Soon the nascent green sensibility that Charles Schulz expressed would sweep the nation in the form of the modern environmental movement. Dreams of Orbit City quickly gave way to nightmares of a pollution-poisoned Earth; the old ideal of limitless progress through new and better technology was rejected in favor of self-imposed limits and a romantic embrace of the small-scale and primitive. The anti-Promethean backlash was now under way.

Real people want some connection to the past and to the natural world.”

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel’s famous lament captures the disappointment of those of us raised on mid-20th-century technological optimism. Back in the 1960s we were sending men to the moon and exploring the ocean depths, and we thought we were just getting started. Back then, a bright and gleaming future beckoned with moon bases, space stations, underwater cities, limitless energy from fusion power, robots at our beck and call, and yes flying cars.

The explosive growth of the internet gave us once again a heady sense of humanity’s expanding powers, but one altered and ultimately disfigured by the anti-Promethean backlash. The culturally dominant vision of the future that took shape in the 90s came to be known as “cyberpunk”: it contrasted an online world of limitless possibilities — the frictionless, disembodied realm of “cyberspace” — with a physical reality dominated by soulless mega-corporations and ruined by environmental despoliation.

Here I’m referring to Ezra Klein and his “supply-side progressivism,” Derek Thompson and his “abundance agenda” — by the way, those two have now joined forces to coauthor a new book — and Matt Yglesias and his regular calls for energyabundance.

Here I’m talking about “solarpunk,” a sci fi genre/aesthetic/social movement. It’s best known through artwork — notably, images of futuristic cities swathed in greenery so that nature and artifice fuse seamlessly.

The name solarpunk seeks to define by contrasting with other sci fi genres: both the dystopian cyberpunk I’ve mentioned already, as well as alternative history “steampunk” (imagining a world in which steam-powered computers carried the Victorian era into the information age). As explained by Adam Flynn, associated with the movement from its early days, “If cyberpunk was ‘here is this future that we see coming and we don’t like it’, and steampunk is ‘here’s yesterday’s future that we wish we had’, then solarpunk might be ‘here’s a future that we can want and we might actually be able to get.’”

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and wild, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world — but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not warnings.

The “solar” part of the name is clear enough: the movement envisions a future built around clean energy, especially solar. But what about “punk” — what’s that supposed to mean? It suggests an oppositional, countercultural stance: egalitarian and anti-hierarchical, frequently anti-capitalist, or at least anti-consumerist throwaway culture. Though the solarpunk idea is still too new and amorphous to have any rigorous ideological framework, it definitely gives off a left-wing vibe. You can see a clear solarpunk sensibility in the works of some prominent left-leaning sci fi writers: just mentioning books I’ve read, I’d include Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson and Makers and Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, during a recent live Q&A session on Instagram, spoke out against climate doomerism and called herself a big believer in the optimism of solarpunk.

[Solarpunk] imagines a world where energy, usually from the sun or wind, can be used without harming our environment. Where green roofs and windmills allow humans to live in harmony with nature. On the surface it might seem like a rosy, perhaps even naive perspective for our moment, when climate change-fueled disasters are in the news every other day. But imagining Solarpunk purely as a pleasant aesthetic undermines its inherently radical implications. At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today.… Many solarpunks agree that the ‘punk’ element becomes clear when they go past the movement’s visuals and into the nitty gritty. Solarpunk is radical in that it imagines a society where people and the planet are prioritized over the individual and profit.

So let’s look at the core of the solarpunk vision, stripped of the ideological baggage that some people attracted to that vision have brought with them. At the heart of solarpunk is the idea of an environmentally sustainable high-tech future — and that’s the right idea! And it’s the right idea not just because we don’t want to wreck the planet, but because we don’t want to wreck technological dynamism, either. The only way to put the anti-Promethean backlash behind us is to develop technologies that allow humanity and the natural world to prosper together, thereby undermining the indiscriminate cultural hostility to technological progress that currently bogs us down. This is the future that solarpunk envisions. To get to that future, we need as many people as possible to find it attractive enough to work toward, and to fill out those numbers we need people from all ideological starting points.

