The Political Economy of Solarpunk (with Andrew Dana Hudson)

welcome to the fire these times a podcast dedicated to the easy task of tackling the 21st century from the periphery i'm your host julio and my goal is to use this platform to connect with activists scholars writers and other weird folks from around the world to link our stories and interests up join me as we get into all sorts of futurisms from solarpunk to d-growth as we explore meaningful ways of creating links between the peoples on the periphery and as we explore various topics from tech to anti-authoritarian politics feminism abolitionism the colonialism anti-racism and all the other fun isms in between this podcast is ad-free and accessible to everyone thanks to the generous donations of patreon supporters on patreon.com fire these times for as little as five dollars a month or 50 a year you can help keep this podcast independent that way if you're a student unemployed or in any kind of financial difficulties you can support with two dollars a month or 20 a year there are also 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sustainability researcher his stories have appeared in multiple outlets such as future tense vice terraform mit technology review grist and many more his 2015 essay on the political dimensions of solar punk has helped define and grow the solar punk subgenre and this is what we primarily spoke about in this episode today i found this episode pretty informative and i think andrew did a pretty good job at explaining solar punk both for an audience that is uninitiated so don't worry if you haven't heard about solarpunk before and at the same time he managed to transform this into a pretty in-depth conversation on the potential of solar punk as well as i think um most of you know by now i'll be dedicating more episodes to discuss solar punk as this is a movement that i believe has great potential and as usual i'm pretty bad at explaining why but uh yeah that's it for me folks thank you for listening as always i hope you find this conversation as entertaining and informative as i did thanks a lot everyone [Music] my name is andrew dana hudson you see him pronouns and i'm a speculative fiction writer sometimes i call myself a climate fiction writer i do research into sustainability and do narrative strategy and editing a few other things and yeah happy to be here and thanks for being here we'll be primarily speaking about one of the essays that you've written a few years ago called on the political dimensions of solar punk which i think is going to be the title of this episode as well i just told it um can you just uh for those who don't know like just from the start can you explain what solar punk is i've i have done two or three episodes so far about cyberpunk so some listeners already know but i'm gonna assume that not everyone does know so how would you define solarpunk yeah um i think it's i've i call it a speculative movement because it seems to be broader than just uh a speculative genre of fiction there are people who see these aesthetics and and these sort of genre conventions and and one are more interested in a kind of practice than they are in uh being creatives in this uh particular space but you know as a as a a movement of science fiction and and praxis uh it seems to me to be about trying to tell stories in a future in which there's been some kind of green revolution or there is going to be some kind of green revolution it's about figuring out what a sustainable world actually looks like and how we get there from here so i often talk about it in in comparison to cyberpunk you know the original uh punk subgenre which i think is is a really good point of comparison and i think solar punk is kind of the true uh the the true heir if you will to to cyberpunk and you know when when cyberpunk emerged in the 80s it was at a time in which you know science fiction was really you know it was a lot of uh time travel paradoxes and you know wormholes and galactic space empires and all these sorts of you know really cool ideas but there was a you know some some writers came onto the scene who said look all that uh stuff and you know out in space uh is missing what is changing life right here on planet earth which is computation right that that was the technological revolution at the time and so they uh created a canon of literature and an aesthetic based on imagining uh computation sort of spinning out into uh to be a more dominant force in the world which of course that it now has right they just nailed a lot of that those kind of basic predictive elements and you know they they uh call it cyberpunk because they mostly told these stories from a countercultural perspective right from the perspective of the people who were uh you know fighting the system or marginalized by the system in a uh you know more elaborate way than the average kind of cyber pro right um who were sort of rebellious in in some uh manner and not like living a mainstream life uh where you you know wake up in your like tiny apartment and you like fill your brief your cyber briefcase and you go to your cyber job at like wayland yutani industries or whatever right um and go home and eat your cyber meal right so the cyberpunks are all like the hackers right the mercenaries the like all these cool people um and so you know for me i think where solar pump kind of comes into the equation is uh looking at our current situation and be like okay there's a new uh set of technologies that are changing the world right they're for the most part technologies of sustainability they're uh really cheap renewable power which seems to get cheaper and cheaper right solar in particular um and has solar in particular has this like distributed potential to to really change where and how our society gets and moves around uh power and then there's like permaculture there's uh technologies of adaptation to the changing climate there's a little like biotech in there um there's all kinds of like traditional knowledge that um is being sort of rediscovered and and you know is being found useful and so so the question is like okay who are the punks in this situation who are the the people who are taking these technologies to sort of like a bleeding edge place and in in the context of this technological upheaval are not are living or the countercultural lives and not the mainstream lives and like what are their stories right and you know in that context i think you it's not hard to see how you get to the sort of typical kind of solar punk like optimism right because the you know the the uh norma like the normal majoritarian like position on a lot of these questions of the future is like we're doomed like just like the system can't be changed uh and you know all all we can do is sort of live increasingly like sad and nihilistic lives uh increasingly distracted by the the sort of digital uh figments being fed to us so uh you know and so solar punk is like pushes in an opposite direction and says like cyberpunk was about technologies that abstract human relationships with with uh the world right that drive our our lives into greater and greater levels of abstraction and um solar punk is about technologies that de-abstract human relationships with the material world right that give us more agency over food and water over uh the climate over the land so that's kind of where i i try to look at it i think you know it also brings in a whole host of people who are like seeing solar punk has an opportunity to tell stories about social justice which is like certainly needed to tell stories that are more diverse and bring in uh perspectives from uh you know from around the globe from different marginalized identities from uh afrofuturism and indigenous futures and disability futures and queer futures and and i think you know those all are seeing solar punk aesthetics and wanting to play is is great um but i yeah i think that's that's i guess that's probably a big enough spiel to be working with yeah you know thanks thanks a lot for that um i guess you you already answered part of it but because the the next question was going to be like how did you go from looking at solar punk as an aesthetic which a lot of people i think still think of it that way to assessing its political economy which is obviously the the main essay that i was looking at and what does that kind of look like well um you know when when i wrote that essay solar punk just was sort of like very just the beginning uh to kind of peek into the consciousness and uh so you know i i think i guess assessing is kind of a tricky word there because there wasn't a lot to assess right like they're um wasn't a lot of solar punch literature there was like a little art there were like a few stories um there you know were kind of these like fashion sketches on tumblr that you know when paired with some of the kind of like trees on skyscrapers seemed to like imply a kind of vibe and um you know i so and there was like some manifestoing going on right and there's been a constant manifestoing for like the last seven years um and and i read um notes toward a manifesto uh essay by adam flynn who was someone that uh i had sort of been acquainted with in the bay area uh he was like roommates of one of my best friends and and so i read this essay and like oh i know this guy so i went and like made him get a beer with me and we we started uh talking about solar punk and and you know wrote wrote some solar punk later but you know it i think for me it was like having those conversations and kind of getting a sense of of uh you know what kinds of futures people were starting to play