Стиймпънк Лондон

Punked Pasts and

Cyborg Cities

Helena Esser

 

(Steampunk London

Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular

Transmedia Memory)

 

Science fiction critic John Clute viscerally describes how William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s seminal steampunk novel The Difference Engine (1990) radically transforms the Victorian city of memory as follows:

Very soon the face of London begins to convulse into a Freemason’s wetdream of the City as a monologue of temples: parks and homes are demolished to make way for entrepreneurial edifices decorated with pharaonic runes and dedicated to Progress: new thoroughfares slice through the heart of town, steam gurneys choke the roadways and poison the air; and everywhere one can hear the sound of the new order being born.¹

In so doing, he illustrates the central subject of this interdisciplinary study: By deconstructing and then re­mapping a vaguely familiar but commonly held urban imaginary, steampunk London emerges as a retro-speculative, alternative ‘Victorian London’ that both affirms and re­imagines its status as emblematic socio-economic nexus and collective symbol for the Victorian past.

This study explores why steampunk fiction, as a creative- critical, neo-Victorian, and popular memory practice, gravitates so often to Victorian London as its potent setting, and how its anachronistic impulses work both within and against a collective memory of the Victorian city. It contextualizes steampunk cities against Victorian cross-media strategies to represent the complexity, simultaneity, and social challenges of the modern metropolis, and so illustrates how and to what end steampunk creatively re-imagines London’s urban environments across both spatial and temporal axes. In so doing, it illustrates how popular fiction at large, and neo-

Victorianism in particular, invites participatory consumption and a playful, yet politically informed re-evaluation of the Victorian past’s legacies, and considers its potential - and its failures - to interrogate and challenge our relationship with that Victorian past.

A Short History of Steampunk

Steampunk is notoriously difficult to define, although easily identifiable as retro-speculative, Victorian-looking universes populated by airships, automata, ray guns, or revenants: Steampunk, ‘as a genre and a paradigm resists definition’.² It typically infuses neo-Victorian settings, be they fantastic secondary worlds or identifiably real-world Victorian past, with retrofuturism and technofantasy³ as either aesthetic marker or temporal concept, and may incarnate across genres in literature, film, fashion, music, video games, or sculpture. Termed - although not invented⁴ - by K.W. Jeter in 1987 for Locus Magazine,⁵ steampunk initially synthesized 1980s anti- neo-liberal politics against the collapsing industrial paradigm and has re-emerged in the internet age as a cross-cultural, collaborative transmedia subculture that spans fiction, maker culture, music, art, and cosplay.

This maker culture most exemplifies steampunk’s creative interrogation of our relationship with technology, and has most often garnered scholarship’s attention.⁶ It potently illustrates how steampunk synthesizes Victorian fictions, aesthetics, and materials - ‘the dandified gear of aristocrats, peculiar brass gear, rather stilted personal relationships, and elaborate and slightly kinky underwear’, as Sterling postulates - into a culturally charged visual shorthand,⁷ and therefore merits a brief overview. Steampunk’s quest to re-capture a knowability of the technology that saturates and defines our lives is illustrated by a much-quoted manifesto out of SteamPunk Magazine by the Catastrophone Orchestra:

First and foremost, steampunk is a non-luddite critique of technology. [...] It revels in the concrete reality of technology instead of the over-analytical abstractness of cybernetics. [S]teampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears and delusions. The technology of steampunk is natural; it moves, lives, ages and even dies.⁸

Attempting to ‘rediscover the inherent dignity of created objects’,⁹ steampunk’s online and collaborative maker culture seeks to re-humanize technology by externalizing its hidden functions in the Arts and Crafts spirit. Steampunk creations promise accessibility and offer a sensory experience: Their levers, gears, and boilers can be seen, heard, and touched, in opposition to the streamlined digital black boxes that refuse us users access or agency over their inner workings. The Victorian design aesthetic here signifies a complex network of meta-historical interrelations between production, workmanship, materiality, capitalism, and identity that are firmly identified with, and located in, the Victorian past. It so re-thinks and re-applies Victorian critiques of industrial production and the mass market by Karl Marx, John Ruskin, or William Morris, and employs similar strategies of reclaiming agency and dignity through manufacture. However, the industrial design which Victorian critics rejected now becomes itself the object of reverence, because, now outdated, it is perceived as picturesque and intriguing. As a postmodern and post-industrial aesthetic, steampunk also illustrates our collective re-evaluation of a technological aesthetic once perceived as daunting and infernal as now quaint and clanky: ‘Steampunk’s key lessons are not about the past,’ reflects Sterling in the Steampunk Bible:

They are about the instability and obsolescence of our own times. A host of objects and services that we see each day all around us are not sustainable. [...] Once they’re gone, they’ll seem every bit as weird and archaic as top hats, crinolines, magic lanterns, clockwork automatons, absinthe, walking-sticks and paper-scrolled player pianos.¹⁰

As such, steampunk is intrinsically bound up with the neo­Victorian project of re-assessing the nineteenth century’s legacies, here from a technological perspective. It condenses ideas about agency, artistry, and accessibility that defined object-user relationships amid the Industrial Revolution into a retro-speculative aesthetic shorthand¹¹ and adds irony and adventure. Its anachronistic, (re-)created objects become understandable, emotionally valuable, and full of (dangerous) possibility: ‘Through the recovery of the everyday danger of interacting with volatile objects, steampunk practitioners desire to re-engage with the physical world, subverting the sterile and safe relationships they perceive to exist between people and objects in contemporary society’.¹²

Despite its semi-ironic reverence for Victorian materiality and aesthetic, steampunk remains conscious of the social and ecological cost of Victorian industrial production, and steampunks are called to ‘punk responsibly’ and remember that ‘steampunking is a political act’.¹³ Ultimately, steampunk is animated by a semi-nostalgic, semi-ironic celebration of a perceived sense of escalation and hubris associated with the Victorian age as a riotous, dirty, adventurous age of invention, romance, and exploration. As Diana Pho explains: ‘Modern science fiction tells us: “Oh god, don’t go build giant robots. They’ll kill us all!” But Victorian science fiction says: “Yay! Let’s go build giant robots! Oh shoot, they killed us” ’.¹⁴

Steampunk is a self-aware, meta-historical, transmedia aesthetic that flaunts playful, retro-speculative anachronisms as its defining feature, and so collapses linear timelines into an imaginative and often semi-ironical triple exposure of past, present, and future. It usually includes techno-fantastical impulses and incorporates multiple, often paradoxical tensions. Marked by an inherent hybridity that blends genres and modes, such as the neo-Victorian with science fiction, it resists ontological coherence and unsettles dichotomies between fact and fiction, past and present, history and speculation, irony and nostalgia, the familiar and the strange. As such, it resembles Donna Haraway’s cyborg in that it may ‘contain contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes’, instead holding ‘incompatible things together, because both or all are necessary and true’.¹⁵

