A lo-fi, low-key critique of solarpunk
By Jo Lindsay Walton
Joyce Ch’ng’s ‘The Barricade’ (2024) is a solarpunk short story in which nothing much happens. The lack of incident is probably deliberate: a gentle rejection of the idea that all narratives need conflict. Put your characters in horrible situations and watch them struggle to survive: this is standard creative writing advice. It may be more steeped in capitalist ideology than we care to admit.
By contrast, the closest Ch’ng’s story gets to real jeopardy is a flock of birds smacking into a solar panel. The solar panel is easily repaired. The bird strike could even be taken as a positive sign. It implies a lot of birds. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which helped to kick off (or revive) the environmental movement in the 1960s, takes its title from imagining the loss of birdsong.
Ida loved birds. Their songs would wake her up every morning. There were no more cases of poaching (or so the newspapers said). Native birds were returning. Numbers were climbing up once more, helped by careful husbandry and re-introduction of species.
Solarpunk is an eclectic genre. It typically envisions hopeful futures, where humans live in harmony with nature, and often with one-another as well. Solarpunk communities are often multi-species communities. The term solarpunk seems to have originated in an anonymous 2008 blog post, ‘From Steampunk to Solarpunk,’ imagining the widespread return of wind-powered sea freight. This contemplative excitement about technology, old or new—or both old and new—has continued to characterise solarpunk.
Crucially, solarpunk prefers to tackle technical problems and ecological crises in ways that serve social justice. Hannah Steinkopf-Frank writes, “imagining Solarpunk purely as a pleasant aesthetic undermines its inherently radical implications. At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today.”[1] The genre may not have a consistent set of politics, but it often resonates with degrowth and postgrowth perspectives, as well as pluriversal politics — that is, mobilising local, traditional, and Indigenous worldviews in ways that may diverge from mainstream sustainable development discourse.
So what would the Solarpunk Development Goals include? Looking pretty would definitely be one of them: solarpunk visual aesthetics often remind me of the work of Hayao Miyazaki (especially films like Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke). There’s a lot of biomimetic architecture around too: with sinuous bridges, arboreal arcologies, clusters of skyscraping vertical farms, forests, and apartment spindles, all sprouting lush vegetation.
Ch’ng’s ‘The Barricade’ represents the lower-tech end of solarpunk. It is not quite a primitivist vision: advanced technological infrastructure remains vital, not least the Barricade itself. But technology gets developed and deployed more carefully, to support the real needs of people and planet. Some ‘obsolete’ technologies appear to have been revived. The great rusting tankers signify the rejection of destructive technologies. Instead, “Ancient craft like perahu and bedar now ply the sea and the inlets around the islands. On a calm day, their sails flash like the wings of birds or butterflies.”
The Barricade exists because the sea level has risen. Of course, we call the raised shoreline the Barricade: it acts to block the sea from reclaiming what is hers. A long time ago, we lived in harmony with the sea, with the sea people co-existing with water and wind. Now we wish for that level of balance once more.
Balance is a frequent theme of solarpunk. In Kate V. Bui’s ‘Deer, Tiger, and Witch’ (2021), a Bioremediation Specialist explains to a precocious deer-loving child scientist: “Everything is interlinked: deer, tigers, people, plants. If one goes out of balance, so do the others. Do you know why I’m here, Con? Your village hired me because the harvests are failing.”[2] In Gregory Scheckler’s ‘Grow, Give Repeat’ (2018), a precocious, chicken-loving child scientist explains how she has innovatively iterated Blockies, “[f]unny cubes of unthinking plant meats”: “in the design compromises and balances for feedback into linked waste and re-use, even evaporation, you have to include people. People are a part of the equation. Everyone in the community.”[3]
Balance may become more than just a theme. Solarpunk is a genre concerned with energy management and burnout of all kinds, from fossil fuel consumption to the overstretching of personal capacities. Solarpunk sustainability may imply mindfulness, responsibility, restraint, and putting on a twelve-hour mix of lo-fi hip-hop positive vibes for relaxing, studying, and repairing the planet to.