with and just sort of wanting to offer some uh sense of like grounding of uh some you know the the essays really like advice to people on to like kids on tumblr who were like somewhat slightly younger than me right which now feels like the the idea that i i was like an elderly uh know it all uh six years ago now it feels very funny um but you know it uh it was trying to say like oh you know this implies a certain set of uh political arrangements right like the the fact that we have that there's you know in my mind not a lot of like magical technologies yeah in in a lot of these imagery right like there's people are still have headphones and they like it seems like they still have phones there aren't a lot of flying cars i mean sometimes you see a flying car and solar punk art um but you know it sort of gives us a sense that like maybe what this is suggesting is not that we invent a bunch of new never heard of technologies we discover new scientific principles and then this sort of creates a rippling change to our society and this is what that new society looks like if we invent those things but rather like it implies that we change our political relationships to each other to technology as but how we build our our cities how we uh what kind of you know labor we pay for uh all those like korean skyscrapers you know you need a lot of a lot of like gardeners like hired us as supers to keep those those trees alive and um and uh you know how we uh uh how we treat each other and and um so yeah i kind of wanted to talk about uh the sort of here there of getting to those kinds of sustainable political uh relationships and um you know just just what sort of ground we were building on when we uh when we pursue a solarpunk future um you know i don't think solarpunk has to has to uh uh be you know 100 engaged with like what do we do in the 2020s what do we do in the 2030s like you can go further out right people do but that for me was like the most interesting part of the question and so i i kind of wanted to riff on uh on that yeah no that makes sense uh is it fair to say that what kind of separates solar punk as as a genre as an aesthetic as you call a speculative movement is a a sense of a present urgency so it's it's not just that obviously most of these stories are set in the future um but they're responding to a real need in the present if that makes sense yeah i mean we live in very like impending times right yeah the the climate crisis is is here um we are we're in the cyberpunk dystopia but the problem is that like turns out that like it doesn't even work very well right like handing handing power over to the the technological the big tech digital mega corporations uh they're not actually able to like solve the problems that are even going to like afflict them in the future um so you know that that yeah it implies a kind of urgency um that i think we all naturally feel and the other thing is like all science fiction all speculative fiction is really written about like the time that it's written in right it's it's really not about the future like the great stuff is about the politics and the culture and the the vibe of of uh the present and our like vibe at the present is time is running out and so that's gonna make it in that's gonna make it into both how how we the stories we tell and also how we interpret um these stories and and these vibes and so uh yeah that's that's uh it's precarious but also really exciting um there's a term that i i use in a book i have coming out next year called our shared storm which is my first kind of novel like book even though it's kind of a fix-up novel um but it has a sort of extended section on climate fiction and how i think it works and there's a term i use called post normal fiction so in sustainability there's a term called post normal science which is like very influential on the the discipline of sustainability and the idea is um that you could imagine like a sort of a chart space with an x and y axis and the x axis is uncertainty the y axis is stakes and as you get further out you sort of move out of the the realm of like pure science where you're just doing just 100 percent abstract research into this world of applied science and then you're kind of go out into this world of like uh advocacy and consultancy right where policymakers call upon you to call upon scientists to kind of give their opinions and like those what those opinions are like affect the real world have real stakes and and are maybe trying to answer questions about uh problems that are are not as clear as those in the laboratory um and then if you go out even further you get into what um the uh rabbits and funkowitz i think were the authors what they called the post-normal realm which is um an area where the the stakes are high or uncertainty is higher both and you're sort of dealing with wicked problems where you kind of only get one shot but their argument is you can still do science in this situation and i think you know we can look at kind of a similar graph and be like this is some this is something that authors and and you know all kinds of different disciplines might be doing right like we could we that when we write climate fiction because it is speaking to a particular political moment about something that is like very impending and uncertain and the stakes are very high that we're kind of doing a post-normal fiction um and that you know that means that i think a lot of people uh think of it very differently right that they they stop feeling like i want to create like uh a piece of kind of pure literature and people start being like man what what can how can i write use my stories use my whatever my creative talent is to uh like push nudge the world in a better direction because like i gotta do something um and so you know i think it there's an activist bent to a lot of this there's a uh it can be a little didactic it can be a little pre-figurative where people are sort of using uh solar punk and uh the other kinds of specular fiction to like figure out to game out these problems and try to figure out how we we solved them as opposed to just say you know here's here's where i imagine it going or here's here's what the future is going to be like right um if you want to just like purely predict the future i don't know if like solar punk is the best place to start because it's like you know it's an unlikely proposition like a lot has to go right for us we have to like flip a lot of coins and win those coin flips but i think solar punk sort of says like okay let's like let's figure out what it looks like if we make good choices right like let's tell stories about that situation and hopefully in the process figure out what those good choices are and kind of mobilize our collective imaginations to um to to kind of get on that uh get on that bandwagon together yeah and you do mention in the essay like a like even a possible limitation to solar panel that it can't do everything but before before sort of asking that question uh well the essay was written in 2015 i think and you had written back then that solo punk um i have the code here is a creature holy of this decade native to global network society and i i definitely i had it a few months ago i think for the first time and but there's definitely something about solar pong that feels even today very 2010s which doesn't that which doesn't mean that it doesn't also feel 2020s in many ways i feel i feel like i'm still because of covert i think i'm still in my mind instead of a thousand intense but that's a different thing um because it's like enough time has passed or had passed and still has passed for the internet to no longer be that much of a quote-unquote new big deal for many people i i'm definitely among those who he is native to the internet whatever that means probably the first generation to say so as a millennial uh certainly true for those who those who are younger than than me as well um what's your understanding like if you why why do you think the 2010s were decay where the decade let's let's put it that way where sort of panghiri started becoming a thing well i think there's kind of pure technological reasons right like uh that was that was the the the sort of historical moment where we started to really see the cost of uh of solar power and other renewables just like plunge and uh start and really begin to out compete um fossil fuels and you know from a sort of this is what we're doing in the new technological revolution standpoint you know like like gibson said the street finds its own uses for things right that's sort of classic cyberpunk saying and uh so you know with when the the new thing is um these this new renewable energy technology that is shaking up for power structures that flow from our our energy system uh you know then then uh we have to figure out what what is the street doing with those things and and that takes us to a different place than than cyberpunk that sort of calls for a new um calls for a new moment and uh i i also think that you know um when i wrote this you know i look back at this essay and and uh how like influential it's turned out to be and and but also i feel a little chagrined because you know i i like 100 missed what was like around the corner right you know i i wrote this for a moment um in which it felt like we were just locked into a kind of neoliberal stagnation and the only bright spot was uh a like just this sort of budding on the margins of a new kind of imaginary that i saw in solar pump right and then you know a year later we have brexit we have trump all of a sudden you know my sense that uh the the like ruling