Solarpunk

As people across the United States face massive cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other vital programs, many are asking: What happens when the systems we rely on fail us? And what happens when our communities are torn apart by toxic inequality, political fragmentation and declining social trust?

The solution may lie in something that humans have been doing throughout our existence: taking care of each other, often without realizing it. Today that’s what some of us call the “solidarity economy.”

Maybe not entirely on topic, but I wanted to share it somewhere 😅

An interesting discussion of the anarchistic, individual freedom, and social justice aspects of Green politics, and their dialogue with restrictions on environmentally harmful activity - how did a movement born of the '60s counterculture get itself (falsely) labeled as petty dictators obsessed with taking away people's freedom to consume?

The political battle Greens currently face is to reclaim their idea of freedom and reinsert it into the broader historical momentum of human emancipation. They need to reframe their message as one of hope, not constraint. In spite of climate and biodiversity urgencies, they have to focus again on politics with a capital “P”: not party politics and elections, but the encompassing vision that gives meaning to both the individual and the collective.

Green liberation is a message of freedom. It offers to change everything so that we can stay who we are. After centuries of learning to be “free from” constraints and building our sense of individuality, we need now to be free together. Indeed, the freedom to be yourself is about becoming aware of a triple reflexivity: oneself, the world, and the planet. Because if infinite material growth is indeed impossible within the physical limits of this planet, there is infinite growth potential in each and every one of us.

We thrive in the links we create and maintain with each other. And this is what Greens can offer to contemporary politics: a vision of humanity that is not reduced to relationships of domination or production; an anthropology that is not reduced to sociological determinism and victimisation; a representation of the world that makes sense of this individual life that none of us ever asked to live, the fruit of a desire that was not our own. In the depths of each of us, stifled by the anguish of living or fulfilled in our projects, there is the aspiration to belong to something greater than ourselves. Deep down, we are beings of connections.

Pretty good Solarpunk prompt with some medium-hard sci-fi thrown in.

This is a project that is still active. Not too much stuff online, more on site.

Shloka, a new digital game produced by scholars at the University of California, Santa Cruz, uses Hindu deities, practices, and narratives to communicate the problems of climate change to people in India and throughout the Hindu diaspora. As players encounter gods from their religion who teach them about local issues like water pollution and smog, the culturally familiar framework enables a deeper understanding of climate responsibility.

"The larger takeaway is that cultural familiarity drives immersion," Marman said. "People are much more interested to see the culture represented. They're much more interested to see the teachings of their culture being shown through a game in which they can interact with."

More information: Sai Siddartha Maram et al, "Pray For Green, Play For Green": Integrating Religion into Climate Change Serious Games, Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3715336.3735764

Our Solarpunk Book Club has been reading A Half-Built Garden over the past few weeks. This Sunday at 6 PM UTC, we'll be hosting the author, Ruthanna Emrys, who graciously agreed to join us for a Q&A and discussion. Whether you’ve already read the book or are simply curious to take part, we invite you to join the conversation on our Discord: Solarpunk Book Club

From Wikipedia: In 2022, Emrys published A Half-Built Garden – a first-contact novel set in a near-future world, where decentralized, self-governed watershed networks managed to replace corporations and nation states as the primary means of societal organization. While these networks managed to start a journey of recovery from climate change and environmental damage, the arrival of alien species threatens both this progress and the new balance of power. The novel is praised for its interesting solarpunk world-building.

Conservative apologists for the status quo often stigmatize their opponents as “utopian.” But socialists and feminists shouldn’t be afraid of the term, since utopian thought can play an important role in helping us develop practical alternatives.

[...]

Today’s conservatives do not merely resist change. Project 2025, for instance, is in many ways a textbook example of utopian thought, with an ethical vision that grounds its specific policy proposals and touches on every aspect of society, from family to trade, from gender to taxes. This imagined world is one they want to produce, not preserve, even if it’s wrapped up in traditionalist ideology.

The Left needs its own counterproposals: rich accounts of a transformed society that both help us decide what steps we should take now and keep us motivated for the long haul. I’m not suggesting all leftists should unite around one utopia but rather that debate and experimentation around ambitious aims for social transformation is an urgent political project rather than a matter of merely academic concern. Pace Marx and Engels, utopia’s radical potential has not yet been exhausted.

Artists, designers, futurists, environmentalists, and dreamers are invited to make submissions for a Digital Art Exhibition for the forthcoming ‘Southeast Asian Solarpunk Art Project’ on 4 October 2025.

