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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:

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.

"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.

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:

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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Our recommended Solarpunk Reading List: