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alyazabrief introduction
two days ago i wrote an off-hand blog update about my problems with solarpunk. i wrote this in a matter of a few hours, but i think my premises are pretty straightforward and defensible. however: these are not my only problems with solarpunk—in fact, i elided many of the more complicated issues that undercut solarpunk for me. i will now elaborate in some detail on these issues.
what does it mean to be solarpunk?
let's start from the ground floor here: i don't know what it means to be solarpunk. i don't think most solarpunks know either. or, i suppose i should say they might have an answer to the question "what does it mean to be solarpunk?", but i doubt that i would find it satisfactory.
whenever i engage in solarpunk spaces, i find it a consistent struggle to actually see myself—an impoverished Black nonbinary person—reflected there. this is true of the aesthetic, genre, and movement, and there are some obvious sources of this disillusion. as i previously observed, solarpunk's growth as an aesthetic and a genre is intimately tied to Tumblr; but that platform is comprised of "mostly white, mostly sheltered middle-school misfits and fandom teenagers who have since grown up." so solarpunk has inherited its demographics, and thus people i cannot relate to whatsoever. this would make it rather hard to be a solarpunk.
but it's not just an interpersonal feeling of disillusion that i have here—that would be something i could just work through. what i find is a fundamental disagreement with solarpunks invoking diversity and decolonialism. in solarpunk texts these are often considered integral to defining the term and what it stands for at all. solarpunks, then, implicitly frame themselves as advocates of diversity and their aesthetic, genre, and movement as one with an essentially decolonial character. i simply don't believe this is accurate. i consider it false from first principles: solarpunk is, again, very white, not particularly diverse, and hardly free of colonial prejudices; i also consider it false in actual practice: as we'll go over at length, solarpunk seems much the opposite—something that reifies a white, Western, and colonial line of thinking and leaves little room for anything else.
solarpunk as an extractive analogy
in function, i would argue solarpunk actually has something of a low-stakes extractivist relationship with diversity and decolonialism: it takes many of its most interesting building styles, technologies, cultural practices, and more from non-Western cultures. but then it fails to actually process them, their purpose, their place, and their context. if anything it decontextualizes these things—it fails to give them, and the peoples who made them, proper deference or due. thus they are cherrypicked without much deeper consideration and then laundered back into culture under the label "solarpunk," a Western curation of how the world ought to be run and what is acceptable or not.
jugaad, swadeshi, and refugee
take for example the assertion that "solarpunk draws on [...] Ghandi’s [sic] ideal of swadeshi and subsequent Salt March, and countless other traditions of innovative dissent." already a strong prescription is made here by posing Gandhi, poster child of nonviolent resistance and someone whose form of resistance is acceptable to nearly everyone, as the ideal. intentionally or not, forcible or violent resistance is foreclosed—a position hard to stomach given the nature of the climate crisis and the salient critiques of nonviolent tactics by people such as Peter Gelderloos. and what necessitates invoking Gandhi's "ideal of swadeshi" by Western solarpunks? even most other educated Westerners probably have no sense of what this movement was, or what its occurrence means practically for themselves today. certainly i don't. the swadeshi movement was strongly informed by the particular circumstances of colonial-era India, and particularly resistance to the first partition of Bengal. it seems quite out of place in any foundational solarpunk document.
where it's possible to extract meaning from an invocation of this sort, we still find that solarpunk fails to grapple with what that invocation actually implies. continuing the example, the swadeshi demand was not a blank slate—it comes bearing its own context and prescriptions. Gandhi's unrealized "ideal of swadeshi" was intimately tied to a notion of absolute, decentralized self-governance (Swaraj) by the Indian traditional village. the best analogy to this in the West is perhaps Hutterite or Amish communities, which have long utilized community-based economics and self-governance as Gandhi might have envisioned—and which also tend to be strongly hierarchical and oppressive because of their social beliefs. needless to say the invocation loses its luster when thought of this way.
meanwhile when we strip it to its bare essence, the swadeshi demand for "communal economies removed from ruling ideology, and serving as the basis of a new, moral system" becomes one with plenty of Western analogues that better serve its purpose in a solarpunk context. from Peter Kropotkin to Murray Bookchin, there is a long history of Western theory on this subject. non-white Western theorists have also taken up the subject and built on it throughout history. Jessica Gordon Nembhard's Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice documents the long history of Black cooperative structures in America, many of which were built on similar principles to the swadeshi central demand; more contemporarily, Huey P. Newton's intercommunalism served as the basis of the Black Panther Party's "survival" programs.
