Why We Need More Than Solarpunk

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In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at the importance of speculative climate fiction, sci-fi, and utopias for political movements. Specifically, I look at various short stories, films, and books that introduce us to worlds beyond capitalism, that have, in their own way addressed our ecological and climate crisis.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The world today can feel soul crushing. Whether you're churning out emails in a cubicle for eight hours a day or forced to sew t-shirts around the clock that are only worn once, or you're bombarded by headlines of sea level rise, droughts, and disasters, the crushing weight of global capitalism feels inescapable. But all is not lost. While the destruction of climate chaos in the chains of fossil capitalism feel suffocating, as science fiction author Ursula K.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

LeGuin argues, We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. She goes on to add, Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in our art, the art of words.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

The story is a powerful tool, one that harnesses the future to create change in the present. Stories plant seeds, beautiful visions that have the potential to germinate into alternative worlds that show us that business as usual is not inevitable. So as we struggle to upend the current status quo of rampant emissions and extraction at any cost, what role do visions of the future hold? Are they useful? And what stories and artistic utopias are out there right now that might bring a light to the looming darkness of climate chaos? In the days of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, utopias were under attack. Convinced that the utopian socialism of their predecessors was not an effective way to end capitalism, Marx and Engels rejected any form of utopianism. They immersed themselves instead in the material realities of history, and developed critiques alongside a theory of change that they called scientific socialism. This framework, unlike utopian socialism, argued that society wouldn't be changed by appealing to reason or ideals. It would only be transformed by changing the material conditions of the economy. Or in other words, the direct overthrow of the ruling classes by the working class. As a result, Marx and Engels were critical of sketching out what possible future worlds would look like and relying on those visions to create revolution. For them, socialism was to be achieved not by attempting to appeal to people's minds, but instead revealing and exacerbating the already present contradictions within capitalism, the core of which was the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. This is not to say that Marxists never once dreamed of the future, nor that speculative fiction is useless in the struggle for a world beyond fossil capitalism. But instead that as much as we need the backbone of scientific socialism to critique fossil capitalism and guide us through ending it, we also need visions of the future that give us something to struggle for. We need to imagine what's on the horizon. Because those imaginings, those brushstrokes of the future, are what fuel our fire. Visualizing different worlds, at least for me, gives energy and purpose to the hard struggle of the present. So bringing these fictions to the page, to the canvas, and to the screen are powerful tools of revolution. Which is why, as Ashley C. Ford writes, the goal of oppressors is to limit your imagination about what is possible without them. So you might never imagine more for yourself and the world you live in. Imagine something better. Get curious about what it actually takes to make it happen, and then fight for it every day. But these utopias or visionary fictions don't have to be and indeed shouldn't be perfect goalposts that railroad us into a strict path towards liberation. Indeed, as Degrow scholar Georgios Kallas writes, paraphrasing Marxist scholar David Harvey, we should oppose utopias that are meant as models or blueprints. Not so much because they are unrealistic, but because the realization of a perfect ideal tolerates no objection and crushes everything that stands in its way. Kallas goes on to say that we need dialectical utopias, ones that are contradictory, messy, and incomplete that challenge us and make us reflect on our own world. Ultimately, this means we need to envision, in the words of the Zapatistas, a world where many worlds fit. Countless authors, filmmakers, artists, and creatives need to develop a diverse range of future worlds. So that it's not just Elon Musk, the sky will be cleaner and quieter, the future's gonna be good. Or a white guy like me controlling the narrative of what's possible. So if we know that these visionary fictions are crucial to sustaining the fire of an ecologically just struggle for a better world, who's dreaming up those futures right now? Which artists and what stories are bringing light to the darkness of climate chaos? The worlds of the future are bright, and coursing through those future worlds are political currents that show us that a life without capitalism is possible. Degrowth, eco-anarchism, and eco-socialism all seek an economy beyond capitalism that is just and ecologically sound. But often the political discussions of how to achieve these tendencies lack engaging narratives. It's hard to get excited about the future when technical terms like means of production and metabolic rift are all you hear. While it is crucial to understand these terms and the political and economic theory behind tendencies like socialism, we need stories to fill those frameworks with emotion and passion. The story is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down, or the Trojan horse that plants the seed of resistance by revealing the beauty and flaws of more liberatory worlds. Politicians in power have long understood the potency of envisioning future worlds. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, didn't just submit a jargon-heavy Green New Deal proposal to Congress and wipe her hands clean. She, together with Naomi Klein, painted her own vision of what a future with a Green New Deal could be in order to sway people's hearts.

SPEAKER_07 5:57

The biggest problem in those early years was a labor shortage. We were building a national smart grid, retrofitting every building in America, putting trains like this one all across the country.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

And on the campaign trail, candidates will often ground their platform in personal anecdotes.

