Why Write a Manifesto Now
My part in this began in March of 2020, when the company I worked for lost access to its shipping ports and I was laid off into a country watching its grocery shelves go bare — the long, invisible system that feeds us stuttering in public for the first time in most of our lifetimes. I became a prepper. Not in the way you might think — no bunker, no wall of canned goods, no cottage fantasy of vanishing off-grid into a white dress and a blurry daydream. I wanted to learn to live through whatever was coming by way of knowledge and living systems rather than fear, and for once in my life I stepped away from the desk and learned how to breathe. A balcony garden came first. Solarpunk was the name I found, later, for the direction I was already walking.
Adam Flynn’s “Notes toward a manifesto” appeared in 2014, and others have followed — the 2019 document from the Solarpunk Community (ReDes) is the one most people find first. Each did the work a manifesto exists to do: it made a scattered community legible to itself. A new generation keeps arriving and asking for the principles restated by people who are practicing them.
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A manifesto binds no one. Nobody signs; nothing is owed. What it does is record what a community holds true at a particular moment, plainly enough that its members can recognize one another — and that the people circling the edges, wondering whether the word means anything beneath the pretty renderings, can decide whether to step in. The thinkers this site keeps returning to — Murray Bookchin on the shelf, The Poor Proles Almanac in the feed — argue more sharply than we do, but the impulse is the same: say plainly what you are for, so that others can find you. What follows is ours.
What We Believe
1. The future is alive. Not as a figure of speech. The societies that come through the next century will be the ones that understand themselves as participants in a biosphere rather than tenants holding a lease on it. Solarpunk insists on that recognition before it insists on anything else.
2. Hope is a discipline, not a mood. The phrase comes from the organizer Mariame Kaba, and we keep it because it is exact. Optimism trusts that things will turn out fine on their own; we do not. Hope, as we practice it, is the daily work a livable future requires, done whether or not you woke up feeling hopeful. Sentiment is cheaper. It builds nothing.
3. Beauty matters. A future that is not beautiful will not be defended. We do not apologize for caring how a place looks, or how it smells after rain. Aesthetic is strategy.
4. Technology must serve life. Solar panels, fermentation crocks, open-source software, bicycles, looms, libraries, and mycelium-grown materials are all technologies, and we celebrate every one of them. What we refuse is the assumption that a tool must extract — from soil, from attention, from people far enough away not to be seen — before it counts as progress. The question we put to every technology is simple: does it leave the living world more alive than it found it?
5. Community is infrastructure. A neighborhood where people know one another’s names comes through a crisis differently than one where they do not — the research on heat waves and floods says so, and anyone who has been carried through a hard month by good neighbors did not need the research. Mutual aid funds, tool libraries, seed swaps, shared meals: load-bearing structures, every one. Build them before you need them.
6. The local is the unit. No solution scales until it is rooted somewhere in particular — a watershed, a city block, a strip of ground somebody actually tends. Planet-scale change, when it comes, will look like many rooted efforts loosely joined, the way a forest is joined underground.
7. Ancestors and descendants are present. We are not the first people to live here and we will not be the last. Indigenous land management and ancestral foodways keep proving to be working answers that industrial habit discarded and is now, expensively, rediscovering. And the people downstream of us in time are not an abstraction. They will stand on whatever soil we leave them.
What We Reject
The doom monoculture. The assumption that the future must be dystopian — that grim is sophisticated and hopeful is childish. This was always a failure of imagination dressed up as realism. Decades of it have not made anyone more prepared. They have made people tired.
Extraction as the measure of success. An economy can grow on paper while the forests and topsoil it depends on thin out beneath it, and ours has been doing exactly that for a long time. We keep a different ledger — soil built, water held, species returned, neighbors fed — because those are numbers we know how to move.
The lone-genius story. Solarpunk is not waiting on one billionaire’s breakthrough. The solutions already exist, distributed across millions of practitioners, most of them unfamous. What remains is implementation.
Greenwashing. Solarpunk is not a marketing aesthetic. A corporation that adds vines to its rendering while continuing to extract from communities and ecosystems is not solarpunk; it is camouflage. We name this when we see it.
Cynicism as identity. The cynic is not wiser than the believer; the cynic is exhausted. We reject the position that caring publicly is naïve.
What We Practice
A worldview that never reaches the hands is decoration. Solarpunk is a practice, and practice means specific, repeatable acts. Among ours:
- We grow some of our food. Not all of it. Some.
- We learn the names of the plants and insects in our neighborhood.
- We support local makers, growers, and repairers.
- We mend before we replace.
- We share tools, books, skills, and meals.
- We vote, organize, and show up at planning meetings.
- We rest. We sleep. We refuse to be productive every hour.
- We tell each other better stories about the future.
What This Project Is
Futurespore is one node in a much larger network. We write, we teach, we host community forums, we build software (projectGAIA) that helps people learn about plants. None of that is the work itself. The work is what readers do in their neighborhoods with what they learn here.
If any of this sounds like what you were already reaching for, there is nothing to join — you are in it. Plant something. Learn one weed by name. Repair the thing instead of replacing it. Tell someone.
That is as much as a manifesto can do. The rest is done by hand.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do solarpunks believe?
Solarpunks believe a livable future is possible, but we have to build it. That means renewable energy, decentralization, biodiversity, repair instead of disposability, community over consumption, and nature woven into daily life. Techno-utopianism without ecology isn't enough, and neither is ecology that refuses technology.
What is the Solarpunk Manifesto?
The Solarpunk Manifesto is a 2019 collaborative document from the Solarpunk Community (ReDes). It names hope as method, low-tech and high-tech integration, biodiversity, decolonization, and beauty as essential. It isn't the only manifesto. Adam Flynn's 2014 'Notes toward a manifesto' shares similar core commitments, though the 2019 version is the most widely cited.
What does solarpunk reject?
Solarpunk rejects dystopian futurism, infinite-growth capitalism, planned obsolescence, monoculture, lawns, car-dependent urban planning, and the cynicism that says nothing better's possible. It also rejects shallow aesthetic appropriation. Green city pictures without the underlying politics aren't a solution. I think they're part of the problem.
Is solarpunk anti-technology?
No, solarpunk isn't anti-technology. It opposes extractive technology while embracing renewable energy, open-source software, repairable hardware, biomimicry, regenerative agriculture, public transit, and mycelium materials. The objection is to technologies that concentrate wealth, surveil people, and push ecological costs onto others, not technology itself.
How do I 'be solarpunk' in everyday life?
Grow food if you can. Forage locally only with reliable identification and safety knowledge. Bike when possible, repair things, plant natives, and replace lawn. Join or start a community group, support local agriculture, and read fiction imagining livable futures. You don't need utopia or total self-sufficiency. Solarpunk is a verb, grounded in consistent practice.
Written by E. Silkweaver