we find this trouble too with invoking "Jugaad-style innovation from the developing world"—another turn of phrase from the same foundational solarpunk work. solarpunk's consideration of jugaad is purely an aesthetic one since the basic principles of jugaad are almost universal (Wikipedia gives them as "innovative fixes or a simple workarounds, solutions that bend the rules, or resources that can be used in such a way" - in effect, the Indian subcontinent just happens to have a broad word for this). but jugaad's ramshackle "aesthetic" is explicitly a byproduct of systemic failings—of underdevelopment and inequal access to resources—that solarpunk presumably seeks to address in the first place. in other words: "jugaad-style innovation" only happens because of a capitalist economy in which many are necessarily deprived. i feel comfortable asserting a better world would not have jugaad aesthetics. so what is the purpose of its inclusion versus, say, appropriate technology? why does solarpunk not foundationally rest on a publication like Low Tech Magazine?
i think that there is a consistent tendency, in solarpunk, to gaze toward the developing world as a gigantic involuntary laboratory for solarpunk ideas. (non-white people generally—particularly indigenous peoples in the West—are also subjects of this gaze.) this is weird. but it would probably be fine if that gaze were processed, engaged with critically and in a nuanced fashion, and its impact on solarpunk acknowledged. for the most part, though, this is not the case. much of the current basis on which solarpunk is built strikes me as—unintentionally or otherwise—culturally appropriative and orientalist. to adapt a turn of phrase from Edward Said, solarpunk bleaches away "troublesome interpositions" of context. the invocation of the swadeshi movement and aestheticization of jugaad are just two examples of it doing so. but there's no shortage of erasure of indigenous peoples; overlooking genuine extractivism needed for solar panels and wind turbines; Eurocentrism; or fetishization of Western norms, values, and morals in solarpunk spaces either. and sometimes solarpunks explicitly make prescriptions that cut to the heart of this problem: one early treatise on the politics of solarpunk proposes earnestly that "If we are going to create solarpunk cities/societies from scratch, refugee camps may very well be the foundation we build on." perhaps if one were to actually live in a refugee camp, they might not be so quick to prescribe this state of living as acceptable for others to live in. but most Westerners—and especially most white Westerners—will never have such an experience. and most solarpunks are white Westerners. so it goes.
diversity and decolonialism for who?
solarpunk at the end of the world
in an article on Storming the Ivory Tower entitled "You've Got To Throw Your Zombies On The Gears!" there are two observations that seem worth examining. the first of these is actually a rather simple statement, which is:
Solarpunk[—]in the projected context of resurgent fossil plagues, mass refugee status for the entire equatorial region, sunken cities, famine, and, perhaps, extinction[—]seems woefully unprepared, delusional.
indeed, i think this observation begs the question for the prevailing, depolicitized solarpunk2 that cares more about aesthetic than action: how solarpunk can you be when your world is ending? even achieving 1.5°C—now virtually impossible without either geoengineering or inventing the deus ex machina of carbon capture—will be bleak for many. on our current trajectory (closer to 2.5-3.5°C), much of that Global South will become unsuitable for decent human living, or perhaps habitation at all. Gaia Vince suggests there would be "[a] wide equatorial belt of high humidity [that] will cause intolerable heat stress across most of tropical Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, rendering vast areas uninhabitable for much of the year." Paul Behrens speculates that "Increasingly, we [will] begin to dread the onset of summer, anticipating what the season will bring: how many wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc., and how large they will be. We will adapt by bolstering infrastructure… but the changes will outpace us. Higher temperatures will render people incapable of working; they are already increasing suicide rates." David Wallace-Wells fatalistically notes "Already, as many as 1 billion are at risk for heat stress worldwide, and a third of the world’s population is subject to deadly heat waves at least twenty days each year; by 2100, that third will grow to half, even if we manage to pull up short of two degrees. If we don’t, the number could climb to three-quarters." and these are just some of the effects to come.
foundational solarpunk writings propose "infrastructure as a form of resistance" and assert ingenuity and local resilience as core values of solarpunk. but even in the Global North our built infrastructure assumes a world colder than the one we live in today—it literally is not equipped for the current amount of climate change, much less further heating. what happens when we actually reach 1.5°C or 2.5°C? absent radical politics, what is the solarpunk prescription to our current situation, in which climate isotherms shift nearly every year and whole ecosystems are forced to follow? Tad DeLay notes in Future of Denial that "A given temperature line, an isotherm, moves poleward at a rate of sixty kilometers per decade. Species dependent upon specific bands of temperatures will move at a similar speed if they are to survive." humans too will be a part of that great migration—hundreds of millions are expected to become climate refugees in the decades to come.
