bottom line? of course not. i'm sure that Hamdi Ulukaya thinks he does right by the world through his modest philanthropy (informed by his transient, Kurdish upbringing in a very unkind-to-Kurds Turkey), but at the end of the day he is now a billionaire whose company makes in excess of one billion dollars in sales every year. there is no ethical way for this to happen. his preferential hiring of (and defense of) refugees at Chobani is, i'm sure, very much appreciated by those refugees and comparatively humanitarian in a world generally content to treat them as subhuman—but among other things it's also a great way to launder good PR out of extracting the surplus value of a particularly desperate set of workers. and color me skeptical Ulukaya and Chobani as a company would accept, say, worker ownership of the company—or even anything more radical than an aesthetically kinder, gentler capitalism.
for all of the assertions from solarpunk manifestos that solarpunk is "about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm" and essays about how it "imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today"—does it? the Chobani ad and its influence seems like a definitive refutation of solarpunk as obviously countercultural or anticapitalist even limited to solarpunk aesthetic and genre. the VICE article from which i steal this second quote notes that "many Solarpunks saw the Chobani ad as fairly innocuous, given that the company sells a health food made with natural ingredients." but what is innocuous about a corporation appropriating an aesthetic, particularly one so supposedly joined at the hip of radical politics and the overthrow of capitalism? is it not obvious greenwashing for a "health food" corporation to steep itself in the visuals of a world it would have no place in? Chobani—or even a world with advertising as we understand it today—is not what i imagine from solarpunk. Hamdi Ulukaya and his billion dollars are not things i believe a solarpunk world should have. the most damning question in my view here is: why did solarpunks eventually reappropriate the ad—attempt to file its branding off, and reclaim its visuals—if it was innocuous? doesn't it seem like an issue that corporations can make better solarpunk propaganda than solarpunks themselves?
these questions and their answers have very real implications for solarpunk the movement, too. if the aesthetic and genre can be so coopted by Chobani—at best a minor note in the symphony of corporations that make up the world's hegemonic, capitalist economy—how might BP (innovator of the "carbon footprint calculator") weaponize it? how might Microsoft, Google, or Nestle, or any company whose existence is unavoidably tied to ecological harm and exploitation? a radical movement whose cultural essence could be—already is—so easily subsumed by capital strikes me as not much of a movement at all, and certainly not an anti-capitalist one.
the influence of Tumblr
but even granting that i overstate the possibility of/degree of cultural recuperation1 taking place here, many proponents of solarpunk are woefully underequipped to build a serious political movement. this is in no small part because solarpunk grew up on—and is in many respect a product of—the website Tumblr. in my view almost every political, organizational, social, and intersectional issue in solarpunk the movement follows from being so strongly based there.
in blunt terms: Tumblr has always been dogshit for politics, for political education, and for endowing people with a good understanding of the world they live in. most of the bad politics i had at 13—an obnoxious obsession with "egalitarianism" over "equality" and a general lack of questioning authority and social structures—were inherited through Tumblr and its raging wars over social justice ca. 2012-2014. i consider this a comparatively good outcome—some of the other people in my former Tumblr vicinity became truly obnoxious scolds, or queer-exclusionary radical feminists, or genuine far-right reactionaries from Tumblr politics. the audience Tumblr historically cultivated—mostly white, mostly sheltered middle-school misfits and fandom teenagers who have since grown up—is simply not one you should trust with unfettered political discussion. solarpunk aesthetic and genre, unfortunately, inherited both these demographics and the byproducts of the great social justice wars.
one result of this Tumblr-heavy origin is that there's a remarkable level of fandom-brain or pop-culture-brain that can be found in solarpunk, and it undercuts how countercultural solarpunk actually is. Tumblr users understandably find much value in cultural analogues—but in this context they are often farcical. the Sunbeam City wiki, for example, is quite generous in its application of "solarpunk" and solarpunk-adjacent." i'm not saying that you can't find inspiration in WALL-E, Sonic CD, or Treasure Planet, but it strikes me as amusing to assert these as solarpunk works of art, doubly so while emphasizing post-capitalist and anti-capitalist politics. Welcome to Night Vale's inclusion meanwhile is just goofy in a classic Tumblr way. and even the more justified inclusions like Ursula K. Le Guin and Hayao Miyazaki are a bit weird. i would not call The Left Hand of Darkness "solarpunk" in any meaningful sense given that it was primarily written to challenge gender roles. and frankly i have no idea what Howl's Moving Castle—a film Miyazaki did to express his distaste for the Iraq War—is doing here unless we're making solarpunk mean "anything that has an agreeable, left-of-center political message".