It is the thesis of this study that, for steampunk fiction to function and deliver a satisfactory audience experience, it mobilizes a variety of popular cross-genre, transmedia tropes and mechanisms, with which its contemporary, transmedia­literate and globally connected audience of what one might call post-modern natives is intrinsically, if subconsciously, familiar. Through its anachronistic remix, steampunk creates ludic, irreverent relationships with space and time, here centred on and embodied through the Victorian metropolis, opening the past to interventions that play on the tensions and ironies of our hindsight position towards history. As such, it creates an active reader position and invites audiences to re­imagine their subject position in relation to material culture, here the shared memory of ‘the Victorian’, and urban space, and to evaluate competing collective narratives of the Victorian past. Steampunk so creates a unique interplay between (perceived) past and present, which in turn reflects back on our contemporary identity politics. Thus, depending on which historical meta-narratives are mobilized and how, steampunk holds the potential to shape its audiences as active political agents in pop culture discourse. Indeed, ongoing debates about the re-signification of post-colonial legacies and reparative re-shaping have been an integral part of the steampunk culture since its beginnings,¹⁶ and so align it with the neo-Victorian project.

Neo-Victorianism and the Popular Imagination

As a meta-historical remix of popular memory, steampunk is always, if sometimes unconsciously so, engaged in what has been established as neo-Victorianism’s core-principle, namely that it must ‘in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians.’¹⁷ It is also a decidedly popular incarnation of post-modern ‘historiographic metafiction’, ‘those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages’,¹⁸ and, in its re-evaluation of the conditions, enduring traumas, and legacies of the nineteenth century in light of the present moment and its (usually) post-colonial and post-neo-liberal identity politics,¹⁹ is likewise

resurrecting the ghost(s) of the past, searching out its dark secrets and shameful mysteries, insisting obsessively on the lurid details of Victorian life, reliving the period’s nightmares and traumas. At the same time, neo­Victorianism also tries to understand the nineteenth century as the contemporary self’s uncanny Doppelganger, exploring the uncertain limit between what is vanished (dead) and surviving (still living), celebrating the bygone even while lauding the demise of some of the period’s most oppressive aspects, like institutionalised slavery and legally sanctioned sexism and 20 racism.²⁰

Steampunk, while its origins lie somewhat far afield of those of neo-Victorianism, is then nonetheless an essentially neo-Victorian mode, as it, too, constitutes an active site of interpretive struggle over the (re-)signification of cultural memory and, by extension, the collective identity of imagined communities,²¹ only steampunk’s neo-Victorian re­interpretation is infused with playful retro-speculation.

That the question of ‘what it means to fashion the past for consumption in the present’²² is as contested today as it was in the wake of neo-liberalism is painfully evident in Britain’s Brexit era. Indeed, whereas the ‘Victorian’ marker, delineating Great Britain between 1837 and 1901, or what Eric Hobsbawm has termed the Long Nineteenth Century (1789­1914), is as potent as it is constricting and Anglo-centric, steampunk, like neo-Victorianism, is a global phenomenon with global potential.²³ What, then, comprises ‘Victorian-ness’ for international popular audiences? What is the symbolic significance of Victorian London especially as a potent essence of and emblem for that ‘Victorian-ness’ across national boundaries? How does steampunk London encapsulate, re-negotiate, or re-inscribe collective cultural memory which, as Jan Assmann suggests, is both externalized in symbolic spaces such as the urban sphere, and repeatedly communicated in and through everyday interaction?²⁴

This study’s aim is to pry apart and interrogate the multiple cultural mechanisms and meta-narratives about ‘the Victorian’ at play in the steampunk city in order to gain a deeper understanding of how a popular cultural memory of the Victorian past is shaped and transmitted. Steampunk emblematizes the production of communicative and cultural memory, not by relegated specialized authorities, but through the participatory space of popular culture, which Stuart Hall, after all, defines as a dynamic, ongoing process that both produces and reproduces a dominant cultural order: ‘Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured.’²⁵ Notably, he also identifies popular culture as deeply rooted in nineteenth-century mass media, which is why a comparative approach to collectively constructed notions of Victorian London - both Victorian and neo-Victorian - will be especially productive: Considering that widely consumed media lastingly shape popular perception and illustrate ‘what we want to imagine the period to have been like for diverse reasons, including affirmations of national identity, the struggle for symbolic restorative justice, and indulgence in escapist exoticism’,²⁶ which persisting meta-narratives about the city reflect back our projected fantasies about the nineteenth-century? Which narratives are prioritized in an imagined teleological genealogy towards our present collective identity? Which stereotypes persist in the popular reception, potentially hampering a productive re-negotiation of the past? For example, given that, as Diana M. Pho argues, steampunk’s ironically self-reflexive play dismantles homogeneous historical narratives, and rejects nostalgia in favour of transformative critique,²⁷ how does it reckon - or fail to reckon - with the nineteenth century’s colonial legacies, especially regarding London as the Empire’s capital?

Indeed, as Antonija Primorac notes, ‘audiences’ expectations are moulded less by a knowledge of the period based on the archival data (maps, blueprints, lithographs, paintings, photographs, life-writing, fictional and newspaper accounts), but more by the images generated by other, preceding, films and TV series set in the same period’.²⁸ ‘In a sense’, Kohlke and Gutleben diagnose, ‘the neo-Victorian is by definition hyperreal, since it has no direct access to the Victorian real, instead relying entirely on Victorian texts and documents, that is, on signs of the past’.²⁹ Popular neo- Victoriana, sourcing from a pre-established collective idea of ‘the Victorian’, therefore often re-construct and perpetuate ‘already accepted ideas about the Victorians for the sake of period authenticity. [...] [This means:] stereotypes about the Victorian past are (still) an important foundation on which popular adaptations rely’.³⁰ This may include persistent stereotypes about gender, or the almost reflexive, non-critical perpetuation of Gothic tropes, which are entangled in fraught Victorian ideas about race and Otherness. Popular neo- Victoriana and steampunk fiction may thus powerfully illustrate how our collective, politically conscious desire to reckon with the legacies of the Victorian past may be shaped by and entangled with shared fantasies and stereotypes about the period - and embodied, not least, through the ‘Victorian’ urban imaginary.

