Solarpunk

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

Mar 16, 2023 Excerpt from upcoming book on disability and ecology

But how do we loosen modernity’s grip when we’re still dependent on its tools? The answer is solarpunk, the edgy but sincere cultural movement joining technology with nature – reimagining technologies based on conceptions of science that coax rather than torture.

“Scott Boyd is walking through deep mud near the mouth of the Stillaguamish River, on Puget Sound about 30 miles north of Seattle.

A solarpunk retrofitted building is so epic it has ended up in the Guinness Book of World Records. That’s because it’s got the world’s largest solar mural on its side. The artwork covering the Sunrise Building in Edmonton, Canada, incorporates solar panels providing clean energy and saving money for the residents.

The vision of solarpunk: joining nature with technology in vibrantly inclusive ways to create a world that truly blooms

Picture the bucolic little town of a fairy tale. At its core stand medieval buildings, a square where folks hawk their goods, and perhaps a well to provide water. Beyond the defensive wall radiate agricultural fields, where people toil to bring grains, fruits, and vegetables to market.

Solarpunk is often dismissed as a purely aesthetic movement - pretty pictures of skyscrapers covered in vines. But true Solarpunk is political. It is about decentralization.

Gathered by this shared awareness, on Saturday, January 31, 2026, a temporary community took shape, choosing as its founding act the sharing of food during a collective lunch. What better occasion to think of the future as a present practice, bringing together pleasure, experiences, and desires. Spazio Baôm became a field of subtle forces, where imagination, language, technology, and political project were treated as materials to be handled together. The voices that intertwined—Daniela Calisi, Kenobit, Francesco Verso, Simone Savogin, Xenodibi, to name just a few—gave form to a choral discourse that holds together solarpunk and gratuitism, care and infrastructure, poetry and action.

Sadhana Forest is an international ecological and humanitarian project focused on reforestation, water conservation, and community-based learning. Volunteers live together in a simple, vegan, low-impact environment, practicing collective work, ecological restoration, and regenerative living. The project places strong emphasis on growing native and drought-resistant tree species and restoring degraded ecosystems.

Linking to the other network to credit PestoBolloElemento with the hard work of aligning these pictures!

We’ve added a lot of subscribers since we first published our deep-dive on what solarpunk is back in 2022. That’s why we’re sharing a concise explanation of our scene in this post. It’s for all of you who’ve come more recently to this newsletter and as a refresher for those OGs who have been with us for a long time (love you guys).

Vier Millionen Kilo Kartoffeln suchen ein Zuhause

Happy 2026! The Eco-Libre project published our 2025 Annual Report for last year.

If anyone asks what a solarpunk economy might look like…

Whats a good tool for tracking my emissions?

I thought this ingenious invention might interest some folk on here:

Acquiring solar panels at home can be an expensive hassle for people in the US. But small, simple, plug-in solar panels for use on balconies are soon to become available for millions of Americans, with advocates hoping the technology will quickly go mainstream.

Its winter where I live and winter means cold. Currently its below freezing outside. My offgrid heating is limited to the point I have to sometimes layer up to be comfortable.

Tldr: the author reviews Jeremy Brecher’s Green New Deal From Below, which calls for environmentalist activists to “outflank” Trump’s anti-environment federal policies by engaging in “hundreds of arenas at state, local, and civil society levels.” The author compares this approach with green syndicalism and discusses many examples of local collective action, ultimately concluding Brecher’s approach relies too much on lobbying politicians and working within the system but can help build the grassroots efforts, alliances, and working class social power necessary for a true green revolution.

An amazing, hopeful story from Anarcasper over on Substack. #solarpunk #resist

Source: https://www.signmedia.ca/guinness-world-record-set-by-edmontons-solar-panel-mural/

LOS ANGELES — To many locals, the Los Angeles River — hugged by concrete embankments and heavy vehicle traffic — hardly seems like a river at all.

Data centres that supply domestic heating aren’t new, but I’ve never seen a distributed model like this before.

“solar mamas” trained in Zanzibar by Barefoot College International, a global nonprofit, through a program that brings light to rural communities and provides jobs for local women. So far in Zanzibar, it has lit 1,845 homes [in 10 years].

India’s solar additions surged 70% year on year to 29.5 GW in the first three quarters of 2025, driven by rapid utility-scale and rooftop deployment, according to JMK Research.

In short, capitalism pays no price for nature’s gifts even though these gifts are immensely valuable. Yet they are valuable in only one of two key senses of value: they have use value but not exchange value. (Exchange value comes into play only later, after they have been harvested, extracted, appropriated, and offered on the market.) Because they have no exchange value, the “free gifts” are free because they are priced at zero.

As artificial intelligence reconfigures every dimension of our societies—from labor markets to classrooms to newsrooms—we should remember the Luddites. Not as caricatures, but in the original sense: People who refuse to accept that the deployment of new technology should be dictated unilaterally by corporations or in cahoots with the government, especially when it undermines workers’ ability to earn a living, social cohesion, public goods, and democratic institutions.

In Finland, kindergartens are exposing children to more mud, wild plants and moss - and finding changes to their health that show how crucial biodiversity is to wellbeing

Many companies seem to be walking back climate pledges. The sad fate of the Net Zero Banking Alliance is a case in point. But if you peek behind the curtains of this seeming defeat, you’ll find a weird, counter-intuitive phenomenon that seems to be on the rise: many companies are actually continuing or even accelerating their climate goals, while also quietly scrubbing their public acknowledgement of them. In fact, in 2024, the consulting firm South Pole found that in some sectors across the world, the majority of surveyed companies are now intentionally talking less and less about their climate goals. 

(Video will be on YT later)

We’re happy to announce the release of the Eco-Libre Life-Line version 2025.10.

After decades of struggle, indigenous leaders and organizers have shown how to win against billionaires and large corporations

That is where many of us are stuck. Overloaded, stretched thin, feeling guilty for resting yet paralysed when we try to take in everything at once. The truth is that the outrage machine wants us this way. It floods our feeds with distraction and despair, demanding we react to every fresh injustice, every scandal, every policy failure. It bleeds us dry until we are too exhausted to act with intention.

The Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) is a State of California initiative that provides funding for income qualified residential customers to install solar and battery storage systems on residential property. Solar panel systems provide residents with the ability to generate their own electricity, while battery storage systems can store electricity for use during peak rate periods or in the evenings when solar production decreases.

As people across the United States face massive cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other vital programs, many are asking: What happens when the systems we rely on fail us? And what happens when our communities are torn apart by toxic inequality, political fragmentation and declining social trust?

Maybe not entirely on topic, but I wanted to share it somewhere 😅

An interesting discussion of the anarchistic, individual freedom, and social justice aspects of Green politics, and their dialogue with restrictions on environmentally harmful activity - how did a movement born of the '60s counterculture get itself (falsely) labeled as petty dictators obsessed with taking away people's freedom to consume?

Shloka, a new digital game produced by scholars at the University of California, Santa Cruz, uses Hindu deities, practices, and narratives to communicate the problems of climate change to people in India and throughout the Hindu diaspora. As players encounter gods from their religion who teach them about local issues like water pollution and smog, the culturally familiar framework enables a deeper understanding of climate responsibility.

Conservative apologists for the status quo often stigmatize their opponents as “utopian.” But socialists and feminists shouldn’t be afraid of the term, since utopian thought can play an important role in helping us develop practical alternatives.