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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– from Profiles of the Future (1973) by Arthur C Clarke Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.
– from ‘The Deepening Paradox’ (2011) by Karl Schroeder⁠

In Indra’s Net of pearls and jewels, every gem reflects every other, a shimmering image of interdependence. This ancient Vedic metaphor for connection across the cosmos also illuminates what the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht first proposed in 2014 as ‘the Symbiocene’: the era after the Anthropocene, in which human technologies take their cues from living systems and work in partnership rather than through dominance. The term ties technological curiosity to biophilia – our love of life – so that what we make is shaped by the living world we belong to, until the boundary between the built world and nature begins to soften. If the Anthropocene began when the Industrial Revolution set industry against the living world, the Symbiocene imagines what should follow: interspecies democracy, life within Earth’s limits, and ecological reciprocity. This is not a future where we engineer nature to fit human comfort and convenience. Instead, creation becomes a conversation: a turning away from our long habit of using technology against nature, toward listening, humility and the flourishing of life.

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.

A solarpunk values map, where eco-centric and human-centric aims overlap. Courtesy Day Sanchez/ Solarpunk Generation

Think: dirigibles drifting above rooftops, solar panels that repair themselves, permaculture and agroecology – growing food by designing farms and gardens to work like ecosystems, where soil is rebuilt, water is conserved, and ‘waste’ becomes nutrient – meals from what you and your friends helped grow, holograms that ease the glare of screens, and a life measured less by shiny throwaway objects than by shared experiences. The point is not ecology or technology, but the refusal of that split. In its queer and eco-anarchic streak, boundaries stay permeable, hierarchies stay suspect, and the world is understood as a set of overlapping relationships rather than sealed categories. From there come its cultural commitments: inclusivity; post-scarcity (the idea that society can meet everyone’s needs); and post-whiteness, meaning no single culture gets to define the default future. Against capitalism’s manufactured inequality, it sketches a more porous way of living, modelled on nature’s interdependence. In that wider frame, truth-telling becomes possible again, long-held wounds can start to heal, and humour returns – not as denial, but as the relief of not taking ourselves, or our tools, quite so seriously.

If oneness with nature is our evolutionary inheritance, and rising above nature our post-Enlightenment present, then solarpunk imagines a future back in balance. It keeps what technology makes possible, but redirects it toward meeting real needs while cooperating with the living world. The ‘solar’ in the name matters here. It suggests power that is abundant, gentle and shareable, and it carries a simple claim: the good life does not have to be complicated, wasteful or built on someone else’s loss.

To get an aesthetic sense of the technologies, watch this solarpunk-inspired commercial, retouched – in classic solarpunk fashion – to cut the dialogue and remove all branding

One way to see this more sharply is to set it beside steampunk, the retro-futurist movement that romanticises an age of steam, adventure and machines still simple enough to mend by hand. For solarpunk, that affection for repairable tools carries over, but the values shift. Here, landscape planning, architecture and infrastructure are treated as ecological questions, not just engineering ones. Progress is measured by peace and sufficiency, and by technologies that strengthen communities, protect the commons, and make everyday life more durable.

The solarpunk........

© Aeon