Cognitive Mapping and the Urban Imaginary

Collective memory is palimpsestically enshrined in the city. Its urban space is, as Henri Lefebvre conceptualizes, socially produced³¹ and, whether in answering the logistic and economic demands of everyday life or encoding collective identity through lieux de memoire,³² continually accumulates layers of meaning. Perhaps no modern metropolis embodies this like London, where Roman ruins can be found near the brutalist sprawl of the Barbican performing arts centre, or where Leadenhall Market, a colourful Victorian arcade built on a market site dating from the fourteenth century, stands next to the 1980s’ futuristic Lloyd’s Building. Indeed, London has been the subject of literary production for centuries, and this study considers prominent approaches such as urban

Gothic, flanerie, and psychogeography,³³ as well as literary urban studies.³⁴

Here, mobilizing Roland Barthes’ notion of the city as semiotic and symbolic,³⁵ the material city is conceived as a multilayered narrative, and the literary text may in turn become an urban model capturing or simulating the cityscape. Accordingly, my interest lies in how Victorian media (journalism, fiction, maps, paintings, and illustrations) aim to represent London’s ‘citiness’³⁶ - its socio-economic networks, palimpsestic infrastructures, simultaneous movements - and how their strategies lastingly shape the collectively imagined Victorian city against which steampunk London is juxtaposed. Literary cities, so Lieven Ameel states, can be considered ‘realms of the imagination, constellations of tropes in an intertextual network’.³⁷ Consequently, collective memory of Victorian London emerges as a transmedia phenomenon in the vein of Henry Jenkins’ notion of convergence culture, that is as a communally fostered imaginary constructed and consumed across multiple different media.³⁸ After all, neo­Victorian cities of memory are ‘spaces in which memory is not just continually fostered, produced, and preserved, but also contested, deconstructed, and sometimes deliberately distorted or fabricated’.³⁹

This study’s main interests are in understanding how a shared urban imaginary is constructed, maintained, or re­framed across media and across time, and how that imaginary informs collective identity politics. Following Edward Said’s concept of imagined geographies, it conceives of identity as spatial: Identity arises from how and where we locate, in our mental map of the world, the local and the strange, them and us, here and there, and is as such inherently political.⁴⁰ The city, too, functions as a microcosm of what Fredric Jameson terms cognitive mapping: Its paths and cornerstones externalize Lacanian notions of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’,⁴¹ and so ‘enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole’.⁴² The urban environment serves as an embodied, spatial analogy for how we situate ourselves in relation to larger social systems, and so serves as ‘our mental and cognitive mapping of urban reality, and the interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate, and decide to act in these places, spaces, and communities in which we live’.⁴³ However, urban imaginaries, here of Victorian London, may function not only as mental maps of real spaces, but also as spatialized metaphors for our social and historical relationships.

This is why the steampunk city, albeit purely virtual because inherently fantastic and anachronistic, may illustrate how and to what end collective memory works in unique ways. As David Pike notes, ‘a key element to the allure of Victorian London for steampunk is its limitless capacity to contain not only the world, as the imperial narrative would maintain, but also the multiverse—this world, all alternative worlds, and all the holes, fissures, and folds in between’⁴⁴ - all encoded in and through the city. Steampunk London acts as a projected theatre of ‘Victorian-ness’ that is open to participatory play. It re-calibrates our ‘interpretive grids’ and so acts a heterotopic counter-site to historical memory, ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.⁴⁵ Putting into play Kohlke and Gutleben’s claim that, ‘[p]alimpsestically, we read the past city through the overlaid present, but conversely, we also read the present city backwards through the underlying and resurfacing past’,⁴⁶ the steampunk city understands urban space as a cumulative texture, but also re-shuffles its palimpsestic layers. It draws attention to the process of memory-making and playfully invites audiences to re-think their subject position in relation to those processes and the identities they produce.

Book Overview

This book approaches the complex, multilayered nature of steampunk London from a variety of different angles and a multitude of texts. While the first two chapters focus on how steampunk comes into being through various cultural influences and collective memory-making, the latter two chapters ask why, that is for what purpose, and for whom, steampunk re-imagines the Victorian past. In all of them, Victorian London, whether imagined from a nineteenth­century perspective or through a steampunk lens, serves as a focalizing prism in which identity and memory are spatially encoded. While my focus lies largely on prose fiction, where steampunk Londons are typically most thoroughly imagined, I also discuss film, graphic novels, the visual arts, and video games at various points throughout, as my aim is to interrogate steampunk London as a transmedia phenomenon. As such, this study considers steampunk fiction from across the anglophone world, including the US, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand. The fact that writers and creators of steampunk Londons, just like their audiences, are at once globally scattered and connected through social media and a popular culture shared through the internet, demonstrates that steampunk imaginaries of Victorian London function as de-localized shared memory figures - illustrated by the international success of games like Assassin’s Creed, or the globally sourced and read book reviews on sites such as Goodreads or YouTube, dedicated online forums, and blogs.

Chapter One examines the origins of seminal steampunk in 1980s California. I consider the impact of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) on the steampunk imaginary and argue that, while authors K. W. Jeter, James Blaylock, and Tim Powers semi-ironically coined the term steampunk in reference to cyberpunk, a coherent and recognizable steampunk aesthetic emerges later with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990). My analysis situates early steampunk in the context of cyberpunk’s counter-cultural agenda and the re-signification of the industrial paradigm at the dawn of the digital age. It examines how the novel utilizes the Victorian city in order to discuss the impact of cybertechnology and considers its re-use of urban space against the backdrop of Marxist urban theory, namely Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the ‘right to the city’, and David Harvey’s reading thereof.

Chapter Two is concerned with how steampunk functions in the context of collective memory, adaptation, and remix. I use London’s East End as an example of how Victorian transmedia discourse constructed a palimpsestic urban mythology that encoded Victorian social anxieties through Gothic tropes. Focusing especially on Gustave Dore’s illustrations, Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896), and media generated around the Jack the Ripper murders (1888), I show how Gothic ‘knowledge’ is transmitted through popular culture. Against this backdrop, I examine how Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula (1992) mines and remixes real and fictional events and people into a newly resonant, counter-fictional collage in order to satirize British 1980s neo-liberalism, positing that counter-fictionality is a staple of steampunk. I contrast Newman’s popular fiction archive against the psychogeography of Peter Ackroyd and finally present George Mann’s The Affinity Bridge (2008) and S. M. Peters’ novel Whitechapel Gods (2008) as examples of how stereotypically or radically steampunk may re-purpose the legacy of East End mythologies in new ways going beyond the Gothic legacy.

