said my brain for no reason as I was delivering a stack of books on WWII to a classroom today.
Solarpunk Stories: What is Solarpunk?
The Anarchist Library: A Solarpunk Manifesto
William Joseph Gillam: A Solarpunk Manifesto: Turning Imaginary Into Reality
No. And here's why.
Solarpunk is inherently optimistic. It imagines a future where humans have sufficiently figured their shit out to stop destroying the thing that engendered and sustains our very survival (y'know, the planet).
I do not share this optimism.
One would think I *should,* right? My backyard is full of chickens, my garden is "designed" to be a chaotic mess of permaculture offensive to HOAs everywhere, I hoard rain water, I don't recognize "food waste" or "yard waste" as concepts, and I'm absolutely eyeballing solar panels. I was almost-literally raised by the forest when I wasn't being raised by an Apple IIGS. Surely I, of all people, should be all in on solarpunk?
Yet I'm not. Because I cannot muster the optimism that humans will, en masse, figure out that we were never separate from the Earth and its fate. We have treated the planet as something we can *use* for too many centuries - hell, millennia. If we ever knew how to live as if we came *from* the Earth and are not merely *on* it, we have forgotten - actively stamped out - that knowledge.
We are a short-sighted species. Full stop. I don't see that changing, but it would have to for us to actually figure all this out.
Solarpunk envisions a future where we've harnessed technology to improve the quality of our environment. We marry technology with ecology; the former harmonizes with the latter.
I don't buy it. Our technological trajectory has been one of ever-increasing destruction, driven constantly by the core unexamined belief that the Earth *owes us something* - something we're allowed to just grab from the planet and distort to our own ends. That's what human technology *is* - the collection and distortion of natural materials to our own ends. That's what technology has always been.
I don't see how we continue to do that *and* fully understand what the Taoists call p'u - the uncarved wood.
Solarpunk envisions the long-term survival of the human species. Maybe I'm too old, or too jaded, or something, but...I don't really care. In fact, I worry about any strain of thought that focuses too much on some "future" at the expense of the now. The TESCREAL types are already waaaay too into that, with incredibly shitty consequences for actual humans who are currently alive right now.
I care very much about the short-term survival of the people I encounter daily. The school district in which I work has a double-digit homelessness rate among our students. We're pushing 100% free and reduced lunch overall; in a couple buildings we're already at 100%. Well over half of my students have a 504 or an IEP, many driven by the trauma of human hardship.
I don't care if we survive as a species. I care that these kids make it to adulthood.
Let me try to put this in terms of images:
Solarpunk is eco-domes flourishing with life, recycling their own water and air, and running zero-waste households with a biodigester in every kitchen.
Cyberpunk gardening is coaxing along a tree seedling that has managed to pop up between the cracks in the concrete of Night City.
Will that tree keep growing and eventually undermine the buildings it's beside? Maybe. Maybe not. I won't live long enough to see that. What matters - for my humanity even more than the tree's - is that I keep that little guy going *now.* That I deal with, and resist, what oppresses us *now.* That I help the kids in front of me *now.*
I'm not opposed to solarpunk - at all. Someone needs to have some optimism around here. Someone needs to build toward a world where people like me don't need to water individual tree seedlings in the middle of the surveillance district outside the Fight the AI For Your Right To Eat unemployment office. Maybe watering my seedling helps make that future more likely. I don't know. I just know the damn tree needs water.
Went for a lunch walk and did some thinking.
My primary problem with a lot of solarpunk writing, right now, is that it remains focused on individual solutions to systemic problems.
I'm not opposed to the individual efforts. As noted above, I too am pro-DIY, gardening, water conservation, and the rest.
I AM opposed to treating these as if they solve systemic problems with how we treat the planet. Especially when so many individual solutions rely on those toxic systems.
One example: Small portable solar panels can be used to charge one's phone. Pretty neat, yes? Certainly the average person (eating hot chip and) charging they phone via solar is a Doable Thing.
Except: modern solar panels, and cell phones for that matter, still rely on rare earth metals and other resources that are both non-renewable and currently extracted in some pretty appalling ways:
ScienceDirect: Environmental impacts of rare earth metals mining
Harvard Business Review: The dark side of solar power
Insofar as our individual "solutions" still rely on systemic horrors, I'm not sure how much progress we're making. And I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of crediting ourselves with progress when that progress is built on the unsustainable. That's exactly what we have been doing for centuries - crowing about our "progress" while careening toward our own extinction. That fundamentally has to stop.
This is a tough spot to be in. We need to do something; these are the things we have; the climate and the survival of humans as a species aren't likely to wait for us to overthrow the corporate social order. There is no one good, clean, elegant solution here. As hopeful and even joyous as solarpunk futures look, I don't see a way to them that doesn't take us through some really dark places first.
The best I can suggest is a both/and. Hook up those solar panels AND realize they're not a sustainable product. Compost those kitchen scraps AND understand that every time you enter a grocery store you're up against all of agribusiness and commercial food.
If what you do matters for no other reason, it matters because it's what will save YOUR humanity. Some days, that needs to be enough.
--