if in the Global North "infrastructure as a form of resistance" is problematic, in the Global South (where infrastructure is poor to nonexistent in the first place) it totally collapses. so too do hopes of ingenuity and resilience that rely on, among other assumptions, the premise that outside activities will remain non-lethal. but this is already being tested at an alarming rate by current wet-bulb temperatures (which become lethal at lower-than-first-thought thresholds) and current dry but protracted heat. the worst of these will both be experienced by the Global South—that is, if rising sea levels, flooding, famine, disease, and other worries don't get there first.
it is here that some solarpunks will probably exercise an escape clause i've avoided to this point: solarpunk is utopian. it's not meant to politically grapple with the here and now, at least in the ways i'm talking about; rather, it exists to be a sort of collective speculative fiction. this is why it is depoliticized. but i find this problematic as an out: it cedes that solarpunk can't really be a movement, and many solarpunks clearly disagree with that notion. beyond the aforementioned "infrastructure as a form of resistance" quote, one of the landmark early works outlining solarpunk invokes "local free association and global networks" as a model of political organization, and asserts "solarpunk can create connected pockets of vibrancy and resistance amidst a larger world of decline and oppression." clearly there is a desire among solarpunks for some sort of solarpunk movement. but if we are to nullify the out and say solarpunk should be a movement, then what good would its current depoliticized form be? without a radical change in our economic, political, and social systems solarpunk's utopian vision will be for a privileged few, if any.
we know this because the underlying arithmetic of climate change is simple, even if its outcomes are complex. we know the future in some places is uninhabitable, and these future uninhabitable places are disproportionately in the Global South. no amount of invoking "local free association and global networks" who build "infrastructure as a form of resistance" and try to be locally resilient will overcome this. you cannot resist wet-bulb temperatures above a certain threshold, nor build a community on an island that is beneath the waves. both will happen in the near future to people living today—the end of some worlds is now inevitable. in this respect depoliticized solarpunk again takes something of an appropriative and extractive form: Westerners are likely to reap the diversity of the world and the new-found benefits of applying technologies once confined to the Global South, while the Global South is depopulated by the climatological arson of the Global North.
and far from any sort of decolonial arrangement, i find it alarmingly likely the "best" outcome for a depoliticized solarpunk movement would be neocolonial: a world in which the developing world becomes completely reliant on the developed world to continue existing at all. Kwame Nkrumah's vision of countries whose "economic system and thus its political policy" are directed by outside actors would in this case become extremely literal—countries might remain intact only through an outside actor ensuring said country is habitable, with habitation technologies only the outside actor can manufacture. certainly this is not inconceivable of countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there exist considerable natural resource deposits and a profit to be made on continued resource exploitation. (but what of other countries where few such profits are forthcoming?)
the rage and pain problem
this provides a useful turn to the second point i find substantial "You've Got To Throw Your Zombies On The Gears!", which is:
Solarpunk as it stands feels a lot like "green technology"--a series of tweaks that make for good branding and style but don't rock the boat too much. Where is Solarpunk's militant side? Where is the rage and pain? Where is the accusatory question: "Who killed the world?"
as we have just recounted: parts of the world will end—in a meaningful sense—in the lifetime of most people reading this. there are real people and real corporations who are actively killing the Earth right now, and who causally have the blood of dozens of species, thousands of ecosystems, and millions of people on their hands. Eunice Foote discovered the mechanism for climate change in 1856 and the arithmetic of future warming was deduced by Svante Arrhenius as early as the 1890s. the American Petroleum Institute warned in 1965 that "[...]by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in the climate beyond local or even national efforts." Exxon research in 1979 found that "the present trend of fossil fuel consumption will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050." they knew. everyone responsible for the climate crisis knew what would happen. yet in its depoliticized state, solarpunk has more to prescribe about aesthetics than its very reason for existing: the greatest crime one person has ever committed to another.