Chapter Three considers how popular video games Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and The Order 1886 (both 2015) actualize Victorian representations of London into a spatial simulation that aligns narrative progress with movement through space. Against the backdrop of Doreen Massey’s theory of space as an active process of interlinking trajectories, I examine how Charles Dickens’ London and the London of Sherlock Holmes have represented London’s complexity through immersive and panoptic perspectives and analyse how game spaces synthesize the two. With brief recourse to the retro-speculative game spaces of BioShock (2007-2013) and Dishonored (2012), I show how game spaces become legible textures and storytelling devices in themselves. I argue that Assassin’s Creed implements a fantasy of agency within urban spaces, whereas The Order uses cyberpunk impulses to build a dystopian hyper-city that undermines and challenges popular stereotypes about the Victorian era.

Chapter Four explores the ideological undercurrents informing steampunk imaginaries by discussing gender and feminist rebellion in fm-de-siecle London and steampunk fiction. I briefly consider the figure of the flaneur as a gendered phenomenon to offset how and why self-directed mobility in the modern metropolis was a central tenet of the New Woman’s transgressive potential. However, I also consider how different or successive feminist agendas have shaped our perception of the nineteenth century, and how a monolithic feminist genealogy informs modern stereotypes about femininity and emancipation. Against this backdrop, I consider the progressive and paradoxically conservative agendas that inform how sexually liberated neo-Victorian and steampunk action heroines are configured and where their shortcomings lie by considering them within a framework of post-feminist and fourth-wave-feminist theory. I then provide a close reading of Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse novels (2009 to present) as a positive example of how steampunk may imagine empowered and feminine heroines. By discussing how the same series reimagines LGBTQA+ characters through steampunk, I interrogate steampunk’s potential to provide radical alternative histories.

Steampunk’s retro-speculative play provides us with playfully anachronistic and unique meta-historical approaches towards a collectively remembered Victorian past. Here, we may highlight, redress, satirize, or re-experience its glories, quirks, and failures with utopian or dystopian impulses and nostalgic or radical outlooks. Free to re-imagine an era we understand as both socially, economically, and technologically formative, yet also fundamentally outdated and strange, steampunk’s adventurous re-calibration of the nineteenth century bears a uniquely radical potential to address, even re­dress, the era’s enduring traumas, such as its gender, class, and race hierarchies or colonial violence. However, as a popular phenomenon sourced from and aimed at a wide audience, steampunk’s retro-speculative interventions also reflect back on us. They reveal what and how much we think we know about the Victorian past, which perceived historical failures we believe we can amend, and whether or not we have the imaginative tools to actually re-think them. Indeed, as this study will reveal, steampunk may (often unintentionally) re­iterate fraught assumptions about both past and present, and so expose our own blind spots. Fundamentally, however, steampunk playfully highlights and challenges our relationship with history and deepens our understanding of human agency in the outcome of historical processes, seeking to inspire us to approach the future with the same creativity. After all, as Sterling notes, ‘the past is a kind of future that has already happened.’⁴⁷

Какво е соларпънк?

A Solarpunk Manifesto: Turning Imaginary into Reality

William Joseph Gillam,

Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 6C2, Canada; wgillam@balsillieschool.ca; Philosophies 2023, 8, 73

Abstract: In the last century, science fiction has become an incredibly powerful tool in depicting alternative social imaginaries, particularly those of the future. Extending beyond their fictious nature is a commentary on the stark realities of modern society. The ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre, for example, offers a dystopian critique on the dangers of technological dependence and hypercapitalism. In studying science fiction, future imaginaries can be developed as utopian goals for governance systems to strive for. In contrast to cyberpunk, the subgenre of ‘solarpunk’ depicts a utopian society where humanity lives locally, sustainably, and in harmony with nature. This paper deconstructs solarpunk media to describe three guiding principles of solarpunk: anarchism, ecology, and justice. As an anarchist community, solarpunk strives for a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society devoid of hierarchy and domination. As an ecological community, solarpunk strives for local, self-sufficient, and sustainable living where both the human and non-human flourish. Finally, as a just community, solarpunk strives to rid society of marginalization and celebrate authenticity. These three principles can be used to guide humanity towards a utopian, solarpunk future.

Keywords: solarpunk; imaginaries; futures; anarchism; ecology; justice; punk; соларпънк; научна фантастика;

1. Introduction

Social imaginaries allow society to evaluate their moral purpose and order [1]. It is how people directly perceive their social reality, how everything fits together, social norms, and themes that underlie their society [2]. An important subset of social imaginaries are future imaginaries [3]. A future imaginary is a vision shared by a group of individuals depicting a desired future’s political, economic, and social configurations. Drawing on specific themes and vocabulary, future imaginaries are used to strategize for those wishing to develop a given future. A critical set of future imaginaries today are the many possible futures of human-induced climate change. Global industrial practices have led to the Earth’s systems destabilizing and the biosphere degrading, and current global governance structures have failed to mitigate the crisis and to promote optimism in doing so [4,5]. The media and literature are wrought with visions of an apocalyptic future where human civilization has collapsed and along with it, the biosphere [6]. This rhetoric breeds a sense of fatalism that the world is doomed regardless of humanity’s efforts [7,8]. These apocalyptic visions are imaginaries depicting a dark future where humanity fails to prevent further climate change and the subsequent sixth mass extinction. The popular outcomes for humanity in these imaginaries are rightfully pessimistic: global civilization collapses and humanity may or may not go extinct. The goal of climate governance is to prevent these imaginaries from becoming reality, and herein lies the issue. Global environmental governance is predominantly reactive in nature, responding to issues as they arise however lacking in vision or conviction for building a post-Anthropocene humanity [9]. Governance systems build away from disaster whilst not building towards any particular future. For example, the 2 ◦C goal of the Paris Agreement is a simple long-term goal; however, there is little perspective into what the future of humanity looks like if these conditions are met. Climate change has effectively highlighted the many wrongs with the current global order and the future is much more intersectional than simply preventing ecological disasters.

 

The future of humanity needs a specific Imaginary to build towards as opposed to simply preventing catastrophe. One genre of social imaginaries for global governance to explore as a possible future are those within the punk identity.

What does it mean to be punk? The 1970s saw the proliferation of punk music through bands such as The Sex Pistols, The Dead Kennedys, and The Ramones [10]. As the genre grew in popularity, a ‘punk’ identity developed. Early punk bands used their platform to call out inequalities and injustices they saw in their society. Blue-collared youth felt increasingly marginalized by a globalizing society and used punk music to express their anger and disdain towards the establishment [10,11]. To punks, there was no future [12,13]. The working class was predestined from birth for a life of banality, working monotonous jobs as a minute cog in the capitalist regime with no future beyond so. This meaningless life was juxtaposed on the looming threat of nuclear war to give punk a nihilistic and apocalyptic tone. The punk identity was built from a feeling of being trapped as spectators in a fast-moving and heavily consuming society. As a form of existential revolt, punks wanted to subvert the status quo to reclaim their future [13,14]. Anarchy was the common tool for punk subversion, although a variety of subcultures developed, drawing on feminism, anti-racism, situationism, and in some cases, fascism (e.g., The Ramones) [12,15]. Independence and personal freedom became a rallying across the growing punk identities: a desire to develop an authentic self despite the nihilism of the future. Thus, to be punk is to deconstruct the societal status quo that prevents one from having a future and inhibits the self from being truly authentic [16].

