Going a slightly different direction today in that, for once, this has little to do with politics and nation-states and more to do with the historical basis for a nascent genre.
Solarpunk is a fairly recent development. I first became aware of it perhaps a year ago, thought it was cool, and didn’t give it much more thought, but in the last few months it seems to be picking up steam. As far as I know, there isn’t much art or literature in this genre yet (please recommend anything to me that you know of! I’d love to see it); it’s more like a movement and set of guidelines. This is unusual, since usually a punk genre forms around a nucleus of influential work: compare steampunk, which coalesced around The Difference Engine, The Anubis Gates, and Victorian speculative literature, and then had guidelines and a subculture applied to it.
What is solarpunk? Unlike most of the other punks, it isn’t so much an alternate past as a possible present and future. While steampunk and dieselpunk revolve in large part around highly aestheticized machinery and dystopia, solarpunk is more about ecology and optimism. Steampunk has gears, tentacle beasts, and airship-monitored empires; solarpunk has natural fibers, algae lamps, and a nearly anarchist streak. Despite its name, it isn’t dependent on solar technology (at least not the way steampunk is dependent on steam); it’s about powering our technology through whatever makes sense for a given area. In stormy areas, windmills; near rivers, hydroelectric power; in the desert, solar panels. It’s about coexisting with nature rather than using it. It looks at technology and says, “how sustainable can we make this”, not “how powerful can we make this”. It looks at scientists as innovators and heroes, not potential madmen. If you lived in a solarpunk city, you’d recycle almost everything. You’d know how to fix your own phone. You’d have autographed posters of biochemists on your wall. And you’d have a kick-ass Art Nouveau aesthetic, because solarpunk is elves.
So now that we’ve defined solarpunk, inasmuch as one can, let’s look at its historical basis, because, like the other punks, solarpunk has its share of might-have-beens.
First of all, a huge component of solarpunk is what one might call mindful architecture: windows made of glass that generates electricity, wind scoops, rooftop gardens, etc. This kind of architecture has some pretty strong historical fact behind it—also science, because science is awesome and is older than our word for it.
The Mediterranean peoples knew an awful lot about how to deal with the sun, because they lived in the northern hemisphere, where in winter the sun moves to the south, while in summer it’s right overhead or slightly to the north. So they built their houses with huge windows and doors to the south to warm the space in winter, and they put few or no openings on the north, so the summer sun would reflect off the roof and winter winds couldn’t get in. This meant they had to burn very little fuel in the winter, and in the summer they had cooling breezes. Entire cities had this north-south orientation. It was so important that the Romans even passed laws ensuring that every building had access to the winter sun. And in Egypt and neighboring Western Asia, windcatchers were built on roofs to direct air currents into the interior. This form of air conditioning is incredibly ancient and still in use today.
And solar machinery? People have toyed with it off and on throughout the centuries. The closest anyone really came to running machines on solar power before the advent of the solar panel was AugustinMouchot, a nineteenth-century Frenchman who used a system of reflectors and boilers to drive a steam engine (not a train, just an engine). His machine was a bit cumbersome but could have been developed into practicality, but coal prices went down in France and the government decided it was not economical to invest in solar research. Others tried after him, and solar-powered pumps and ovens were available for quite a while (still are, probably, but this is about history), especially in the southwest of the United States. During the Edwardian era, people got so excited about solar power that there were even plans to build huge energy plants in Egypt in 1914, but an insignificant war began in Europe that directed funding elsewhere.
Every time the world faces a fossil fuel shortage, the scientific community looks back at solar power and thinks “huh, yeah, we should give this another go”. In the twenties and thirties, as the ideals of the Bauhaus (which included solar architecture) spread over the world, people tried solar water heaters, south-facing windows, and just about everything else, but as more and more oil fields were found and fossil fuels dropped in price or became easier to procure, these were put on the back burner.
The “problem” with solar power is that it requires a significant initial expense: you have to retrofit or specially design your house, or you have to buy a bunch of solar panels, or you have to spend money on a lot of mirrors. But after that, the system requires no power input (you don’t have to keep buying gas or coal) and very little maintenance (just send someone out with a rag and some Windex every now and then). This, in fact, is one of the most infuriating things about the history of solar power. It’s always on the verge of being realized, and then someone says “this smoky poisonous stuff is cheaper, let’s do that”. It’s also one of the most inspiring things about solarpunk. We can achieve it—as they say, we have the technology.
If you consider yourself a follower of the solarpunk movement, or even just have a casual interest in the subgenre, please reblog this post! I’m trying to gauge the size of the current solarpunk ‘fandom’ on tumblr. If there’s sufficient interest, I might even look into creating a network or group of some kind so that like-minded solarphiles can share ideas, headcanons and projects. Oh, and I’ll be following back predominately solarpunk blogs, so there’s something tangible in it for you too. Thanks in advance!
hello! if you’re interested in solarpunk I have a demographics survey out too!
A reimagining of city design by Belgian architect Luc Schuiten. His concept is to blend the natural with the artificial by using living architecture to construct urban centres. To do this Schuiten envisions new ways to plant trees and shape their growth, pruning and grafting them into buildings and residences, using textiles and bioluminescence. Honestly, it’s one of the most delightfully solarpunk city concepts out there!
“The City of Habitarbres [habitable trees] develops in a remodeled forest environment tailored to the needs of a new lifestyle. The people are no longer consumers, but the actors of a new ecosystem that enables the management and the development of every term and ensures a long-term evolution of the city.” – Luc Schuiten