class that poured my asses all over the levels of change was just totally uh just totally went out the window right like very it was became very clear that rather than you know this sort of neoliberal establishment like firmly having their hands on the steering wheel and controlling where society goes like no one had their hands on the steering wheel and everyone was just like was just like slumped down like shoving their foot into the gas pedal and you know so in that situation i think it slightly turns out to be kind of slightly different right where um you know the levers of change are up for grabs and we can imagine uh a politics that radically shifts the the direction of our of our world of our societies that doesn't need to sort of be this kind of pre-figurative lifestyle in the margins of you know this of these technologies right that we can imagine it coming from a revival of the trade union movement from um like mass use movements right a kind of from mass politics and not from this kind of counterculture um but you know at the time in 2015 uh where we were like really feeling the drag of the obama years here in the states and um really kind of feeling like um you know the the sort of um the that we weren't at an end of history but like uh if we were going to like have new history happen like something uh we we need to very deliberately like crack that shell open um and it seemed like imagination and these kinds of um these kinds of people and and practices that i uh i and others were identifying as kind of like a new generation of both science fiction and also just like real life punctum um was uh uh yeah like that was the place for it so um and i think you know the just sort of mechanically of how it emerged right like it emerged from people on tumblr who are like very genre savvy just got like seeing sort of a you know a lacuna and wanting to fill that fill in um what goes in that sort of genre spot um it didn't emerge from a bunch of you know uh sci-fi writers deciding to uh you know write some edgy stuff and then that stuff getting collected and called solar punk right solar punk as a term inspired a lot of people to write to write particular kinds of stories and you know i think that that uh um shift from like we want to talk about genre we're like super hyper media savvy teens on tumblr to like you know establish science fiction writers writing um in you know very much inspired by these ideas and aesthetics right that that's like a flip-flop that um you know is is very contemporary is very uh of of internet culture in the teens and um so you know and and again it's um you know good science fiction is always about the politics of the moment right and and um our our politics and the teens and what we felt sort of impending um were uh you know required a new kind of storytelling um to deal with right like you know cyberpunk that's about urban decay and corporate power and globalization right those are the core anxieties underlying that and so with solar punk it's global social justice the failures of like capitalism and the climate crisis um and you know so so um those of like i think our primary concerns have you know shifted a lot since 2015 right like now i think a lot of people would say that it's like even more the climate crisis um that it's uh you know the rise of fascism amidst the failures of of late capitalism and um it's uh uh you know not just um for global social justice like that those are her like probably taking a back seat to the the ways in which we now see uh inequality playing out through the lens of the pandemic right um and so you know like solar punch stories like none of us were really out there predicting something like covet right so um if you were like reinventing silverpunk now in 2021 or 2022 um i think you know you'd come up with something very different right um because the you know the the ground has has shifted um so uh yeah all these things are are i think are very historically contingent but that that like sort of what makes them really easy and interesting for uh and and open for lots of people to engage with right because we're all we're all living in that history and so we we all have opinions about it no for sure um you mentioned the focus of global justice and i i found it very i think one of the elements of that essay that kind of grabbed my attention the most is that you actually do mention the importance of care work not just i mean it always has been important instead is important but it definitely seems based on just demographic trends and stuff like that that it's going to be even more important in the future and i don't i don't actually know how to ask this question but why why did you walk us through your thinking if you can remember it of like how you thought why why you thought it was important to include care work in a discussion about soda punk yeah so you know this essay was really kind of an attempt for me to um you know bridge bridge between the um kind of predictive analysis of of ongoing history by some cyberpunk thinkers who i like really you know respected and followed and the sort of this new type of futures thinking that i was seeing from you know not from the older gurus but from like the younger the younger crowd um you know from people who are just a little bit younger than me at the time and um you know so so uh a core uh part of the essay tries to cast solar punk in light of something that uh bruce sterling who's a really successful novelist and kind of one of the originators of the term cyberpunk and and you know was the editor of mirror shades which is um you know sort of the classic cyberpunk anthology sorry bruce i i i stole his uh term for a story of mine called solar shades it's also the name of my newsletter solarshades.com um and uh but he you know he was saying a lot in the sort of early teens that the future is about old people in big cities afraid of the sky right that um if you want to predict the future right like rather than uh being like oh the future is going to be about x technology or gadget or x you know the rise of web x or whatever um and you know you should just look at like the things that seem like unshakable inevitabilities right that that's the demographics of people are getting older on the planet as a whole right because we're living longer and we're having fewer kids so the demographics of how old the average person is are shifting uh the vast majority of the planet is the majority of the planet now lives in cities and pretty much everyone else is trying to get there right we're urbanizing very quickly um and you know the climate crisis is is impending um so uh you know i think i tried to sort of say like okay this is this is where we're at this is like the the situation if we're going to imagine a science fiction that is like youthful and hopeful and um like fresh then we have to sort of like recognize these uh realities right because this is not something that's gonna change very easily any of these um so you know i think um care work is is super important and and something that's been like consistently devalued by capitalism over the last few decades and you know the the end of of uh uh the the the end of our lives is like increasingly miserable for more and more people even those who were ostensibly uh middle and uh and upper class right um and so you know it in in that context i think you know if we're talking about like family life if we're talking about like the kinds of jobs that are in the background the work that's going on you know we're just gonna need to be a lot of that there's going to be need to be more multi-generational households there's going to be there's going to be lots of people who you know you can imagine being your your cyberpunk or your solar punk heroes who are sort of their day job is going and and being like a long-term care nurse or something like this right um and it's gonna be like a core uh issue that communities are gonna have to to deal with right unless they're communities of no old people right but like if your solar pump communities don't have any old people in them um then you know the the all the old people are somewhere else and you have to figure out how to like if you're going to save the world and make it sustainable you have to do so for them as well um so and and you know i think like history has borne this out right like kovid has been just a horror uh for the elderly population i mean that's where so many of the deaths have come from uh has been nursing homes and and um from the elderly and and you know just you know in it just seems like uh our kind of benign neglect turned into uh you know extremely malign neglect in in that context and and so you know that's gonna be we if we're going to have uh a world organized around more just principles this is just something we have to figure out um you know my parents are getting older and figuring out you know was the right the right thing to do by by them and and you know how do i ensure that like you know my life going forward is one that uh that that our lives are kind of both able to move forward and and one or the other of us doesn't drag us down or i don't like sort of put them to the side or any of those things like those are kind of the intricacies of uh modern relationships that i think we uh solar pump can you know that offers a lot of grist for drama and storytelling and and uh uh you know the sort of base stuff of of uh having uh of imagining you know how people live right so yeah i i mean i think also there there's just sort of fits in with a general shift away from um work is about uh you know showing up to a workplace you