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Solar Punk is just another version of the Nordic model
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
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So idk anything about solar punk, but I did an image search for it and about half the images have people in them and none of it seems particularly fascist?
Half of these pictures, if you were to politically analyze them in the context of solarpunk, are somehow quaint little farms but also wind power which if you'd cared about saving the earth is definitely not something you'd do. Optimally you'd want very dense urban enviroment mostly if not all to make sure as much nature as possible can be untouched and thriving.
I thought about this line too, but there's also a lot of urban solar punk art or people calling certain talk buildings in Italy and China solar punk
Just a heads up that the idea of nature = no humans, or rather, the divide between human spaces and "natural" spaces is also firmly rooted in white supremacy and colonial ways of looking at land and its role in production. Indigenous and global south people, even global north people in some cases have thrived in rural and wild environments while inhabiting them and participating in the biodiversity. The problem isn't people, it's extractivism. And if ecosystems will ever have a chance to recover it will be through regenerative and conscious practices, not by letting fields fallow and forests do their thing while humans live sequestered "outside" of nature.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the principle but what kind of population numbers did those indigenous tribes have? We've got 8,2 billion people on this thing now.
Picking up the criticism about solarpunk here; if your future only works after most people are dead for some reason or another it's not exactly utopian or even good.
This is a lack of rigorous thinking, from someone I presume is capable of debunking the Black Book of Communism.
For the vast majority of middle-income, upper-middle-income, and high-income countries, the total fertility rate is below the replacement level, and even below 1.6 in the imperial core. After a century of this, we're back to a world population of 2 billion people, a figure that no one would argue is inherently overpopulated. Even if the TFR harmonically regresses to 2.05, we would be fine. Communism could "kill" 5 billion more people and be the most peaceful world-system in modern history.
Those indigenous peoples had 100 million people just in North America, which is proportional to about 600 million people globally.
great, that only leaves about 7,9 billion others to account for then
Please read the whole comment and follow the math, it's not that complicated.
are you positioning the solar punk five years from now or 105 years from now? we (well, some of our progeny) could return to 1920s population numbers over a long period of time by individual reproductive choices without any mass killing or government policy. there's only a missing population if you think the art is depicting next week.
Read Communism: the Highest Stage of Ecology
https://www.iskrabooks.org/communism-the-highest-stage-of-ecology
I disagree pretty hard with dense urban areas being optimal and that leaving land outside of cities "untouched" would be a good thing.
Humans are nature and the entire planet is our home, which must be maintained regularly. This idea that we need to separate ourselves from the so-called natural world in order to protect it seems incorrect based on history. Many indigenous groups maintained thriving forests, grasslands, etc for centuries before colonizers showed up. Many other animals maintain their environments as well; beavers, elephants, etc. Humans are pollinators too!
Obviously we do many horrible things to our environment, but that's not an innate human behavior. We learned to be destructive of our own environment over time and then it was spread everywhere through colonization. Many people went from being just another animal to seeing themselves as special and, largely through religion (not saying religion is bad, just saying it was used as a tool by the ruling class to indoctrinate people), were taught that everything and everyone existed to be exploited for resources. Capitalism is born out of this idea that we are not part of nature.
I think alienation as described by Marx and others after him explains what I'm saying here in a different context and certainly in more detail. I also don't think we shouldn't mostly live in cities of some type, but we absolutely need people out in the world taking care of it. Moreover, I think at least a not insignificant number of humans simply cannot thrive in dense urban environments.
That depends. (link is to probably the most principled/scientific solarpunk in existence)
Wind power really isn't the problem here
Okay, then about the "quaint little farms"... Labor-intensive permaculture, in addition to less quantifiable things like increasing biodiversity (and thereby nutrition, maybe?) and reducing a sense of alienation and even shortening supply chains, can produce enough food for maybe 10 people per hectare, or 1000 people per km². We can use this to estimate how large a food-autonomous city can be.
If everybody working the farms rides a bike there, a maximum of 10 km each way, there is a radius of 10 km around the city that can be worked. If the urban environment holds 80 people per ha, and each km² urban environment requires 8 km² of farmland to support it, we get...
(insert algebra sounds)
...about 145k population, in a circle of land that is 25 km across, but the city itself is 5 km across.
This is with side-by-side American standard city lots (1/6 acre, plus street frontage) that I'm doubling the buildings on to fit 2 one-story buildings within. With townhouses, you could easily double this density, and with apartment buildings that are still small enough to build with appropriate tech and to climb the stairs after a day at work, you could quadruple the density. If you put everyone in a narrow arcology tower with the same 10km radius, you could fit 314k people in the citytower.
Edit: With the sparser model (1k per sq km), you still can have all of humanity fitting into about 20% of the world's land area, including food production but not including fuel and other resources.