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Solarpunk: When your ideology is pictures
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Post videos you genuinely enjoy and want to share, duh. Celebrate the diversity of interests shared by chapochatters by posting a deep dive into Venetian kelp farming, I dunno. Also media criticism, bite-sized versions of left-wing theory, all the stuff you expected. But I am curious about that kelp farming thing now that you mentioned it.
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I always thought that the problem with stuff like the Solarpunk Manifesto is that it's like Soviet Aesthetic purged of workers and labor. I could make a drawing or a song based on the ideal of Communism, such as it may exist in the far (hopefully not too far) future. Soviet art tends not to depict that per se, instead what you see is workers labouring and happy to be labouring under Socialism, building out that Communist ideal. Solarpunk as an ideology is meant to be an antidote to despair, so the ideal Solarpunk world is already built.
The focus of Soviet art always seemed on people, wether they were working, fighting or building that Communist ideal. The focus of Solarpunk is on places, it is farms, gardens and green plazas, all devoid of mosquitoes, never being built but always being used - and I think only a minority of the Solarpunk artists caught up with that and started adding people on work suits doing the work of maintaining those places.
This is a picture I found online of a Sistema Agro-Florestal (Agri-Forest System) in Brazil. It is an idea that is arising under capitalism to combine local, native flora with staple foods and cash crops, in a way that permits you to more reliably control pests and cut back on both fertilizer and presticides. It also allows you to utilize land for food production without completely breaking down natural ecosystems, as native fauna like birds, mammals and insects, can make use of the Forest part of the system for transit and other purposes.
If I'm not mistaken, this sort of thing is also becoming a thing in upscale coffee farms in order to a) improve crop quality due to symbiosis, b) reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events such as heatwaves and extreme rains. There's also the idea to increase cocoa production in Brazil back to historical levels, as the country has had to deal with the Witch's Broom plague for decades at this point. So its not limited to small scale family farms either. Again, its an idea of that is arising in capitalist Brazil and, presumably, in many other places as well.
This is a drawing by a magazine in capitalist Brazil depicting an idealized version of Agri-Forest systems.. There's a guy using a hoe to till the soil and there's another guy climbing a ladder to harvest fruit. Idealized in a way, as there's no use of machinery, not even for watering crops. But its something human and achievable right away.
And this is a Solarpunk farm. Labor is only implied - the lady is having her cup of coffee in the morning, raring to go. But go where? The even larger implication is that everything is automated. The future is optimistic. Even the picking of delicate, fresh fruit has been optimized by ghibli octoarms machines.
Then you've got the floating gardens in places like Mexico, which harness native techniques to create pockets of extreme fertility and endurance in the middle of Mexico City. It really is something to behold but it is not something that can be appreciated without the labor involved in creating, maintaining and cleaning canal farms in the middle of a metropolis.
My hypothesis is that what forces of production remain in the US are so regressive that the people with a positive, environmental outlook into the future just aren't in industry or farming. They are city dwellers who, for the most part, wish their cities were livable spaces. Whereas elsewhere in the Global South, however regressive the landowners and capitalists may be when it comes to rewarding labor, environmental pressures do force them and their media to open the way for different ways of doing things. Even if it starts as a cynical ploy to acquire carbon credits or greenwash their initiatives of capital, something like a large scale sugar farm that doesn't do harvest burns respond to a real, social demand for fewer miserable months of mass air pollution in a year, for an instance - while also being a frontier for capital investment.
That looks so fucking cool. Far cooler than some shitty yogurt commercial.
This is a really good response and I wanted to elaborate on it a little but I don't have much juice left in my battery so it's gonna be more of a sketch than a fully fleshed out reply like yours:
Solarpunk feels reminiscent of that Marx quote, that it is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Although it's transposed onto the political realm and urban design rather than the spiritual.)
I think so much of this goes back to the urge that traces its roots to a Thoreauvian desire to "return to nature" and to realign oneself with the "good", away from the debased reality of society as it exists around us. It's a way of checking out of society and this urge is endemic in the west, especially in the US, where it seems like every other person longs to check out from their conditions and escape to an alienated, self-sufficient back-to-nature lifestyle on a generous homestead. (Look, I'm gonna be real - I can't lie and say that this doesn't hold an allure for me too but the solution to political ills is never and will never be to escape and check out from politics.)