Punk identity quickly influenced science fiction writing through promoting new social imaginaries. In 1982, Bruce Bethk coined the term cyberpunk when he used the term as the title of a short story [17]. The story depicts a young delinquent named Mikey who lived in a society deeply connected to their technology, hence the ‘cyber ’ component of cyberpunk. The ‘punk’ component refers to both the rebellious nature of the identity and the existential dread of having no future under a capitalistic society [18,19]. Cyberpunk describes the alienation one feels in a highly capitalistic and highly technological society [20]. A cyber¬punk social imaginary is a warning, crying out that a hypercapitalist and technological future is not a future at all but a grim non-future for many [19]. While many other punk-connected social imaginaries exist now, compared to cyberpunk, most are anachronistic in nature. For example, steampunk envisions a society in which steam-based technology was the dominant source of ingenuity [21]. While creative, it is unlikely modern society will revert to using steam technology, and thus steampunk is not a strong contender as a future imaginary. If cyberpunk depicts a possible dystopian future, is there a punk-related social imaginary that depicts a plausible utopian future? There is, and it is called ‘solarpunk’.

Compared to popular punk imaginaries, solarpunk is relatively new. Inspired by the Beluga Skysail, a cargo ship partially powered by wind, the blog ‘Republic of the Bees’ coined solarpunk in 2008 [21]. The blog envisioned a solarpunk society being completely dependent on renewable energy and the revival of older, less damaging technologies, such as sailing. Solarpunk was meant to be more than a world-building tool. It was also meant to be a societal goal; not just a tool for fiction, but as commentary on a new possible future. The renewable energy foundation of a solarpunk society already exists and for proponents of the imaginary it is a matter of advocating for a faster energy transition. Solarpunk discourse remained limited until 2014 when Tumblr user, missolivialouise, expanded on the topic on their blog [22]. Solarpunk was to be more than a society built on renewable energy, but also one interconnected with nature and art. Children would learn both technology and gardening, artisanship would be promoted, and cities would be lush with vegetation, both for ecological and agricultural purposes. Tumblr user missolivialouise conceived that a solarpunk society would see less corporate capitalism and the promotion of small, local businesses. The post brought newfound popularity to the imaginary and eventually led to the creation of several manifestos, including one written by ‘The Solarpunk Community’ in 2021 [23]. The manifesto contains 22 principles describing a solarpunk society from proposed visual aesthetics to concepts of justice. Broad themes can be extracted from the manifesto and other writings to create guiding principles for governance to use in building a solarpunk future [23,24]. A solarpunk society is post-capitalist and post-scarcity. A solarpunk society is one that is ecologically minded. A solarpunk society is a just society, not only for humanity, but for non-humanity as well. A solarpunk society is community-oriented and prioritizes the local over the global. A solarpunk society deconstructs power and promotes horizontalism. In an act of existential revolt, solarpunk subverts the nihilistic and ‘no future’ rhetoric of classic punk and replaces it with hope and optimism: optimistic that there is a future although drastic social change and resistance is necessary to reach it; optimistic that this imaginary can become a reality and stay as such. As a social imaginary, solarpunk can provide guiding principles to direct activism and governance towards building a better future for humanity and the Earth.

While there is movement in managing global issues, the future of humanity should not be hobbled together by a patchwork of governance strategies; instead, there needs to be an imaginary, a vision to build towards. Although, as some would argue, punk is dead, the nihilism towards the future remains permeated through society [6,7,13,14]. The dystopia became even more so. The individual became increasingly marginalized in so far as their labor was their only source of value to the system [25]. Labor became synonymous with life. Where this dread was originally juxtaposed with a nuclear apocalypse, it has been replaced with another threat of annihilation: climate change [26]. The neoliberal machine lends itself to believe that it can solve the global ecological crisis, although astute observers generally see this as nonsense [8,27]. Just like the original punks, it feels as if there really is no future to be had. You either become dehumanized within the growth economy or see everything collapse under climate change. Perhaps, however, it is time to subvert this notion. After all, punks want to subvert the status quo, and one would imagine that would include punk nihilism. Replace dystopia and dread with utopia and hope. Replace cyberpunk with solarpunk. Imagine a future where resistance to the system did result in widespread social change. Solarpunk imaginaries could guide this future. It could be that rallying cry to subvert the system and build a new one. Using solarpunk imaginaries as inspiration, this paper develops guiding principles of anarchism, ecology, and justice to support subverting the status quo and building a better future.

2. Solarpunk as an Anarchist Community

Themes of community, self-sufficiency, and post-hierarchy in the Solarpunk Manifesto indicate that solarpunk is inherently anarchist [23]. Other solarpunk writings are much more explicit and directly reference anarchist and decentralist writers, such as Murray Bookchin, Peter Kropotkin, and Fritz Schumacher [24]. Anarchism is a complicated phi¬losophy with many different perspectives; however, they are bound together by a general rejection of hierarchy and domination [28]. Anarchism rejects authority and replaces it with values of horizontalism, decentralization, and mutual aid [29]. Although not all punks are anarchists, one could argue that all anarchists are punks. The ‘punk’ in solarpunk is derived from its anarchist leanings and intentions to create their own future, and from the reliance on technology which most probably will be obsolete in the future. Solarpunk rejects the status quo and rebels against the hierarchies imposed by the neoliberal global order [23]. Solarpunk anarchism is thus defined by two interconnected tenets: post-capitalism and post-scarcity anarchism.

It is not surprising that a utopian anarchist imaginary would reject neoliberal capital¬ism. Where anarchism rejects hierarchy and domination, neoliberal capitalism promotes it, although in the meantime it promotes individuality, personal freedom and personal choice [30]. In this way, capitalism is an antithesis to anarchism. Under capitalism, the work¬ing class is dominated by the capitalist class who exploit working class labor to accrue wealth [31]. Fritz Schumacher, author of “Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered”, believed that the enormity of the industrial economy was at fault for the vast inequalities and poor state of living for much of the world [32]. To Schumacher, it was a matter of scale; the industrial economic system had bloated itself through engorging human and natural capital. As it grew in size, the calculus of the economy shunned the human. The working class were to be automatons for the bourgeoisie with their sole purpose being to provide labor for production. The dehumanizing of the economy, as argued by Schumacher, was not an unintended consequence of the modern economy, but instead was its foundation. Industrialization set a clear hierarchy with the proletariat and nature being subservient to production and the bourgeoisie.

