Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Eleven: All About Solarpunk: Literature and Movement.
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
This episode, we’re going to dive into solarpunk. I often use solarpunk and hopeful climate fiction interchangeably, but solarpunk is also an in-real-life movement and lifestyle. Today we’ll talk about both and how imagining a different world is key to all of it.
Solarpunk Vision Goes Viral
In 2021, an iconic vision of solarpunk went viral with the Dear Alice commercial for Chobani yogurt. It was a bright green world, full of windmills and bubbling streams, fresh produce hand-picked—or bot-picked by entertaining and delightful robots. The commercial was formatted as a letter from a mother to her daughter about the beautiful world she’d helped build and was passing on. It was a pastoral, fantastical, gorgeous solarpunk future, and it sounded like this:
If that music sounds familiar, it’s because it’s an original score by long-time Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi.
And it’s a commercial for yogurt.
I remember seeing this short video and experiencing a thrill of recognition. I’d been writing solarpunk for over a year, hopepunk for even longer, and it seemed like representations of this kind of green future were simply absent in most media. Seeing this glossy depiction on the screen was incredibly exciting and affirming. I think the solarpunk community was so hungry for any kind of depiction that actually took solarpunk seriously, they could almost forgive the commercialization. Almost.
As The Garden Library blog says:
The irony of such a beautiful animation that envisions a world where human technology synthesizes perfectly with mother nature, being created by a single-use plastic yogurt company wasn’t lost on the public.
Solarpunks were hungry for the vision, not the yogurt. My reaction was dual-edged as well: excited to have the visuals and ideas out where people could see them, but queasy that this anti-capitalist imagery was being offered up by a corporation, no matter how well-meaning.
The tension of that reaction, as well as the impact the commercial had, illuminates a lot about solarpunk, both the community and the literature, which strangely seem to occupy different spaces, although of course overlapping.
But first, a few definitions. We are word people here, after all.
What Is Solarpunk?
A serviceable definition of solarpunk could go something like this: it’s a vision of a bright future where we’re living sustainably, in harmony with nature. Technology has an appropriate place, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground, but always green and benefiting humanity.
It’s the obvious opposite to grimdark post-apocalyptic dystopias, but it’s also the opposite of shiny tech-optimist futures because solarpunk believes, emphatically, that Tech Won’t Save Us. (And you definitely should check out the podcast by that name.)
Solarpunk is deeply community-oriented and justice-centered. It says what’s broken about our world is more likely to be caused by technology than cured by it — that our ills are social and our solutions must be as well. And it must include everyone and address deep structural and historical injustices.
For a truly excellent deep dive into the history and ethos of solarpunk, you should check out previous Bright Green Futures guest Ana Sun’s article in DreamForge magazine called Write the Future You Want to Live In. She calls solarpunk a “literary, artistic, and activist” movement, and I like how she points out solarpunk’s defining collaborative nature:
One of the speediest ways to grasp solarpunk principles is through a collectively authored manifesto housed at Regenerative Design. The Wikipedia entry on solarpunk also happens to be a good place to begin. The free encyclopaedia itself embodies solarpunk values as a volunteer-run, non-profit organisation, running on open-source software dedicated to documenting society’s best version of truth through open collaboration.
Those deeply-held values are why the Chobani commercial was so discordant. And Chobani is not the only one trying to capitalize—a word that I used advisedly—on the hunger for a brighter, greener future.
I recently came across a solarpunk conference that was charging $1000 a head for a weekend of solarpunk lifestyle and celebration. It was brought up in a Facebook group I belong to (and heartily support) called Artists Against AI. People in the group complained the conference was using AI in their marketing. That’s a red flag for any conference, given that generative AI is based on theft and exploitation, something I’ve spoken about many times outside the pod. But it was especially a red flag for a solarpunk conference—that kind of exploitation would seem to be a deep contradiction to the solarpunk ethos. But I was also surprised I hadn’t even heard of this particular conference.
When I looked into it, every vibe was off. It was big, glossy, expensive… major production money went into this thing and the price of entry showed it. Their marketing, aside from using AI, deployed a bunch of the right words—sustainable, green, future, inclusive—but their sustainability measures centered mostly on not using plastic in their food service. Which is a pretty underwhelming way to embody Radical Change. This solarpunk conference was a party for people to cosplay a green future but not in a way that suggested any real change. For sure, nothing to threatened the status quo.
The queasiness on this one was off the charts for me.
The most positive spin I could muster was that solarpunk had become popular enough, at least as an idea, that folks were trying to monetize it. But, as The Garden Library noted before, it’s super ironic (and disturbing) when the capitalist system tries to monetize our dreams of an anti-capitalist collaborative future.
Living the Solarpunk Lifestyle
I want to be clear that I don’t have any problem with people cosplaying a solarpunk lifestyle, at least in the sense of trying on parts of it, to see if they fit, and maybe taking them for a spin. That DIY approach—and regular sci-fi cosplay is deeply DIY and creative and joyful—is a very imaginative process. As an engineer, I get appeal of being a tinkerer. And while none of us can escape completely from the capitalist world we’re living in, it sure feels good to explore ways to opt-out. I deeply, emphatically support that. Just not as an expensive, exclusive weekend of patting ourselves on the back for recycling. Or using the promise of a brighter future to sell yogurt.
Solarpunk is much more radical than that. It’s my friend who’s DIY installing his own solar panels and backup battery for when the next storm comes. It’s my other friend who’s rewilding her yard, one patch at a time, for years. It’s my Canadian friend who forages for mushrooms and my American friend living in Ireland who put a tiny wind turbine on his roof. It’s people guerilla planting food forests and baking bread in solar ovens and waxing on about the wonders of ants and beebalm. Many of these people won’t identify as solarpunks—they may not even know what solarpunk is—but I see the seeds they’re planting, and that is the future I want to live in.