SPEAKER_09 6:14

Through hard work and perseverance, my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Because as neuroscientist Paul Zack reveals in his research, when we hear a narrative rich with emotion and tension, our brain releases chemicals that influence to create change. So for the anti-capitalist climate movement, we need not only direct action and political struggle, but also stories, narratives and visuals that reveal suffering and success not just in the present, but visionary fictions that explore the possibilities of the future. And there are already countless artists out there doing exactly that. One of the core examples is Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, a sci-fi classic that delves into the specific contours of ecological anarchism. The dispossessed gives us two possible futures. One on the resource-rich planet of Uras that squanders its abundant resources through an overproducing market economy, and another on the resource-scarce planet of Honaris, a planet of exiled anarchists who thrive communally on very little. The dispossessed is ultimately a story of opposite planets and opposite futures. Opposite in the sense that the planet of Inaris is the moon of Uras, and vice versa. But opposite in the sense that as degrowth theorists Georgios Callis and Hugh March write, Anaris is what Urus is not, and Uras is what Anaris is not. Dispossessed, possessed. Barren, lush, horizontal, hierarchical. Le Guin doesn't just tell us what anarchism can be. She shows us, through, for example, the small vignettes of unarusty children who are unable to conceive of a prison because their society doesn't function on the punitive basis of our current world.

SPEAKER_03 7:56

They have picked up the idea of prisons from episodes in The Life of Odo, which all of them who had elected to work on history were reading. And when a circuit history teacher came through the town, he expounded the subject with the reluctance of a decent adult forced to explain an obscenity to children.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Or through the massive afforestation projects that the people of Inaris collectively maintained.

SPEAKER_03 8:15

He worked now in a planting crew, thousands of seedlings raised in the green mountains. They planted the little trees in the dust, and they looked back as they went. There was a mist of green, very faint on the pallid curves and terraces of the desert. On the dead land lay, very lightly, a veil of life.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

The dispossessed reveals the quiet yet messy possibilities of a liberatory future. As philosopher Andre Gors notes, the book crafts the most striking description I know of the seductions and snares of anarchist society. And the work of speculative fiction and ecological utopias has blossomed since Le Guin published her book in 1974. Solarpunk, for example, has witnessed a bright new emergence of artists and writers developing futures that look very different from the capitalist extraction economies of today. Animation Studio The Lines Solarpunk world of electric apple harvesters, lush farming cooperatives run on solar and wind power, and small technologies that tighten the connection between humanity and nature is a perfect example of a solar punk future. One that mends the relationship between nature and humanity through appropriate and community-centric technologies, cooperatives, and decentralization. The imaginings of solar punk artists reveal that an ecological future doesn't have to mean living in scarcity or giving things up. It instead shows us how beautiful the world could be when we live with appropriate abundance. Writer Susan K. Quinn's short story, The Seven Sisters, gives us another glimpse into a solar punk world. One that isn't a romanticized and unrealistic view of the future, but instead reveals that struggle and loss will still exist in a post-capitalist ecological world. Quinn's future zooms in on a tea farming cooperative in the American South that seeks to decolonize tea through education and fair practices. At the farm, a close-knit community of chosen family all grows the tea together.

SPEAKER_08 10:08

The whole farm met the mandates to be net zero on carbon and make your own energy. But the tea house was quite the spectacle of green tech, from the passive solar design and geothermal heat pumps to the solar glass windows and rooftop windmills.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

But in a very solar punk manner, the farm doesn't rely on the backbreaking work of harvesting tea in the blistering sun of a hotter world. They instead use solar power harvest bots. But of course, not everything is pure bliss. The Seven Sisters Cooperative struggles to stay afloat after a heat dome scorches seven acres of their crop to ashes and their harvest drones fall into disrepair.

SPEAKER_08 10:43

She had only four harvest bots running, out of ten in the fleet, and it wasn't near enough. Two were out for repairs, the rest needing one thing or another. Aubrey, the farm's botkeeper, was laid up sick in the guest house.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Quinn shows that while the future is promising, there's still loss and pain, revealing that an ecologically just world will certainly be more pleasant to live within, but it won't be without scuffs and bruises. Alongside Solar Punk, there are also visions of decolonial, anti-racist realities embodied in the Afro-futuristic visions of movies like Black Panther. Specifically, the capital city of Wakanda imagines a vibrant urban center that seamlessly melds accessible transit with pedestrian-centric roads, local fisheries, thrommy markets, and the use of advanced technology in the service of ecological living. All the while trying to answer the question: what does the world look like without the destructive influence of white capitalist colonialism? This imagery is crucial and is expanded in the indigenous futures of storytellers like Gina McGuire, who drills down into the complicated impacts of a future where meat is banned in the US.

SPEAKER_04 11:54

It had been 20 years since the meat industry had been shut down and US production had fully switched over to plant-based replacement.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

And how that ban might impact those indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands.