Kropotkin, an early anarchist writer, emphasized that as a social movement, anarchism was born amongst the working class in an attempt to protect themselves from a power-¬seeking minority [29,33]. While there are measures within the neoliberal system (i.e., unions, state institutions, etc.) to diminish class inequality, they are far from perfect. A 2017 study demonstrated that between 1975 and 2010, relative global inequality between states fell, whereas absolute inequality rose [34]. Excessive exploitation of human capital condemns billions of people to live with high levels of scarcity, an outcome modelled into capitalist calculations [31]. As Murray Bookchin would write:

“A century ago, scarcity had to be endured; today, it has to be enforced – hence the importance of the state in the present era”. [35] (p. 34)

In response to the artificial scarcity enforced under neoliberal capitalism, Murray Bookchin proposed ‘post-scarcity anarchism’ as a possible solution [35].

The concept of post-scarcity is straightforward. A technology of abundance exists today (e.g., automation) that upon further development can completely supply all social needs, along with providing a degree of luxury [35]. No longer would production occur for the sake of production, nor consumption for the sake of consumption, but instead the economy would prioritize the security and welfare of all. Artificial scarcity would hypothet¬ically cease to exist. Whereas modern automation weakens the proletariat, in a post-scarcity society, automation provides the means to support their growth and livelihood [32,35]. Part of this process would be the abolition of private property [36]. Once accomplished, the wage system would collapse, and the proletariat would be emancipated from capitalist dominion. Labor would be limited to any necessities left unproduced by automation, and leisure would constitute the majority of one’s time. Under these new conditions, the human psyche would be free for self-expression and creativity, a freedom otherwise lost under the mindless labor of industrial production. Per Kropotkin, for example, an individual wishing to own a piano could in theory associate with carpenters as part of their collective leisure to build one. Individuals would have the freedom to pursue their passions [33].

Harkening to Marxist ideals, post-scarcity anarchism requires the complete abolition of the state [37]. In deviation from Marx, however, anarcho-communists would argue that a transitionary, revolutionary state (e.g., state socialism) is as equally dangerous as a capitalist state given it consolidates power and authority to a few who may not relinquish such power, as already proven during the Cold War. Thus, a post-scarcity anarchist society would require the immediate complete dissolution of the state through revolution and the establishment of a network of decentralized communities [38]. Each community would be carefully tailored to the characteristics of its region with the intention of replacing the oppressive urban sprawl of modern cities [35]. Given its anarchist philosophy, community governance is completely decentralized. Participatory, democratic assemblies vote on policy, while administrative bodies coordinate policy implementation whilst not conducting policy making themselves [38]. In rejecting hierarchy for participa¬tory democracy, power is distributed horizontally across the community as opposed to the top-down approach prevalent in governance today [30,38]. Confederated councils link these communities into a greater network with the goal of creating interdependence and self-sufficiency. While these communities may desire goods only available to them globally, theoretically these regional networks should produce and distribute enough resources for the contentment and survival of each other. This is not to say communities without local ac¬cess to coffee, for example, should lose access to non-local goods, but instead communities should have self-sufficiency in their respective locality.

Under ideal conditions, it is easy to dream that this future could come to be; however, with the global economy nested within the state system, complete social reconstruction will be difficult. Fortunately, there are policies for proponents of a solarpunk future to promote in guiding society towards this goal, the first action being ‘degrowth’, similar to punk’s ‘deprogress’. Degrowth is a growing discourse that challenges the hegemonic nature of growth in the global economy [39]. Comparable to the thoughts of Fritz Schumacher, advocates for degrowth believe the incessant need for economic growth has led to unnecessary losses in ecological and social welfare [40]. Economic growth increases social happiness and welfare to a limit, whereas past that limit, growth provides diminishing returns. Growth past this this point is socially and ecologically unsustainable. The goal of degrowth is to prioritize fulfilment over labor [41].

Achieving ‘degrowth’ will require drastic institutional change in the economy, its governing mechanisms and its functions as abolishing the competitive spirit and its regulatory role; how¬ever, it will require less than the complete social reconstruction to achieve post-scarcity anarchism. Proposals for degrowth include decoupling labor from the economy, work¬-sharing, work-hour reductions, cooperative production and consumption, currency reg¬ulation or removal, and guaranteed basic income or base [40,42]. Similar to post-scarcity anarchism, a primary goal of degrowth is to promote local self-sufficiency. As part of this process, degrowth can also be an avenue for proponents of solarpunk imaginaries to promote the empowerment of cities in international geopolitics. Cities have been gaining newfound authority and legitimacy on the global stage in dealing with issues such as climate change and migration [43,44]. Targeting city-level politics with policies promoting localization and self-sufficiency opens new ways for setting the foundation of a solarpunk future. In targeting policies that promote localization and degrowth, solarpunk advocates can start pushing society towards the conditions necessary to establish a post-scarcity anarchist society.

Deeply connected to concepts of post-capitalism, post-scarcity, and degrowth is eco¬logical theory. It is difficult to imagine a future utopia where non-human life is exploited to the degree it is now. Thus, if the ‘punk’ in solarpunk refers to its anarchist foundation, then the ‘solar’ refers to the reintegration of human and ecological systems. The follow¬ing section develops these themes as part of the guiding principles towards building a solarpunk future.

3. Solarpunk as an Ecological Community

The domination of capitalism extends well beyond the working class, reaching towards nature as well. As pre-modern economies transitioned from small, isolated markets into ‘one big market’ under industrial capitalism, there was a shift in market priorities. Where pre-modern markets prioritized household subsistence and redistribution, capitalist markets prioritize the production of goods for sale and the accrual of wealth [45,46]. As part of this process, Karl Polanyi argued that labor, land, and money were misleadingly commodified by the system in what he would call ‘fictitious commodities’ [45]. Polanyi believed society would collapse if markets were the sole mechanism governing these commodities and thus state intervention is necessary to prevent any market failures [46]. If one were to generalize ‘land’ into ‘nature’ as a fictitious commodity, the relationship between capitalism and nature becomes clear.

