10 Years of Solarpunk

Andrew Dana Hudson looks back on “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk” after 10 years. When I was first learning about Solarpunk in 2021 (and getting my eyeballs on every piece of media about it that I could), this piece resonated with me strongly and I refer back to it often. And today, Andrew looks back on that with both wonder at how it’s taken hold and want for it to be more realized in the material world.

We’ve spent over ten years imagining better futures. When I wrote “Dimensions,” that task itself seemed daunting, obscured as alternatives were by the choking neoliberal smog. But, in a tremendous feat of collective imagination, we did it. We pulled it off. From the policy-wonkish, to the pro-topian, to the perfectly utopian, we’ve created a range of answers to the question, “what does a sustainable world look like?” Solarpunk can now serve as a vital shorthand for that set of imaginaries.

I’m not saying the worldbuilding work is fully complete, but I do think we’ve reached a robust place. It’s time we turned our attention to other tasks, to the other part of the definitional question: “how do we get there from here?”

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