In this way, balance becomes more like a structuring principle of thought. Solarpunk often wants to embrace the possibilities of futuristic technologies, but in a prudent and measured way. Excitement about science and engineering shouldn’t mean getting mesmerised by snake-oil techno-fixes, or neglecting the social justice implications of a technological solution.
However, Chn’g’s ‘The Barricade’ could more accurately be described as solar-and-candlepunk. Ch’ng describes ‘candle days,’ where beeswax candles are used because solar power is insufficient. It is quietly confronting a difficult reality: despite the rapid growth of green energy, a third of global energy still comes from oil, a quarter from coal, and a fifth from fossil gas (natural gas). Wind, solar, and hydropower combined account for only about 10%, biomass around 6%, and nuclear approximately 4%. Perhaps it shouldn’t be radical for a solarpunk story to suggest that solar (and other renewables) won’t suffice for our energy needs in the near future—at least, not unless we adjust those needs.
The vertical farms and the solar plants rise up, the beeswax candles burn down. The Barricade rises too, to match the rising sea levels.
Like a bird, she was free. Buoyant, carried by the water and current, Ida surrendered herself to the freedom. She was only a drop in a huge sea, connected and interconnected to it.
The sea water pool was a designated swimming area. Beyond it, the Barricade stood against the rising sea levels.
The sun was beginning to descend, the sky now awash with pink and orange. The solar panels gleamed, absorbing the last rays. Tonight was another candle day where they paused their work and enjoyed the glow of the candle light. There would be song and dance, storytelling and puppetry.
It was a revolution that got us here. When the people sacked the villas and mansions, and mobbed our oppressors, one wonders, were we really demanding more puppet shows? It does seem life is a little frugal behind the Barricade. Or … is it? Lyric, lingering prose can evoke the sensuous pleasure of pastimes that have low energy requirements and environmental impacts—or which help to regenerate nature. In theory, this is a way literature and culture might intervene in postcapitalist imaginaries. It might be a space for exploring the difference between ‘quality of life,’ an abstract economic construct, and the actual qualities of our lives. What if it was capitalism that was frugal, mean, hardscrabble all along? With its thin, samey consolations, with its endless grind of work?
I am grateful for the ambition and the frankness of this story. Often there is a disconnect between the solarpunk manifestos and the stories that fill solarpunk anthologies. You turn to the stories, expecting to find detailed depictions of the worlds described in the manifestos, and it’s somehow not quite there. This disconnect is perfectly fine—and unlikely to bother anyone who isn’t literally trying to research a book on postcapitalism and science fiction—but it is nice to find a solarpunk story that conducts clear postcapitalist worldbuilding.
Nonetheless the vision of ‘The Barricade’ veers, for me, too much toward the romanticised pastoral. This is tempered by the presence of some advanced tech and some social and cultural novelties. Overall, the proposal seems to be that transcending capitalism requires a deliberate scaling down of the complexity of modern society. It feels unbalanced toward a collectivist, communitarian ethos, where the needs of the group may sometimes outweigh individual freedoms. Democracy’s revival implies a return to direct, participatory methods, reminiscent of ancient city-states where citizens engaged directly in public life—voting, debating, holding office. I also find myself questioning the dynamics of power within the society of ‘The Barricade’—particularly the influence of elders and the role of the family. What unspoken hierarchies might persist in this seemingly egalitarian world, and how do they impact the autonomy of individuals within it? There is at least a clear concern for the democratic adaptation of tradition. “Ida remembered what her teacher had said: Adapt, but adapt with empathy and sensitivity.”
All in all, I wonder if the aesthetics of balance are capacious and versatile enough to do the kind of work that solarpunk sets for itself. Or, at least, can we imagine multiple equilibria? The implicit answer is often place-based: this community is calibrated for the balance that is described, but for anyone who cannot be content here, at least they can go elsewhere. There’s no such thing as “one size fits all”: alongside balance, this feels like a very solarpunk preoccupation.
