Tevun-Krus #75 - International 4: SolarPunk

@Nablai's Nebula

Welcome to the latest edition of Nablai's Nebula, an ongoing series of educational and inspirational articles brought to you by Ooorah's very own Nablai! Enjoy!

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Happy New Year, everyone :) How was your New Year? Made any resolutions you intend to keep? Tell me so that we can share notes. I know we are one month late for the greetings, but better late than never.

This month's February issue focuses on Solar Punk. Now to those of you wondering, "what is solar punk?"--just hang tight as we breeze through the same.

Solarpunk is a genre of Speculative Fiction that focuses on craftsmanship, community, and technology powered by renewable energy. Other aspects of this genre include a quasi-Utopian setting with a slight bend toward social anarchism. Like the Tumblr community that fostered the genre, Solarpunk also likes to feature cultural awareness, gender equality, self-expression, and artful creativity. It works on the principle that science is good for humans, working on the combination of nature and technology in leading to an utopian setting.

The genre was coined on Tumblr in 2014 when a single post swept bloggers into hysteria.

The idea of SolarPunk bounced around online for years, before it picked up support from the people. We can trace the earliest concept back to 2008-- in a blog named "From Steampunk to Solarpunk" by the Republic of the Bees, as a sub-genre inspired by Steam punk.

In 2012, the publication of the Brazilian sci-fi anthology "Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável" marked the expansion of this speculative fiction genre beyond the English-speaking world to the international audience. From there the internet started building, critiquing, and diversifying an aesthetic theme with a corresponding outlook on sustainable development.

Unlike Cyberpunk that accepts the world we have and the systems that support it like corporate globalization, industrialization, and exploiting resources in slightly-less-bad ways, SolarPunk aims to subvert those systems and replace them with ones that work better in the long-term through local communities, supporting artisans, and living sustainably.

Solarpunk focuses on renewable energies, as well as technology to envision a positive future for humanity. It encourages optimistic envisioning of the future considering present environmental concerns, such as climate change and pollution. It also embraces less advanced ways to reduce carbon emissions, like gardening.

The solarpunk aesthetic uses nature motifs and is inspired from Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement, Afrofuturism, indigenous American designs, and Edwardian fashion into a stew of artistic harmonization. It uses all of the above in taking the existing aspects of our current world and to repurpose them into something more liberatory, specialising in reframing, pastiche, and reimagining of existing characters, styles, and trends in a very different context.

Musician and photographer Jay Springett has given the easiest basic definition of Solarpunk:

"SolarPunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question 'what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?'

At first glance, Solarpunk imagines the future. It envisions a totally different system of energy delivery, essential services and transport. Quite different to the intersection of roads and coal-fired power plants we live amongst today. This would be a world of eco-cities, 3D printing, vertical farms, solar glass windows, wild or inventive forms of dress and design. In this world, technology would be used to automate away needless human labour and to help restore the damage the Oil Age and natural exploitation has already done.

SolarPunk has its share of predecessors in the writing world. Starhawk's "The Fifth Sacred Thing"(1994) and Ernest Callenbach's "Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston" (1975) both have imagined anti-capitalist, de-urbanised, garden-centric societies.

SolarPunk stories are likely to feature characters from oppressed or marginalised groups living more freely, equally, and inclusively than they can now or they are shown exploring an exotic world of body modification, gender and sexual discovery, learning new forms of technology and dealing with conflicts from the remnants of the old world. They also face unique problems which are sure to arise in the very different social scenario.

SolarPunk is a Revolt of Hope Against Despair. I know what you are thinking. As many have pointed out- what exactly is meant to be "punk" about the genre that it comes across as the lovechild of hippies and futurists. After all, isn't punk meant to denote anger and rage at "the system", with the black leather and spikey hair?

According to experts, Punk is more of an ideology than a specific set of signifiers, which implies a rebellion against and negation of the dominant paradigm and everything repressive about it. It is a culture, a movement in itself.

So, in a world being torn apart by a planetary system based on avarice and power-lust and ecocide, SolarPunk might be the most "punk" movement of all.

SolarPunk is also not content to accept the rigidity of a tomorrow ruled by authoritarian governments, rapacious corporations, and a despoiled biosphere-- it aims for a future characterised by a reconciliation between humanity and nature.

An ethos defined by SolarPunk would strive to dissolve every form of social hierarchy and domination--whether based on class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, or species. It tries to break up the power some individuals or groups wield over others and thus increases the aggregate freedom of all-- empowering the weak and including everyone in the process.

It is based on liberatory movements such as anti-authoritarian socialism, feminism, racial justice, queer and trans liberation, disability struggles, animal liberation, and digital freedom projects.

So, this is all for today. I'd love to read your thoughts and comments on this article. Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Can't wait to see you in March! This is Nab signing off. Love you and take care :)