From Capitalist Realism to Solarpunk Realities

For episode 147, Elia sat down with Ariel Kroon, Luka Dowell and Andre, aka HydroponicTrash after the four of them took part in the Solarpunk conference a few months ago.

We’re releasing it now to take a bit of a break from our exploration of Israel-Palestine and because Solarpunk is how at least one of us, Elia, tries to create hope where none exists.

Solarpunk has an eye to a better future, but how do we get there? What is necessary for us to do, and how can we think differently, in order to make this better future possible? We focus on the relationship between speculative fiction, dual power, world-building, and political action.

Ariel is the co-host of the Solarpunk Presents podcast and part of the Women and Climate speaker database; Luka is the host of the podcast Solarpunk Now!; and Andre aka HydroponicTrash is an Afro-Caribbean & Indigenous anarchist in Dallas who runs the Anarcho-Solarpunk substack.

The Fire These Times is a proud member of ⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: the (newly aired!) Mutual Aid Podcast, Politically Depressed, Obscuristan, and Antidote Zine.

Episode Credits

Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠
Sound editor: Artin Salimi
Episode design: Elia Ayoub

Transcript prepared by Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:

I don’t think the feeling is that there’s nothing we can do about climate change because it’s just too powerful; I think the feeling is a little more nuanced: it’s like we would have to fight against all the powers in society in order to do something, and there’s no way that can happen. That’s what solarpunk is trying to overcome. It’s not just climate solutions, but figuring out how to get them to take off and gain momentum.

Elia Ayoub: Welcome to The Fire These Times. I’m your host, Elia Ayoub, and today we’re having a special episode, in the sense that I’ve spoken with the three guests separately, and we recently did a panel at the Solarpunk Conference called From Capitalist Realism to a Solarpunk Reality. That led me to believe that we needed to have the four of us together to talk about solarpunk and what we find so meaningful about it.

With me today are Luca from Solarpunk Now, Ariel Kroon from Solarpunk Presents and Andre from HydroponicTrash.

Ariel Kroon: Hi everyone, I’m Ariel Kroon. I’m from Canada and I live in southern Ontario. I’m one half of the podcast Solarpunk Presents, which has had Elia on it, and I’m also an independent scholar. I was trained in English literature and I did my thesis on Cold War post-apocalyptic fiction, specifically nuclear anxiety, and I looked at how that translates into the anxiety we’re feeling around climate change right now. It’s actually very similar, so the ways we respond to it are also very similar, and I was drawn towards that. I started out looking very specifically at this time period in the past and then realizing, Oh wait it’s super relevant, oh no!

Luca Dowell: I’m Luca, and I’m based in LA. I have done a previous episode with Elia where we talked about neoliberalism and hauntology (very spooky, lots of ghosts). My background is in critical theory, and I’m really interested in the critical evaluation and negation of the ideologies and power structures surrounding us. I’m currently studying with the Institute for Social Ecology and focusing on dialectical naturalism, social ecology, and philosophy of technology, which is my pet area that I’m getting interested in now that I’m an independent scholar. I’m really interested in ideology and how we talk about the past and future—the go-to stories we have for making sense of our world and ourselves, and how those stories and ideas are shaped by power.

Andre (HydroponicTrash): Hey everybody, my name is Andre. I use the handle HydroponicTrash online. I work in cybersecurity, so I hack computers, but really what that means is looking at the black box of technology and seeing how it works behind the scenes. What I mainly focus on is how technology intersects with our lives and with social and political change, and so my focus is not just on “high technology” but appropriate technology—that might mean low tech or passive things—and how that connects in with ideas from anarchism, permaculture, and when we enter into a more ecological future, how our underlying systems, technologies, and infrastructures will influence our social systems and vice versa.

One of the things I talked about in our the presentation was how we can go from the world that we live in now, and take steps, not just from an individual point of view, but small actions to build collective action and a solarpunk future. Not just with techno-fixes and high tech gadgets, but what are some things that we can actually do to make that future happen, and how the interactions between our technology and social change will get us to that point.

EA: For some time, I had this pretty unhealthy obsession with Milton Friedman (just reading him is not good for your brain), and then to make things worse I started reading Ayn Rand, and at some point I noticed a certain pattern repeating itself, which we broadly call neoliberalism.