know a [ __ ] job uh in an office or work is about like manufacturing things in a factory um to you know work is is about care and um meaning caring for each other caring for the land caring for non-humans um caring for crops these sorts of things um caring for landscapes and and sort of uh of the more urban variety um and you know we've got plenty of big stuff to build too we've got like a lot of machines to construct to like have shot at a sustainable future but um you know more and and more i think we'll we'll probably see a shift to that especially you know especially since it seems like people are are increasingly not wanting to uh spend a lot of their lives in like service jobs that are increasingly thankless and are way behind on wages right i mean we've got all these sorts of walkouts and the great resignation happening here in the states and um you know the uh the shift of sort of the primary locus of the economy from uh of the post-industrial economy from service to care i think because you know that that's like a pretty good bet uh as a futurist you could you could predict that and and you'd probably be all right this actually ties into the the the section well pretty good part of your essay is on cities and what i'll do if that's okay i'll just read it um small paragraph that you that you wrote um okay so i'm quoting uh cities don't die cities happen where people gather and people gather in cities because of this the cities we have today are largely going to be the cities we have for hundreds of years they will grow and sprawl where they can we cannot start anew from scratch we must reuse and refurbish the built environment to perfectly sterling there man you mentioned before the wreckage of the unsustainable is our frontier what we build never goes away often it must be lived in uh encode i think a lot of people when they think of solar punk and i've kind of had conversations with francis sort of trying gosh like what when i describe solarpunk what are the sort of things they think about and it's usually two things one is like more like i don't know the shire but with technology and the other is like high-rise buildings but with you know green balconies or something like that and i definitely if you just google images like solarpunk you will sometimes see some of that but the stories that i've been uh reading and obviously your essay definitely goes against that that um i would call it a trend but definitely against that tendency but anyway how would you view the relationship between solar punk and cities and i guess it definitely i mean it definitely does tie into the previous question about care work as well so you don't have to repeat that but yeah i think you know this was again sort of like a cautionary note to the people that were at the time um i saw kind of doing a lot of this this new imagining um and sort of saying like uh don't try to like imagine you know idealistic communities that are kind of off the grid or or not engaged with real places uh as we imagine them um i mean you can you know you can't i've read plenty of good stories that that sort of take you know start from that that point but you know that i if we if we don't change our cities then we don't succeed right we we sort of every you know all the bad things coming to our civilization are just going to come uh if we don't change you know how our cities uh look and feel and provide for people and you know how they work from a logistics and transportation standpoint um so uh you know from from like a pure sustainability standpoint there's just like energy efficiencies that you get from having people live in densely that we just have to leverage from like a futurist standpoint you know if you were to just like pre you know do like random person generator in 2050 or 2030 or whatever like almost certainly that person is going to live in in a city right like just the vast majority of people are going to live in something that you know we consider either urban or suburban right um and you know it just seems like we with the way that we've we've yes we need to change how how we build right like we need to stop building you know for planned obsolescence and uh trying to start trying to build new things that last a long time right that can last into like you know a solid long now of of hundreds or even thousands of years um or can be maintained to uh but um you know i think the the sort of the two ways that we we sort of get distracted is by uh sort of running off into the woods right building a little shire or by just sort of imagining a the kind of perfect uh future uh cityscape that is you know fresh built right that doesn't um which is what you know a lot of those um uh sort of green architecture renderings uh look like right and and you know that they don't have people in them at the most they have little render ghosts um running around and and just sort of like enjoying the scenery right but you don't have people with with jobs and stories and and uh worries and and relationships and friends and lovers and family that they're sort of tied to inhabiting these these uh places so you know i think something that i uh i like is um if you've got like uh a giant uh you know brutalist but with greenery uh sort of uh you know structure uh it's not actually silver funk it doesn't become solar punk until there's graffiti on it too right you need to have that sort of human human handprint but yeah i i i think it you know the the question of of how we retrofit this stuff is just a really like interesting and tricky part of of uh uh you know the sustainability problem the you know the wicked problem that we face right like the the idea that that okay let's just like buy some land let's build like a skyscraper this arcology that recycles all its water and gets all its energy and like boom that's like okay you've provided housing for like 2 000 people or something like that like good job just like the tiniest minuscule part of the problem right then the new like trillion dollar infrastructure package that just passed has 15 billion dollars to get rid of uh lead pipes and everyone's saying like oh no to get rid of america's lead pipes you definitely need at least 30 to 50 billion dollars right like why can we not just be like oh just don't live where there's red pipe lead pipes just like go like go out into like the unspoiled world and and like build afresh right like we can't do that like people live there we need the housing like people have lived there for a long time we don't want to kick them out of their homes right like they're part of communities these houses with lead pipes are like you know a part of a fabric um so we have to go and it's like much uh trickier work in some ways um at least from sort of an imagination standpoint uh to to do that but because you're you know you gotta tear up streets and and like it's annoying to like do this in places where it's sort of people have have to like uh deal with the construction noises and you know all these sorts of inconveniences in in my new book uh that's coming out uh there's a little bit that i'm quite fond of and sort of you know there are five scenarios um and one of them is a little more like a solar punk utopian one where we've sort of mostly handled the problems or or are on our way and um they're at the climate negotiations and the narrator or sort of the perspective character from this on this section um is from california and he sees these um uh these sort of like swaggering uh guys from africa come in from you know who are like uh from ghana and nigeria and and uh south africa and you know various places and he's like oh man they they had it so lucky they were able to you know not get stuck with all this zombie development that uh we are just like up to our neck in in california that we we are still just kind of like trudging along like we built the modern world and we built it wrong and these people have gotten to like skip a lot of our mistakes right like totally leapfrog us um so uh and and build you know the implications that they've built these kind of uh kind of visions and uh you know that americans are kind of stuck uh burdened with the sort of previous centuries uh mistakes and that that takes longer to kind of dispose of than uh to to create these archaeologies are fresh so yeah yeah no that makes a lot of sense um i actually look uh you send it to me i haven't got it yet unfortunately i had the first uh chapter but there's a very interesting uh link you just made it as well now like the the relationship between solar punk and utopia i don't know why i sort of don't see them as as necessarily the same thing but they're definitely sort of in conversation with one another you write um so i'm gonna quote you again uh punks are an essentially anti-social or at least counter-cultural force rejecting and attacking the norm in this case that means understanding that the beautiful clothes and buildings polar punk and visions are likely to be surrounded by something very different the cracked concrete of decaying infrastructure the smudged plastic of cheaply made gadgets the intimating glass and steel of finance photosys and code you just mentioned it now like that idea of of california in the future for example uh or now but so i guess the obvious question here is would you would you define cyberpunk as a utopic genre or what do you see the relationship between solar pump and utopias well you know clearly a lot of people who uh are inspired by by solar punk uh are inspired in a kind of utopian way right like they see this and they're like this is uh what what like their imagination is cracking open the