The Dawn of Everything<\/em><\/a>, indigenous people are the source of almost all Western revolutionary thought in the modern era. They posit that during the early modern period, in the first centuries after contact was made between Europeans and Native North Americans, indigenous people offered critiques of European civilization that came as a \u201cshock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation.\u201d According to Graeber and Wengrow, this shock was so electrifying that it became the catalyst to the European Enlightenment. Solarpunk literature similarly teaches that we must look to indigenous people to discover how our species sustains its existence long term. Throughout the genre we see a return to living like a people who acted not as overlords but as stewards of nature, protecting and preserving it for the next generation. This perspective accepts that we are a disruptive species capable of catastrophic destruction if left unchecked. However, solarpunk literature shows societies that look to limit our ability to destroy a home that we must share with countless other species. <\/p>\nHow to get that job done seems like a Panglossian fantasy, but the genre attempts to show how humanity can practically draw those boundaries and allow our species to flourish among many. On Becky Chambers\u2019s Panga, half the moon is rewilded and given back to nature. She writes, \u201cIt was a crazy split, if you thought about it: half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others. But then, humans had a knack for throwing things out of balance. Finding a limit they\u2019d stick to was victory enough.\u201d <\/p>\n
I first set upon this genre not because I was interested in indigenous ecological practices or sustainable technologies, but because I read a lot of fiction for pleasure. I particularly enjoy novels with good world-building. If they are set in space, all the better. I became engrossed in solarpunk because these novels make me happy. I believe that solarpunk is powerful propaganda because it leaves us yearning for a better world. The specific teachings of these novels are well and good, but the stories are what engross and transform us. Unlike essays on the dangers of gas stoves, cattle farming, and microplastics, their positive vision of the future taps into the life of the senses. It is one thing to relate how a zero-carbon footprint and a consciously selective use of technology will be good for all living beings. It is another to show us why we want all those things and how much more pleasure we will be able to take in our everyday lives by becoming a people that leave no poisons behind. <\/p>\n
In each solarpunk novel I read, I was struck by the amount of page space devoted to cooking, walking, and especially bathing and swimming. Long, luxurious passages about beaches, lakes, and volcanic hot springs are everywhere across the genre. The life of the body is deliberately foregrounded, making these novels incredibly soothing to read. Some passages are like guided meditations. Solarpunk is not, however, merely a salve to anxious, over-mechanized modern living. While you can read solarpunk as self-care, I found myself enraged as often as I was becalmed by the depiction of everything that we are missing because capital has taken away our birthright as inhabitants of planet Earth. I don\u2019t want to wait for the robots to take to the woods. I want ecotopia now.<\/p>\n <\/section>\n \n\n\n
This post was originally published on Current Affairs<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Move over cyberpunk. Make way for solarpunk, the defiant ecosocialist answer to dystopian doomerism. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573068"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1573068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1573069,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573068\/revisions\/1573069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1573068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1573068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1573068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}