A few days before that conference, I was listening to one of Cory Doctorow’s podcasts where he reads his blog posts, and the title was: “Milton Friedman was a monster, but he wasn’t wrong about this.” He was referring to a quote that Milton Friedman wrote in 1972: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

Maybe in the sixties, neoliberalism seems impossible because in the post-World War II era there was a new social contract in the west—I’m simplifying a bit, but there was this idea of, We all need to sacrifice to defeat the Nazis, so now we’re going to come together and create some basic safety nets: the New Deal in the US, NHS in the UK, essentially what’s called the welfare system. By the sixties, for various reasons there have been a number of crises. I like to imagine folks like Friedman waiting for the opportunity to pounce, but that’s basically what they did, and it worked. Folks like Reagan and Thatcher and Pinochet have picked up that ideology and it has spread to the extent that today it’s quite difficult for even a mainstream left-wing politician to not be a neoliberal. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s become almost “neutral,” like you can’t really disagree with the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism without being called “ideological” because it’s seen as a non-ideology.

I think when something becomes a non-ideology, that’s when its potency as an ideology is the strongest. That’s what I’ve been thinking about and why I started with Milton Friedman, who is very much not solarpunk-y, because I think it’s interesting to look at our “opponents” and see how they do things and why it works. It doesn’t always work because they’re bad and evil; usually it’s because there’s a small kernel of truth here and there, and it’s just coated in a lot of bullshit and power and oppression. I want that without the bullshit and oppression—what is it about this that “works” and doesn’t work, and what can we learn from it?

AK: It’s very Sun Tzu of you, very “know thy enemy.”

LD: While we’re talking about crisis and the way crisis presents an opportunity, I think a really interesting historical example to look at is the 2008 financial crash. There’s a great book about this by Philip Mirowski called Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, who is a historian of neoliberalism, and that book is his attempt to reason out why, after a very obvious example where the system failed, we came out of it by doubling down on neoliberalism instead of realizing that something was wrong with it and moving to an alternative, and how that led to neoliberalism gaining more power and traction in society. [Here is text and audio of a 2014 radio interview with Mirowski on this topic via Antidote. —ed.]

There are so many layers to it: Friedman and Hayek and the other original progenitors of these theories already had their ideas out there, and people have adopted them, and it was already disseminated through academic departments around the world. There’s nothing inevitable about the way that neoliberalism has taken hold, but it’s not like it just happened by chance either. It was a concerted effort, and I think in order to fully understand how it happened, we would need to have a perfect understanding of history, which we don’t, but this book is a pretty good attempt.

“Know thy enemy” is a worthwhile pursuit, and having some idea of how you can give ideas traction and have them increase in significance over time to become a driving force in history is a really critical thing to figure out for anyone who wants to create a new paradigm, which I think is our goal. The title of our panel was “From Capitalist Realism to a Solarpunk Reality,” which is a paradigm shift from this neoliberal capitalist realist framework to a solarpunk framework.

How do we make ideas real? How do we create a new framework for telling stories, understanding the world, advancing technological and scientific progress, and working together on a political and ethical basis? What is that ethical basis and how do we develop it? All of these questions seem very relevant, and I think studying history is always a good start.

Maybe we don’t like how history went down, but there may be some themes or trends to gain a better understanding of the forces at work from looking at the growth and development of neoliberalism. There’s a David Graeber quote which I think I reference way too often: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” I think that really speaks to David Graeber’s project—he was an anthropologist, and he was looking at the past and trends that already exist and how things got to where we are, with the goal of pushing history and progress forward.

EA: Can I just quickly say what’s on my landing page? I have that Ursula Le Guin quote: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” I mean, there is still the divine right of kings in some parts of the world, but that’s no longer the dominant hegemonic ideology. It’s worth pondering that at the end of the day, when we do move beyond capitalism, which we will, because nothing is permanent, to quote our good friend Milton Friedman, the thing that felt impossible becomes inevitable.
AK: I was thinking a lot about The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein and the way there’s that crisis opening and then people pounce. An interesting bit about crisis from my point of view of studying the nuclear Cold War crisis was that everybody thought of it as this immediate thing that’s going to happen, and would just take two seconds and then be over.

We’re currently in a climate crisis and we can’t really recognize that as a crisis. Now we’re starting to see a bit more of the immediate effects, such as typhoons, hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires, but for the last couple of decades it was slower, and it was more what Rob Nixon calls slow violence—it’s the air pollution that isn’t going to kill you in one exposure, but if you live next to a very polluting factory, chances are you’re going to have higher chances of asthma and your kids are probably going to die a lot earlier than they should, but that’s not a single cause or single event, so it’s harder for humans to perceive.

