Solarpunk: A New Hope for the Future
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art by Mark Henson
Welcome to a world of new possibilities.
If you have made your way to this article, you are most likely already familiar with Solarpunk as a concept, or like us, you are interested in living a Solarpunk life.
Maybe you just want to know what the heck Solarpunk is. Either way, we are stoked to have you! Let’s get down to it.
What is Solarpunk exactly? A very basic definition of Solarpunk can be found on the Solarpunk Resource Guide put together by Jay Springett:
“(Solarpunk) is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question ‘what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”
It’s no secret that our world is in transition. Times are changing and changing fast. We need to be able to adapt to these changes if we want to thrive. It’s time to change from an extractive model (capitalism) to one that is regenerative.
Regenerative means that not only do we build systems that are sustainable, but we also work to co-create with Nature to build systems that are healthy and abundant into perpetuity.
Solarpunk focuses on what the transition to the post-carbon world of tomorrow will be like to live through. We are living through the transition right now.
The key to getting to that post-carbon world that we are striving for can be found in how we adapt in our daily lives. The number one thing you can do right now to activate your inner Solarpunk is TO BE HOPEFUL.
That’s right. Be hopeful.
Hope is the most powerful thing you can do to activate your Solarpunk life and radically affect the future of humanity.
At first glance, this may seem like an over-simplification and it probably is. Or maybe - just maybe - it isn’t.
Apathy is everywhere in our world today. All the mainstream media produced about the future is post-apocalyptic and dystopian. It may seem like harmless entertainment, but it’s more like “entrainment” for our minds. Cynicism is the enemy of progress and the primary antagonist in the world of Solarpunk.
“This, incidentally, is the thesis of Tomorrowland, delivered quite earnestly and explicitly at several key moments in the film: that the future used to be better. That our steady diet of dystopian cinema, television, comic books, and video games is rotting us from within, and the more we gobble up the zombie wastelands fed to us by Hollywood mythmakers, the more poisoned we are, assuming our trajectory toward such wastelands is already written. Dystopia, argues Tomorrowland, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a tomorrow we have resigned ourselves to because it requires nothing of us today.”
"What The Future Was: ‘Tomorrowland’ and The Time Before Sci-Fi Went Dystopic” by Claire L. Evans (@TheUniverse) (Futures editor of Motherboard and one-half of the conceptual pop group YACHT
Tomorrowland is the story of a secret society of scientists that went into hiding to avoid the politicization of their innovations. In their quest to improve probable futures for humanity, they discover that humans embraced the idea of their own demise because that way they didn’t actually have to do anything about it. Apathy was just easier.
But then, a young woman, Casey, changes the probability of humanity’s demise from '“inevitable” to slightly better. It’s her optimism that gives humanity a glimmer of hope again.
Now you see why this is so important?
Hope is the key to unlocking our collective imagination and freeing our minds from the confines of previous systems of thought and limiting beliefs about what can be done and what cannot be done.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
We have to be able to imagine the world we want in order to make it a reality.
Start to hold the possibility in your imagination that we can work together to co-create a future that looks and feels better than today.
Hope is what makes Solarpunk so “punk”. It’s punk because being hopeful is THAT radical. So radical that it flies in the face of the dominant paradigm.
As Howard Zinn so eloquently summarized it for us:
“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
There it is. Just by being hopeful you are being Solarpunk. Hope is SOLARPUNK AF.
Once we welcome this core value, we can begin to take steps towards co-creating a future that we can be excited about! A future where we can thrive in harmony with nature. A future where you can drink the water and breathe the air and revel in the sunshine without fear. A future full of hope.
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