Commodification is a highly nuanced term and can easily fall into a category of buzzwords to describe the ever-encroaching nature of capitalism into “every nook and cranny” [47] (p. 278). It is often depicted as a physical transformation, where one object is converted into a commodity for market distribution, although this not always the case. Generally, the process of commodification implies that a whole class of goods or services are converted for sale, and not just a single instance of a class [47]. Inherent in this process is that the value of a commodity is not intrinsic and must be assigned by the market. For nature, evaluation is simple. Value is primarily assigned based on the benefit it provides to humans [48]. In Western science, the functioning of the ecosphere is still described in market terms though its depiction as goods and services, such as atmospheric regulation, biodiversity, and pollination [49]. These benefits inherently occur outside the market and yet there have been several attempts to determine their market value. Famously in 1997, a group of scientists estimated the average value of the entire biosphere at USD 33 trillion per year [50]. An underlying assumption of these efforts is that the market will adjust accordingly to protect these systems over economic growth, but this has not been the case.

A conveyor belt is an often used but apt metaphor to describe the relationship between industrial capitalism and nature. Some piece of nature goes in, some form of production occurs, and a commodity pops out. Problematic within this process is the general under¬valuation of ecological functioning [51,52]. The functioning of the ecosphere is integral in protecting current life from catastrophic change, and when viewed as a commodity, the work and energy of the ecosphere is left unpaid. The value of the ecosphere in promoting human well-being is ignored behind dreams of economic growth. During commodifica¬tion, any lost ecosystem functioning is labelled as an ‘externality’ and has been ignored throughout much of industrial history, with the true prize being the output commodity and subsequent economic growth [47]. The nature-to-commodity conveyor belt was amplified when global civilization entered a state of ’hypercapitalism’, referred to as neoliberalism. Hypercapitalism is a Marxist term to denote the growing ‘speed and intensity’ of the global flow of capital [53]. Neoliberalism promoted the deregulation of the global market to allow for the free flow of capital and by rule should not provide so little opportunity for state intervention or regulation according to a functioning legal frame [54]. The nature-to-commodity conveyor belt proliferated worldwide, leaving a lasting mark of domination on the ecosphere.

Capitalism is not all to blame for the present-day domination of nature. Seventeenth century philosophers Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, were highly influential in separat¬ing humanity from nature. A forefather of the modern scientific method, Francis Bacon considered nature to be a tool to be used by man to construct a better world for himself [55]. Similarly, Descartes saw the potential for technology to help man better understand nature and one day become the “masters and possessors of nature” [56] (p. 35). To Descartes, na¬ture was something to be controlled and tamed. Cartesian dualism, alongside the growing discourse on scientific method, empowered early European norms of global legalism and laid the foundation for modern Eurocentric global governance [57,58]. Further facilitated by capitalism, European modernity was built on the notion that nature was a tool to be controlled by humanity, implicating not only that humanity and nature are distinct enti¬ties, but that it is the right of the first to dominate the second. Solarpunk writings and imagery depict a human society reintegrated with nature [22,23]. The ‘solar’ in solarpunk thematically connects humanity back to its roots, with the sun being the primary source of energy [59]. Prior to the discovery of fossil fuels, a community’s energy budget was entirely dependent on solar radiation and plant photosynthesis. Unsustainable practices (i.e., over-use) would lead to their collapse [60,61]. Fossil fuels mitigated such dangers by supporting the industrialization of food systems, although now it is leading to the degradation of the biosphere [62]. Thus, for the realization of a solarpunk future, the Enlightenment goal for a full-scale domination of nature must end. This rhetoric lends itself to the discourses on eco-anarchism and post-humanism.

Striving for a ‘free ecological society’, eco-anarchists believe in freedom for both human and non-human life to flourish [63]. For this to pass, humanity must end any domination over non-humans.

In contrast to Cartesian dualism, eco-anarchists ontologically view humanity and nature as one interconnected whole [64]. This ontological view is one shared by proponents of post-humanism. Post-humanism claims that humankind is neither “above or apart from nature but has become an active force of nature, forcing an integration of social and planetary systems into a global ‘social order’”. [65] (p. 100) Morally and ontologically, it removes humanity as the foci and instead acknowledges the right of non-human nature to exist outside the domain of human evaluation. An important tenet of post-humanism is providing agency to non-humans and the biosphere, which is otherwise lost when humanity is centered in governance [66]. In challenging the anthropocentric nature of global governance, McDonald proposed an ecological security discourse “oriented towards ecosystem resilience and with it the rights and needs of the most vulnerable across time, spaces, and species.”. [67] (pp. 173) Burke and Fishel further suggested an ontological foundation for planetary security, asserting: “Our new materialist ethic asserts the need for human institutions to acknowl¬edge the independent agency, power and flourishing of non-human lives and ecosystems, and grounds its ethics there. This provides an ecological awareness and a material focus on earth’s systems and their interrelatedness that a singular focus on humankind cannot”. [57] (p. 100) 

In achieving a solarpunk future, governance must strive to follow the ontological views of eco-anarchism and post-humanism. Governance should shift from being anthropocentric to ecocentric, considering the needs of the biosphere over the needs of humanity. While this may be a long process, there are pathways for solarpunk proponents to follow in guiding global governance down this path, the first being renewable energy.

Indirectly, fossil fuels may be considered a form of human domination over nature. With their original purpose as an energy source, the burning of fossil fuels has led to catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate [6]. Compared to the relatively stable conditions of the Holocene, ecosystems are under severe threat as they deal with a changing, unstable climate [4]. Given this, it is essential that fossil fuels be phased out as an energy source and replaced with renewable sources, such as wind and solar. In 2015, the share of renewables accounted for 19% of the global energy budget, rising an average of 0.17% per year from 2010 [68]. By 2020, the share of renewables had increased to 29%, and through to 2026, 95% of new energy capacity is overoptimistically forecasted to come from renewable sources [69,70]. During this time, the reliance on non-renewables has declined and is expected to continue to do so. The transition away from fossil fuels to renewables is well underway and thus solarpunk advocates would do well to facilitate a continued and more rapid transition. Localizing a renewable energy grid can also be a tool for promoting community self-sufficiency, with another tool being ‘agroecology’.

Agroecology is a broad category of scientific and social discourse, although it has two practical implementations [71,72]: (1) the application of ecological theory to the design and management of replenishing food systems; and (2) the integration of the ecological, economic, and social dimensions of food systems. Indigenous and traditional farmers have applied their own ecological knowledge to agricultural systems for centuries [73]. These agroecosystems, that in some areas could equal permaculture, tend to mimic their natural counterparts and in doing so promote crop productivity, protect biodiversity, resist pests, and have more efficient nutrient cycling. The ecological nature of agroecosystems supports the growth of multiple crop species, which promotes dietary diversity in the local community. Modern agroecology aims to mimic these systems, although at a larger scale [71,74].

