I love Solarpunk so fucking much. It’s the most late 2010s ass genre humanly possible. A genre consisting entirely of Pinterest concept art boards and a yogurt commercial. Aggressively political with no actual political stance or statement other than “climate change is bad.” genuinely incredible levels of sucking
Solarpunk started out as a concept of imagining a sustainable future without capitalism cooked up by Brazilian anarchists, to my understanding. (There's a whole timeline I found here if anyone wants to flip through it.) Something of a humanist/naturalist contrast from transhumanist and singularity/"rationalist" views of the future. And, of course, contrast from the gritty dark hypercorporate crapsack worlds of cyberpunk. A few novels were written, but overall the literary movement fizzled out because it turns out writing compelling stories in utopian settings with solely interpersonal conflict is pretty hard, actually.
From there the political aspect of it got picked up by climate doomerist types who pushed it as an antidote to the impending apocalypse. Alas, being fanatically worried about climate change seems to have fallen out of fashion since COVID for whatever reason. I believe a lot of these people have moved on to walkable urbanism and anti-AI movements.
And the aesthetic side of it started off with a particularly influential Tumblr post from 2014 that had quite a few neat ideas. All of those were sanded down over time into a vision of skyscrapers with moss and solar panels, coupled with some recycled cottagecore material and a bunch of Ghibli screencaps.
And then Chobani comes in and makes a yogurt commercial that's just futurist luxury automated cottagecore in a Ghibli aesthetic, complete with some vague handwaves at a spunky DIY attitude and a whole bunch of small-scale renewable electric generators. And from there the movement, whatever it was, merged with "Frutiger Aero" and completely fell apart into bland nothingness.
I suspect the Brazilian anarchist sci-fi writers who were hoping for some kind of cultural counterpart to thinking that Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" was literally going to come true are rather disappointed in this turn of events.
It turns out that praxis leading to solarpunk future and solarpunk presence is million skills with million names and acquiring and practicing these skills don't look particularly like solarpunk aesthetic. It looks punk. But to give it a distinct visual language, both consistent and recognizable at a glance, you need to put a strictly aesthetic effort on top of everything else.
Praxis itself? It looks like disability activism. It looks like attending local town council meetings. It looks like diving into super specific debate on local law requirements on water-permeable surfaces percentage. It looks like keeping in contact with local priest to snoothly distribute furniture from well-off middle class finishing renovation to 18yo orphans ageing out of the system. It looks like negotating with local cultural activity center how to organise half-illegal craft workshops because paperwork for fully legal ones excludes the most neglected demographic. It looks like lobbying for health insurance to put "replacing batteries in the implant surgery" on the list of covered medical services, so people don't need to surgically replace whole implants. It looks like million other specific things.
People who got inspired by solarpunk tend to spend some time looking at art, then turn around, ask "okay but what can be done now that I can engage with" and then go do it. And then what they do stops looking like solarpunk aesthetic.
Of course there's also that thing that before Covid, lots of climate collapse containment issues were literally "we know that business-as-usual is cheapest short-term but can we focus on how it's killing us long-term". Covid era showed that business-as-usual is unsustainable now, mid-term and short-term and today and yesterday; and also that goverments can simply decide to act and it create tangible effects. Suddenly, it wasn't "solar would be better if your gas import was ever endangered", it's "we build all the solar for yesterday because we cannot afford keeping to gas". Creating inspiring narratives is optional when cost of business-as-usual is visible to naked eye. Lots of people who used to share inspiring pictures of solar on background of green hills either went to install solar and negotiate specifics of grid inclusion, or moved on to the next issue.
Central idea of solarpunk aesthetic was to give people tools to imagine sustainable future; to create visual and narrative shorthands allowing people to engage with vision of non-apocalyptic future.
Central idea of solarpunk philosophy is that apocalypse is anything but inevitable and the main challenge isn't lack of means and tools, but widespread cultural pessimism. You cannot change anything if you believe change is impossible. Therefore, for change to be possible, you need to envision the world that can be changed.
Basically, if solarpunk art convinced anyone that there is achievable alternative to doom, it have already succeeded.
You absolutely can merge in one all the issues ever discussed in context of exploring how sustainable climate-proofed non-capitalistic world can work and how it can be achieved, with the attempt to design a distinctive and consistent visual language for it.
And you absolutely can blame whichever aspect of that merged entity for the fact that detailed fact-based solutions are difficult to derive from visual language or using visual design tools.
You can! Totally! You're just going to sound silly.
