Is Solarpunk the Hippie Movement Redux?

Christina here with a confession. Sometimes when people talk solarpunk, I can’t help but wonder if solarpunk is just this decade’s version of being a hippie.  Solarpunks want to wear natural fiber clothing, listen to groovy music, eat organic food, grow their own veggies, shop at co-ops, and peace out in a world full of social justice, sustainability, and community gardens.  It’s easy to think, well, how is this not just the 1960’s all over again?  Or for that matter, how is solarpunk not just another resurgence of the same old ideas about alternatives to the prevailing society that have been going in and out of style since even before the Cynics of Ancient Greece?

But of course, on a basic level, solarpunk is just one of the more modern (or postmodern, or post–postmodern) stops on the train that started with various ancient schools of thought. If we self–identified solarpunks had been born a few decades earlier, we would have been called hippies, just like all the other people with a yearning to sew their own clothes, shop at health food stores, and stick it to the man. And that train of thought does extend to the (not at all new or even modern) utopian socialism and anarchism of solarpunk’s vision of a super cool future for us all, even if solarpunk is also pulling in ideas from non–European philosophies, cultures, and traditions.  Solarpunk is one of the latest outgrowths of these ideas that have been threaded through our cultures for millennia.  Because there kind of really isn’t anything new under the Sun.

At the same time, even though solarpunk can sound so embarrassingly hippie sometimes it’s amazing it’s not knotting up its own macramé bikinis, solarpunk isn’t a photocopy of the hippie movement.  For starters, solarpunk isn’t a youthquake flipping a couple of hundred million birds to their elders’ starched, repressive society.  Yes, there are youngsters amongst us, and we are fighting against the still repressive aspects of society, but solarpunk is full of middle–olds who have been swimming against the main stream for 20, 30, or 40 years already as punks, cyberpunks, or just general idealists.  Also, unlike the hippie movement, solarpunk isn’t about ME!  It’s about how we transform society and the way we do just about everything so that the future’s a great place to be.  It’s all about embracing the sort of technology that will help us live our best lives with lower carbon footprints and less pressure on Earth’s ecosystems. 

So, phew, we’re not just a bunch of hippies arriving at the part 60 years after it started.  Except that we’re actually way later than that.  Philosophies, countercultures, and movements have been working to bring about the sort of just, sustainable world that solarpunk is merely imagining the transmodern version of since forever. So you could be forgiven for looking around and freaking out because WE’RE.  NOT.  THERE.  YET.  Even after all the thought, discussions, consciousness-raising, and all around hard work.

In fact, aren’t we backsliding in many respects?  When I look at how things have changed over the 30 years of my adulthood, I see progress in certain areas but an incredible amount of worsening in others.  Look at all the noise and pledges that have been made about reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the last 30 years and yet with each passing year humanity collectively releases an increasing amount of them to the atmosphere.  Meanwhile, we solved the DDT problem, the CFC/ozone hole problem, and the leaded gasoline problem, and yet still find ourselves awash in a stew of “forever chemicals” that we only started releasing in earnest within the last few decades of increasingly industrialized agriculture and increasingly rampant consumerism.  Despite the growth in the environmental movement over the past century, out treatment of the environment has never been so overwhelmingly devastating as it is today. Technology has gotten a whole lot better and that has helped us get better at housing, feeding, and clothing people—we’re managing it in the billions these days!—but we’ve also gotten a billion–fold more effective at polluting the environment, destroying nature, waging warfare (and doing massive collateral damage to the planet and ecosystems), and just making a general mess out of things.

This, not whether or not solarpunk is filled with hippies, is what keeps me up at night. I dread to imagine the state the world would be in today if solarpunk’s multitude of forbears hadn’t been fighting for social justice and the environment.  But, if a growing awareness of the need to stop emitting greenhouse gases, and to stop destroying the environment, and to do everything more sustainably hasn’t been enough to stop humanity from doing increasingly worse on all of these fronts, how is solarpunk going to be the movement that actually stops us from doing more of all the bad things we’re doing to other people and the environment?