Reverend Danie has referred to a literary genre called solar punk. In keeping with May’s theme ‘imagination’, here is a great read in the solar punk genre that imagines a liveable, greener future. Imagining a greener future is a needed step in creating one.
In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers’s delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future.
What is solar punk exactly?
Read a description of this hopeful climate fiction genre.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” (Fisher, 2009, p. 2)
Solarpunk is a genre of ecologically-oriented speculative fiction characterized both by its aesthetic and its underlying socio-political vision (Sylva, 2015). In many ways (down to the name), solarpunk is the inverse of its moodier older sister, cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is perhaps most succinctly summed up in the phrase “high tech, low life,” referring to the immense technological development imagined by the genre and its insurmountable social problems (Neon Dystopia). By contrast, solarpunk can be said to be “low carbon, high life.” Pointedly, solarpunk has no commitment to “low tech” as such (as, for example, anarcho-primitivism does), but rather rejects technologies which are not in harmony with the environment. Indeed, many solarpunk stories imagine clever, high tech yet low carbon solutions to environmental problems (see Grzyb & Sparks, 2017)
Find the complete article about solar punk from The Journal of Sustainability Education here.