This video was made in collaboration with St. Andrewism, check out his new video after this
on even more Solarpunk solutions using the link in the description.
The world is falling apart. At least according to headlines in mainstream media. Right now,
it’s hard not to feel like we are on the verge of an apocalypse. But what if we imagined
something different? What if we imagined worlds where nature, humanity, and technology not only
coexist, but thrive together. Worlds that are rich with the greens and blues of abundance.
Utopias? Maybe, but certainly utopias worth striving for. This is what Solarpunk is all
about. A burgeoning genre of art and a movement that casts off the dystopian, technology-heavy
futurism of cyberpunk and instead tries to build a world wherein people not only live well, but also
live well with the natural world. Solarpunk is an exercise in imagination, but it is also a call to
action. There are very real Solarpunk solutions that already exist or are currently feasible
that can start to bring about a Solarpunk future today. And today, we’ll look at the viability of
some of these solutions and answer the question: how can we build a Solarpunk world right now?
Solarpunk is high and low tech: Before we dive into the promising
tools that might aid our quest for a Solarpunk world, we first need to understand the role of
technology in the Solarpunk community. As we will soon see, technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Just because your community uses an electric tram or slaps some solar panels on their roofs
doesn’t mean they’re Solarpunk. Yes, it’s a step in the right direction, but employing technologies
doesn’t automatically make you Solarpunk, technologies depend on context. Solar panels
under an imperialist-facist state do nothing to change a destructive and exploitative relationship
with the planet and other humans. Plundering the imperial periphery to build electric batteries
is not Solarpunk. As one reddit user writes, “Solarpunk without the abolition of capitalism
is just greenwashed Cyberpunk.” So, Solarpunk technologies and solutions should be seen as
just one part of a much broader struggle to do away with capitalism and employ more ecological
and ethical ways of being. So, melding Solarpunk with political tendencies like eco-anarchism or
eco-socialism is essential to actually realizing those visions in the real world. In addition,
Solarpunk is neither always low-tech nor is it always high-tech. The worlds of Solarpunk
envision technologies applied in appropriate situations in order to foster harmony between
people and their environment. In one town this could mean passive cooling housing,
while in another it could mean communal living decked out with solar panels. It could mean
mechanized apple pickers or it could mean shovels and hands in the dirt or it could mean both at the
same time. What matters is that those solutions strengthen the relationship between communities
and the land around them as well as lessen the work needed to live a comfortable life. So,
with that said, what exactly would some of these technologies look like?
Earthships: Drive out into the high-desert surrounding Taos,
New Mexico and you’ll find beautifully unique houses that look as if they were crafted by the
elements. These are Earthships. Dwellings that are the brainchild of architect Michael Reynolds,
who, in the 1970s, sought to build a completely off-grid house that could withstand the extreme
cold and heat of New Mexico. Earthship design principles focus on core tenets like passive
heating and cooling, using recycled and local materials, recycling water, and
fostering self-reliance through integrated greenhouse gardens. And all are implemented
in ways that look right out of a Solarpunk drawing. The foundation of an Earthship is built
with recycled tires stacked ontop of each other and with dirt tightly packed into them. This not
only provides structure, but as Earthship dwellers like to say, it acts as a battery. The sheer mass
of an Earthship’s walls soaks in the warmth of the sunlight during the day, which its roof is
perfectly angled to let in the right amount, and then the wall slowly emits that heat during the
cold of the night. As a result, some Earthship owners claim to not need any external heating
sources. The Earthship is built around living with and embracing the natural world. It does so with
technologies that are tangible, and accessible. It uses other people’s trash, like old tires and
glass bottles, and the dirt around them to build something that's appealing and comfortable. And
it does this in a way that ties people to the land. But, to live in an Earthship is not some
Eden, there are drawbacks. For one, recycled tires do eventually break down, releasing toxic gasses
into the air. Reynolds and Earthship builders claim that plastering the walls around the tires
protects homeowners from this off-gassing, but other builders, like Martin Holladay, claim that
you would have to be constantly sealing up cracks to have peace of mind. And claims of independence
of water grids through rain water collection are dubious in the desert climate of Taos. While
Earthships certainly aren’t perfect, they offer up promising ideas of how to integrate nature
into everyday living. They are a Solarpunk answer to the question: how can we live comfortably with
the natural world? They won’t work everywhere, but individual pieces of them can be integrated
into housing anywhere. Imagine homes using passive heating and cooling systems so they
don’t have to run the air conditioning or heating all the time. Imagine building gardens within
a house. Imagine incorporating filtered rain water into our plumbing. Imagine building a house with
as many local and recycled materials as possible. The Earthship shows us that there are already ways
to live well and lightly on the land right now, and it does so in a way that melds low-tech and
high-tech ideas into a beautiful structure. This is Solarpunk. Finding the appropriate technologies
to build aesthetically stimulating and liveable dwellings that tie us tightly with the landscape.