There’s an argument in environmentalist and eco-critical circles about “slow violence” and “fast violence” and how they incite people to do things. On one hand, if something is fast violence, like in The Day After Tomorrow, people are just going to look at it and say, Oh, that’s science fiction! That will never happen, but if you’re prompted with slow violence, then people are like, Well, that’s not really a problem right now. You’re darned if you do, darned if you don’t.

EA: In The Day After Tomorrow, towards the end the President of the US is saying, We’ve learned the lessons of Mother Nature and she has humbled us and now we’re going to do better! and then the movie ends. If it’s climate change, then the shit that we saw in that hour and a half of the movie is going to happen again, but they had to frame it in a Hollywood-y way for it to be more palatable. And with Don’t Look Up, they used a metaphor of a meteor coming because there had to be one thing to focus on, and arguably the metaphor works in the sense that we’re putting our heads in the sand instead of looking up, but in the movie climate change is represented as something that’s one “fast violence” event, whereas in reality it’s a mix of different things.

AK: It depends on where in the world you are, right? But in order for us to perceive something as dangerous or a threat, it has to be spectacular. It has to be something that we can witness happening right in front of us, which is problematic in a lot of different ways. I’m sure that there is a much nicer euphemism for it, but there is a concept of “disaster porn tourism” where people go to see things like record temperatures in Death Valley, and these are things that are perceived by a certain subset of the population as something to watch that does not affect them.

For so long we’ve been fed narratives, especially in TV and movies, of this spectacular violence and we have internalized that feeling that we are removed from that spectacular violence, and so how do we internalize that? The chickens are coming home to roost in North America, at least, when it comes to climate violence.

LD: There’s a a cruel synergy between the slow or diffuse violence of climate change and capitalist realism. When it seems like the problem isn’t all that immediate, it’s very easy to think that we shouldn’t do anything yet, or we shouldn’t do anything too drastic. The metaphor of the meteor in Don’t Look Up really didn’t work for me, and I’d love to do a whole podcast just ranting about this movie (and I’m sure people have done that already), mainly the fact that it’s just one thing in the sky that we have to blow up and we’d be fine. It has a very easy solution that relies on military industrial equipment that we already have plenty of, but with climate change we have to do all these different things and a lot of them require overhauling entire systems.

It all seems very complicated and requires going against the momentum of society. When you pair that with capitalist realism, this feeling that we already have the best system we could have and it may not be perfect, but anything else would be too ideological or inefficient or not conducive to allowing innovation or prosperity, whatever these reasons are, leads us to think that capitalism is the lesser evil. The weight of that also makes it more difficult to act and I think these two things just synergize together into this oppressive feeling that nothing can really be done. It leads to this climate doomerism feeling.

I don’t think the feeling is that there’s nothing we can do about climate change because it’s just too powerful; I think the feeling is a little more nuanced: it’s like we would have to fight against all of the powers in society in order to do something, and there’s no way that can happen. It’s worse because we know something could be done, but it’s not going to because there’s no way to get things off the ground.

I think that’s what solarpunk is trying to overcome. It’s not just climate solutions, but figuring out how to get them to take off and gain momentum.

HT: When it comes to capitalist realism and climate change itself, I think crisis can be a really big catalyst towards breaking the idea of capitalist realism. As things collapse, it forces people to look at the reality of things and “wake up” to the things that are really happening. There’s also a flip side of crisis where a hope comes out of it because you see that in crisis, for instance, after Hurricane Katrina, for the most part you saw people banding together and helping each other out, and helping each other survive in a really bad situation. You see that time and time again after a crisis—people will come together and do pro-social stuff.

Living in Texas, I got a firsthand taste of what it feels like to have climate change directly impact your life and cause a regional crisis. Our power and electrical grid is maintained by a private corporation and so there wasn’t proper maintenance done on the electrical grid. In 2021 there was a really bad winter storm that knocked out power for most of the state, and it was to the point where the entire grid was minutes away from collapse if power stations weren’t shut down.

With that crisis though, the idea of community microgrids and collectively-controlled infrastructure that is owned and maintained by the people seemed like a fringe belief before, but it only took the electrical grid almost completely failing for people to say, Oh shit, that might actually be a really viable thing that we should think about. Those ideas weren’t just floating around randomly—people were thinking about them and saying, Maybe we should think about how climate change is going to impact the infrastructure of our lives, and thinking about different ways we can organize society and the way we do things so that when the next crisis comes, we won’t have the same problems that we did underneath a neoliberal or capitalist system.

It’s interesting how even in a really conservative state like Texas, I can now have conversations with people about microgrids and stuff like that, and people are really on board with it.