problem of like how do we imagine utopia um and you know some of the plenty plenty of of the work that gets done is not in engaged in this sort of like um you know more near future uh intermediary time where we're like trying to solve the these huge problems and like let's sort of uh turn our our literary camera to what's happening among the these like weirdo solar punk people that are totally bucking the norms and and uh rebelling against conventions and power structures and you know are they are they sort of like the class the revolutionary class you know in sort of a marcusa kind of way that is gonna like be able to uh overthrow the the the you know hegemonic forces and um uh you know that's kind of the the section that i'm mostly interested in um not entirely i i quite like you know utopias and their discontents right i like imagining like we've got a green new deal or like we fix all these problems right like how what is the drama was the thing that's gonna like have people griping about and can i tell a story about that but but you know like i don't wanna box anyone out right like becky chambers novella um a song for the wild build is like clearly like i don't know becky becky can totally like call me up and correct me on this if uh if she feels like it but it seems like that would not exist in its current incarnation had like solar punk has a kind of aesthetic discussion not not happened right and it's a great it's a great story it's so fresh and and nice and you know very much like we live in a society that's just fundamentally good and just and like we're still it's still not going to make us 100 happy but we're going to be empowered to like seek out our happiness um and uh you know in some ways that puts a lot of responsibility on us to to do so um and to get it right so you know i think i think we we have to include that kind of work and you know there was tons of that sort of utopian uh imaginings and um i was a story reviewer for this uh climate fiction contest that this website grist had earlier this year the imagine 2200 contests yeah yeah they're really yeah they're really good and and so you know me and and serena umari and tobias buckle we all kind of like cracked down to like the top 20 out of like 900 some stories and you know that was of those like tons of them were were kind of solar solar punk utopias and i you know i i think that you know that is um something that uh we really do need to engage with and write um i think you know last year a couple years ago um uh the science fiction writer carl schrader tweeted something about how like people are um people would prefer dystopias they understand to utopias they don't understand yeah right yeah um you know our current wherever you're at in the world like you are if you're a living person like still living um and you know some people are in in such desperation that they absolutely will take anything else but for a lot of people we're kind of just on the border right like we know we've got problems but we are sort of surviving and uh we know that there is kind of a place for us in the world where we are sort of scraping by and if you go to those people and you say we're going to change everything we're going to up in the whole system um we're going to change you know how how we make laws and that we're going to change how our communities are firmly we're going to change our households you know and it's not unreasonable for those people to sort of uh go of the devil they know we're headed to being like i in some ways i would rather like keep this world in which i know there's a place for me then embrace a radical vision that i might uh where there just might not be a place for me so we have to kind of like help them see that you know themselves in these futures and i think telling utopian stories and in which people can be like okay so that's what i would be up to were we to abolish capitalism that's how i would go about my day and find like meaning in my life um that's sort of like what the content of my my memories and and and my um relationships would be you know that that kind of work i think is is really important um uh and so you know i don't think there's any need to sort of box it out of solar punk um i do think that you know if we're serious about this as like a punk genre and not just sort of like a call to a broader utopian thinking um you know the the the silverpunk pieces that i find most effective and that i often try to write are the ones that like um are about this like sort of bucking the norms of of society right um and are about the you know the individuals that are are um that are the punks that are the counter culture um that are doing something that's sort of like uh inherently you know not the mainstream um so and because that's where a lot of innovation happens that's where a lot of like cool dramatic uh ideas happens that's where people who you know if we prefigure them they may be prefiguring the further future um they might be sort of the just the lead of a trend that will soon encompass you know millions and millions um so i think you know also i don't you know clearly solar punk has a reaction against dystopian thinking right um you know you know in a way the like i think that was really having a moment kind of in the early the early teens right where you had you know your hunger games you had your elysium you had you know on and on and on um and that was kind of like the grist of a lot of uh you know sort of american pop culture particularly and like particularly why a culture which i think you know for the like youth that first started talking about solar punk on on tumblr right like this is the kind of thing that they're trying to chart an alternative uh to so um you know we we don't want to do dystopian uh or at least you know if we we want to accept the dystopian like reality and then figure out what is the utopian um uh you know tendency within that uh what is the sort of countervailing wind um these are all just different strategies that that we can take different kinds of seeing instruments that we can use to to try and like you know solve these these problems right because it's a like i said it's a post-normal situation we're we're using this genre this literature to like actively uh figure out what our future should shouldn't look like um and uh you know i'm like i'm i think you know the future like a lot of it emerges from material conditions right a lot of it is out of our hands um but you know a lot of the people who uh were inspired by cyberpunk um who maybe weren't the science fiction authors but were sort of like the people being like oh yeah this is interesting like man some of them went on to like make some some real cyberpunk dystopian technology right like some of them went on to to you know be silicon valley types and and uh or you know we're inspired by that literature to get into computers so um if we can you know and create a literature that inspires people to get into uh ecosystem repair and and uh sustainability and uh uh you know climate removal and or carbon removal climate repair permaculture all these sorts of things then like hell yeah let's do that yeah that does seem to be very like it's become almost of a of a joke online i guess but like the the recent announcement of like those like those robot dogs or what have you and uh the whole facebook and ray ban glasses and stuff like that that come that he refuses coming out of a black mirror episode at some point like that even that comparison feels that it's not enough anymore like the the as you say like the dystopian reality is let me put it this way there was a time i remember some years ago when watching black mirror just as an example felt like this is a critique of something that's happening today and oh we shouldn't do that essentially and a lot of it basically we did do that and so going back into into that mindset i'm saying this because i rewatched uh some of the episodes recently it really feels that okay well this maybe was a response to a moment it was response to something that was happening let's say that but right now i wouldn't want to i wouldn't be as interested let's say if they come up with a new season because i feel like reality is already pretty dystopic if that makes sense and that's why when i when i put that and it sort of leads me to the to the next question i wanted to ask about where i already started asking before the teens why it was the 2010s you wrote this essay in 2015 as i mentioned before and one of the things that you wrote in it is that um where is it i suspect that at some point the next decade or so it will truly dawn on us that the increasingly inhospitable climate is of our own making the result of policy decisions and political failures as it happens we're recording this while cop 26 is still happening it would be done by the time this is out it's been both very underwhelming and overwhelming at the same time for me but it is to add the same so that being said it is also true that the momentum has very clearly shifted in the past few years i think very few people would deny that especially when it comes to climate activism uh i i i'm old enough i'm 30 and i'm old enough to remember that there was a time when it really felt that there was a very small number of people actively talking about the climate other than climate scientists uh many indigenous activists and and so on most people from what i can remember was simply it wasn't part of a daily concern let's put it that way i don't i don't know for a majority but it doesn't it definitely seems that this is shifting let's put it that way i think i think that's an i