First published: May 20, 2024 | Permalink | RSS

A dithered view of Lisbon showing its castle, hills, and many homes and buildings in pastel colors with orange tile roofs

Over the past few years, I have been taking in a lot of Solarpunk influences. Solarpunk is a movement/genre/aesthetic/practice based around ultra-sustainability, averting climate climate catastrophe, and community-centric social organization that has been growing and evolving over the past 15 years, largely starting in Latin America, and I first came across it with Andrew Sage's "What is Solarpunk" video and got such a craving for more things like this.

Already, I had been looking for more art and literature that makes sustainability look desirable in a way that wasn't just corporate greenwashing, but also wasn't just the cottage-core fantasy or the machismo-filled bushcraft stuff. I read a lot of dystopian fiction as a teen and young adult, and like many others, I tired of that sort of imagery being a warning and co-opted by venture capital funded companies. I wanted something that could actually serve as both a cultural escape and as a playbook of how to improve our odds as a society against climate damage, rising fascism, and increasing apathy in the face of both.

Solarpunk has already been included in greeenwashing campaigns of corporations and is often reduced to "glass towers with greenery poking out," but is, and can be so much more. I enjoy reading Solarpunk books like Walkaway and Inifinite Detail (both of which have excellent playbooks for decentralized, community-based living) as well as art when I can, but I am especially interested in trying to incorporate as many of these things into my daily life as I can.

Of course, I would love to stick solar panels and a battery on our house and retrofit it to be as sustainable as possible, but that is expensive (to do quickly) and there are smaller things to make life more sustainable like remembering that "reduce, reuse, and" are the words that come before "recycle", repairing whatever I can, and only buying new things when I need them. In finding a new aesthetic, many of us (Americans, especially) are drawn to throw out our current possessions and buy the starter pack of the New Thing™. Typically, the answer to "what is the most sustainable ___?" is "The one you already have." Of course, if the object in question is a fuel-hungry thing that creates a lot of waste, that may be worth retiring and replacing.

Ruby has taught me a lot about repairing clothes, and I know how to maintain our bikes and some parts of our house. But, I have been recently trying to learn more about repairing electronics like my early 2015 Macbook I bought used from a previous employer and I would love to migrate this website from GitHub Pages to my own device in our home. Even as it is, using a static site that delivers a few kilobytes per page is far more sustainable than serving gigabyte-sized packages for websites made of mostly text.

Like many things, living sustainably is an iterative process and we all learn more each day. Even as my own work is influenced by it, my interest in Solarpunk is less trying to look a certain way, but rather how to behave. I certainly don't claim to be doing this perfectly, but I aspire to it and am currently slowly transforming an empty lot by our house into a garden/pocket-park, learning to repair electronics and clothes, and engaging my local communities in these as much as I can. What small, slow progress are you making?

Thank you for reading!