EA: Going back to the title of From Capitalist Realism To Solarpunk Reality, we’re also acknowledging that capitalist realism is an -ism. Capitalist realism is this idea that there is no other alternative, and because it’s not seen as an ideology, it is in many ways the most ideological. It’s hegemonic thinking, harking back to Gramsci.

This is a broad question, so feel free to take it in whatever direction you want, but what is it specifically about solarpunk that you think makes it the most “effective” at being a response to capitalist realism, and in the hope that eventually we go beyond it?

HT: When it comes to the speculative aspect of solarpunk, it gives people a new way of looking at the world, and not just from a science fiction angle, but bringing that speculative idea into reality. That’s what most people who are interested in solarpunk are trying to do. I see it as an inspiring thing where you can put yourself in the shoes of somebody living in the near future, a reality that you would want to live in, and say, Okay, how do I actually take steps to get there? I think most science fiction or speculative fiction is a reflection of modern times, and all fiction really is, but I think solarpunk is maybe closer to utopian socialism, where you are imagining what the world could be and how that could be a reality.

LD: Solarpunk is, in a sense, an artistic movement; I feel like it’s got both an aesthetic strength and a rational strength to it, and it’s also got a pretty serious commitment to realism and what’s realistic. The term “reality” or “realism” deserves some some interrogation, because the way we use it within capitalist realism can be, in its own way, unrealistic. I’m using the term “real” in all these different senses, but there’s a distinction that I found helpful in Chaia Heller’s book, The Ecology of Everyday Life, in which she makes the distinction between rationalization and rationality to explain different relationships that an idea can have to reality.

Capitalist realism is more about rationalizing than it is about what’s actually rational. Rationality is this ongoing pursuit of truth, basing things in logic or empiricism and things that can be proven or demonstrated, and rationalization is more like justifying the status quo. It uses the language of science and the language of logic to give the veneer of rationality, but it’s really a lot more ideological.

AK: That reminds me the book called Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason by Val Plumwood, who’s an eco-feminist philosopher. She was also talking about that, and saying that “reason” as we think about it, or “rationality,” is actually built upon a series of constructed binaries; for example, between men and women, human and animals, black people and white people. It’s all of these ideas that come out of the Enlightenment that were informed by very wrong-headed thinking about the way people operate and the way things are in the world. Our “rationality” these days is built upon that and we don’t question those binaries, but when we do question those binaries, you realize that rationality isn’t actually very reasonable at all.

What is reasonable is to use the scientific method to interrogate these things, and to take a page from sociology and psychology and really think about the embodied experience of people and animals as they are in the present, and not according to the dictates of people from seventeenth-century Europe.

LD: I think solarpunk shares a more feminist commitment to not getting stuck at the stage of rationalization, and actually trying to interrogate using the best tools that we have to deepen our understanding of the world, rather than pretending that the “common sense” status quo understanding we have is the correct one, and that rationality is then a matter of fitting everything into that box. That’s rationalization, not rationality.

EA: I’m currently reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, and it mentions Robin Wall Kimmerer’s anecdote of how the Potawatomi language uses verbs for some words that would be nouns in English. For example, the noun “hill” in English is an inanimate object, a thing that’s always there, whereas “hill” as a verb is something that is in the process of becoming itself, like it’s constantly “hilling.” It sounds a bit clunky in English, but if other languages have that concept embedded within it, that shows that if there is more than one way of conceptualizing this very same thing, then its inanimate “thing-ness” is something to be questioned.

As you mentioned, Ariel, the categorization of humans as humans and then by contrast, everything else as non-humans, is interesting. It essentially means that there is a subject and there’s an object; for example, in English, most people refer to dogs as “it,” and the “it” is also the same “it” that we use for an inanimate objects. Now, those of us who have pets usually say “he” or “she,” and here I’m using my human framework to simplify things, because many of us have this need to categorize things.

In the past century, with the development of decolonial and anti-colonial movements and literature, we’ve seen an attempt to go beyond that. There are those who reject it entirely, like the Algerian nationalists who reject anything that comes from France, and there are others that try and go beyond it, saying, We’re neither this nor that but something completely different. Back in the sixties and seventies there were also more discussions about What does it mean to be “X”?

It’s a subtle recognition that culture is basically a social construct, and recognizing them as constructs (to go back to that Graeber quote) means that something is made and therefore can be made differently. What I find fascinating about solarpunk specifically is that it’s almost like we’ve gotten to a point where we have recognized that there is such a thing as social constructs—we are made out of stories that we tell ourselves and others, and that are told to us or inherited. It doesn’t mean that the stories are “wrong” or fake, but they are stories.