think that's a reasonable assessment but given that you wrote this six years ago and all of these have happened since how would you sort of see those six years in relation to how solomon has been developing as has it been focusing on different things it's definitely bigger than it used to be climate fiction as a as a broad umbrella maybe then solo punk and i i i'm very bad at categorizing things so feel free to to kind of correct me how have you seen this change oh yeah i mean um so well i i went to cop 24 a few years ago um and that was really enlightening and then i you know i wrote my my book that i've got coming out uh in april um is set at the cop instead of five different versions of the cup and um you know it was very much about that that culture that particular sort of political project um and you know on the one hand it's like gosh you know it is such an uphill climb right uh because the institute like the the framework and the institutions are just like very flawed and and don't really have the leverage um that we need them to have um and the uh you know the the um we're sort of muddling along with like had we known the way things would go right like i think maybe we we wouldn't be um you know for instance working with a consensus based u.n model right then on our system um that we have right like it worked for the montreal protocol uh to to uh you know fix the hole in the ozone layer but it turns out that climate change is just a very different problem than uh the problem of of uh hydrofluorocarbons eating into the ozone layer right like it's a different uh class of uh pollutants that are like entangled into our uh economy in a very different way and uh you know when the the moment at which we were trying to uh deal with the hole in the ozone layer was also the moment that like dupont chemicals patent on freon was coming up for expiration so they were like capital was all for it like yeah like let's go and change out all of our refrigerants and sell a bunch of new refrigerators and make a lot of money on that right um and you know increasingly that's how it looks now right that most of capital is starting to be like you know it seems like we could make a lot of money if we put up a lot of new solar panels and wind farms and like you know gosh it like they kind of just run for free and like they're so cheap and like we can sell the energy and like like yeah like companies want to you know want to buy offsets they want to do this and that like so you know yeah like capitals coming around in a way that it wasn't in 2015 that's certainly good for our like chances um i don't know if it's necessarily gonna get like gonna get us to uh any kind of you know utopian or truly sustainable scenario fossil fuel is still digging in um pretty hard um you know this is the hardest thing human beings have ever tried to do right it's just the most wicked of wicked problems and we only get one shot at it um and you know we the the best we can do in terms of like running experiments to find the best uh to to find the best strategy is to you know tell little science fiction stories and and try to you know learn from those um because we only have have like one earth to enact our our strategy on so um you know i'm i'm yeah i uh there's a section in in my book in which all the like a bunch of characters are sort of holed up in the bar and the most dystopian of the of the scenarios and are talking about like what went wrong like where you know what like what did we as as you know the unf triple c like and our predecessors in this institution like um do you know where what could we have done better and i think there's like yeah there's tons of things that we we could have done better but we are you know you never step in the same river twice you never like worked on the same wicked problem twice right like the fact that we are working with this set of institutions with this set of of uh diplomatic procedures is uh you know that is the problem right that's what we have to solve for not sort of this other uh hypothetical in which you know um the kyoto protocol was formulated differently al gore won the 2000 american election like blah blah blah so um you know like all that said watching this cop feeling like it's okay there was all this buildup for it and uh you know bidens go in there empty-handed right because our sort of like the coal bear like we have a colbaron in the senate who's just gonna say no um or like you know one semi-likely situation is we pass 500 billion dollars worth of uh of of you know clean energy subsidies like you know mansion's willing to accept that whenever this podcast comes out that'll probably have already happened or not so i we're all all here in you know november uh 2021 on pins and needles in america to see if if that happens but you know it's it's very possible that we will not do and not have any like regulations that shut down uh existing fossil fuel infrastructure and but we do have a bunch of subsidies to kind of like build out clean energy in that situation like man do we need some solar pumps right we need some solar pumps to push the boundaries of the renewable energy the clean energy technologies and so that we can out compete the fossil infrastructure even faster right because the you know we're not going to be able to the you know the powers that be just aren't gonna let us sort of regulate those out of existence we're just gonna have to uh prove that they are worse than the alternative um and you know we might need some punks to go out do some direct action make it harder to run these the this particular uh you know stack of infrastructure make it a lot less profitable to extract and and burn fossil fuels and you know with a variety of tactics you know it it's not a great situation but um it'd be a better situation for all of us if we could just kind of smoothly pass the correct policies um but in the absence of that like yeah we need a countercultural force to help get us uh on a better track so uh you know it's a yeah not not the the best top so far um but there's a lot of like you said there's a lot of energy in climate now and and uh you know i think that that basic prediction that i wrote in 2015 like oh yeah that's right you know we had blood skies over california we had you know huge storms like flooding major american cities i mean you know in 2015 we'd already had some of that right like we had hurricane sandy which was like sort of a classic like oh my god and like the super storm that flooded new york situation that really felt like it was ripped from the the climate fiction headlines um but uh you know now we've we've really had them right in the context of the pandemic year in which you know everyone was very uh you know finely tuned to disaster unfolding and you know for a lot of people all we could do is kind of sit in our homes and watch um so i think yeah i think we've we've checked uh we checked that box right of for the for the most part obviously not everyone obviously there's like increasingly uh particularly here in america an increasingly irrational uh you know reactionary uh segment of the population uh that is like living in you know deeply out of touch with reality but lots of people are like oh like yikes this is not gonna be good um lots of people have experienced climate disasters um so you know obviously it will keep getting worse right i mean one of the things i think we've found since 2015. honestly since we found out we found since i started writing my uh you know my my uh scenarios book is like woo the climate's a lot more sensitive than we thought right like we like it turns out like 1.1 degrees celsius of warming is like a lot nastier than we thought it was going to be right that's what we're at now more or less and like i don't think we want to stay here right for me that like ramps up the eventual necessity of climate repair and getting all that carbon out of out of the atmosphere um so that we can stabilize at a lower average temperature that is in a less chaotic system um you know on the other hand uh it seems like uh coal you know we've still got your our coal barons kind of in charge of of american policy but um and we've still got plenty of coal to shut down that's continued to be built and extracted in china and elsewhere but it does seem like the appetite for coal is a lot less than a lot of early modelers predicted right so you know it's going to be real hard to hit 1.5 c as our sort of the the top of our warming um it might turn out to be a lot harder than we thought to hit two um or i guess i guess it'll probably be easier than we thought to hit two but two is going to be a lot nastier to live through right it's kind of what we're finding so we're kind of we're making all these adjustments uh we're finding out that reality does not like you know match the uh that does does not it's not sort of conveniently um uh match up what the sort of you know these very carefully negotiated over uh un targets are um the whole and yeah we need we need to be engaging in that process and and the fact that solar punk has like become a thing now i mean when i wrote this it was really like let's like here's an interesting idea let's make this a thing and it's definitely a thing now right i mean you know i there there's multiple anthologies there's like seems like everyone almost all the big sort of uh um names in science fiction or writing kind of near future climate fiction novels right some of them are more utopian than others um and you know we the the name solar punk is now no longer like a joke i mean it it's so it's a big town i don't you know i'm constantly finding out like