Solarpunk: technology in harmony with nature

What solarpunk actually is

The term was coined in 2008. It describes an art movement that imagines how the future might look if we lived in harmony with nature in a sustainable and egalitarian world: rooftop gardens, floating villages, clean-energy transport, and a science fiction that is not set in a ruin. It is the deliberate opposite of cyberpunk's neon misery.

Michelle Tulumello, a solarpunk art teacher in New York state, puts the stakes high. Solarpunk is "really the only solution to the existential corner of climate disaster we have backed ourselves into as a species", requiring a shift in world view "from competitive to cooperative".

Does the tech industry care?

Smith tests the movement against actual companies, with mixed results.

- Verne Global runs data centre services in Iceland on 100% renewable energy. CTO Tate Cantrell says renewable energy is "a very real manifestation of a solarpunk future", technology that "disappears into the environment".

- Climeworks, the Swiss direct-air-capture firm, has the goal of inspiring "a billion people to remove carbon from the air". But chief commercial officer Daniel Egger admits the overlap with solarpunk "isn't big". They simply had not heard much about it.

- Carbon Upcycling Technologies* in Canada launched a consumer brand, Expedition Air, in *2020, selling paintings and T-shirts made from carbon-captured material via an artist-in-residence programme. Venture lead Madison Savilow says the art was used to "de-risk the uptake of this novel material" and start conversations with larger manufacturers.

The part companies skip

Phoebe Tickell of Moral Imaginations argues that prescribing solarpunk to people is less effective than getting them to exercise their own imaginations. Companies want resilient, creative employees, and the visions follow.

But the article is honest about the friction. Solarpunk advocates knowledge sharing and community-centricity, not hierarchies, profit and excessive wealth for a minority. It demands system change. Tulumello expects solarpunks to back "small, nimble, eco-friendly high-tech startups with cooperative structures". Software engineer Ellie Day is blunter: for something to be truly solarpunk "it needs to be beyond profit... people need to come before profit, always."

The open-source ethos runs through the examples. US-based Open Source Ecology designs industrial machines such as tractors, ovens and cement makers that can be built for a fraction of commercial cost, and gives the designs away.

Why it matters

Solarpunk is one of the few aesthetic movements that comes with an economics attached. That makes it more useful than a mood board: it gives you a test for whether a green tech claim is doing anything structural or just redecorating. It is also a rare example of fiction and design being used as infrastructure for policy imagination rather than as marketing.

Key takeaways

- Solarpunk, coined in 2008, imagines existing technology used cooperatively rather than extractively.

- Most green-tech firms in the piece had either never heard of it or found it only partly relevant. The anarchic "punk" half is the sticking point.

- The movement's real demand is ownership structure: cooperative, worker-owned, open source, beyond profit.

- Tickell's argument is that it could be the connective narrative between tech, social justice and environmentalism, which currently treat each other as enemies.

Image credit: Verne Global.