Phoebe Wagner

The art nouveau sort of design of solarpunk has clearly captured, you'll see it show up in advertising and marketing, and also in just the ways that people want to present their work.

So there's a lot of bright colors that you'll see.

It's a very sort of in comparison to the gritty sort of neon of cyberpunk.

In solarpunk, you're going to see a lot of sunlight, you're going to see these bright colors, you're going to see sort of

flowing clothes and these buildings that oftentimes are sort of worked into the landscape as opposed to being starkly sort of positioned against it.

And then you're going to see a lot more green space.

Now, there is, of course, Solarpunk stories that take place in the desert.

And Solarpunk has a variety of different locations, as it should.

It's a very global genre.

But oftentimes in the pictures you see in the art, you see a lot of this focus on green space and

people and non-humans interacting together in these green spaces and a lot of that bright colors that make it desirable.

So one of the important things that Solarpunk does is it acknowledges that we are living and are going to be living through difficult times in terms of the climate as well as social injustice.

So my PhD is in American literature, and I focused on environmental literature.

And one of the things we see in earlier environmental literature is this focus on warning.

There's this idea that if we can just warn people and sort of focus on

If we don't change our ways, X bad thing will happen.

That's a lot of what early environmental literature is.

And so solar punk is in sort of the opposite of that.

Instead, it's saying, hey, we're living in this moment of disaster or climate issue or war, and we're building something better out of it.

We're surviving, and even more than surviving, we're thriving.