i'm not saying that vengeance against those who have brought us here is necessary—it is not, and killing oil executives would not be useful praxis even if i think you could justify it morally. but where is the rage and pain in solarpunk—and why are hope and optimism treated by solarpunks as mutually exclusive of these? even non-killing forms of physical praxis against entities responsible for the climate crisis—destruction of natural gas and oil infrastructure, sabotage of cars and trucks, monkeywrenching and tree-spiking, or permanent blockading like the Unistʼotʼen Camp—are ones solarpunks seem loathe to acknowledge. far more frequent in my experience are guerrilla gardening, community gardening, little free pantries or libraries, Food Not Bombs tabling, and the like. i don't mean to speak ill of this variety of praxis or anything, but its unique valorization is another place where the notion of "Gandhi as ideal" i mentioned earlier rears its head for the worse. solarpunk has essentially tethered itself to a Gandhi-like path of pacifism and nonviolent resistance (including nonviolence against property)—but, for their value in the toolkit of politics, in what sense are either of these punk or countercultural? they're arguably the dominant mode of political resistance today.
and even supposing my assertion was not true, it's still hard to be more punk than literally facing prosecution for anti-corporate direct action. many people engaging in physical praxis experience this. it was barely 20 years ago that the United States government enacted a "Green Scare" in an effort to crack down specifically on practitioners of sabotage and monkeywrenching. people in the Earth First! and Animal Liberation Front movements have already seen very real prison time for mere property damage against polluting industries and tree-spiking in forests intended for clear-cutting. and the possibility of prison, or worse, has not ceased to be true for environmentalists in the time since the Scare. last year police brutally executed Tortuguita, an environmental activist involved in the Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. 23 other Stop Cop City activists face domestic terrorism charges for their alleged involvement in the movement's blockades and direct actions, and another 60+ face racketeering or money laundering charges because they supposedly supported the movement materially. the pattern of repression makes it clear what those in political power fear from activists, and right now it's direct action.
perhaps not coincidentally, there is striking difference in the tactics often used by colonized or oppressed peoples and the tactics valorized by solarpunks. beyond Stop Cop City recent examples are easy to find. Stop Line 3 land defenders "put up barricades and dug trenches across roads" to halt the pipeline; it was reported they "slashed tires, cut hoses, [put] rocks and dirt in engines, forced entry into offices and destroyed electrical wiring in equipment." and in Wetʼsuwetʼen territory protesters have for years seized equipment, dug trenches and built blockades, disabled Coastal GasLink infrastructure, and continually blockaded roads and the Coastal GasLink pipeline. there were solidarity blockades of rail lines by Mi'gmaq and Mohawk First Nations throughout 2020, slowed only by COVID-19. in one instance in 2022, 20 masked attackers armed with axes caused significant damage to a Coastal GasLink pipeline work camp by "seizing large company machines and using them to destroy the site."
history likewise gives many examples of self-defense and violent resistance from the colonized and oppressed. the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973—one of the pinnacles of the American Indian Movement and its efforts to mainstream the colonial failings of the United States government—was certainly not nonviolent. it literally involved the seizure of a reservation town, and during the 71-day occupation three people were killed. the Black Panthers—both before and after their turn toward intercommunalism—made a point of openly embracing self-defense and defensive violence against oppression; in several cases (such as that of Bobby James Hutton) they forewent even this principle and shot first. and even the Civil Rights Movement had a degree of heterogeneity with respect to nonviolence: Akinyele Omowale Umoja's book We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement observes the continual creation of Black self-defense and paramilitary forces in the Jim Crow South. these were ubiquitous enough that even the non-violent SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) were sometimes influenced by them. CORE's Louisiana chapter explicitly adopted armed self-defense and organization as a principle in 1963; and both CORE and SNCC had many members who supported the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and its contemporaries. this despite RAM advocating for "armed struggle as the primary means by which Black liberation would come about" and its desire "to build a Black liberation army to wage guerilla warfare in the United States".
all this to say: i find the near total absence of physical praxis and violence from solarpunk to be bizarre—and once again reflective of solarpunk's depoliticization and mostly white and Western demographics. many of the movements and moments i would consider punk have explicitly used one or both of those things—particularly the movements and moments of non-white peoples, who have often needed a component of violence to enact any sort of change at all. if i were to summarize my position by way of books, i would assert that Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline or Aric McBay's Full Spectrum Resistance ought to have equal or greater a place in solarpunk than Food Not Bombs' Hungry for Peace. that they don't is a statement of priorities. and that's not a dunk on Hungry for Peace (which is a very good manual that i recommend)—it's an objection to the bounds of acceptable activism that seem to exist form many solarpunks. but i suppose it would be rather easy to be a pacifist—to take refuge in nonviolent protest—when you're not colonized or oppressed, and when your world will not end in the lifetime that you read this.
