Second Wave Solarpunk

This blog post was written with much helpful feedback from kagozaiku of the Copy/Paste Co-op discord server.

At some point in the 2000s, people started to realize all that crappy stuff predicted by the near future dystopian science fiction genre of cyberpunk was starting to come true. People began to think collectively that maybe instead of all this digital panopticon stuff, we can try to manifest something nice instead. As an intentional contrast to cyberpunk, people started to rally around the idea of solarpunk as a positive vision of a beautiful, green energy-based society.

An image of solarpunk that described what would become the recognizable face of the genre's aesthetic is described in one of a handful of early solarpunk manifestos by artist Olivia Louise. In it, she called for:

“a plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement to create a world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech, as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between.” 

I once saw an engineering presentation on biofuel technology, where in the introduction the presenter showed sweeping fields of forests, giving the impression of it being an environmentally friendly technology. In reality, the biofuels proposition to replace our civilizations petrochemical demands with fuels derived from plant biomatter, is an unrealistic one. This is an example of what I was later to learn is called greenwashing. It's the strategy of using green technology imagery to make an environmentally hazardous thing seem safe. Since the utopian solarpunk aesthetic has become somewhat recognizable, greenwashing has made itself synonymous with it. Solar panels have been reduced to representing the technological triumph of capitalism over nature, which negates any need to reassess society and ourselves on any meaningful level. The imagery of a utopian future has become a brand for corporations like Chobani to capitalize on.

There is good solarpunk media, but the genre often falls into a few traps, which I believe are holding it back from achieving its goals of imagining and manifesting a better tomorrow. With utopianism can come toxic positivism. It looks to create a cozy escapism, which is understandable, but that doesn't imagine unfamiliar future worlds. Our imagined utopias can't be in conflict with our assumptions about the world, so they just reproduce it without challenging it. It slaps trees on skyscrapers instead of wondering how society might have to change to get into ecological balance. It isn't looking to imagine new ways of living outside the capitalist mode of production. 

This is why I think a lot of the best solarpunk doesn't really fall under the solarpunk umbrella but is more just an inspiration or is adjacent. Even Psalm for the Wild Built, the classic solarpunk novel, exists at the edge of utopia, and overlooks the impossible gulf between humans and robots. Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke contain devastating effects of civilization on nature. Red Mars is about class war, not living in utopia. 

Donna Haraway, future theorist, argues that conflict is inherent in society and that a peaceful utopia cannot exist. She writes, “Sex is a constraint on the formation of societies because sexually reproducing individuals are not identical genetically. They therefore compete with different investment strategies… any society with most of its members engaging in sexual reproduction cannot hope for real peace.” The alternative being a laboratory-controlled society where individuals are created to fit into an authoritarian social structure. Their peace would be the result of total loss of freedom. 

Science fiction that imagines a better future doesn't imagine a world without conflict, it imagines what new conflicts will be there, or what conflicts that exist today have taken new form in the future. 

Haraway also writes quite a lot about cyborgs, sometimes positioning them as an archetype of the people of the future. They challenge our ideas of humanity and their world, rejecting the boundaries around our ideas of humanity, both draw closer to animals and machines. Individuals can be chimerical and contain permanent contradiction instead of needing to be rigidly and homogeneously defined.

A better future world that exists in harmony with nature celebrates human genius and our power of creation. That world accesses a deep cultural and ecological wisdom while always looking to create new things and see things in new ways. A communistic society that relies on the power of educated masses to prevent exploitation and be vigilant for the ever-present threat of fascism that threatens the world.

Haraway's approach is my favorite way forward for a mutated second wave of solarpunk to overcome greenwashing. The genre needs to become more chimerical, holding hope and the vigor of life, while coexisting in contradiction with non-utopian genres. In Final Fantasy VII, industrial pollution causes the planets lifestream to awaken. The lifestream grants humans incredible power, but also, as a defense mechanism, the planet gives birth to the Ultima Weapon, the one of the most powerful monsters in existence. Even in a setting of rampant industrial environmental exploitation, the planet has new and powerful creative abilities. The recent Weird Hope blog post inspired this post. It presents a new genre of psychedelic, hopeful, post-apocalyptic exploration. It takes a dark setting but injects it with light. Weirdhopian characters are becoming something beyond human to adapt to a world changed by humans. A second wave of solarpunk is one that doesn't block out the uglier sides of humanity but holds space with them as a chimerical passenger. A second wave of solarpunk imagines weirder ways to build a new world in the shell of the old by crosspollinating across genres instead of being locked into any restrictive definition.