I did say this post would be about collapse, but it ended up not being that, so you know. deal with it.
I suppose a critique of solarpunk as an aspirational fiction is as good a place as any to start. Maybe i can lead from that into deep ecology and then general collapse politics. If you are not aware, solarpunk is a science fiction genre most well known from the films of studio ghibli. It presents another path of techno-utopianism: rather than the cyberdellic facebook metaverse VR alternate reality free from government regulations with hints of ancapism, basically the lost future that vaporwave is the perfect critique of. In solarpunk, rather than escaping to a technological reality towards singularity and VR and virtual malls and AI bosses, humans adopt a more harmonious relationship with Nature, using technological progress to improve their surroundings with renewable energy, sustainable agricultural tecniques, and canals, they love canals. They also like blimps. Environmentalism, humanist, anti-capitalist, and technological. Seed bombing drones, DIY, horizontal organization, salvage, princess mononoke, collectivism, the whole shebang. You might think this sounds right up my alley in a lot of ways. I too am anti-capitalist, DIY, anarchist, and i like ghibli movies and ecology. And yes, I do share a lot of ideas with people who also like solarpunk, and my vision for a possitive future does share many elements with solarpunk, however there is one major distinction: they think things can ever be good. Solarpunks are aware of "greenwashing", where the aesthetics of ecological thinking are plasterd on top of structures which are actually harmful. An example I saw today, I went to the shop and noticed that they have big signs bragging about how their plastic bags are compostable, and they charge 10p per bag I suppose to dissinsentivise buying them (I think that's a government mandate). 10p is not very much money, but of course like any flat charge it's going to dissproportionately punish the poor for being poor, those small costs do add up over time but for someone on a extremely limited budget, they maybe can't afford to save up for a reusable bag, or they can afford it, but it's going to be an actual expense for them, where as 10 quid for a bag might be an almost imperceptible expense for someone not living in poverty. Anyway that asside, sure their plastic bags are compostable, but that doesn't really matter when almost every item in the store is sold in a non-biodegradable plastic bag, including for some reason a bunch of bananas? Corps and governments only have insentive to be "green" on their public face, but once you look even one inch past the veil it all falls appart. Now solarpunks know this, and they reject it. They reject for example, simply building high rises and covering them in greenery, when that greenery can't actually be productive enough to outweigh the resources used to build and sustain it. However, this is where I say, they've only succeeded in extending the veil's reach. Instead of the one inch from the compostable bags at the checkout to the plastic packaging on the produce, you have to go a few meters from the solar pannels on the roof-top garden, to the mines and factories in the third world required to produce them, and the waste created when they break after a few years (even well maintained solar pannels don't last very long, " Solar panels are discarded only after at least 25 to 30 years, and most have been installed only in recent years. By 2050, researchers expect that almost 80 million tonnes of solar panels will reach the end of their lives." [low tech magazine]. Or maybe you want to talk about the small scale wind turbines that power the solarpunk's house, and how the fiberglass they're made of is only producable through unsustainable factory processes, the blades need replacing every few years, they cannot be recycled or even really reused, they do not biodegrade, and due to physics, small turbines will probably never generate enough energy to offset their production costs in their lifetime. [no tech magazine]. Maybe your solarpunk permaculture with minimal human intervention and no industrial irrigation system, fertalisers, GMOs, or pesticides works great in the fertile soils of northern europe, but you try that in the climate and geology of many parts of the global south? Good luck feeding your population, or even yourself. See one aspect of their ideology which solarpunks like to down play is that it necesitates a drastic reduction in world population, and that population culling is going to end up being most necessary in sub saharan africa, and similar climates. Now I'm not calling them racist eugenicists, but let's just say it's not exactly a good look. To me, the end product of a solarpunk future looks likely to create a class split between the "punk" living in their envirodome permaculture small communities, and the population of the rest of the depleated world who's job it is to sustain them. That's not too far from how the world works now.
So this is probably the part where I am expected offer my perfect ideological sollution to these problems, and an improved possitive view of the future we can use as a lighthouse to guide ourselves. I think the lighthouse metaphor works too well for solarpunk, because you don't actually want to get too close to a lighthouse or you will hit the rocks. Well I have some bad news: I don't have one. I dont think one exists. I think, in simple terms, we're just fucked. For a variety of reasons. If I were to offer some course corrections I would say be more critical of humanism, and less essentialist about what constitutes nature. I'll just leave this quote from Hello From The Wired here, as it sums up my possition quite nicely "cyber-nihilism insists on post-humanism. We do not seek to save Nature, because Nature does not need saving, and cannot be preserved in its present form no matter how much we like it. Nature does not matter to us either as a thing to be worshiped or to be used; it is, rather, a hostile and wholly inhuman thing, and because of this we both have an affinity for it and an enmity towards it. We do not seek to tame it, or to save it, but to accelerate its metamorphosis into a gray, metallic form. We therefore recognize that Nature is not a fixed set of characteristics that must all be present in order to say that it exists and is safe. Nature is the default, and cyber-nihilists seek to accelerate the default towards an eldritch bio-mechanical landscape." [Hello From The Wired, An Introduction to Cyber-Nihilism]. What that eldritch biomechanical landscape looks like I'm not too sure. Probably something to do with brutalism.
Solarpunks (and also vegans, anprims etc) missunderstand nature as some immutable perfect system where humans must either integrate seamlessly, or if that's not possible then distance themselves from as much as possible. I say nature is nothing if not fluctuating. It's natural when termites build their mounds, or beavers build their dams, so why is it unnatural when humans build our commieblocks or computer infrastructure, or even farms? And why is building solar pannels or biodomes somehow excused from that? Generally speaking, I am a self interested person. If you wanted to put it politely, you could call me a "voluntary egoist", or at least I try to be that. I'm not interested in saving the world, I do not think it's a valluable goal, I do not think the world needs saving, and even if it did I do not think it's possible. What i am interested in is making life as livable as possible for myself and the people I care about. It just so happens that what's good for me is probably also good for you, we probably live in similar economic conditions, have similar wants and needs. I need a place to live and food to eat as much as anyone else. So what's in my self interest is probably often in yours too. So when I go on rants about ecology, permacomputing, software, whatever. It's because that's what I want. I am mad that modern software won't run on my old thinkpad because I have an old thinkpad and I want to run modern software. It just so happens that a lot of people are in a similar situation, so what's good for me is good for them. Speculative fiction has always been best as a warning, not as a goal. I don't really care where we're going, as long as I can still connect to the Wired when we get there.