then again, solarpunk manifestos will frequently assert by fiat that the aesthetic, genre, and especially the movement is "speculative", without bounds, and all-inclusive of "races, religions, sexes, [and] those with disabilities."
this actually brings us to another result of solarpunk's Tumblr-heaviness, and a place where the lack of political education really causes problems: in the rush to declare everyone included, there prevails a genuine tyranny of structurelessness in solarpunk the movement. from first principles everything falters. an anticivilizational anarchist finds as much home under the incredibly broad premises of solarpunk as Chobani and Hamdi Ulukaya. and there is simply no way to build a movement between these two things, or out of such drastic differences in what solarpunk actually is.
controversial as they otherwise tend to be, Jo Freeman's words in "Tyranny of Structurelessness" that
Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting [people] to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. [...] The more unstructured a movement it, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages. This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given a certain amount of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions, the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about.
seem quite true as applied here. in the case of solarpunk everyone brings their own understanding to the table, but nothing exists to synthesize those understandings into something collectively workable. a lack of structure—and a lack of values beyond the most basic platitudes (everyone is included, the aforementioned "ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community", etc.)—means countless solarpunks who respond positively to Chobani, and call WALL-E and Welcome to Night Vale solarpunk(-adjacent) works. that lack of structure, in kind, is a consequence of solarpunk's Tumblr-heavy origin and its beginning as an aesthetic and genre—neither of which have owners. compounding matters is Tumblr's community structure, which is allergic to centralization of any kind. and despite the raging political battles—especially those that existed concurrently with the formulation of solarpunk—most of Tumblr's users have little to no experience with any form of organizing that would transfer to creating a centralized movement.
all of this adds up to something that is simply unable to become a movement—to become politically real. instead of there being solarpunk parties, pressure groups, cooperatives, or even small affinity groups, the solarpunk movement is almost exclusively Tumblr blogs, podcasts, and manifestos for an audience of dozens. instead of building off the legacies of people like Murray Bookchin—someone who arguably created a roadmap for solarpunks to adopt themselves—solarpunks seem to be very divided on whether they adhere to any theoretical doctrine at all. and instead of building a solarpunk future, people seem to mostly just fantasize about it and hope someone else does the work. but if there's anyone doing that work, i don't know about it.
Conclusion
i suppose my feelings would be summarized best by a statement: you can't build a cohesive political movement out of aesthetic and genre. really this feeling goes for everything that is punk, and doubly-so for solarpunk which doesn't have the benefit of 50 years of struggle and violence over what its fundamental values are; what it means; what adhering to it is like; who it's for; and how to live it. even today being a punk (with no qualifiers or specificity) doesn't intrinsically imply anything other than being visibly countercultural (and increasingly it doesn't even mean that. recuperation has come for many of the visible markers of being punk.) there are conservative punks. there are Nazi punks. there aren't many of them, but they still exist and people still have to fight them over what punk is.
so solarpunk runs into trouble immediately. it cannot really substantiate what it wants to be, even in ideal circumstances—and solarpunk has not been developed in ideal circumstances. that's not to say it doesn't have good people or good ideas, but if you're a "solarpunk" for political reasons and don't already have strong priors i think you're wasting your time. my sincere advice would be to read Bookchin and Öcalan, and learn from the Zapatistas and Kurds. become a social ecologist, or a communalist/libertarian municipalist, or a democratic confederalist. the Institute for Social Ecology does cool stuff and so does Rojava and its institutions (see Internationalist Commune, Cooperation in Mesopotamia, and Lêgerîn for just a few of these). and if you like the aesthetic and genre, it's fine to do that. just don't expect them to be vehicles of revolutionary politics or anything.
notes
1 "the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective" -- it's a very useful $10 word for your travels.