Sailing for the 21st Century: Along the Hudson River in New York,
Sam Merrett runs a zero-carbon shipping company. No, he doesn’t run a fleet of electric trucks,
nor does he bike, Merrett ships local goods up and down the Hudson River by sailboat. That’s right,
in the age of massive gas-powered cargo ships making globe-spanning trips, Merrett has
created a fossil fuel free cargo company based on sailing. One that is at the whims of weather and
the seasons, but makes the buyer appreciate the ebbs and flows of the natural world around them.
This epitomizes a Solarpunk future. Solarpunk evisions a world in which the technologies we use
help us to appreciate the rhythms of the planet, and sailing in the 21st century has the potential
of making that happen. Marrett shows that it’s already feasible to do on a small scale, and
when considering that sails and ropes for ships could support a thriving hemp farming operation
that sequesters thousands of tons of carbon with each crop, sailing cargo locally is an appealing
possibility. But, sailing in the 21st century runs the gamut of low-tech rigs like Merrett’s schooner
to futuristic technologies that are beginning to see their first real-world tests. Right now,
engineers and cargo companies are in the midst of wrestling with the polluting
reality of international cargo, and are on the hunt for high-tech solutions for big shipping.
While Solarpunk emphasizes the local, it can still embrace global travel and transport with emerging
technologies. Like retrofitting cargo ships with column-like “sails” that reduce fuel use
by possibly as much as 30%, or future thinking cargo ships with retracting rigid sails. A
Solarpunk future that involves international cargo recognizes the need for these high-tech sailing
solutions because they are appropriate for their high-seas context, but what’s important is that
these high-tech cargo ships are not viewed as a silver-bullet. In a regional or local setting,
hemp sails and schooners are a much more suitable and nature-reliant solution. So while a Solarpunk
future might envision rigid-sail cargo ships traversing the open ocean to facilitate a thriving
hemp trade between continents, a smaller canvas sailboat might bring those goods the last mile
to markets. But at this point, you might be thinking, wait wouldn’t sailing mean that there
will be delays? Won’t everything take a long time to get to me? To that I would say that Solarpunk
does not prioritize Amazon Prime-like convenience. That kind of convenience is something people
in the imperial core will have to learn to do without. It comes at the cost of the planet and
the people forced to work in grueling conditions and hours to get that package to your front door
in one day. Solarpunk envisions a world wherein we don’t have to crush people
and the planet in order to find comfort in our lives. So yes, things might be a bit slower.
But I would gladly slow down my life if it meant that my community and my surroundings thrived.
What’s Holding Us Back? Although Earthships and sailing cargo
do exist in this world, they aren’t prevalent. Looking around I usually see the plumes of smoke
rising from cargo ships, not the undulating waves of a sail. And I see concrete buildings instead
of earth packed dwellings. So, what’s holding us back? There is no simple answer. There are a
huge host of reasons, one of which is that some of these technologies are still in development. But
when it comes to these beautiful Solarpunk worlds that artists around the world have begun to render
I can’t help but think about, you guessed it, capitalism. The profit-centered global economy
we’ve built has driven us to create technologies that, for the most part, function to expand
margins and make more money for the capitalist class. Ideas and inventions that can’t compete
in the market, regardless of whether they are zero-carbon or build community health, are pushed
to the margins. Marrett’s sailboat cargo company is a novelty because it can’t compete with the
monopoly of Amazon Prime or industrial shipping companies like Maersk. Solarpunk dares us to
dream of a world outside of capitalism because even though these technologies do exist right
now under capitalism, they are not widespread or “successful.” The labor required to ram hundreds
of tires full of dirt for an Earthship, for example, would bleed someone's bank account dry,
while the wind-reliant nature of a sailboat means that it can’t provide the regimented convenience
of one-day shipping. Combining low and high-tech solutions, Solarpunk demands a future built not
on profit, but instead on community and a strong relationship with the natural world. So instead
of focusing on technologies that make the most profit, Solarpunk urges us to seek out ideas and
tools that deepen our interpersonal relationships as well as our ties to the earth beneath our feet.
If you want to learn about even more tools that we can use right now to forge a Solarpunk world,
head over to Saint Andrewism’s youtube channel and check out his newest
video. And while your there make sure to check out some of his other amazing pieces
like the one about the atin-work movement or his video about why imagination is vital.
You really can’t go wrong on his channel, so make sure to go over and check it out!
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