They are showing the value of imagining a different tomorrow by manifesting it in the world today.
But we have a little bit of a problem, and this is where the lifestyle movement of solarpunk and solarpunk literature seem to occupy different spaces. The folks who are busy trial-running solarpunk ideas in the world tend to very-heavily focus on the practical applications and sometimes on philosophy. Some are writing degrowth manifestos while others are very into the science of rewilding or ecosystem management. Others are very tech-focused on batteries or energy generation or revolutionizing transportation. And all of that is great. I have a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering. Trust me that I can go down the rabbit hole of scientific papers with the best of them.
But there tends to be an undervaluing of the power of imagination.
Leave aside, for the moment, straight-up hopeful climate fiction, like we lift up here on the pod. Scientists and engineers—and y’all, I used to be both—can very seriously undervalue the role imagination plays in their own work. What they think is possible or not can very tightly limit what they can invent or even propose. If you ask folks, they’ll say, sure, imagination is important, but then they’ll proceed to limit what really counts, what’s really possible, what’s practical, etc.
I’m reading a delightful book right now called The Light Eaters that talks about the absolutely raging academic debate being held right now between botanists about whether plants have consciousness. I can just see the brawls happening with sharply worded introductions to academic papers.
Scientists and engineers—and a lot of solarpunks have some familiarity with tech, including bio tech like the botanists—tend to be more comfortable in the world of right now or maybe five minutes into in the future. And again, I love a practical application of how we opt out of capitalism and build a better world as much as the next person angry about the world we’re in. But there seems to be a belief—or maybe it’s just a vibe—that stories about a future solarpunk world aren’t as important as, say, building a raingarden.
But storytelling is one of our strongest tools in the climate crisis, and way too often, we’re leaving it in the toolbox.
Which brings me back to the Chobani commercial. That short video electrified people. It went viral in the way few solarpunk things do, and it wasn’t because of the tension about the yogurt. It wasn’t just the pretty art or the familiar music. It was the story. It was the vision of a solarpunk world manifested in front of hungry eyes.
The Chobani commercial showed the power of imagination despite its commercial stain.
The folks who are living solarpunk lifestyles (consciously or not) actually have some form of that vision in their heads and they’re busy trying to manifest that in their lives.
Building the Solarpunk Vision
Everyone I know who writes in this space does the same thing in their personal lives. But we writers also use our imaginative powers to conjure whole worlds of possibility, ones that definitely challenge the status quo in a way that we can only access right now through fictional depictions of the future. I’ve spoken before on the pod about how non-fiction and fiction, science-fiction and literary-fiction, all have a part to play in these stories of a better world. In a similar way, the solarpunks who are manifesting an alternative lifestyle today also have common cause with those of us writing stories about a greener, more sustainable future. Movement and literature are two parts of a whole. What is real and what is imagined are more tightly interwoven than even storytellers tend give credit to, but we at least understand the power of story.
Art and life are constantly imitating each other.
Last year, I had a table at a Solarpunk Expo, right here in my new hometown of Pittsburgh. I was delighted to find such a thing even existed! The expo had crafters of upworked jewelry, activists working on community stormwater issues, and entrepreneurs building portable composters out of shipping containers. There were a couple artists but I was the only novelist/storyteller. The vibe was incredible, everyone eager to visit each other’s tables, a huge pressing crowd of attendees, and me busy handing out zines and books. We were all drawn in by the solarpunk idea, and it struck me how the expo exemplified the very thing it was celebrating: diversity, generosity, community, hand-crafted DIY everything, and a passion for a better, greener world. I look forward to having a table again this year, later this month, with my zines and my new short story collection and my attempts to explain the power of imagination in conjuring this future we all want.
If you’re in Pittsburgh, I would love to see you, and I’ll drop a link to the expo in the show notes.
For everyone else, I encourage you to attend a completely separate, online solarpunk conference happening on the same day. Solarpunk Conference: Rays of Resilience is online June 29th and I’ll put a link in the show notes. I attended their first conference last year and it was great. This year, Ana Sun (our guest in Episode Ten) will be on a literature panel that’s actually a workshop to help folks try their hand at writing solarpunk.
Which brings me back to the power of storytelling and the failure of imagination. Amitav Ghosh said in The Great Derangement that literature’s difficulty in grappling with these stories was a failure of imagination, the same failure we were experiencing in society as a whole.
If we’re failing to imagine, that just means we need more practice.
I’m starting to understand hopeful climate storytelling as not just a genre we write or read, or even a lifestyle we practice, but a process that we actively engage in. Through that lens, solarpunk is a process of imagining a better future. It is a practicing of imagination that we so desperately need.
I also believe it’s a process we can teach others. That kind of engagement—beyond the stories or practices themselves—becomes a tool. It becomes a climate solution.
I have much more to say about that, but I’ll have to save that for a future podcast.
In the mean time, not all the stories we lift up here on the pod are technically solarpunk, but many are, and I’m comfortable identifying most of my own hopeful climate fiction stories as solarpunk. You can find a growing list of these stories on the substack, with new stories added each week.
Which is exactly what we need.
Bright Green Futures is a weekly newsletter/podcast. Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading. The best way to support the show is to subscribe and share the stories with your friends.
LINKS Ep. 11: All About Solarpunk: Literature and Movement
Dear Alice, Chobani solarpunk yogurt commercial
Tech Won’t Save Us podcast
Write the Future You Want to Live In by Ana Sun (DreamForge)
Pittsburgh’s Solarpunk Future 2024 expo
Solarpunk Conference: Rays of Resilience, an online solarpunk conference on June 29th 2024
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
Bright Green Future’s list of solarpunk/hopeful climate fiction
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