7000millisieverts

[7000millisieverts]

The solarpunk aesthetic is an art movement/genre of fiction which aims to give a view of what the world would be like if technology was used with nature kept in mind. While the concept of technology in balance with nature is quite broad, the key ideas revolve around connections to the earth and other people through culture, renewable energy, and restarting civilization. As the Solarpunk Manifesto says “The ‘punk' in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.”

Where does the name solarpunk come from? At first glance, you would assume it comes from renewable energy, mainly solar energy, and you would be half right. Solarpunk gets its name from plants and the way they’re able to use the sun as energy, which inspires us to create technology that does the same. Solarpunk focuses on the ways today’s technology restricts and destroys, highlighting features of human life that are intertwined with technology today but can be separated with time (culture, music, crafts, etc…)

Solarpunk as a movement sparked because of climate change, overpopulation, and the hope those things began to take away. The movement focuses on making our own clothes, tech, food, and anything else you can think of, which makes teamwork very important. Solarpunk offers solutions to today’s problems that could be used to build our world again from the ground up rather than just warning us that the way the world is going is bad with no ideas on how to fix that.

Solarpunk is all about having a sustainable civilization where architecture and daily life does not push out nature, but strives to live with it. Houses, cafes, businesses, skyscrapers would all be built with gardens or some kind of vegetation growing on its walls or roofs. By isolating human cities to small and compact areas, we can both have a productive civilization and let nature reclaim the land we took.

Visuals of the solarpunk aesthetic include some aspects of other techpunk aesthetics such as cyberpunk and steampunk, but solarpunk aims to make the technologies existing in those aesthetics compatible with nature running them on more sustainable energy. Solarpunk is also generally sleeker and more elegant than those other aesthetics due to its architecture and use of whites, browns and greens.

For more information on solarpunk, view these solarpunk resources:

Solarpunk aesthetic wiki

Solarpunk manifesto