Beyond this core commitment to clean energy abundance, solarpunk also clearly embraces a countercultural sensibility — an opposition to business-as-usual consumerism. And that’s the right idea, too! But both solarpunk proponents who embrace it as a new species of anti-capitalism, and supporters of technocratic capitalist innovation who reject solarpunk for the same reason, are misunderstanding what is the optimal relationship between solarpunk and capitalism: not either-or, but both-and.

To rise to the challenge of the permanent problem and build societies with widespread opportunities to “live wisely and agreeably and well,” we need both the Jetsons and solarpunk. That is, we need large-scale technocratic capitalism and decentralized high-tech communities committed to greater self-sufficiency at the local level.

To make our civilization environmentally sustainable, we need to keep advancing the technological frontier until our energy and food systems no longer pose a threat to the rest of the natural world. That can only happen through large-scale capitalism — that is, the combination of entrepreneurial private enterprise and a government that actively promotes ongoing development through big investments in R&D and other market-enabling public gods.

And to make our civilization sociologically sustainable, we need to recognize that mass mobilization into wage employment and consumerist lifestyles is failing to provide most people, especially those outside the professional-managerial elite, with good opportunities for rewarding, fulfilling lives.

This is why I’ve come to support the somewhat radical idea of an economic independence movement: to provide an alternative pathway for flourishing by encouraging the creation of vibrant face-to-face communities that are increasingly capable of providing for themselves.

I see a great deal of overlap between the solarpunk vision and my own ideas about economic independence. In particular, for an economic movement to really take off, it will need to be animated by a solarpunk-style countercultural sensibility. I’ve written already about the need for a counterculture — not warmed-over free love and drugs from the 60s, but a producerist, DIY mentality committed to a high degree of local self-sufficiency.

Instead, we tend to fritter away all of the hours gained by commercialized time-saving conveniences on commercialized time-consuming distractions.

Accordingly, I believe that getting off the greased slide toward WALL-E-fication will require an explicit cultural turn: a movement motivated by a studied rejection of consumerism and hyper-specialization in favor of DIY practical competence and problem-solving ability.

I see how the Jetsons and solarpunk can be synthesized into a larger whole that would contain the best of both worlds. But I imagine that for such a countercultural movement to get off the ground, its participants would likely need to take a more partisan view: condemning the corruption and spiritual emptiness of consumerism, denouncing the wastefulness of throwaway culture, hostile to brands and elaborate packaging, preaching temperance in the face of the media experience machine’s many temptations, committed to childrearing and seeing the spread of sub-replacement fertility as definitive proof of the current system’s bankruptcy.

The overarching narrative common to Solarpunk is one of transition from an old, decrepit, pathological Industrial Age to a new sustainable one, which can often incur struggle and conflict based on the passive resistance to change in an ignorant and heavily propagandized society and the active, often violent, resistance of the vested interests benefiting from old power structures and economic hegemonies….

Rather, it is realized through a culture of fundamentally greater reason and responsibility. Solarpunk futurism anticipates and aspires to a sustainable (sometimes imagined as moneyless and stateless) post-scarcity culture on the premise that scarcity, given the technology of the present, is largely a deliberate construct of market economies intended to engineer dependencies and hegemonies concentrating wealth and power. It imagines these overcome largely through the cultivation of local resilience, with renewables in their many forms, independent production, and regional and global resource commons key tools to this end….

That substantive vision — of technological progress that harmonizes human wellbeing with the wellbeing of the rest of the living world, and that allows a high degree of self-sufficiency at the local level

Not the complete answer, though. We still need large-scale capitalism pursuing Jetsons-style progress: breakthroughs in geothermal, small modular nuclear, and fusion; translating those breakthroughs into conversion to indoor farming and cultivated meat; heading out into space to establish a permanent human presence and outsource mining to the asteroid belt; and pushing ahead with the AI revolution that will help make all of these other wonders possible.

The Jetsons future and the solarpunk future aren’t antagonists. There’s room for both, and there’s a need for both. The challenge ahead is managing their co-development and coexistence.