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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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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.
When I say "polycultures like Three Sisters can outperform broadacre cereals", and you say "actually it's Four Sisters btw" (that term is nowhere near as commonplace as the one I gave), you are doing an extreme case of nitpicking.
When I say "mass commodity crops that get highly refined are ultimately not good for our health" and you say "they are actually better because they won't get wasted as much", you are defending industrial monoculture for globalized commodity production.
When you say "it isn't possible to make flooded canals over every city to make floating gardens in" you are saying something extremely obvious that doesn't prove anything or advance the discussion. No one is making the assumption that what works on a mountain lake can be replicated all across the world, this is obvious and you are using it as a strawman. I'm not going to list every tradition of polyculture for you, I was giving two examples that are either already present in the thread or extremely widespread and well-known.
When you say "chinampas don't promote a 'oneness with nature' characteristic of solarpunk", you are contradicting the original claims that solarpunk is too broad, and making an arbitrary line that does not exist in the genre. Any depiction of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan would be highly suited to solarpunk. Milpas, ahupua'a stream terracing, Inraren-style food forests, they all would look well-placed in solarpunk. In fact one of the problems with solarpunk is hanging on to the element of broadacre monocrop fields.
When you say "there's no change in the demands on arable land [between two different crops that provide the same number of calories]" that is simply wrong. Growing field corn for 2 million calories of chemically homogenized corn derivatives is far more damaging to the soil than growing 2 million calories of chestnuts or hazelnuts is, to say nothing of the logistical burden, health outcomes, or other structural issues around industrial farming.
Or if you are ignoring my point about how industrial commodity agriculture is ultimately bad for everything, and just zoning in on "bleached flour vs. unbleached", you are nitpicking to avoid actually engaging with what I'm saying. I should have said "not adaptive for our food system" instead of "not essential to our nutrition" though.
When you imply that solarpunk envisions a big gentry-like homestead for everyone, you are ignoring the majority of the genre which suggests a city/countryside dichotomy and plenty of small consolidated residential units. I haven't seen evidence that people in solarpunk settings live in ultra-low densities, which seemed to be the core of your argument.
Appropriate Technology is a rigorous term that refers to technologies that are sustainable, accessible, adapted to local factors/constraints, and maintainable by people that use them; the corollary of this is that they do not increase scarcity, and decrease alienation. It is not equivalent to "appropriate use of technology", and interchanging the two is just showing your unfamiliarity with the subject. Appropriate tech is nearly inseparable from an ecological emphasis, and it is a vital part of any model that projects to still be operational 150 years from now. At some point we're going to need to resort to our own body power, energy from photosynthesis, and long-lifespan solar panels... this kind of sounds like it would be a core pillar of a certain art/design genre.
Maybe I'm biased because my own experience engaging with the genre overlapped with my personal radicalization and the struggle to imagine what decolonized and decommodified life would look like, but I see a deep usefulness in it. Growing and harvesting things yourself, relying on the people you live nearby instead of the global market, and keeping your consumption within the bounds of your solar envelope sound like the most plausible pillars of solarpunk to me. Oh, and touching grass.
The video creator's points were that without a clear sense of boundaries, solarpunk can have its identity diluted, and if it only depicts the finished product, it can end up as nothing more than escapism and end up completely disconnected from our living practices. These are deeply true and apply to any aesthetic movement/style.
But so much of the criticism ITT and elsewhere boils down to "I don't see it in the subset that I glanced at, therefore it doesn't exist throughout the genre". Especially wrt labor and wild lands. For wild lands, they'd just be the same, a solarpunk wilderness scene looks on the surface the same as pretty much any other wilderness scene. As for labor, having gardens right next to houses implies that the people in the houses tend the gardens. I said this before in one of Ysgwñss' threads that became the last (?) solarpunk struggle session, you're not going to be inundated with imagery of people doing manual labor when one of the goals is for us all to have less labor that needs to be done.
You could just be honest and say "I don't like solarpunk because it's not explicitly Marxist enough" and be done with it. I'm not interested in losing track of the topic through back and forth arguments.
What I am interested in is being prefigurative, experimental, and living in a way that is consistent with revolutionary ideals and long-term vision, where the means are continuous with the ends.