Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future
CURRENT WORK in the Energy Humanities insists that we must understand “modernity” as an experience informed by fossil fuels: our use (or abuse) of specific energy resources defines the shape of our culture and society. We can take this equation of energy types and socio-cultural characteristics — an iteration, roughly, of that old adage that we are what we eat or, better, that we are what and how we eat — as a general claim: petro-modernity in all its grimy grandeur is the current iteration of a longer historical relation between energy consumption and social life.
Given this relation, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer argue that we need to “map out other ways of being, behaving, and belonging” in relation to energy in order to “reimagine modernity” in the face of global warming. It’s possible that a shift to renewables will spell the end of capitalism; that alternative forms of energy are not compatible with capital’s grail of profit and growth. On the other hand, however, where there’s a capitalist will there’s usually a capitalist way. The necessity of energy transition provides us with a historical moment of crisis in which opposing ideologies are wrestling over the future not only of energy, but of society. The point is less whether renewable energy automatically equals a fairer society, and more that the massive infrastructural changes ahead provide leverage to institute something better.
It seems important today to find, question, and celebrate narratives that are striving to meet the challenges facing us and that provide persuasive visions of a better future. As Amitav Ghosh and others have argued, however, literary realism runs out of steam in the face of the climate crisis and its increasingly commonplace impossible events. Realism relies on an unspoken reliability of the social and material world for its verisimilitude, yet when the world refuses to function as the stable background for our kitchen-sink dramas, a realism which ignores the growing instability of the Earth’s climate increasingly feels like escapist fantasy.
This is why the most interesting literary work that addresses the Anthropocene and its attendant crises is emerging from speculative (rather than realistic) genres: science fiction, fantasy, and the weird. Speculative genres provide a means to think beyond the constraints of what we have inherited as “reasonable” — they reveal the fragility and contingency of such reasonableness, gesturing instead toward seemingly unreasonable alternatives that we desperately need.
Over the last few years, a promising new speculative subgenre, Solarpunk, has emerged from a small online community to become a movement with a recognizable aesthetic and a preliminary manifesto.
(via Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future | The Los Angeles Review of Books)
Another fantastic article on Solarpunk in a major outlet. Written by Rhys Williams Research Fellow from Glasgow University it is well worth your time. He covers and provokes with some thoughtful criticism but perhaps in future could go further.
This Long read follows hot on the heels of Olivia Rosane’s Anthem of the Sun: Solarpunk aims to cancel the apocalypse (previously)