But how do we loosen modernity’s grip when we’re still dependent on its tools? The answer is solarpunk, the edgy but sincere cultural movement joining technology with nature – reimagining technologies based on conceptions of science that coax rather than torture.

The ‘punk’ in solarpunk comes from its blended roots: not rejecting technology like a luddite, nor blindly embracing it like an ecomodernist, but instead yoking technological development to ecological and biological principles to serve the good of the whole.

The ‘solar’ element connects the photosynthetic wonder of plants as light-eaters, with the free energy of the Sun harnessed by solar panels and other forces of nature in wind, water and geothermal energy.

Solarpunk’s point isn’t that a ‘solar future’ begins and ends with the devices we already know. It widens the meaning of technology to include Indigenous and place-based practices such as chinampas – raised garden beds woven from reeds, anchored in shallow lakes, and refreshed with nutrient-rich silt from canals. They don’t produce electricity, but they do produce abundance: food, soil and a stable local ecology.

Solarpunk puts that kind of low-energy, high-yield ingenuity beside high ecotech like atmospheric water harvesters to pull drinking water out of the air, and regenerative microgrids to store power. In other words, it treats science and technology as plural: shaped by culture, landscape and values, not dictated by a single industrial blueprint. That’s why solarpunk often turns to biomimicry – learning from nature’s designs – to aim human ingenuity at repair: restoring ecosystems while also restoring the ways we live with one another.

…

Self-sufficient cities, fostering health through clean air, water and lush botanical features, have appeared in futuristic visions for decades. Visual representations harken back at least a century to futurists sick of black soot, utilitarian architecture and industrialisation’s pollution sapping the beauty from buildings and the people who lived in them. As housing and architecture itself became industrialised and mass-produced, local flavour evaporated, and the patience to evoke beauty was lost.

In the postwar period, it wasn’t only the Soviet Union where ugly block buildings took over. As cement and pre-fab became the tools of the global trade, cities became designed for cars, not humans, and buildings reflected this loss of connection to beauty and nature. Urbanisation at the expense of liveability not only harms our health and dampens the idyllic rus in urbe (bringing the charms of the countryside to the city), it also kills the spirit.