The thing is though that a solarpunk world isn't one that is a degrowth or sustainable growth society but it's only possible to achieve this bucolic utopian vision by depopulation; there absolutely is not enough acreage available even if we had multiple earths to provide this lifestyle for everyone while also being sustainable and while having sufficient wild regions that maintain healthy biodiversity and a stable ecology. Strange that the solarpunk vision never seems to have room for wild spaces within its vision, just like how it conspicuously omits labor.
And there's the rub - it's really an alienated, deeply consumerist vision of what it's like to be "back in nature" or whatever from the perspective of an urban or suburban westerner; there are no stables to muck out, no weeds to pull, no battling against the elements and instead fruit drops from the trees into your hands and the crops grow themselves. It's a very mystified or mythologized post capitalist techno-eden that feels very, very petit-bourgeois in spirit and especially in its view of the world. Yeah, it's not the same as a European aristocrat's lavish estate from a few centuries back but it feels like it has a lot more in common with that than it has the people who are producing the coffee to make your morning comfort a reality while you wistfully gaze out at rolling hills with babbling brooks and wind power generation as an electrified bullet train whizzes between the meadows in the background.
Are you sure about that?
One, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and acorns have a calories-per-acre production metric that rivals or surpasses broadacre cereal crops. It is not an accident that they are well established as food crops across the northern hemisphere's temperate forest regions.
Two, companion planting or polyculture is more productive per acre than broadacre farming. Chinampas (which CarmineCatboy posted) and Three Sisters plantings are two examples of wildly productive formats. The difference is that polyculture is labor-intensive, and conventional agriculture economizes labor above all else. We certainly won't be able to feed the world with 1% of people working as farmers as the West does now, but 10-20% farmers would be feasible. If you bring the energy cost and embodied energy of farm equipment into account, conventional farms fall even further behind.
Three, the standard Western farm grows wheat or field corn or soy and about half of all this goes to livestock feed or biofuels, then most of the remainder is refined into corn syrup or modified food starch or bleached flour or hydrogenated vegetable oil and so on. These especially shelf stable commodities are not essential to our nutrition.
Four, conventional farming is depleting our topsoil and our oil resources and our other mineral resources, and it won't last until the beginning of the next century anyway.
The idea that we need conventional agriculture to survive was planted in our heads by the capitalists, and we need to unlearn it.
And we could provide for 10x the current population if we shifted agricultural production to wolffia or azolla but that's not the point. I said this directly after talking about the image of a homestead, hence the term bucolic and talking about it in terms of lifestyle and not in sheer terms of agricultural productivity. The fact of the matter is that there is not enough habitable land to provide a homestead to 8 billion+ people.
I already know that polyculture farming is more productive but chinampas are not a model which is suitable for intensive farming in many places in the world and, like it or not, chinampas do not embody the vision of a oneness with nature that solarpunk promotes; establishing chinampas will require dramatically changing the waterways and thus the local ecology so it's not some magic bullet that resolves all of these issues. There are plenty of freshwater fish that are endangered around the world that probably wouldn't survive if we turned all the world's freshwater waterways into chinampas for food production. It's four sisters btw.
Most foods are not essential to our nutrition. Bleached flour or unbleached flour, it doesn't change much in regard to if it's essential to our nutrition and it doesn't change the demands on arable land except for the fact that the more shelf stable a food is, the less food waste is incurred due to spoilage. I don't really get what your point is.
Yes, but it's not a binary question of maintaining the current system or switching to solarpunk and this framing is disingenuous.
This doesn't come off as being in good faith. I never said that we must maintain our current system of agricultural production or that it's totally fine. That was never my point and I didn't argue that whatsoever.
I was reserving this criticism of solarpunk politics but it's very retrograde in its outlook and I've never seen defenders of it beat the allegations that it advocates for a "return to nature" to reconnect with some essentialness of being human. In all honesty it seems to me to be this eclectic, aestheticized pseudopolitics or at its heart it's anprim ideology with a coat of permaculture-inspired paint to make it more palatable. We can't just throw chinampas at the problem and call it good; ecologists and agronomists at the top of their fields will tell you that it's very complex and dependent upon the local conditions and there aren't many simple solutions.