SPEAKER_04 12:04

He himself had never liked the idea of the plant-based proteins of meat being made and had watched it with fear for his people as the rising protein prices had come along with the industry war. He had watched as their waters had been increasingly fished by all those who couldn't afford the protein.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

Each of these fictions grounds notions of degrowth, anarchism, eco-socialism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism in tangible vignettes. They imbue these politics with humanity and emotions, and allow us to stretch out our legs and walk around in the world we're fighting for, if just for a moment. But there are also future visions from scholars and activists, those that want to bring the power of the story to their political framework. This includes work stretching all the way back to the utopian socialist William Morris's 1890 book News from Nowhere, which describes a socialist world in the year 2000. A world without private property, hierarchies, money, class, or prisons. And since Morris, there's been a long tradition of transforming the political into the fictional to give the struggle emotion and purpose. Fiction allows the reader or viewer to step into another world or another person's shoes and feel the result. As professor of English Patricia Valderama writes, fiction can transmit information really effectively in non-technical language. Troy Vitesse and Drew Pendergrass tap into this tradition in the last chapter of their book, Half-Earth Socialism. After mapping out the political technicalities of Half-Earth socialism through discussions of planning algorithms, transitions to renewable economies, and creating a decolonial and biodiverse world, they paint a very tangible narrative of a person waking up in a future that has achieved some level of Half-Earth socialism. While the world the protagonist inhabits does sound beautiful, Pendergrass and Vitesse attempt not to romanticize their vision. The solar factory workers in their world still want to go on vacation. Albeit in this future world, that vacation is furnished by the community.

SPEAKER_09 14:03

Edith mentioned the extra vacation time. And I do like taking the train to the beach and staying in one of those fancy houses they converted into a resort.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

And there's still cafeteria arguments, but this time it's about what the cap on energy usage should be for the community.

SPEAKER_09 14:17

I can't believe those self-righteous people you hang out with on that farm are pushing for a 750 watt quota. I'll just be voting for a little more energy. 1,750 watts is not luxurious, and you know it.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

And characters still put in work harvesting at local cooperative-owned farms that service the regional area. But at the same time, it's a completely different future from our present. There is no fossil fuel extraction, and the economy is democratically and ecologically planned. There are shared communal living situations, not unlike very nice dorms, where families can raise their kids together, share in community meals, and enjoy quiet or rowdy games of cards after a filling meal. But this future lays out just one vignette of a political possibility. In contrast, the YouTube channel Prolicult shows something radically different: a world built on hemp-based production. An economy that sequesters far more carbon than it produces due to the fast-growing and carbon-sucking properties of hemp and builds a socialist and ultimately a communist world in the husk of a capitalist one.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

What we require is the reindustrialization of the globe with a plant-based economy. We must increase the production of goods using a combination of the natural sciences, engineering, and carbon-negative raw materials, like temp.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

All of these worlds, from the coastal waters of Hawaii to the deserts of Inaris, reveal the energizing possibilities of a post-capitalist zero carbon world. But these are just possibilities. To make the many worlds of our imagination real, we need to join the struggle of building liberatory zero carbon and anti-capitalist worlds right now. But where do we start?

SPEAKER_06 16:02

Everybody's afraid of daydreams. Daydreams are dangerous. Daydreams are pieces of imagination, they're bits of poetry. They're the balloons that fly up in history.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

That's Murray Bookchin, a political theorist who believed in the importance of developing an ecological vision of the world that seeps into the unconscious minds of the masses and sparks change. And hopefully the glimpses of the future worlds we've just witnessed do just that. But daydreams can be a double-edged sword. They can change us, but they can also paralyze us, trapping us in the comfort and beauty of an unrealized future. So the purpose of these speculative fictions is not to numb the pain of the current ecological and capitalist crisis. It's to ignite a fire under us by revealing that other worlds are possible. We only get to live in those messy, complicated, but beautiful futures if we struggle for them in the present. This means building those decolonial farmers' collectives like the Seven Sisters Farm right now. It means for some in Atlanta, defending their largest remaining urban forest from destruction. It means organizing your workplace to demand stronger control of production, and it means developing ecological post-capitalist solutions like regional environmental planning of half-earth socialism or hemp-based production. This work of building those visionary fictions today is exemplified in the anarchist practices of Naotopias. These political spaces develop more ecological and just pockets in the world right now that seek self-administration, DIY attitudes, and a strong relationship with nature. The free town of Christiania, right in the middle of Copenhagen, is a perfect example of this Naotopia model. After a group of anarchists and ecological activists squatted in an abandoned military base, the Danish government ceded the rights to that growing community. A community that, while still having to navigate the realities of living in a capitalist economy, is carving out ecological and anarchist organizational models that are reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGwyn's Anaris.

SPEAKER_05 18:06

But on some fundamental areas, we've tried to work on being independent. We collect our own garbage, we do our own road works. For the younger children, we have our own children's institutions. A lot of stuff is done independently.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Christiania is just one future world realized today. There are so many other communities out there, like the 2500 strong Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain that are struggling for worlds beyond ecologically destructive capitalism. So I invite you to dream. Take a moment out of your day and sculpt a beautiful, ecological, post capitalist, decolonial, and just glimpse of the future. Write it down if you want to, draw it if you can, but most importantly, start the work and struggle to make that world possible today.