II. The Rocks We Build On

First, some facts on the ground. Novelist Bruce Sterling, who helped create the original science fictional ‘-punk’ — cyberpunk — says that the future is about “old people in big cities afraid of the sky.” This is inexorable. Barring radical cataclysm, the reasonably inevitable trends of urbanization, an aging populace and climate change will set the stage for life in the coming five decades. If you are a human living in the middle of the 21st century, chances are you will be elderly — or surrounded by the elderly. Chances are you will live in a city. Chances are your community, country and supply chains will be plagued by some combination of extreme weather, rising sea levels and droughts.

These are the facts we must build on and around, whether we are making solarpunk fiction, solarpunk fashion, solarpunk infrastructure, or solarpunk political demands. If solarpunk is to back up its optimism with meaningful solutions, or even meaningful notions, we must consciously consider how to respond to each of these trends. Allow me to make some suggestions.

Old people. We only have to look at Japan to see the way an aging population can empty towns and leave both infrastructure and social structure untended. This is an extreme case, exacerbated by Japan’s immigration policies, but even in places where the world’s young are free move in to fill open jobs and depopulated communities, the elderly will often outnumber the youth. Caring for these elders will require a huge effort, particularly in the developed world. As will attending to their deaths.

Still, longevity is an incredible resource for a society that prizes long-term planning. I believe solarpunk can be an ideology of profound compassion for dealing with the elderly. Its aesthetics speak of a gentleness, and a recognition that color and beauty can bring joy and give life meaning even in the most painful of circumstances. I’m all for solarpunk symphony halls, libraries and city centers, but of all the spaces that have been made drab, brutal and soul-sucking by modern consumer architecture and decor, surely hospitals and nursing homes must top the list. Solarpunk is partly about building infrastructure that can be sustainable into the long term — and that can sustain many generations. What better way to begin than by creating assisted living facilities as stone-sturdy as cathedrals, with sun-streamed stained-glass and ivy-roofed walkways? Places where we ourselves would want to live out our own infirm years, decades later. To borrow a phrase, let us approach geriatrics as if people mattered.

Before we get too sappy, let’s remember that living in a society with an aging population also means living under the political power of an elderly majority. The youth have the energy to mobilize, but in the developed world today (and tomorrow) they just don’t have the numbers to stage revolutions, win electoral battles or pass radical reforms. Societies of the old are societies of political stagnation. Their politics produce de facto dynasties (Bush vs. Clinton) and decadent paranoiacs (Berlusconi, Putin, et al). The economic agenda of the old is about preserving costly entitlements, hording jobs and wages for workers with seniority, and fighting inflation. The old tend to live off capital assets that decline in value as the economy inflates, while the young today must work to pay off debts that shrink as inflation rises.

As a “punk” ideology, solarpunk must be opposed to the political domination of the old. But we may also have to live with it. We just aren’t likely to win the numbers game. Solarpunk’s strategy should be to create pockets of progress and imagination within a larger political landscape of decay, deadlock and long emergency. (More on this later.)

São Paulo, with a metropolitan population of 19 million — Wikimedia Commons

In cities. It is a dark truth of environmentalism that wind farms, solar arrays, hydroelectric dams and other triumphs of sustainability require completely engineered landscapes. Building them means ripping up the ground and installing massive amounts of metal and concrete.

Cities are the same. Urban density means transportation efficiency, shared infrastructure, more pooled resources to throw at common problems, and at times a greater sense of community than rural isolation or exurban sprawl. Solarpunk obviously applauds these advantages and puts them to use. But cities are built on great devastation of the natural world. They are structures that consume huge amounts of energy and materials and produce tremendous amounts of waste — even if the suburban alternative is worse per capita. When cities die they leave unwieldy ruins that take yet more resources to break down. Cities are a scar upon the earth.

More to the point, cities don’t die. Cities happen where people gather, and people gather in cities. Because of this the cities we have today are largely going to be the cities we have for hundreds of years. They will grow and sprawl where they can. They will retreat from the rising seas where they must. We cannot start anew from scratch (see Naypyidaw below). We must reuse and refurbish the built environment. To paraphrase Sterling, the wreckage of the unsustainable is our frontier. What we build never goes away; often it must be lived in.

