#From the american perspective i think we really need a guiding light other than elon musks desire to dominate things

[brightening-the-stars]

I was going to try to yap in the tags but it was too many characters, so for a bit of irrelevant commentary-- I'm personally fascinated by stories that follow semi-utopian societies in which a group of people has solved a bunch of problems caused by life under capitalism, but also thrown out a few desirable aspects of our current system as they built something entirely different. I think Ursula LaGuin's "The Disposessed" and Lois Lowry's "The Giver" do this especially well. (I've linked the Wikipedia synopses in case anyone is interested, though I would absolutely recommend reading both books!)

My tastes are partially driven by my politics (I really love stories that try to create realistic anarchist societies that maintain a level of technological sophistication similar to our own) but I think these stories are also just really engaging literature, because we get to explore the world through characters that take for granted things that we dream about, and dream about things that we take for granted. Because of this, they can avoid being prescriptive or preachy, and there's a pretty clear route to an interesting plotline as the characters dive into the non-ideal aspects of their organizational systems and try to rebel against or improve them.

I think solarpunk would lend itself really well to this sort of thing! What would it take, to unify people to create this sort of a future? What would we lose along the way? Even if we think these losses would be worth it, what would our great-great-grandchildren think as they are growing up in the world we've created? They should be allowed to complain about their world in a nuanced manner that recognizes that a broken utopia doesn't have to be cartoonishly oppressive. Work that criticizes aspects of a possible solarpunk future without reducing it to something monatonically bad would allow us to more clearly examine the flaws in our ideas and envision a realistic future.

(as a disclaimer, I'm not all that familiar with solarpunk so im not sure if this is coherent?? Also tagging @guutzprojects bc we were discussing similar ideas recently!)

I think a lot of the reason there's not been a ton of big solarpunk-style media is because it's inherently utopian and that leads to a real lack of conflict. Which is a shame that there's not a lot, because I LOVE how Solarpunk looks! But A lot of it is very big-scale from what I've seen; theorizing about ways man can integrate technology with nature, but not really what man is actually doing after that. What are the kinds of lives people would live in a solarpunk city? Surely actual human stories don't simply end because a lot of our needs are met. There's gotta be something!!