The call is organised by EnergyLab Asia, a non-profit driving Cambodia’s energy transition, in collaboration with Micro Galleries (a global art collective), Sambor Village hotel in Kampong Thom and Seapunk Studios (a network of creatives around Southeast Asia).

The open call invites artists, designers, and creatives from across Southeast Asia to submit digital artwork for an exhibition to be held at F3 – Friends Futures Factory in Phnom Penh on 4 October as part of Clean Energy Week.

The project seeks to inspire a hopeful, sustainable future through art, countering climate pessimism and empowering local communities.

The proposals should be for digital artworks that envision a sustainable, hopeful future rooted in local culture and community resilience. Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement, close to the hopepunk movement, that envisions and works toward actualising a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The ‘solar’ represents renewable energy and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the ‘punk’ refers to do-it-yourself and the countercultural, post-capitalist, and sometimes decolonial aspects of creating such a future.

Artists retain full copyright, and printing costs for the exhibition will be covered by the organisers. Works may be toured or shown online in the future, powered by Microgalleries. Eligibility

Artists of any medium and career level, primarily from Southeast Asia can apply.

This is an online course (Eastern Time)

Encompassing art, theory, and speculative fiction, solarpunk is a vision of futurity that asks: What sort of world can result from the alignment of nature and technology? Gesturing, on the one hand, to the sun—a resource, by its very nature, inhospitable to private property logic—and, on the other, to counterculture, solarpunk sees decommodified energy, sustainably harnessed, as core to human liberation. In contrast to the pessimism that, in the age of climate change, increasingly marks our cultural and political sensibilities (as well as certain strands of critical theorizing), solarpunk embraces a so-called radical optimism: its speculative fictions describe utopias; its aesthetics and architecture orient themselves to communalism; and its theory postulates a harmony of technology, nature, and human life (and the ability to achieve it)—even in the midst of climate catastrophe. But what would it mean—culturally, economically, politically—to “align” technology and nature? What, exactly, counts as nature? Why, pace the solarpunk imaginary, is “free” energy crucial to human emancipation? And what, more generally, is the value of speculative thinking and literature? Are solarpunk optimists, to borrow from Ursula K. Le Guin, “realists of a larger reality?”

This course will focus on the philosophical and imaginary turn towards radical optimism in the face of climate change. We will delve into the art, theory, and fiction associated with solarpunk, in order to think about problems of technology, nature, and productive human society—and how nature and material life can be integrated beyond systems of exploitation and oppression. We’ll consider the uses of utopia, the attractions of science fiction for non-capitalist thinking, the meaning of sustainability, debates over growth and degrowth, and the philosophical and cultural significance of affects of optimism and pessimism. Is contemporary pessimism a form of realism, or a lack of imagination? Readings will include works and excerpts from Ursula K. Le Guin, Kyle Powys Whyte, Andreas Malm, Rebecca Solnit, Becky Chambers’s Monk and Robot duology, and emerging literature within the solarpunk movement—both theoretical and literary.

I received my backer copy over the summer and been having a blast playing it. Definitely gives me some Solarpunk vibes. The game is also completely compostable and produced using localized production to minimize the international shipping necessary.

The Everyday Anarchism podcast had an episode, Tolkien's Romantic Anarchy, that gave me very many thoughts & feelings that I'm going to barf out here.

Yes, Tolkien is a Catholic fossil who built a world of eugenic-flavored world of racialized and patriarchal hierarchy, but you can tell he didn't want to live in Minas Tirith with the courtly remnants of the Numenorians. He wanted to live in the Shire, where the fanciest gentlehobbits still had relationships with their farmer neighbors and gardeners.

They were talking about how most people, conservative, liberal, or progressive, idealize that village life with lots of relationships and nature. (Put a pin in that.) Because obviously that's how the fascists reel em in, the weaponized airbrushed fairytale picture of the free, good life, where the men are men, and the slurs and the scapegoats are pushed out.

But in trying to avoid that pitfall, we leftier people lose out on that joy of second breakfasts and frolicing around in waistcoats and dirndls. I am that bitch whose algorithm is narrowed down on all the hobbitcore and cottagecore and crafting content and is dangerously close to the tradwife pipeline. I live in the tension where I'm next door to the fun cosplay queers but also the conspiracy theorists who want me trap me in the kitchen as a pregnant household appliance.