Thoughts
It's an interesting topic.
>> for the unaware, solarpunk is variously an aesthetic (perhaps thought of as the antithesis of cyberpunk), a genre (primarily of speculative fiction) and a movement (in a broad sense seeking to make real the aesthetic and bring into being what is prescribed by the genre). <<
Those three things work fine as separate parts.
An aesthetic can be whatever you think is pretty, if you're just making or hanging art. If you're doing it as fashion, more practicalities come into play.
A genre can likewise be whatever you find entertaining to write, film, read, view, etc. The amount of logic required will vary depending on where you choose to place it on the hard-soft spectrum of science fiction. I have seen very concrete solarpunk and blithe fantasy solarpunk. Both are fine as entertainment. Science fiction has always been a lot about imagining futures, good bad and ugly, thinking about implications of technology, and hopefully helping humanity avoid some of the worst foreseeable disasters.
*sigh* Well, we tried anyway. It might've worked better if more people had read the books.
A movement, however, requires a great deal more facts, logic, common sense, and science than things which live in the imagination. Once you set your goal as manifesting things from there to here, you are into a whole new level of worldwalking that is very challenging to do. I know, I do it all the time. You have to know a ton of different fields at least in passing to be able to A) find a dimension with the desired parameters, B) identify the key things making the target society work, C) figure out which of those can be replicated with extant resources in your dimension, and then D) describe that well enough for people to replicate or tinker around building it yourself. It can be done, people have done it, but it is difficult and complicated to get right. Also if you fuck it up, you might make matters worse instead of better. Technology is risky stuff.
Throw together an aesthetic, a genre, and a movement without understanding and accounting for the differences -- that's just begging for trouble.
>> taken at its most charitable, you might say for instance that "Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”" <<
That's a good summary of the core ideal. It's a riff on something science fiction has long done, and when done well, it can accomplish great good.
Look at Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. "What would it look like if humanity survived the Nuclear Age without blowing ourselves up? If we actually learned to get along with each other?" It was a shining beacon of hope that people desperately needed at that time, and it had tremendous influence, not just on the culture in general but in motivating specific people to do things from joining NASA to joining the Civil Rights Movement.
I've been an activist for decades. I've tried all kinds of techniques for driving change. And the one that has the highest throughput, the most people saying, "I did the thing," is plain old storytelling. Show people what a solved puzzle looks like, make them yearn for it, and include within it concrete things that people can do to move in that direction. It works. But you have to know what you're doing. That means knowing the problems you want to solve, being able to imagine or otherwise find a solution, describe it in tempting terms, and slip into the story or footnotes or somewhere enough actionable bits for your audience to try out if they wish.
>> i think that's pretty interesting; i think it's also very important. we're in a climate crisis and an ecological disaster of our own making—our future will be sustainability or catastrophe.<<
Sooth.
>> a "solarpunk" future might be what we need, especially if you subscribe to a vision of the future that involves degrowth and a reduction or redistribution of technological availability. <<
It's an outgrowth of one of four projected scenarios, the "Green Technology" future that uses high tech to maintain as much of the current lifestyle as possible, while replacing the worst excesses with more sustainable options.
However, high tech isn't the only option. Quite a lot of solar applications are low tech. Just ask any tree. Low-Tech Magazine focuses a lot on solar energy. These ,a href="https://www.instructables.com/Solar-1/">projects on Instructables range from high-tech panels to low-tech solar dryers. Built It Solar has a similar range. You need a factory to build a solar panel, but not to build a suntrap garden. I keep an eye on high tech, but it's not all that reliable for me personally. I am keenly interested in things I can actually deploy myself. Getting the government to budge is an exercise in frustration. But I can budge a brick easily, and a boulder if I fetch a lever.