Solarpunk doesn't have prescriptions about how things are grown, just some permaculture overlap. The comment you were responding to had pictures of both chinampas and agroforestry. If you're not talking about that, then you're arguing against something nebulous and undefined. Is it practical to try to define solarpunk as "anything you want it to be", or is it more practical to call it "appropriate tech with transparent social structures, and an environment that is scaled to human comprehension"?
Of course the Texcoco style won't be suitable around the globe. There are lots of vernacular approaches for every corner of the globe, pre-capitalism. No need to trip over yourself to justify homogenized grain and pulse products, these are not good for human health or for ecology, and they end up getting wasted at a similar rate anyway around the point of consumption.
The only rigorous and non-debatebro part of your post is saying that we can't give everyone a homestead with fields and buffer space. And yeah, sure. But the comment you're replying to also has a low-rise city skyline that's implied to be within cycling distance.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that solarpunk is anything more than a gateway drug, but if it's not something that gets eaten up by cottagecore, it ends up orienting toward ecology and accessibility.
Yeah, but this is my exact point - it's not rigorous, it's just vibes and aesthetics. That's the whole point of my criticisms.
I am aware. Did I not just describe my criticisms of chinampas in the comment you just replied to?
Why do you presume I needed to be informed of this so deep into the replies?
I don't understand what you're saying here. I wasn't responding to the use or depiction of chinampas or agroforestry. I'm responding to the lack of political dimensions and the lack of program inherent to the solarpunk movement.
I'm not sure how I could have made that clearer unless I specifically prefaced my first comment with "This is not about the agriculture methods depicted in the images above".
That's a question for people who count themselves as part of the solarpunk movement.
But to me "appropriate" is a floating signifier as much as "in line with ecology" is - if you drill down into the details, all you find is vibes.
So what was the point in giving me the cliff notes of chinampas exactly unless you were trying to flex your knowledge and position the discussion as if I had no idea what they are?
You keep on attempting to school me on chinampas for some reason. I don't get it.
Again, I never said anything like this. I never argued in favor of conventional agriculture nor did I say that it's justified. You're tilting at windmills.
I have zero clue what point you're trying to make here. In comparison to what? Based on what evidence?
See this is where I take issue with your attitude in these replies. You have approached this discussion as if there are only two options and that any criticism of solarpunk as an aesthetic masquerading as a political program equates to defending conventional agriculture and the typical western diet.
On top of that, instead of actually engaging with my arguments you decided that I don't know basic terms and that I needed to be told about food production methods like chinampas. Then you sling an insult at me by calling me a debatebro. That's dismal. If you take issue with debatebro comments then you should reflect on how you've approached this exchange with me.
That was the entire point of what I was saying. The fact that you felt it necessary to gripe about bleached flour and shelf-stable foods and it's only when this deep into the replies that you finally start discussing the point really illustrates your hypocrisy in calling me a debatebro.
Not from what I've seen. I just see buzzwords like "appropriate use of technology" being deployed to avoid engaging with matters of implementation. I don't see any real engagement with ecology.
Just like with what permaculture has become today, so too is solarpunk. I've seen people with waterlogged soil making swales that further exacerbate the problems of water management on their land because they only understand form and not function, the same can be said with countless rocket stoves and rocket mass heaters - it's an utter disregard for any design principles because it has become aestheticized and a rocket mass heater has somehow become a symbol of permaculture. This is the exact same problem inherent to solarpunk except for the fact that solarpunk started as an aesthetic and, for all its problems and all the criticisms of it, at least permaculture was founded on serious agro-ecological design principles. The same cannot be said for the solarpunk movement.
This is why I think its important to be charitable about criticisms of Solarpunk. It does come from a genuine place. It's not the vapid futurism that Tech Oligarchs sell. And the video does make this point well: its not enough to have an aesthetic, you have to ask yourself how you get to that Solarpunk ideal, because, after all is said and done, if your aesthetic and your wellwishes do not arise from a concrete programme it becomes the easiest thing to co-op. Especially by said Tech Oligarchs. This, of course, without asking oneself any questions about de-growth, consumerism or the economic system in place. Even within a capitalist framework you have to be smart about it, otherwise you'll never get those walkable cities you so desire.