a better world is possible (but not through solarpunk)
i will reiterate my belief that if you're a "solarpunk" for political reasons you should read Bookchin and Öcalan, and learn from the Zapatistas and Kurds. social ecology is, to me, what solarpunk ought to be (but won't)—and under its wings are at least two schools of thought. you might adhere to a classical Bookchinite communalism/libertarian municipalism, or take after Öcalan and his democratic democratic confederalism. i think both are defensible, and both Bookchin and Öcalan are some of the most forward-thinking theorists of our time. you would be doing yourself and those around you a favor by trying to make their prescriptions reality.
of course you might charge that social ecology has many of these same problems i've talked about. in some respects this is a fair observation. Murray Bookchin—although an antifascist and antiracist Jew who spent much of his life opposing sources of oppression and dominion—obviously had his own blind spots. his opposition to racism, colonization, and settler colonialism was primarily expressed via polemics against others and not affirmatively throughout his work (to which it was also left secondary); his works, likewise, strongly center Europe in no small part because of his sectarian objections to the New Left and their centering of the Global South. most social ecologists that i am aware of are also white.
but Bookchin was far more unambiguously anti-racist, anti-colonization, anti-settler colonial, and appreciative of non-European traditions and the need to accommodate them and learn from them than he is usually given credit for. social ecologists, too, are aware of his (and social ecology's) deficiencies and have written at great length about them. take Blair Taylor's Social Ecology, Racism, Colonialism, and Identity: Assessing the Work of Murray Bookchin, an extensive piece in the social ecologist magazine Harbinger which summarizes Bookchin's visions and his drawbacks in this sphere. and social ecology is an actual movement doing actual things, not an aesthetic and genre trying to become a movement. even if on the whole social ecology might be demographically white, the most developed social ecologist projects are generally not. Cooperation Jackson is one such example in the United States—and one of its major figures, Kali Akuno, is intimately involved with the Institute for Social Ecology. and Öcalan's democratic confederalism, as noted previously, is essentially a wing of Bookchin's social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and communalism. the democratic confederalist experiment of the Kurdish people, in fact, is likely the largest ongoing nonstatist experiment in the world. it's also likely one of the most ecologically conscious in the world, and actively seeks to remedy many of the ecological legacies of consequences colonialism and imperialism in the region.
obviously, there are not solarpunk analogues to Rojava. there aren't even really analogues to Cooperation Jackson in the solarpunk space that i know of (although probably not for a lack of trying). i don't think this is intrinsically a failing of solarpunk—it's hard do these things. but it does mean that solarpunk's whiteness (and its dubious ability to actually be diverse and decolonial) is not even offset by what its adherents are doing in practice. it remains essentially an online phenomenon, and a heavily white and depoliticized one at that. this is not confidence inducing. even though i might be one of the few visibly non-white social ecologists, i can look to the inspirational work taking place in Jackson, Mississippi and know there is a place for Black social ecology. i can hear about Black facilitators putting the Symbiosis movement's efforts to build a confederal organization in North America on the right track. i can read Lêgerîn and the inspirational stories of peoples around the world who find hope in the Kurdish project, and hope one day to build it in their own communities and cultures. i can't do something like that with solarpunk, and i doubt i ever will be able to.
if solarpunk is to become a movement at all—or a movement that is actually diverse and decolonial—it will probably have to shed much of its current form; what i write about here will have to be overcome; and, fundamentally, it will have to politicize itself and accept it cannot be for everyone. i do not expect any of this to happen. i do have optimism that a better world is possible, and i hope it comes about one day (through socialist politics)—but i don't expect solarpunk to play any serious part in making that better world. and after reading this, i hope you understand why, and the problems that make me think this way.
notes
1 for many, i would imagine they also afford variations on the same basic notion of escapism from a complex, degenerating world into something simpler and more harmonious.
2 if you're wondering how a movement that so asserts and emphasizes politics could still be depoliticized as i claim here: words are cheap. it is easy to assert anti-capitalism, diversity, decolonialism, etcetera—actually doing these things is another story, and as you may be able to tell i am not sold solarpunk really does any of these things. certainly not with the consistency to justify labeling the aesthetic, genre, or movement that way.