But because the people yearn for the village life, we need that playful imagination to apply to urban living. We need a nice version of RETVRN in small towns where they have the freedom from car dependence (choo choo MF) and aren't desperate and scrabbling to afford the cheapest shit shipped in from overseas. My ass is from a long line of sedentary dirtstratchers, but I'm fascinated with how long humanity lived (and is sometimes currently living) in semi-nomadic patterns for millions of years and what that might look like in the modern age with a preference for plumbing and lugging all the sweet, sweet modern gadgets around. (I'm not in the camping hobby, so I don't know what kind of hobbyist infighting they have about low-tech or high-tech.)

I need people to do more of this creative play with me, preferably people who are better about getting them words out and published on AO3 or other platforms. (I quit Wattpad a million years ago, and I don't know what good options there are for original fics.)

Mutual aid is a foundational element of Anarchism, but it is often difficult to translate theory into meaningful action while surviving the hellscape of late stage capitalism. Still, up and down the land there are a variety of practical examples from Food not Bombs stands, to Community Toolsheds, and Infoshops. Free Shops often go under the radar, but can be a vital link for many. If you go down to Boscome in Bournemouth on a Friday, outside Costa, you'll find the Boscome Free Shop, week in, week out, being there, making their community better. We wanted to know more so asked them not only why, but how they do this and how can others looking to find a way to make their anarchism practical start their own.

Hello all, I am new here and wanted to introduce myself and hear y’all’s opinion on something’s I’ve been working on.

I am a multidisciplinary designer with a concentration in architecture and environmental design. Lately I’ve been researching and exploring novel approaches to organized efforts, infrastructure development, and strategic implementation. The above image is mostly an unrelated snapshot example of my past work and design approach. It utilizes 80% up-cycled transportation repair materials such as scrap road-plate steel, treated lumber, common masonry, common schedule steel pipes, and polyethylene tubing to create an expanded public transit stop which uses solar heat gain to de-ice the surrounding ground during colder months.

Currently my focus has been on complex business model design. While I can’t share much of the details yet, I will say that it interlocks with more than a dozen symbiotic business models and social governance solutions into an approximate one square mile area through 400 pages of documentation; and can serve up to 1,000 people with a minimum of 100-120 people’s maintained efforts.

Everyone here would be doing me a huge favor towards such ends by providing short feedback to a brief set of questions related to the broad-stoke lived experience of what belonging to such an effort may be like.

Questions:

1. How willing are you and how willing do you believe millennials and gen-z are to relocate their life some number of hours away to participate in a funded solar punk initiative?

2. How willing are you and how willing do you believe millennials and gen-z are to share a 800 square foot all seasons yurt with one other person for 5-6 years?

3. How willing are you and how willing do you believe millennials and gen-z are to participate in a flexible productivity schedule which typically requires 8-24 hours of blue collar work, 8-24 hours of white collar work, 8-24 hours of learning/teaching, and 8-24 hours of leisure weekly?

4. If satisfactorily completing question 2 and maintaining question 3 legally assures lifetime private residency in a 2,000 square foot passive house with no rent or mortgage, utility or repair expenses, and gives rights of first refusal to ones children; would you still be interested if it means you do not own the house on paper?

5. If your only income is from a cooperative owner-operated business model which straddles a couple of symbiotic businesses and professional expertise how satisfactory would this be to you?

6. How willing are you and how willing do you believe millennials and gen-z are to work towards perpetually improved labor automation by sweating approximately 8-24 hours a week for as long as it takes?

7. How might your answers change if the above things together resulted in a housing addition from 2,000 square feet to as much as 4,000 square feet after 10-12 years?

8. How might your answers change if you are assured direct democracy over virtually all collective efforts supported by subject experts advocacy?

9. What is your first reaction to the idea that the only way for someone to be removed from their residence and the community is through reaching a 85% community-wide vote?

10. How might your answers change if the above allows for relocating to another networked community with a largely similar framework and governance as may be necessary and or available?

Source.

I just had another solar installer come by. Like usual, they refused to show me a fucking itemized bill of the total install cost. The math they presented was utter horseshit. But when I read between the lines, I was able to come out with a $3.50/W installed price (6KW system for ~$21k) and that let me do some calculations. In their idealized, guaranteed, projections the system would pay for itself after 7 or so years. Not the worst, tbh.

Anyways I think $3.50/W installed is... high. The panels are now bought in bulk for less than $0.3/W. Of course there's the interconnection, inverters, wiring, panel mounts and brackets, labor, and profit.

But on my home with a projected 6KW system that comes to $1.8k in panels leaving $20k for the rest. I've got a feeling that will come down by necessity once the tax credit goes away.

Does anyone work for an installer? Where is all of that money going?