What is solarpunk? Inside an audaciously hopeful environmental movement that’s thriving in the Bay Area
December 24, 2024
Environmental activists Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott’s second-growth forest on their 10-acre Guerneville property is an outdoor laboratory dedicated to the emerging environmental movement known as solarpunk. Once dominated by a weedy horse track, Solar Punk Farms, which they founded in 2020, has been transformed into a “food canopy” of 40 stone fruit trees with a greenhouse design inspired by the animations of director Hayao Miyazaki.
“There’s all different roles that are really important in the climate fight. There’s firefighters, world builders and rule changers,” Schwanz said, describing “firefighters” as people like Greta Thunberg who are bringing attention to the dangers of climate change. “Solarpunk is a very good example of the world builders.”
Climate scientists say Earth surpassed a critical threshold in 2024, warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which has wrought catastrophic storms, flooding and fires across California. But despite what seems to be ever-worsening environmental news, the growing solarpunk movement has a radically optimistic vision of a harmonious future between humanity and nature.
The quickest adopters of the movement’s values seem to be in the Bay Area, where a local solarpunk chapter formed this year and ventures like Solar Punk Farms in Sonoma County are working as a functional model for its lifestyle of ecological sustainability. Bay Area Solarpunks founder Bruce Shigeura said this alternative vision for the future is sorely needed for a youth distraught by climate anxiety.
“There are so many young people out there who are disillusioned, who are feeling really down because the U.S. is going to pull out of the Paris Agreement, cut down on renewable energy and ramp up fossil fuels,” Shigeura said. “There are two paths now: Despair or real optimism. Solarpunk is optimistic.”
The first usage of the term “solarpunk” came from an anonymous author on the politics blog Republic of the Bees in 2008. It is a portmanteau of solar, representing sustainable energy, and punk, a rejection of the status quo leading Earth to climate change, the author wrote.
In the blog post, he envisioned the use of sails on commercial cargo ships to reduce their energy consumption via a low-tech solution. And in this regard he may have been prescient: The International Windship Association has recorded 39 large commercial ships that utilize sails in 2024, with even more companies considering implementing them in the future.
“(A) major difference between solarpunk and steampunk is that solarpunk ideas, and solarpunk technologies, need not remain imaginary,” the blogger wrote. “And I indulge a hope of someday living in a solarpunk world.”
The proliferation of dystopian media in the mid-2010s via shows like “Black Mirror,” which often depict technology’s tyrannical grip on humanity and the destruction of the natural world, contributed to a growing hopelessness about the state of modern life. These bleak visions of the future caused Bay Area fiction writer Alan Marling to seek an alternative vision — instead of a dystopian “Brave New World,” the solarpunk movement imagined a green one.
“While reviewing stories for the Nebula Awards, I grew depressed with all the dystopias and apocalypses,” Marling wrote to Bay Area News Group. “I knew the danger of hopelessness from my work as an activist and from the themes of so many fantasy novels. I searched for a radically hopeful genre and found solarpunk.”
Supporters founded r/solarpunk on the social media platform Reddit on Nov. 2, 2014. Ten years later, more than 144,000 members around the world share sustainable solutions to control light pollution, promote urban gardening on rooftops and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through innovations, some practical and others fantastical.
One of these posts was a 2018 TED Talk by Keisha Howard who described the importance of envisioning a future unmarred by climate change. She shared renderings of solarpunk visions portraying cityscapes with lush green spaces, hexagonal urban greenhouses and blimps holding wind turbines that power homes and communities. Artwork is crucial in redirecting the dread many feel toward the future to the optimism needed to change it, Howard said.
Schwanz and Scott, two self-described “climate dorks” working in the environmental industry at the time, found Howard’s TED Talk and were ecstatic to learn about this new movement that matched their own values. Scott is a writer and Schwanz is focused on science communication, but they had struggled to relay the importance of addressing climate change without creating despair. They wanted an idea that people could not only attach to but a future they could strive for.
“Finally, somebody has a word for this!” Scott recalled saying. “We both saw it as an incredible strategy and a very powerful story.”
“We knew that being the buzzkill all the time is not effective,” Scott said. “And so we were trying to find different ways to communicate … so that people feel like this is not always a tax or an obligation, but actually something that can make your life better and feels fun.”
Some of these architectural principles have already taken root at top schools like UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, where students learn to create buildings that enhance sustainability and climate resiliency. These ideas include the use of natural, biodegradable building materials such as hempcrete, made from hemp and lime, in its Forest Production Lab in Richmond where more sustainable production of layered timber takes place.
Solar Punk Farms is a realized image of a solarpunk lifestyle that has implemented many of the movement’s ideas, from utilizing regenerative agriculture that considers each layer of a forest as part of the ecology, to partnering with Zero Waste Sonoma to become a community compost site for residents in west Sonoma County. Next year, they hope to invest in a water capture system that can preserve months of water throughout the year.
Schwanz knows the Bay Area is already being affected by climate change, noting that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has told Californians to expect warmer weather in coming years.
“That’s why we’re planting avocados, to see what’s gonna happen, even though we shouldn’t be able to do that,” Schwanz said. “I think one of our explicit goals is to be a demonstration site for what solarpunk or ecologically based values can look like. We do hope that by demonstrating it, people both can realize that it’s possible and then be excited by it.”
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