There could be a way of disentangling that from rationality, for example, and accepting that rationalism or rationalization is a way of perpetuating a story that we “want” to be true. We “want” capitalism and infinite economic growth to work, but there is an uncomfortable reality that we live in a planet with finite resources, and therefore something has to give at some point. Mathematically this does not work, but we change everything else to try to make it work rather than change the formula.

LD: There’s a section of The Ecology of Everyday Life that discusses the turn away from rationality towards spirituality that we got in the seventies as a reaction to capitalism, and she thinks that’s really problematic because, like you said, there’s a lot of great literature breaking down all these categories but people have all sorts of different relationships and ideas about where we should go next. After the critique, we need to build something up that’s positive. We can’t just dissolve everything; we need to create new and more useful categories that serve the limitations of living on a finite planet, or that that serve our psychological and social needs for community.

There’s a quote from the book that says, “The cause of cultural and ecological degradation is indeed capitalist rationalization, not a modern fall from spiritual grace.” It’s not this reactionary idea that, because we don’t have a faith-driven society anymore that’s what’s causing our downfall, it’s capitalist logic itself. We’re trying to fit everything into the capitalist story and trying to make it work, at the expense of continuing to develop newer and more useful ideas.

She continues: “If capitalism is a set of social relationships based on exploitation, regularization, alienation, and commodification, then the antidote to capitalist rationalization is a new relationality.” So we’re not doing away with these relationships; we’re building a better sense of what relationships can be—we’re building “empathetic, sensual, and rational ways of relating to each other.”

I think that’s really a strength of solarpunk too—it’s not just committed to continuing to develop scientific and technological thinking, but it’s also committed to the social and the human, and making sure that these things are working together. It’s rational in a deeper, more feminist sense that I think is a great strength.

AK: In my presentation at the Solarpunk Conference, I started out with Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant, and that book was pretty instrumental in my turn towards solarpunk. It’s about what happens when reality doesn’t actually live up to capitalist realism. She doesn’t really put it in those terms, but the whole book is from her perspective as an American scholar on what happens when the capitalist dream is unattainable—not something that most Americans can aspire to anymore (and I would add, there’s a similar “Canadian dream.”) Lauren Berlant’s looking at what happens when we can’t achieve that, and what the thought process and the emotional reaction to that is.

It’s a bleak but fascinating book, because she comes up with a thesis that cruel optimism is what’s taken a hold of our society. We have this optimism about capitalism and the promises that capitalism gives us, and she says, “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Say you want to buy a house but you can’t attain the amount of money for a down payment, but you keep holding onto that dream, so all of your money and thoughts and time are going towards saving up for a down payment, which just gets more expensive and further out of reach. Suddenly you’re in your forties and you still don’t have enough for a down payment, and you’re like, Wow, what have I been doing with my life? I wanted my life to begin once I have a house! That just derails people from actively pursuing what they want to do, because we’re caught up in this idea of capitalist reality and that this is the way things are supposed to go.

I see solarpunk as as an antidote to that, because it is rooted in the idea of doing what you can with what you have. Maybe you can’t overthrow capitalist realism all by yourself, but you can plant a garden and that’s pretty great. You can do your bit for creating community, beautifying your community, talking to your neighbors, or helping the local flora and fauna and wildlife. Solarpunk is not just an aesthetic, where you scrape off the aesthetic and behind it is a wall that you can’t really do anything with.

I used to be really into cyberpunk, and I still am, but I am not technologically proficient. I would have counted myself as technologically proficient when I was sixteen and in within my context I was the only one who knew about things like Livejournal and HTML coding and stuff like that, but now if I scratch the surface behind cyberpunk, I’m like, Wow, there’s all kinds of cool stuff here that I just cannot do because I’m busy trying to live my life in capitalism and I don’t have time to learn how to do all these things. But with solarpunk, if I scratch off the aesthetic, then I’m like, I can pick up litter, or I can talk to the person walking past me on the street.

I don’t need special knowledge to be able to contribute to my community. It’s a way in which I can immediately put these ethics and values and ideology that I’m learning from theory into immediate practice in my everyday life.

HT: My presentation was about infrastructures and how small actions can build on each other and create larger change. But one thing that I always want to say about infrastructure and engineering is that infrastructures aren’t neutral, just like ideologies aren’t neutral. Our infrastructures and the way things work are directly related to social systems. If we have a social system based on competition and patriarchy, we’re going to have infrastructures that directly correlate to that. If our society is based on fossil fuels, we’re going to have a system that only runs on fossil fuels.

