Conversations about climate change, which are becoming increasingly more common, bombard us with images of doom and gloom. Wildfires, flooding, drought, extinction, and suffering. These catastrophes are happening now and they will happen in the future. While it is important to be informed of the impacts of climate crises that our communities likely will face, this rhetoric does little to advance solutions or spur us to action. We are often reminded of this through stories of climate disaster in popular culture. Movies like Mad Max, The Road, and Snowpiercer all portray a future world ravaged by environmental changes, where the remnants of humanity must struggle for survival. While these post-apocalyptic movies might be entertaining, they surely don’t offer much hope. Without a vision for what can be done to tackle these issues, we may become locked into a sense of apathy and despair. We are in dire need of an optimistic view of the future in which we have faced the perils of climate change and not only triumphed, but radically changed our relationship with the planet and each other. Why don’t we envision a climate future where we succeed? Enter solarpunk.

Solarpunk is an art style that imagines a sustainable future for humanity. It gives us an alternative, more hopeful vision of what the world might look like in the near future. Gaining popularity in only the last 15 or so years, it is a response to the plethora of doom-filled narratives we are used to. There are no set style guidelines for this genre, but it is characterized by depictions of built landscapes that integrate the natural world with renewable technologies (hence the “solar” of solarpunk). Plants grow on the sides of buildings, windmills dot the horizon, and human infrastructure appears to emerge seamlessly from the landscape. While utilizing advanced technology, a solarpunk city is not overly complex – it embraces only those innovations that can function in harmony with the environment. Unlike the car-centric infrastructure found in many U.S. cities today, solarpunk first and foremost values the needs and well-being of people and the environment. This vision is in stark contrast to the future portrayed by a cartoon like The Jetsons, where flying cars hop between dull, lifeless, and isolated platforms in the sky. Instead of running away from nature, solarpunk makes use of concepts like permaculture and incorporates greenery nearly everywhere, integrating the natural world into the build.

While solarpunk is still very much a conceptual framework, there are some examples today that exemplify its aesthetic and values. The Gardens by the Bay in Singapore is an example that incorporates diverse plant life into a cityscape. This park is just that — a park — but serves as a model for how we can blend natural designs into modern cities. More practical examples come from the self-sufficient, low-impact houses known as earthships. This architectural style was created in the 1970s with the goal of realizing a fully sustainable home built with recycled or local materials and complete with off-the-grid solar systems and water collection. Earthships are better suited for more rural areas but the same ideas can be implemented in areas with higher population density. Tree-covered skyscrapers in Milan, Italy utilize an irrigation system that redirects gray water back on to the over 700 trees that cover its exterior. These may only be a few examples, but they highlight the fact that a solarpunk life is not reserved for people of some far-distant future to enjoy. With the social and political will, we can begin to implement these practices today. And crucially, solarpunk is more than just surface level aesthetics and design.

Not only do solarpunk futures entail overcoming climate change, they assume a fundamental rethinking of how our society functions. Simply phasing out fossil fuels will not be sufficient. While this might not be explicitly clear from looking at solarpunk artwork, the broader solarpunk community has described their overarching ideology in documents such as the Solarpunk Manifesto. Solarpunk calls for a society that has abandoned entirely the consumerist, extractivist, and growth-oriented world we live in today. This is where the “punk” half comes in. Emerging in the 1970s, punk is often associated with mohawks and hard rock music, yet is also marked by a deeper counter-cultural philosophy of decentralization, anti-establishment, and a “do it yourself” ethic. This rebellious mindset is exactly the kind necessary to make the radical shift to a solarpunk future a reality. A lot will need to change, especially the dominant economic and political worldviews of our time. 

We are entrenched in an economic system that tends to value profit over people or the natural world, and while there may be innovative ways to solve the issues facing our planet within this system, solarpunk instead envisions a post-capitalist world. Ways to imagine systems that can address the failings of our current model already exist. For example, doughnut economics is a concept that measures the success of an economy not by its GDP, but by its ability to secure well-being for its people within the ecological limits of the planet. This means ensuring a just, equitable, and prosperous society that does not rely on rampant extraction of natural resources and heedless production of waste. A circular, as opposed to linear, economic system would begin to tackle many of the issues surrounding resource use and consumption that we face today. Any solarpunk future necessitates that we rethink the systems in place that have led us to this precipice of climate disaster. Without doing so, solarpunk could become yet another form of greenwashing. Luckily, this doesn’t have to be the case and we have the means to make the necessary socio-economic changes for solarpunk to become a reality.

At its core, solarpunk is a call to action. If this is the future we want to build, we can and should start building it now. We have seen the headlines predicting the worst case scenarios and a planet ravaged by climate catastrophe. The narrative that guides solarpunk is an alternative to those predictions and it lets us imagine a sustainable future that we can strive towards without throwing our hands up in defeat. Naomi Klein puts it best in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate – “So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.”

For more examples of solarpunk artwork, check out some of these artists:

Dustin Jacobus – Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/solarpunkart/  Website: https://dustinjacobus.com/ 

Jessica Perlstein – https://jessicaperlstein.com/collections/artwork/products/the-fifth-sacred-thing-1 

Teikoku Shônen (Imperial Boy) –

https://www.iamag.co/the-art-of-imperial-boy/#jp-carousel-71429