Cities also crystalize the social stressors modernity places on us. Solarpunk aesthetics look to loosen that vice with soothing visuals and textures that imply openness and pay homage to the living world. We can even build with materials that are themselves still living and growing with us. That is a beautiful vision, but one we must place in context. While it is useful to imagine comprehensively optimistic futures and fantasies, solar-punk can’t be the same as solar-utopia. Punks are an essentially anti-social (or at least counter-cultural) force, rejecting and attacking the norm. In this case that means understanding that the beautiful clothes and buildings solarpunk envisions are likely to be surrounded by something very different — the cracked concrete of decaying infrastructure, the smudged plastic of cheaply made gadgets, the intimidating glass and steel of finance fortresses.

Our canny @Threadbare pointed out to me that too often bright-green design is rooted in the tradition of modernist real-estate development, which sells a vision of places made wholly new. Past mistakes are cleansed. The clean hallways are haunted by render ghosts. It’s seductive, and easy to put in a magazine, but anyone who has sat through a planning board meeting knows how unrealistic it is. Solarpunk need not make this same mistake. We know what jugaad is. We know about water hacking, and guerilla gardening, and pressure-washer graffiti. Solarpunk can see the spots where trees have broken through the asphalt for what they are: great places to grow trees.

But on the other side, there is the false seduction of favela ingenuity as well, that charmingly rickety sweet spot where Swiss Family Robinson meets Nat Geo poverty porn. It should go without saying that we should not fetishize slums. Still, it’s true that such places use resources more efficiently, that they successfully house millions with a relatively low carbon footprint. But I have two objections. First, a jugaad is a hack by an individual, not a plan by a community. Second, places that don’t follow fire codes tend to burn down.

Somewhere between these two approaches solarpunks can pioneer into that ‘wreckage of the unsustainable’ to remake our cities greener and better. This is a messy task, and we will probably need to have some difficult discussions about just how solarpunk aspires to relate to “the natural world.” Can cities ever exist in harmony with nature? Does such a thing as “nature” even exist anymore? Do we need to fundamentally change the way we relate to the natural world? Or can we find sustainability through piecemeal reforms? I don’t know the answers, but I do believe that solarpunk shouldn’t shy from its urban destiny. Solarpunk is a continuation of the anthropocene.

Austin, Texas. May 2015 — Devon Hutchins

“Afraid of the sky” should be an easy one, right? Solar power turns climate disaster on its head by making the sky the source of energy abundance, not just superstorms, frozen winters and rains that never come. This is the high concept that drew me to this cause: what more elegant image of our salvation than a solar panel, turning the light that heats our planet beyond comfort into energy, the very commodity for which we set the world on fire? It’s a powerful start to an ideology, and one we should rightly smile over. But the reckoning with the sky remains.

I suspect that at some point in the next decade or so, it will truly dawn on us that the increasingly inhospitable climate is of our own making, the result of policy decisions and political failures. That means the sky is no longer morally neutral. A storm on the horizon is not apart from us. A hurricane or tornado is not an act of God. We have no precedent for dealing with such a burden on a global scale. Our climate sins may grow to define us. If we aren’t careful, the response of most will be: it’s everyone else’s fault. And, because blame is always about power, this debate will either turn violent or exacerbate existing inequalities. (“Those who consume a lot are prepared to slash the consumption of those who already consume less.”) That is a recipe for an even more dangerous world.

We wrecked the planet. Some individuals and organizations more than others, of course, but I doubt we will ever bring anyone to justice. The atmosphere, and with it our collective soul, will not heal on its own for a very long time. All we can do is begin repairs, and through that careful labor perhaps find some measure of redemption.

As you can tell, I take these heavy matters very seriously. Solarpunk doesn’t need to get quite so dour — but keep it in mind. As you world-build, ponder the whys of wearing fashions of joy as a response to global sorrow. Remember that cathedral-time decisions are minute compared to climate-scale momentum. Understand that solarpunk’s “dirt behind the ears” needs to come from planting something that will reclaim a bit of that carbon we burned. Hold your optimism up to the muggy, yellow light and make sure we are willing to work for it. For solarpunk to lead us towards a better future, it must look our climate sins in the eyes, acknowledge their gravity, and start fixing that carbon. There is no going back. Only slowly, steadily clawing our way through, to something better.

Who knows? Climate disasters could provide the impetus to build the radical communities we envision. Droughts may cause strife, but people can also be extraordinarily good to each other when fires and storms hit. Solarpunk needs a foot in the door; let’s not be afraid to walk through it, if the wind blows that door open.