Imagining a greener future - Part 1

Last month, the UK's Guardian newspaper ran a story trumpeting the new genre of climate fiction or 'cli-fi'. As with most similar articles, the story barely touches upon speculative fiction, only stooping to Jeff VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander because it's 'not his usual speculative fiction.'

It's a shame that the Guardian isn't a fan of science fiction because there's an  entire community of writers imagining greener, more hopeful futures. Solarpunk is an emerging artistic movement devoted to considering: "What does a sustainable civilisation look like? And how do we get there?"

On the 26th June, Spectrum London Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Group ran a half-day event exploring what solarpunk means to some of the people involved with it, and how speculative fiction writers can write great solarpunk stories themselves.

I admit to being passionate about this topic. I've done research work using radar/lasers to monitor Arctic ice caps and study the effects of environmental change. In addition, when I first engaged with Anglo-American literary science fiction fandom in 2015, I was disappointed by what British literary critic Paul Kincaid once described as 'creative exhaustion' - an endless rehash of old sci-fi tropes and themes.

So, I was delighted when Spectrum member Steph Troeth, who lives and writes solarpunk, joined co-organisers Kat Kourbeti and I to spearhead and moderate this event (Steph is a total star!).

[NOTE: This isn't an 'official' write-up of the event. I just enjoyed the panels and wanted to share my thoughts/impressions].

We had an amazing line-up of speakers, spread over multiple time zones. In our first session, exploring solarpunk as a creative movement, we welcomed four cli-fi experts:

Devine Lu Linvega, who has been sailing around the world to explore technology resilience, e.g. how modern technology degrades away from the internet and its (mainly) San Francisco-based creators, and how that knowledge can be preserved offgrid, at the human scale;

Commando Jugendstil, two members of a creative solarpunk collective whose projects aim to stimulate communities into imagining practical alternative futures;

Lisa Garforth, a lecturer in sociology whose work traces the history between speculative fiction and environmental narrative, and who is interested in green utopianism and how creatives can help us imagine alternative futures.

Thorunn Helgason, a professor of conservation ecology whose work focuses on climate resilience in agriculture. During the session, she expressed an interest in hard sci-fi and discussing how green utopianism can encompass complexity, such as the unintended consequences of environmental alterations.

The discussion was wide-ranging and it would be impossible to capture the nuances. However, I identified some main themes:

'Solarpunk' is about community-led futures

Cyberpunk is a well-known sub-genre of dystopic sci-fi that's fundamentally anti-corporate. It's about ordinary people using high technology in subversive new ways, a sentiment famously captured by the phrase: "the street finds its own uses for things."

So, what is the 'punk' in solarpunk? Commando Jugendstil described it as people and communities reclaiming spaces and doing something to improve their situation, by legal or non-legal means - in contrast to corporate green utopias. For example, their story Midsummer Night's Heist in Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers is about a complicated heist to make a garden in a public square.

Corporate green urban utopias, in contrast, are often depicted as skyscrapers with a few trees, but no people (see pictures further up this article, which were the Unsplash search results for 'green futures').

Solarpunk is about positive futures

Commando Jugendstil mentioned bringing in ideas from the degrowth movement, but also highlighted some misconceptions. For example, there's a misconception that economic degrowth means living in derelict conditions and being sad all the time. For Commando Jugendstil, degrowth is about 'degrowthing' billionaires and widening the benefits of technology to a majority of people.

In this TEDx talk, Keisha Howard talks about how solarpunk, in contrast to cyberpunk, is about how people can use technology to live in harmony with the Earth.

Solarpunk is against consumerism

Dr Garforth described how environmental discourse in last 15-20 years has tended to focus on how wealthy people in the Global North should 'give things up'. She mentioned what the ecological philosopher Kate Soper calls 'alternative hedonism' - the idea of attaching notions of pleasure to things other than consumerism.

However, for Commando Jugenstil, that doesn't mean opposing the use of technology. Solarpunk sees technology as positive overall, but opposes how present-day technological objects have been turned into consumer products with planned obsolence, which need to be replaced over and over.

Solarpunk favours appropriate technology

Several speakers mentioned  'appropriate' technology, which is appropriate to solving a problem without creating more problems. Dr. Garforth mentioned the idea of 'convival' technology, which works for humans on the human scale. An example is research by the Urban Agricultural Cluster into how technology can reduce the lifecycle and carbon cost of agriculture, and bring it closer to communities.

Solarpunk opposes romanticising the past

Romanticisation of the past can be harmful and regressive. If you don't have labour-saving devices like washing machines in your solarpunk future, you're condemning someone - normally a woman - to backbreaking work in unsafe conditions, e.g. exposing them to pollution from cooking fires. 'Less consuming' lifestyles and 'green housing' typically take up a lot of physical space and this simply isn't practical in, say, the UK, which has high population densities.

On a practical level, there's no unspoiled wilderness to return to. Most areas of the world have been affected by modern society. Strikingly, Professor Helgason reminded everyone that humans, today, use 25% of the Earth's primary productivity in vegetation. Humans and domesticated animals, meanwhile, make up 96% of mammalian biomass.

Solarpunk opposes colonialism

The panel were asked about the possibility of rewilding marginal areas and intensifying agriculture near cities. Professor Helgason argued this has unintended consequences, as rewilding or conserving protected areas can exclude indigenous people from their own land.

Commando Jugenstil mentioned La Via Campesina, a international farmers association from the Global South that struggles against land grabs and in favour of traditional agriculture. Professor Helgason mentioned how agricultural researchers are studying the science behind indigenous agricultural practices, e.g. understanding why crop rotations work. Also, she said that scientists at Leeds and York (universities) are breeding traits from pre-Green Revolution lineages of wheat into elite varieties, bringing the past and future together.

Solarpunk is ultimately about problem-solving

Given there aren't large unspoilt areas of wilderness to romanticise, a worldbuilding question for fiction writers is: how do you reduce the resources used by each person while maintaining the liberating aspects of technology? And what aspects of current society do you want to keep?

[I'll talk about the second session, on writing solarpunk fiction, in Part 2]

Further Reading:

Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990, Pacific Edge (vintage utopian ecofiction)

Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers

Humans make up 0.01% of Earth's life: What's the rest? Our World in Data