On the social component of agroecology, Francis et al. argued that all actors in the food system, from producers to consumers, along with the energy and material flow, need to be considered in developing sustainable agriculture [72]. With the food system becoming increasingly globalized, it is important to explore localizing food systems. Developing local, sustainable food systems is an important aspect in promoting the self-sufficiency of post-scarcity anarchism [35,38]. Bookchin connected this to the spontaneity of ecosystems. As he would write, ecosystems spontaneously trend towards diversity and thus so should agricultural systems to better promote their ecological health; the ecology of a region would dictate the structure of the agricultural system. Agriculture would no longer be in contestation with nature but in cooperation. In localizing their food system, communities can better manage their own self-sufficiency [75]. Local food movements have been growing since the mid-twentieth century and those wishing for a solarpunk future should support such movements [76]. Agriculture is not the only system where solarpunk advocates should strive for ecological integration, but in community development as well.

 

 

First proposed in the early 1900s, ‘garden cities’ marked the beginning of a movement to merge the best of countryside and city living [77]. Garden cities were envisioned as “a constellation of interconnected, self-contained new towns, surrounded by a greenbelt”. [77] (p. 4) Population density would be kept low with each dwelling sitting on a large plot of land. Community members would cooperatively manage city affairs for the common good.

Today, the garden city movement has evolved into one known as green urbanism or eco-urbanism [77]. Discourse on green urbanism has revealed seven dominant features [78]: (1) the renewable energy city; (2) the carbon-neutral city; (3) the distributed city; (4) the biophilic city; (5) the eco-efficient city; (6) the place-based city; and (7) the sustainable transport city. With these features, the proposed “green city” would have a decentralized water and renewable power system, host strong local enterprises, be designed to promote walking and low-impact transport (i.e., bicycles and buses as opposed to cars), have a circular or close-looped system to reduce waste, and importantly, have ecological (i.e., urban wetlands) and agroecological systems be directly integrated into community design. In theory, such a green city would not only have a low ecological footprint, but also be highly self-sufficient. The focus on ecological integration would strengthen the local ecology and mitigate anthropogenic disturbances. The concept of a perfectly green city is rather idyllic and fits well into solarpunk imaginaries.

4. Solarpunk as a Just Community

Anarchism requires the elimination of domination and hierarchy. The domination of one’s future, their identity, or their non-humanity is counter to an anarchist society. In other words, the domination of individuals or nature is unjustifiable in an anarchist society. This holds true for solarpunk imaginaries. Implicated throughout the Solarpunk Manifesto and other solarpunk writings are four pillars necessary for a just society [22-24]: (1) social justice; (2) justice across generations; (3) justice across communities; and (4) justice for non-humans. The first pillar of justice, social justice, targets injustices of recognition and redistribution as they relate to class and identity [79]. Gender is an example of a commonly discussed injustice prevalent within modern societies. On redistribution, women are often subjected to lower-paid positions and less wages compared to men, whilst also being assigned unpaid reproductive and domestic labor. On recognition, androcentric norms privilege masculine traits while disparaging and objectifying femininity. Authenticity is a virtue of the punk identity and it is hard to imagine individuals who could feel authentic if they are marginalized for who they are [16]. Anarchists strive for freedom, freedom for anyone to identify as they wish and be their authentic selves without discrimination [35].

The remaining three pillars connect well to discourse on planetary justice. Believing discourse on environmental justice was too limited in scope to manage the growing ecolog¬ical crisis, Dryzek and Pickering proposed a framework of planetary justice [80]. Parallel to solarpunk writings, Dryzek and Pickering conceived that the scope of justice must extend beyond national borders, beyond humanity, and beyond generations. Accordingly, the planetary justice framework can be adopted by the solarpunk community.

The first aspect of planetary justice is justice beyond national borders. In theory, national borders would cease to exist in a solarpunk society; however, the concept remains true at the community level. Environmental risks are not evenly distributed across a region or the world. The activities of one group can have far-reaching consequences to both humans and non-humans alike who are otherwise removed from the locality of said activities. Environmental impacts easily disregard community borders, shifting the duty of accountability from within community to across communities. Thus, justice across community borders requires citizens to acknowledge the unevenness of environmental risks, create measures to minimize impacts, and provide robust social protection for the vulnerable.

Generational justice relates to “the responsibilities that people living today owe to future generations for protect¬ing the Earth system, and the responsibilities that the present generation holds for remedying the environmental damage caused by those who lived before.”. [80] (p. 70)

The conditions of the Anthropocene were not made in one generation but are a result of cumulative, multigenerational environmental degradations. Changes to the Earth’s systems will have profound implications for the livelihood of future generations and thus current generations have a duty to create future conditions that limit scarcity and reduce the risk of catastrophic state shifts in the Earth’s systems. Simply put, justice across generations requires that future generations do not suffer from the decisions of the past.

Justice for non-humans is conceptually more difficult to narrow down compared to the other pillars of justice. How and why should humanity hold itself accountable to non-humans? There are many different answers to this question. Non-humans could have intrinsic moral value, or much more simply, non-human life supports the conditions for all life to survive, including humans. Regardless of your outlook, humanity has a duty to protect non-humans from the changing conditions of our own making. There are multiple avenues to support these duties. One option is the representation of non-human interests in political settings. This is already occurring to a small degree with certain ecosystems, such as wetlands, being represented in international decision making [81]. Another option is to recognize the potential ‘capabilities’ of non-humans to flourish as communities and ecosystems. Humanity would have an obligation to limit threats to the capabilities of non-humans.

Ideally, for a solarpunk future, these pillars of justice would naturally come to be. The elimination of hierarchy and domination would theoretically lead to social justice and the integration of ecological thought into governance and development would theoretically promote community, generational, and non-human justice. Solarpunk advocates, however, should not sit idly by and wait for justice to come to fruition and instead promote these pillars of justice at all levels of governance.

5. Conclusions

The manifesto written here presents an idyllic, utopian future imaginary for global governance to build towards. The themes of anarchism, ecology, and justice prevalent in solarpunk writings provided guiding principles for governance to adopt for building a better future. As an anarchist community, solarpunk advocates for post-capitalism and post-scarcity. Capitalism enforces non-natural scarcity and promotes the domination over both nature and the working class. Technology exists today that can build a post-scarcity society and thus solarpunk advocates should aim to develop the foundations to do so. As an ecological community, solarpunk advocates believe humanity should live in harmony with nature. To do so, governance systems should further support the transition to renewable energy and promote discourse on agroecology and eco-urbanism. As a just community, solarpunk advocates should promote four pillars of justice: (1) social justice; (2) justice across generations; (3) justice across communities; and (4) justice for non-humans in the name of the future aimed by the solarpunk movement.

Funding: This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement: No data was generated for this manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.

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