If we were to take that feminist literature and political theory and apply that to changing our social relations, that would impact our infrastructures as well, because it’s all tied together. Part of my presentation was a narrative: starting out living in a dilapidated apartment, working crazy long hours, being separated from society, and walking through some of the steps somebody might take to build a better future. There’s small actions like starting a garden, picking up trash, making things a little bit greener, talking to your neighbors, and all of this connects to each other because it’s a snowball effect. We talked about this on the previous episode I was on too, where it’s not individualistic action but individual action that builds into collective action.

What I like about solarpunk is that you could take a speculative or narrative fiction piece and walk through how we get to this better future; going from your dilapidated apartment, after talking to your neighbors, maybe you start forming a tenants’ union, and that tenants’ union might become broader action in your community, that might become regional and even nationwide or global. Most of the presentation I did isn’t about the engineering or infrastructure part, but how changing how we relate to each other and taking steps to get there is how that change is going to happen.

AK: I really like how accessible it is. Solarpunk is something that allows you to create change where you are, but it doesn’t look exactly the same; solarpunk for Andre in Texas is going to look different from solarpunk for Elia in Switzerland, or for me in Canada, or for Luca in LA. It’s bound together by the same ideals of community and of resilience and sustainability, but the ways in which those can be put into action are very different. It also emphasizes accessible infrastructure for people who have different needs and different ways of accessing these goods and services. Things like, Can somebody in a wheelchair use this? Can somebody who uses crutches access this garden if they want to help with weeding? What does that look like?

One of the things about capitalist realism is that it doesn’t acknowledge that people are different. It doesn’t acknowledge that people are located in different places or have different ways of relating to each other, whereas solarpunk does, and not only acknowledges that but celebrates it.

EA: Most people who think about capitalism are not huge fans of it. There’s a reason why “capitalists” don’t call themselves that—they may say capitalism is good but they don’t typically say, Hey, I am a full-time capitalist! (although you have the venture capitalists.)

There’s an example in the book Invisible Women about snow plowing in the UK and how gendered it is. I had never thought about it that way, because “removing snow” feels like a neutral thing, but which neighborhoods get their snow plowed first is an intentional decision. For example, if you are a care worker you may not be seen as a priority because you’re largely working indoors, and so you don’t need to go to the office, and it ends up having a compounding effect. Going back to the Graeber quote, this made me think about the world we live in as something that has been made in a certain way.

Going back to what Ariel said about accessibility, in the neighborhood I live in, every corner I look feels like it could be a bit better or more beautiful without much effort, and I think it’s interesting that we don’t do that, and it’s almost seen as not worth it. There’s a sense of internalized neoliberalism where everything has to have some function to fulfill the religion of productivity, but there are ways to things nicer by having benches or green spaces, for example.

It says a lot that these things are often seen as something to be done after a crisis, like after a massive heat wave we acknowledge the heat island effect of having concrete everywhere as a huge problem. It’s so frustrating, because sometimes keeping things as they are now can be more expensive, and the solution can be simple. Another example is the endless discussion about How do you solve homelessness? Houses! That’s it. Solved. It’s not complicated, but it’s rendered complicated.

Global warming is another case where, sure, it’s a multi-system, multi-dimensional, multi-faceted problem that will not be solved overnight, but many of its problems are well-identified and can be resolved, but they are bogged down by social problems and political problems.

HT: Capitalist realism locks you into this idea that there’s no action to be had, and you have to wait for things to happen, but there are things that we can do right now. That ties into the idea of dual power and direct action. Dual power as a framework is a good way to look at how we could take direct action now to make the changes that we want to make, without having to wait around. The simple things that we can do both within and outside of the capitalist system.

AK: Another way that solarpunk contrasts with capitalist realism is that solarpunk doesn’t demand that you do everything. It doesn’t demand that every single solarpunk is a hardcore anarchist who is going to overthrow the government. Some people are going to be really good at taking political action and are going to be the organizers, but that’s not everybody. There’s going to be someone who’s really good at getting people together for a bake sale, and there’s going to be someone who’s really good at making sure that the community garden gets weeded and watered on time. It doesn’t require that everybody fits into the same mold and does exactly the same thing, because it’s a movement that is made up of people who are multi-talented, and there is always a way that you can contribute, no matter how small.

I’ve seen people in certain circles saying, Is this solarpunk? Am I solarpunk enough? If you are dedicated to creating a better world in the present and supporting people working towards that better world, then you’re definitely a solarpunk activist in the way that you can be.

