The impression I’ve gotten of Solarpunk through lurking on this instance is of some sort of hybrid between bright and dark green environmentalism. These mix like oil and water. The bright green component, that solar panels and EVs are going whisk us away to a utopian future, is a turn off from participating.
I think this fundamentally comes from Solarpunk being an aesthetic movement where it is just so easy to draw a bunch of solar panels and batteries in some digital artwork. How are the quartz and those battery materials being mined? How are those raw ores being reduced both on a chemical and energetic standpoint? Is it even possible to have artisan/localized ways of producing these technologies vs the current status quo dependent on highly energy-intensive six continent supply chain and cheap hydrocarbon flows. Brushing aside these kinds of difficult questions with techno-optimism leads to bright green environmentalism.
The manifesto states that this movement is optimistic, but there is room for aesthetic optimism constrained by the laws of physics in the collapse of the current system. Having to re-localize and work together to survive after supply chains fail leading to re-establishment of community. Ingenious ways of salvaging unusable modern technology, like building a wind turbine from harvested car alternator. Maybe this isn’t ‘solarpunk’ but I would like to know what movement it is.
The impression I’ve gotten of Solarpunk through lurking on this instance is of some sort of hybrid between bright and dark green environmentalism. These mix like oil and water. The bright green component, that solar panels and EVs are going whisk us away to a utopian future, is a turn off from participating.
I think this fundamentally comes from Solarpunk being an aesthetic movement where it is just so easy to draw a bunch of solar panels and batteries in some digital artwork. How are the quartz and those battery materials being mined? How are those raw ores being reduced both on a chemical and energetic standpoint? Is it even possible to have artisan/localized ways of producing these technologies vs the current status quo dependent on highly energy-intensive six continent supply chain and cheap hydrocarbon flows. Brushing aside these kinds of difficult questions with techno-optimism leads to bright green environmentalism.
The manifesto states that this movement is optimistic, but there is room for aesthetic optimism constrained by the laws of physics in the collapse of the current system. Having to re-localize and work together to survive after supply chains fail leading to re-establishment of community. Ingenious ways of salvaging unusable modern technology, like building a wind turbine from harvested car alternator. Maybe this isn’t ‘solarpunk’ but I would like to know what movement it is.