Solarpunk Narrates Futures Beyond Climate Despair

In 2024, one would be hard-pressed to find an American who has not heard the phrase “Make America Great Again.” I couldn’t have imagined the hold this phrase would have over American culture even eight years ago, but Octavia Butler predicted this phenomenon in 1998 in her Parable series.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler is set in 2024, in a post-apocalyptic California wracked by environmental and social chaos, and is widely regarded as predictive of the current circumstances in the United States. In a remarkably prescient explanation, the narrator writes: “Pox (apocalypse) was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems.”

Lauren Olamina, the aforementioned narrator, is a fifteen-year-old Black girl living in a gated (and walled) community in Southern California. She does not believe in looking away from impending and “obvious” problems. Growing up in a world of upheaval and climate disaster, she knows the only constant in life is change, and that human beings are responsible for their own destiny. When her walled community falls, she’s ready for it and finds herself leading a hopeful group of people to establish a new community.

Much of Butler’s writing—and speculative fiction broadly—acts as a thought experiment, allowing readers to reimagine their world. Ursula K. Le Guin, another titan of the genre, describes speculative fiction as “descriptive” rather than predictive.

Le Guin, like Butler, uses present trends and phenomena to illuminate the future—warning readers of what might happen or lighting a path forward. Butler’s accuracy with the phenomenon “Make America Great Again” is not only prescient but downright eerie.

Trump’s popularity was a surprise to many, even in 2016 when he won his first term of American presidency. But Butler predicted not only his rise, but also the forces that would create it—in Le Guin’s words, using genre to predict, “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” Science fiction provided Butler the freedom to create a world in which one teenager might find a way to fight forces much larger than herself, showing her readers what the path forward could be.

What is solarpunk?

The Parable series has been described as climate fiction, speculative fiction, and/or science fiction and is famously one of the first series in the Afrofuturism genre. However, it also fits into an emerging genre that is quickly gaining traction: solarpunk.

Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions a sustainable future rooted in communal self-reliance, justice, and care. Media in the genre often lends towards social anarchism and harmony between technology and nature. Solarpunk resists narratives about decay and doom, offering a hopeful vision of an imminent future in which humans learn to heal our relationship with nature and each other.

Climate despair is pervasive, and I understand why. The options seem increasingly narrow: despair or escapism. In the face of once-in-a-lifetime disasters occurring every few years, it feels impossible to consider climate change with anything but a sense of overwhelming doom.

But isn’t this, in itself, absurd? Climate change is symptomatic of human beings’ absurd desire to look away from existential threats and pray at the altar of growth, and in response to its constant reminders that it will not go away, many people have chosen to continue on the same path.

Writer Amitav Ghosh argues that we need a “heightened imaginary response to climate change.” He explains this idea via the notion of “probability.” If literature inspires reality as much as reality inspires literature, then literature, to a large extent, can shape what our minds might be able to digest as “probable.”

Ghosh argues that by not including the specter of climate change in literature, authors are feeding their readers a comforting illusion that convinces them that their experience of climate change is something outside the norm, something bizarre. He concludes with a scathing indictment of literary fiction: “Here, then, is the irony of a ‘realist’ novel: the very gestures with which conjures reality are actually a concealment of the real.”

Until I read Parable of the Sower a few years ago, I had never read a book in which climate change existed, and people were trying to build a just world. I had never been able to, in other words, “extrapolate” the current reality of climate change into a hopeful future.

Dystopia is popular—The Last of Us, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Hunger Games are some of the most popular visual media of the last decade. It’s important to be warned about our unchecked descent into fascism. Not only does very little of dystopian media deal with climate change, but it also doesn’t tell viewers what to do if we find ourselves there. The only choice seems to be giving up.

Solarpunk is a rebellion against that ostensibly inescapable notion.

Monks, Robots, & Hope

Where the Parable series shows us a small pinprick of hope in the form of a solarpunk community in a sea of climate disaster and inequity, the Monk & Robot series shows us what could have been if we had changed course earlier. This adorable book series is set in a region called Panga, in which robots have long achieved self-awareness and retreated from humankind, becoming the stuff of stories. But one day, a robot ambles up to our protagonist, a tea monk named Dex, and will not leave until Dex answers a simple question: “What do you need?”

I could answer that question in a heartbeat. But Dex lives in a better world, one in which humanity has left behind the “Factory Age,” and the population of the continent of Panga resides within half the continent, leaving the other half wild. The very existence of tea monks conveys a lot in this story—monks who travel from village to village, offering a kind ear to anyone who might want to drown their sorrows in tea. Dex does not necessarily need anything, but they are unsatisfied and don’t know why.

However, Splendid Speckled Mosscap, our robot friend, is on a quest to learn what makes humans tick. So, Dex has to figure it out. What follows is a beautiful philosophical dialogue set in an ecological utopia throughout the entire novella. Becky Chambers, the author, uses the absence of climate change and capitalism to ask some important questions and answer them, too:

“Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?”
…“Then how,” Dex said, “how does the idea of maybe being meaningless sit well with you?”
Mosscap considered. “Because I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful.”

Chambers’ settings and background details tell us a lot, too. Dex’s wagon is pedal-powered, with a solar panel on the roof, and they often have to wait a while to find a spare part. At times, the village with the part is far away, or they have to wait for someone to build it. They often trading for supplies or receive gifted surplus food. Mosscap dislikes the idea of any of his parts coming from a plant or animal because he views their lives as equal to his.

If solarpunk is the overt aesthetic of the book, then degrowth is a strong ideological undercurrent. Degrowth features in a lot of solarpunk media, although it’s often a mark of resource scarcity and disaster rather than an intentional push to leave hyper-consumption in the past.

Dex nodded at the ruined factory. “And the people who made places like this weren’t at fault either—at least, not at first. They just wanted to be comfortable. They wanted their children to live past the age of five. They wanted everything to stop being so fucking hard. Any animal would do the same—and they do, if given the chance.”

“They just wanted to be comfortable” is a sentence I find crossing my mind often. I do want to be comfortable, and I want everyone to achieve a basic level of comfort. As cozy and adorable as solarpunk can be, I think it often slips in a somewhat radical message: some of us will have to sacrifice some comfort if we care about each other enough.

Our current economic system has made us in the Global North accustomed to convenience and consumption at a rate that is unsustainable. Many of us have forgotten that another world is not only possible but exists—most of the world lives in a more collective way, consuming less and sharing more. Like Dex and Mosscap, we may have to wait longer for things, buy fewer products, and re-use more, but solarpunk helps us imagine a future that would be so very worth those sacrifices. 

Returning to Ghosh’s argument, the more we view the effects of climate change as “rare” or “unprecedented,” the less equipped we—as humans, as beings enmeshed in a multispecies collective—will be to deal with it. And the less equipped we are to deal with it, the more we will allow obvious problems to spiral out of our control. The heightened imaginary response Ghosh advocates preparing to actually, rationally, consider the options—and solarpunk lights a path forward. It gives us not only the tools, but also the destination.

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Featured image: Dex in their pedal-powered wagon, as envisioned on the book cover of A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Illustration courtesy of Feifei Ruan / Macmillan.

Laleh Ahmad is a master’s student in the environment and resources program. Her research focuses on disaster preparedness, resource management, and environmental governance in Pakistan. She is particularly interested in the spatial legacies of colonialism and critical development studies. Laleh is originally from Karachi, Pakistan, and runs a newsletter called Muhajir, which typically features essays on empire, culture, and literature. Contact.