Can We Reach a Solarpunk Future in Tāmaki Makaurau? By Liam Hansen (they/he) FEATURE WRITER
Illustrations by Haydn Nixon (he/him)
Liam delves into the sunny, sustainable and sci-fi world of Solarpunk - they chat to researchers about how its ideas can be implemented in real life and sits down with Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick to figure out why the government won’t change anything.
more on a post-capitalism hellscape). These worlds were originally created as a response to what could happen, but now with the ideas terrifyingly feasible, how do we approach the invention of new, fantastical worlds that could be seen as any worse than the one we’re already plummeting towards?
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arly in the morning, you wake up to the smell of homemade bread, the sound of chirping birds, the taste of cool fresh air, and the feeling of the sun washing over your face in a plant-filled bedroom. The natural flora outside of your window is radiant and beautiful, with the concrete streets below barely visible from the overbearing nature which has taken hold. Your kitchen contains fresh, unpackaged ingredients, your closet is full of quirky thrifted hand-made gems, and a Studio Ghibli score is playing in the background. You leave your home and step out directly onto a solar-powered streetcar, staring out the window at various crops, vineyards, farms and flower patches. You hop off the streetcar and enter the city, where trees line every street, package-free markets sit behind pedestrianised areas, and shoppers carry tote bags filled with fresh produce. You join them, energised and fulfilled with your life and environment. You do not live in Auckland. You live in a solarpunk fantasy novel. God, I wish that were me. Solarpunk envisions a universe where we got our shit together and beat the climate crisis, phased out all the things contributing to the destruction of our environment and its inhabitants and replaced them with technology that sees the world clean, green, and absolutely fuckin’ mean. The speculative fiction community has been creating stories of rebels in dystopias for decades. At this point, you can basically take any term popular in a sci-fi or fantasy novel, smack the ‘-punk’ suffix at the end of it, and boom: you’ve got a new cyberpunk derivative that suckers like me will spend the next three months hyper-fixating on. There’s steampunk, dieselpunk, dungeonpunk and mythpunk, atompunk, stonepunk, nanopunk and raypunk - the list never ends! But these subgenres are usually focused on creating hypothetical dystopias, worst-case scenarios or alternative histories where things went wrong or diverged. But it’s easy to get bogged down with the excessively pessimistic views these pieces of fiction provide - especially when the 21st century is seeing the real world hurtling towards an actual cyberpunk dystopia (with less emphasis on the cool robot arms and
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Enter solarpunk - a ray of hope for the future of humanity. First defined on the internet in 2008 (but having existed since long beforehand), it takes all the ideas seen in cyberpunk and its derivatives, from adapted forms of modern technology to new ways of presenting cities, and turns it on its head. Solarpunk envisions a universe where we got our shit together and beat the climate crisis, phased out all the things contributing to the destruction of our environment and its inhabitants and replaced them with technology that sees the world clean, green, and absolutely fuckin’ mean. Think ecovillages centred around farming communities, and cities with dense housing, efficient public transport, and moss growing up the side of skyscrapers. Think community gardens, plant-based homegrown food, and streets where animals happily coexist with humans. Essentially, solarpunk is the good timeline - a source of escapism where we can imagine a world where we can disconnect from our shitty, carbon filled unsustainable reality and pretend that everything is okay. But happiness and sunshine aren’t the only thing differentiating solarpunk from other punk subgenres. The stories built around these universes have continually made audiences stop, and think “Hey, why don’t we actually do these things? Why don’t we bring these incredible ideas of renewable energy and sustainability into reality?” Sure, many of the ideas in solarpunk are entirely fictional and pretty dang hard to bring into reality - but the concepts aren’t out of reach. For a matter of fact, they’re staring us right in the face. We could bring back old, pre-capitalist systems, like food markets and car-free streets. Solarpunk isn’t just a fantasy - it’s a possibility.