you know people doing solar punk projects that i've never heard of which is great right i mean this wasn't the case in 2015. so you know like you said it's all becoming a little more um uh it's all there's a lot more energy and it's not more exciting uh and the stakes are a lot higher so uh you know the onus is doubly on us to do right yeah yeah for sure and at least on like my on my part um i'm trying to do more episodes on this podcast when it comes to solarpunk as well as like writing stuff from time to time and the the reason for that is that uh a lot of the topics that are that i usually go through on this podcast tend to be pretty heavy and arguably nothing is heavier than climate change at the moment and probably for the foreseeable future at least in our lifetimes and others and i i was looking for something that was that could have allowed me not necessarily uh to as a form like escapism for its own sake although i don't i don't necessarily think that's bad either but that it could offer me kind of um energy for the is presenters how i would describe it i would read these stories that are set in the future and i obviously know that they're fiction but they would sort of hit me in a different way or at least affect me a different way than if i was reading and we mentioned the shy before so like if i was reading the lord of things i i'm reading that book i know it's a fantasy i know there but i'm not i'm not reading it and kind of with the the hope that it has something to offer me in the present if that makes sense and and that's fine not all books have to but i definitely needed something that could do that and solopunk as the genre really ended up becoming that for me and part of the my goal on this podcast essentially among other things is to introduce this this speculative movement i really like that definition to to avoid the audience and this conversation is part of that um that being said i would really like to at least mention two uh well please feel free to mention more than that but i know of two of your uh recent works one is a um short story that you you wrote as part of multi multi-species cities solar punk urban futures and all i mean listeners know this by now but everything that we've mentioned i will write them down in the description and and on the website but can you talk to us a bit about what um what is multi-species kinships how you would uh imagine it and uh yeah just talk to us a bit about that that's okay yeah um that story uh the mammoth steps uh was originally printed uh in terraform uh which is that was the science fiction uh vertical and on vice motherboard and was was very kindly reprinted in the multi-species book um which you know i'm very glad at because um you know multi-species thinking is very close near and dear to my heart you know i i back in um 2016 i i stopped eating meat and um for you know mostly for climate reasons but when i did it really felt like a whole new vista of moral thinking opened up to me and um you know i was suddenly because i i wasn't trying to like you know justify uh my choices my lifestyle anymore i could like see more clearly the horrible things that we do to non-humans that we eat that we enslave who's like homes we destroy um that we you know hunt for sport um and uh and i was able to sort of see those see non-humans as like subjects more readily with their own opinions and memories and sort of inner inner life experience um that are like trying to like live a little life not a human life but you know a different kind of life and so you know that that was a a revelation that sort of crept into my my thinking and this this story um was kind of an early uh um was an early sort of attempt that had uh sort of manifesting some of those ideas right um some of which were also like from you know taking classes and talking to people in sort of the conservation world and feeling like the most radical position about animal conservation is uh on the table right now is you draw a line on a map and you say humans don't go in there yeah right yeah you you say that like we're just gonna like patrol against poachers with guns and just let the wild animals live their wild lives and you know if we do that to human beings that's called a reservation right that's like a ghetto and i i think that is um you know to me shows a lack of imagination uh about how we might you know not just uh treat and and you know have them not just have a more just relationship but but how we might have like real partnerships uh with non-human non-human beings and um you know particularly the ones that seem like you know they're they have they're they're smart they're language they have culture they have you know relationships and social structures like elephants and dolphins and chimpanzees and so forth right um octopi uh and so you know some of those it seems to me were were they on offer might want to not live in you know in a wilderness preserve might want to live in a city uh and have an apartment and you know have a job and uh you know be able to like earn money to like spend how they wish on like doing things that they that they like i mean like what what would our cities look like if they were built to have that uh let's have multiple multiple different species kind of engaged in them as a project and um so and and i also think that you know there's sort of a what if there in terms of um you know we have all this computational power where we're you know spending a lot of it making like uh really like dumb-looking nfts i don't know i mean i think there's sort of a cultural debate and like a technological debate that kind of pushed in two different directions for me there but you know we we spend a lot of it like analyzing data to serve people ads right what if instead we put all that computational power or a lot of that computational power toward um you know figuring out how to communicate with with uh other species right to analyzing their language and making sense of it um that's a that's like sort of you know kind of your classic sci-fi what if what if we invented uh elephant language translation yeah and um so that's that's kind of what what's in this story which um uh you know is about like a guy and a boy and his friend who's a de-extincted mammoth in siberia and they go on a little sort of uh road trip together they they walk their way all the way down to thailand to uh meet elephants uh and find that you know the elephants there have kind of rebelled a little bit and are trying to now build a a more integrated human human elephant society uh where elephants are not sort of a slave class right um so yeah and and i've got another like book in the works that has you know i've been it's been on my mind for a long time and i keep trying to you know maybe it may probably next year will be the year i really try to write it but it you know it's kind of an alternate history uh in which we have had a whole bunch of revolutions that have got us to a different political place where we are are sharing our world with other species and it's like a detective novel so it's it's sort of a yeah a socialist detective novel and uh you know a world of talking elephants um but uh uh yeah you know um it but it's a it's a great book and then you know i was really glad that this story was included and seems to have you know caught some fresh uh caught a fresh audience so yeah yeah i actually um you mentioned maybe next year working on another book but you have one that is that is upcoming as well can you talk a bit about that so in in april 2022 uh my my first kind of english language book i i have a collection of short fiction published in italian uh so if you know if you have a listeners who who speak and read italian yeah i always go i actually have the book oh wonderful i don't i don't have a physical copy yet uh so but that that that's great um yeah i think my contributor copies are you know in our in our fraud supply chain at the moment oh yeah um yeah uh so you know if you read italian that's got all most of my short fiction in it uh but this is my first book book in in english um and i wrote it mostly as my master's thesis i took like an extra year to write a book length masters and master's thesis for sustainability and so what it uh it's inspired by a set of um scenarios used by the ipcc used by the intergovernmental panel and climate change that sort of informs the the cop and and um uh all the u.n negotiations so they have a set of scenarios called the shared socioeconomic pathways that were used some of them in the ar6 report um in different ways and these are kind of replacements for a you know the previous sort of sets of scenarios um called the rcps that are kind of just about you know how much um you know how how much carbon we dump right and the ssps are kind of like okay these things are super socially entangled like like let's lay bear what our assumptions are going to be about how um how how uh the the sort of future of of the economy and society is going to look right that informs our you know questions of like what does you know what does like five percent gdp growth equal like more emissions or does it equal less emissions right um so you know there's five ssps um ssp one is like the sort of utopian uh uh ideal right that or not not necessarily utopian but it's a sustainability scenario it's where we like we manage to very pretty much like smoothly get to a sustainable world right like things go well for us we don't meet a lot of challenges to either mitigation or adaptation ssb2 is kind of middle of the road it's like present trend continue sp3 that's like way out in the chart space and