Solarpunk is indeed quite a strange concept, but not for the reason you might guess.
All of these aspects of the solarpunk movement are reasonable:
☑️ A focus on (renewable) energy as a lynch pin for a sustainable future
☑️ Humans living in partnership with the environment, instead of seeing nature as a resource to extract from
☑️ Emphasis on decentralized tech and infrastructure to facilitate eco-collaboration
☑️ Adaptation of behaviors and ways of being to adjust our definition of contemporary culture vis-a-vis climate change
☑️ Using utopian perspectives of seeing the world to imagine a better, sustainable future
No, none of this is strange to me. Not in the slightest.
What’s strange is what makes this punk - the expressly political nature of energy, of climate change, of our shared future on and with the earth.
How bizarre that we must fight and advocate for all that solarpunk stands for… renewable energy? Partnership with nature? Decentralization? Responsiveness to climate change?
It’s like I posted on utopia and idealism the other day - this approach to solving problems or seeing the world with an idealistic lens is often viewed as unreasonable. Or perhaps even unachievable.
What gets me is… we can’t even attempt to pull off some of the stunts from our utopian visions? We’re not allowed to experiment in ways that have a utopian bent?
We’ve really found ourselves in a strange bind here, we’re running out of runway on exponential growth… on the earth as some kind of magical, self-renewing resource. We can’t keep building more, bigger, higher. Not without changing our approach.
And yet, it’s as though we have Stockholm Syndrome. We’ve fallen in love with our captor, the status quo. If solarpunk represents a kind of utopian revival, I can’t help but wonder: are we living in a kind of dystopian present?
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Inspiration for this post: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/solarpunk-grand-dress-rehearsal/