I see solarpunk as an opportunity to let more people know about the enormous variety of alternatives available to all of us as we attempt to build small enclaves of new ways of living: communities, neighborhoods, villages, etc, and creatively network them together. We can look at all the ways we can meet real needs for food, shelter, energy, transportation, communication, connection, safety, fairness, justice, and environmental restoration and resilience to name a few.
I’m particularly interested in figuring out how we can create more communal/cooperative/collective ways of living as well as using what I’d like to call sharing technologies: income-sharing, gift economies, library socialism, mutual aid networks, etc–but I’m also interested in figuring how we can incorporate everything from permaculture and passivhaus to relationship anarchy and transformative justice, plus much, much more into all the things we are creating.
I choose to believe that we are doing more than writing exciting stories, that in solarpunk and other positive speculative fiction we are trying to create vivid possibilities that will inspire people to work to create these things in real life. BF Skinner wrote Walden Two as utopian fiction but it inspired Kat Kinkade to create Twin Oaks, a real income-sharing community that’s now been running for almost sixty years. What else could be built if it could be dreamt? Maybe we can see.
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