Interview with Andrew Dana Hudson, one of the better known voices in solarpunk. His upcoming book Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures started off as his master’s thesis and the IPCC’s (again) Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (the SSPs) models. Perhaps the most distinctive part of the interview, is in the setting for solarpunk and where in the future it is placed. Lots of visions of the genre are about an aesthetically pleasing world of intermingled green and tech, he puts the emphasis on the ‘punk’ part, pre pleasing world, and “a movement to shove us onto a better path; to demand a more radical/holistic/just transition.”
[N]ow that we’re here, most of us don’t get to be cyberpunks, like cool hackers or badass mercs. Most of us are cyber-proles, living under the bootheel of the platforms, the algos, the plutocrats. […]
… give us alternative models of governance/family/school/work/care; and to generally use imagination and hope to resist and beat back the rising tides of denial, delay, despair and profiteering. […]
[W]e’ll need a lot of energy to remove a Lake Michigan’s worth of carbon out of the atmosphere, in order to stabilize the climate and roll back ocean acidification. Call that Big Chemistry. But probably there’s room for Big Computation and Big Culture as well.