LD: There’s something about solarpunk that draws in people who grew up on cyberpunk, but I think an important difference between the two genres is that cyberpunk is a lot more beholden to the “underdog hero” narrative. For some reason they’re both a hacker and a samurai, and they have all these skills that make them the perfect protagonist. There’s a reason why we get the name “Hiro Protagonist” [from Snow Crash —sy.] as one of the main cyberpunk characters.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot is, how does history actually work? How does change actually happen? It’s not because one guy hacked the mainframe and chopped the head off anyone who got in the way, it’s because of all of the people who got him the equipment he needed and the people who were able to create vulnerabilities in the system first, and the network of care that he was able to rely on to get food and healthcare and whatever he needed. I think solarpunk does a better job of looking at how a network of people drives change.

Even neoliberalism didn’t occur because one guy had an idea and that idea just took off on its own. You need people to carry that idea, and they almost do more work than the original “thinker” to disseminate it throughout society. In neoliberalism’s case, it was spread through economics departments and business schools, but that itself is still a whole network of people, and all of their wives and housekeepers and gardeners. Change doesn’t happen because one person has a good idea or is a badass and takes it upon themselves to be the hero of the story. There is no protagonist in real life—we’re all contributing where we can, and that’s not a weakness of solarpunk. That’s its strength, and I think it’s a much more realistic look at how change happens.

EA: I have an example from the prepper world. You have the “toxic” type of preppers, stereotypically white American males, and you have the more “wholesome” type of prepper. These are some exaggerated made up examples, but the toxic preppers might be into stuff like, How to make your own bazooka, or How to fence your house in case of a zombie; very unrealistic things that take a lot of time for very little return. It’s predicated on this idea of: I have a property—usually it’s physical property like a house or a land, and it often extends to my wife and family, in the same logic of private properties. They want to be everything at the same time—biologists and chemists and doctors and architects and engineers and gun people, whereas sometimes the easiest thing you can do in that situation is to get to know your neighbor who might be a doctor. They’ve artificially made it more complicated than it is.

Another example is Elon Musk and the highway shit, and the idea that congestion and traffic can be solved by just adding one more lane, or having this ridiculous death tunnel, but there actually is a way of resolving congestion. It’s called trains and trams and buses and carpooling, and it’s already well established. There is an illusion that this is a problem that is still debatable when it’s actually resolved, because you’re trying to make a profit rather than resolve this problem.

That’s similar to the “toxic” pepper mentality, because a smarter type of prepper is like, Yeah, I need to know certain things and it would be nice to know how to garden and some basic first aid, but I’m not going to spend fifteen years in medical school, so I’m just going to befriend someone who’s already done that. That’s how we already do things in Lebanon, for example. Growing up, our neighbor was a doctor and he became my grandmother’s doctor, and because they were neighbors, sometimes it was free or cheaper, and it just functioned that way. Because otherwise you don’t have access to medicine.

What frustrates me most of the time is not trying to persuade people that solarpunk is a good idea, because most people don’t have an inherent antipathy towards the idea of being nice to each other or having greener or accessible spaces—it sounds nice! But it feels “unrealistic,” and I guess that is what we’re trying to untangle.

Let’s wrap up with final thoughts and recommendations.

HT: I have three books to recommend. The first one is Everyday Utopia by Kristen Ghodsee, which is a really interesting book that goes through different social experiments and utopian ways of thinking throughout history. It highlights different societies that experimented with changing their social relations, and it has some really solid examples of people using technology not in a way to destroy the environment but to actually help it and help each other too. It shows that the alternatives are out there, and there are people who are thinking about how can we live differently and succeed.

It’s a great book to show that what’s deemed “realistic” isn’t really realistic, and the things that are thought of as, Oh, that would be nice are an actual reality and have worked both in past and present.

The second book is I Want A Better Catastrophe by Andrew Boyd, and it talks about climate change, climate grief, and as climate change gets worse, is there any hope? In the book he says, yes, there is hope.

The third book is Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, which is a speculative fiction book about a future where people use a dual power system. There’s a hyper-capitalist cyberpunk dystopia happening, and on the outskirts of that society there is an interesting, more egalitarian, free-sharing society. They’re called “walkaways” because they walked away from society to build their own society, and it touches on ideas of dual power, technology, and people building alternatives.