it's that's like a nasty one there's sort of global breakdown of institutions there's a lot of regional conflict then you have these two to the sides you have ssp four which is like the high inequality scenario where we managed to do to like cut our emissions but the economies uh become really unequal and we do a bad job of adapting to climate change so the you know the impacts of climate change are felt really disproportionately by poor nations and poor people um and you have ssp5 which is kind of a a scenario in which we say like okay let's not even bother trying to shift off fossil fuels let's use our all that cheap energy you know it's not that cheap anymore to um hyper develop the developing world and like you know ask ask like is this in fact or better to to create all this sort of economic growth and just sort of adapt our way uh through the consequences and so you know i i when i first encountered these i was like oh these are science fiction stories these are climate fiction stories so um i talked with scholars who'd sort of worked on them um and decided to try to write a set of stories that like illustrated these um these five scenarios and i decided i kind of want them to be sort of like a comparative uh experiment where i'm sort of eliminating as many variables as i can so in a way it's like one story told five different ways right it is uh the story of cop 60 and there's a sort of a an overlapping cast of characters uh that are you see in in pretty much all all the stories and uh but because they're in different scenarios we've made different choices between now and like 2035 2040 by the time they're at it in in 20 in like 2054 they're all living very different lives you know they've grown up differently they've uh they're like and the cop is a different kind of institution in each of these scenarios and and so you know the it i tried to kind of create this sort of experiment and uh see what it was like to kind of uh take uh the one kind of core situation and sort of splay it out onto this this ssp chart space so it's really fun and very proud of the book it also you know if some of your readers are like academics who want to teach about climate change or climate change or current fiction or environmental humanities it's got sort of like a a section for for that that um talks you know pretty extensively about one about you know the ssps as like a thinking tool about climate change as a seeing instrument or climate fiction as a seeing instrument for talking about the future um so yeah i think i i'm hoping people will find it useful for classes and stuff and i think the book is also pretty entertaining like uh definitely some of like the funniest jokes i've ever written have have been in there and and um you know i got to sort of do the full game at between of kind of utop or like dystopian uh futures and and of different flavors and also a utopian one to cap it off so yeah the uh the book is called our shared storm a novel of five climate futures comes out uh in early april from fordham university press i i bought a domain name that uh i will um hopefully make it easy for people to find it called sharedstorm.com www.sharedstorm.com there's nothing there when we record but uh by the time this comes out i will hopefully have uh uh put something up uh take it easy so um yeah i i'm really excited for this book to come out you know like to some extent i'm like gosh i wish it was out right now because like the cop is going on and yeah and it would be um perfect and and but you know it for i think for a lot of us who are now starting to pay attention to things like the cop to pay attention to the the u.n process that sort of has uh holds all of our future in its hands to some degree i think the book is uh probably pretty useful in understanding that and uh yeah um so you know i hopefully when this comes out your your readers will be inspired you can go pre-order it yeah for sure i definitely encourage them to do so and i will include that in the description as well uh but sort of like as i always do with all guests i ask them to recommend three books to our listeners to sort of wrap the conversation up and so what are three books that you would recommend to our listeners and if you can briefly say why you know i i think i i honestly think like it would might be like most useful for people who are interested in solar pumping and have like sort of dived in to extend that you do to like go like read some good contemporary cyberpunk too and and sort of see the points of contrast so like um a few of those that uh readers might want to check out are like infomocracy by mauka older which is just like the best book about globalization uh uh like it really gets at like what it feels like to what it will feel like to live in like a truly globalized society um and is like just so bristling with imagination um and tons and tons of political ideas that uh i think you know as somebody who wrote about how like solar punch should really think a lot about politics i think i think we should uh consider um you know uh noman is a great uh modern cyberpunk uh book that is by uh nick carcaway that i really like um that you know just has such a uh you know it is so literally ambitious and and um i think should kind of be on everyone's radar um infinite detail by uh tim right that that's like another sort of um like super contemporary uh story that you know you kind of like in some senses you could imagine telling like the solar punk version of infinite detail which is a story about like what happens with if the internet would like boom go away and the kinds of collapse that that come uh with that and so so those are all like really educational books to to dive into that i think um they offer good points of contrast um i mean i mentioned i was like for solar punk stuff you know i mentioned becky chambers a song of the wild built um i think uh that's you know very beautiful little text uh stan robinson he's got his sort of un f triple c book a mystery for the future that's uh you know got a lot of uh really good stuff probably the most horror uh sorry the most harrowing uh piece of climate fiction ever is like the first chapter of that of that book with about a a deadly heat wave in india and like that that really does what i think you know no other no sort of apocalyptic uh far future uh waste you know we live in the post climate change wasteland book has ever has ever done uh as like really bring home just like how scary it is when the weather just turns against your body um and the book is full of really cool ideas um and uh walk away by corey doctorow that's like another uh one that is kind of like solar punk minus the solar but in terms of uh uh you know it just doesn't have a lot to say about the energy questions that i think are really central to to uh solar punk but um in terms like social organization and uh and imagining sort of radical uh ways of of connecting with each other and living and and opting out of uh the sort of hegemonic system which we may or may not be able to do right i think that's that's um uh up in the air whether or not uh i think i think we're all making a kind of calculus about um you know do we think there is one single hegemonic system that like uh overpowers everything else like can we change that system right and it's different in each of the sort of quadrants that that creates right um because if you think uh and i think solarpunk is kind of uh of the opinion that um uh we maybe can't change the the hegematic system but it is not uh totalizing right that there is in fact a competitive like a space where you can build an alternative right and you know i think that there's good arguments to be made for each of these quadrants right to be made that in fact um it is a totalizing system capitalism and uh but we do have an opportunity to change it right like we can build a mass movement and do mass politics that i think is not counter cultural that like stems from the needs of the the majoritarian culture and and stems from the organizing uh and the power and the sort of position into uh in the economy of the working class right a much more traditionally marxist approach and you know so um i think uh you know yeah i i i hope that like i guess since we're on sort of the final word i hope that people are like inspired by solar punk but but you know not necess they should think carefully about that calculation right and not necessarily assume that the path that the best strategy is to go and build a little commune and try to you know have a garden and do permaculture and and have rooftop solar i mean that's like a fine thing to do but it could be that like the best strategy is uh striking and organizing our workplaces and and taking to this to the streets and and shutting and you know shutting down the the economy until uh the powers that be do what we want or you know seizing the means of production right i mean these are all things i think we should consider on the table and and try to make the best choices that we can yeah yeah absolutely and i mean andrew thanks a lot for you we've spoken for quite a bit i appreciate the time you've you've you've taken out of your day to speak to me and this will be the first episode of 2022 and i think it's a nice nice way to start the year but yeah thanks a lot thanks for having me i know we went went over a bit but i really appreciate it oh no we didn't it's fine we're gonna take the opportunity [Music] you

Channel: the fire these times

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Id: gfvv-6Y-X9o

Length: 97min 39sec (5859 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022