Thoughts
I find this substantially true, but not entirely true. It depends a lot on what you go looking for. If you start with the aesthetic you'll find pretty pictures and clothing fashions, with variable degrees of practicality. If you start with the genre, you'll find all sorts of entertainment, some of which is genuinely entertaining, some of which is genuinely solartech, a little that is both, and a lot that fixates on one at the expense of the other. But there's also another branch, which isn't necessarily much concerned with contemporary solarpunk -- the part with deep roots in the hippie community and other Earth/land movements. This is where you find the practical low-to-mid tech stuff that people build so they can accomplish more and/or rely less on questionably ethical and questionably reliable mainstream infrastructure. There is a great deal of ingenuity there, and then those ideas seep into the art and the clothes and the storytelling and everything else.
To look at it a different way, solarpunk can be done from the surface in (which is largely what you're describing) or from the core out (which is some of what I'm describing). If you focus on the surface trappings, you tend to miss the point, which a lot of people do -- and if they're just in it for the art or the stories, it's okay, as long as they don't confuse that with practical plans for sustainability. Start from the core out, and you realize that without a clear vision, people won't understand where you're trying to go; without some charm, all that hard work is very unappealing; so that's where the art and storytelling come in, to create motivation and momentum.
>> with extremely scattered exceptions: there is no real "solarpunk" <<
I have seen many things that reasonably fit within the solarpunk realm. Whether they are "good" or not depends on how you judge them -- and what they were designed for, as the creator's goals may have nothing to do with yours.
>> and likewise no real solarpunk "movement". <<
Likely so. I would expect that more people are in it for relief from this world's fucking miserable outlook than because they have any idea or intent about actually trying to clean up the mess.
>> unless you overfit what solarpunk is (which we'll get to) or define it by vague platitudes like "ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community" (we'll also get to this) <<
Well, all of those things have their uses -- if you define each one, its strengths and weaknesses, and then develop a personal or group process for teaching and learning the skills that make them.
You need ingenuity to solve problems in new ways when the old ways aren't working. But that means you need to respect people who are a little (or a lot) wild and not best suited to conventional anything. Ideally, you want a mix of people who understand the proven methods, and those who can brainstorm when the old ways don't work, and the participatory decision-making skills to keep them from eating each other.
Generativity is just a modern way of saying "Plan for the seventh generation." If you want your kids to have a future -- or humanity to have a future, you better figure this out. Mainstream people are terrible at this. It goes against all their capitalist training, and they struggle to think more than a few years ahead. But it's the norm in many traditional cultures, not all of which have been wiped out yet. Here is one example of deep-future thinking.
Independence and community are two ends of a spectrum, where you absolutely need a healthy balance. Too much independence and people can't work together effectively, so society falls apart. Too much community crushes individuality and motivation, leaving people unable to endure their own company while alone or express themselves honestly in a group. Either extreme screws you, so it is crucial for people to understand why we need a balance and how to maintain that.
>> it is far more of a vibe than a praxis.<<
That is a brilliant phrase. I usually put it "The concept exceeds the execution" but yours is more particular and applicable to many situations, like how people tend to market politics. All feeling and no policy. :/
>> and this leads to interpretations that totally defeat what i presume should be the point of solarpunk. <<
When you're talking about art (the aesthetic), writing (the genre), or other creative activities then there is no one true point. People can do these for many reasons -- for fun, to make a living, to express themselves, to explore possibilities -- and all of those are valid. Even when you're talking about a movement, it can span many goals around a shared vision or at least direction. One artist might want to raise awareness, another to relieve despair through hopeful imagery, and a third to render a solar house so compellingly that people will want to build or buy one. All valid, and all useful in different ways.
Solarpunk is basically about challenging (that's the punk park) the idea of all-powerful fossiltech (that's the solar part) to create a different future than the one presently ahead of us, and people are doing that through art, writing, activism, and other means. They do this as well or poorly, as coherently or chaotically, as they do anything else. That is, 90% of everything is crud, but it's the other 10% that keeps humanity moving more-or-less forward.
Thoughts
I had so much fun with this that I broke it down into sections:
Part 1: Things I Like
Part 2: Things I Question
The Chobani Solarpunk Ad Part 3: The Most Interesting Part
The Chobani Solarpunk Ad Part 4: So You Want to Live in Chobaniland