I’m not sure if anyone has yet tried to connect solarpunk with the Guild Socialism of the early 20th century. William Morris and Art Nouveau offer an obvious aesthetic connection, and there are some shared interests around the revival of artisinal techniques. But the deeper affinity between solarpunk and Guild Socialism lies in their shared appreciation for the particular. In Guild Socialism Restated (1920), G.D.H. Cole outlines specific structures for guild-based organisation, envisioning industries democratically managed by workers’ associations. Yet he’s careful to emphasise that these arrangements are not exhaustive; their fuller significance lies in culturing a spirit of cooperation. Cooperation can be flexible, sporadic, and ephemeral, often arising spontaneously and shaped by the affordances of distinctive personalities, places, desires, resources, and circumstances. Cole writes:
If the Guilds are to revive craftsmanship and pleasure in work well done; if they are to produce quality as well as quantity, and to be ever keen to devise new methods and utilise every fresh discovery of science without loss of tradition; if they are to breed free men capable of being good citizens both in industry and in every aspect of communal life; if they are to keep alive the motive of free service — they must at all costs shun centralisation.[4]
Cole saw this same spirit of collaboration as reconciling the tension between democracy and expertise, such as scientific expertise.
Solarpunk frequently pitches itself against neocolonial universalism. Imagining postcapitalism means imagining postcapitalism for this place, this community, this history. We might think of all the economic anthropology that proclaims that abstract categories like ‘markets’ or ‘wages’ are always embedded in particular, rich, vivid, social and cultural practices. Imagining and practicing postcapitalism must mean imagining and practicing postcapitalisms.
Alongside its anti-colonial ethos, solarpunk often brings an anarchist ethos, or at least anarchist rizz, to the question of how we get from here to there. Climate change gives us monumental tasks, such as the expansion of renewable energy, public transport infrastructure, changes to agriculture, nature restoration, and more. With so many interconnected crises at hand, we need comprehensive, radical solutions that go to the root—approaches that swiftly reduce emissions, that create fair unionised jobs for those displaced by the transition (and for all), bring reparative justice to those most exploited by today’s extractive economy … and look forward to still better things, like whatever postcapitalism might be.
The afterlife of Guild Socialism might be an interesting cautionary tale for solarpunk. Its biggest contemporary influence is in the Blue Labour movement, which has some distinctly nationalist and even anti-immigration notes. So much for just going elsewhere, if you’re not content where you are.
Meanwhile, the kid scientists of Bui and Scheckler’s stories, along with the abundance of youthful engineers, hackers, improvisers, and repair scamps that populate solarpunk, suggest an unacknowledged narrative model for solarpunk labour: the school science project. The solarpunk author takes on the role of a parental surrogate, wondering: Am I giving them too much help? Am I getting carried away? Surely other authors are helping their characters succeed, aren’t they? The school project is inherently low-stakes—at least, no one is likely to get physically hurt.
Yet how comfortable are we with that scrappy, duct-taped, wing-and-a-prayer ethos, when it comes to planting harvests that must survive extreme weather? Or designing breeder nuclear reactors running on depleted uranium-238? Or natural disaster preparedness and response? Or preventing unjustifiable carbon-intensive activities anywhere in the world—a world that shares one sky, one sun, one climate?
Solarpunk itself often resembles a solarpunk contraption. It has been lashed together out of scavenged materials—including ecologically-themed science fiction, utopian fiction, and art, architecture and movies that have vaguely the right vibe—and given a somewhat new purpose. It isn’t strictly owned by anyone, and there are diverse ideas about what it is, and what it can do. The contraption doesn’t always work perfectly. Sometimes you might need to give it a gentle kick.
[1] Hannah Steinkopf-Frank, ‘Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It’s About the End of Capitalism’ (2021). <https://www.vice.com/en/article/solarpunk-is-not-about-pretty-aesthetics-its-about-the-end-of-capitalism/>
[2] Kate V. Bui, ‘Deer, Tiger, and Witch,’ in Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, ed. Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Norie Tamura, Rajat Chaudhuri, Sarena Ulibarri (World Weaver Press: 2021), p. 62.
[3] Gregory Scheckler’s ‘Grow, Give Repeat,’ in Sarena Ulibarri (ed.), Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (World Weaver Press, 2018).
[4] G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-Stated (Leonard Parsons, 1920), p. 61.
This article has been slightly updated from the published version. Special thanks to Polina Levontin, Phoenix Alexander, and Joyce Ch’ng.
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