LD: I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell about history and the present; that’s my interest in protagonists and how ideas transmit through society. The first book I’d recommend is Bruno Latour’s The Pasteurization Of France. You may know his reputation as being a dense and unapproachable French philosopher, but this book is rather accessible, and it’s an interesting exploration of how we talk about scientific revolutions, and how we talk about society and history in general. It’s centered around Pasteur and his discoveries of bacteria, and how that gets taken up by the hygienists who want to figure out how to stop the transmission of disease, and it’s a really interesting journey through the different actors who are involved in making a societal transformation.

This is a case that’s very clear cut, where there’s an obvious transition in society that improves things, but it doesn’t make sense to credit it to only Pasteur—it’s not like he single-handedly stopped the transmission of disease in French cities. It’s a pretty concrete example for actor-network theory, which is a theory Latour developed along with some other thinkers that’s a way of understanding technology as it’s embedded in society.

On the fiction side of things, I wanted to recommend the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. It’s a dense exploration of what you could call a lot of different things: a political drama, or speculative fiction, but it’s written from the perspective of a historian in the twenty-fifth century. The narrator is a historian writing for posterity, so it’s framed as a historical document, and explores questions around how we tell history, bias and censorship, and how different ideas can limit narrators. It does a lot of interesting things with the form of the novel, and I’m obsessed with it. I would it love if the fandom was bigger. Please join us!

My third recommendation is a podcast about trees called Completely Arbortrary. It’s mostly US-based—they mostly talk about trees in Portland, where they’re based, and also across the continent, but I think these trees are found elsewhere too. Every episode is a different tree, and after you start listening, the next time you go on a hike you’ll be telling your friends about all the different trees and how you’re able to identify them. It changed my perspective, and I notice trees in a way I did not before.

AK: I did mention Val Plumwood’s book earlier, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, which honestly changed the direction of my research. She’s an Australian eco-feminist philosopher and she really interrogates the way that reason and rationality have come to be defined within western society, through a feminist lens, and the ways in which we’re trapped in these binary methods of thought, sometimes in ways that we don’t even realize but are subconscious underlying structures. It’s really helpful to be able to analyze those and say, Oh wait, there is a different and better way.

I would also recommend Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. I was thinking about her theories of transcorporeality when Elia was talking about the fungi book, because one of her main theses is that we are connected to our environment in so many different ways. We are colonized by bacteria, and our skin is basically a porous membrane between ourselves and the air and dirt and water around us and thus the beings around us. I would really recommend reading it because she blew my mind.

My last recommendation is actually an Instagram account: Alexis Nikole @blackforager. She’s located in Ohio and I have learned so much from her reels. One of her latest videos was talking about making mayapple pudding, and I did not know what mayapples were or that they were indigenous to my bio-region, or that you can eat the fruit but every other part of the plant is toxic. She also does videos like, how to eat young cattails like corn on the cob, or how to make rosewater at home, and all kinds of fun stuff. She’s a little bit more south than I am, but she’s in the same bio-region, so I can find a lot of the plants that she talks about in my backyard or on the trails around here. I think a lot of what she has to say is transferable to wherever you’re located.

EA: I mentioned Entangled Life earlier by Merlin Sheldrake which I only just started reading. I was led to it by a podcast called General Intellect Unit where they read different books. It sounded so fascinating that I had to get it.

The second one is Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit. I’m a huge fan of Solnit’s work, and I’ve had this fascination with Orwell for a long time but I did not know that he was a huge gardener until reading this book. He had a special relationship with a bunch of different roses, hence the title, and it was actually a formative part of his politics, and then if you reread some of his novels you will see how many floral metaphors he uses, which I never paid attention to before.

The last book is Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber, released posthumously. As a fun tidbit, I met him in London when I was living there and we bonded over our mutual fascination with Madagascar. I had been there a long time ago and I have the map tattooed on my ankle, and he saw it and we started chatting about it. He was just a nice guy to talk to, and he lived there for a long time and that’s what the book is partly about. He presents a hypothesis about Ratsimilaho, a half-Malagasy half-English person who lived in Madagascar and was the ancestor of the zana-malata ethnic group. He was a pirate who oversaw a “period of democracy and peace as a precursor to the Age of Enlightenment. He contests the common portrayal of Ratsimilaho as a European ‘civilizer’”—it’s presented in the literature that because he had influences from England, he brought certain ideas of democracy and whatnot to Madagascar, and Graeber argues that it’s actually the other way around. It’s like a companion book to The Dawn of Everything, which goes into more depth.

Thanks everyone, this was fascinating.

AK: Thank you, I’m so glad we did this.

LD: Thank you.

HT: Thanks, we should all do it again.