Solarpunk is innately about hope for a better future, but Desert is rather about the impossibility to save the world from climate change and the opportunities for anarchy that arise after the world’s end. It’s not as if Desert is devoid of hope, but rather it sees hope and possibilities within the end of the world. In that respect, there is some overlap with solarpunk, but I can’t help but think the nihilism doesn’t jive well with the solarpunk ethos.
It’s interesting as a text for capturing a lot of now common themes about 10 years earlier than most of the public discourse, but is otherwise pretty underwhelming.
The latter half is also pretty uninteresting rambling of what appears to come from an aged member of the UK squatting scene.
Ah yeah? I kinda liked the latter half more than the first half which was all nihilism. I also disliked the bunk population science with its “overpopulation” line which appeared early in the book.
First of all I disagree about the impossibility to win against climate change. We already have basicly all the tools for a good life for everybody on the planet, which is mostly enviromentally friendly. The big answer to a lot of these problems is degrowth and some green growth. We can already see some rather large degrowth moves in more labour rights and the rather large fight against raising the pension age in France. Less work means less damage. As for going green, we do invest a lot in green technology and fossil fuels consumption is going down in large parts of the world. Even more we see a clear trend in lower populations over the coming years, so global growth is slowing. China might have a massive economic crisis, so the biggest growth source in terms of emissions might very well come to a halt. Just to be clear this is not fast enough by a wide margin, but this idea of complete collapse of the current system seems extremly unlikely to me. Countries can take a lot of hitting, before they collapse and humans can adapt surprisingly quickly. We just went trhou Covid to show that and many wars show similar developments. If you would tell the world that fossil fuels would no longer be available in a year, I am pretty sure the Americas and Europe as well as some other places would survive this somewhat well. Obviously with some big changes, but they would be recognisable to the outside world. Many poor countries would also do okay.
What is true is that conflict is rising in the world. China is growing in strength and is able to challenge the US, there is a large war in Europe, food prices cause instability, demographic trends enable workers to fight against capital more and more, climate change causes shortages in many countries and so much more. That creates possibilities, which should be seized. But this is not total collapse and that is honestly good news. Societies need some organization, which currently is provided by the state. Just removing the state, without replacing it with another form of organization, which can be anarchist, will just cause society to collapse. This would be a complete disaster. Just because something sucks, does not mean the opposite is better.
I agree and resonate a lot of what you’ve written except for the first part on winning climate change. I think the IPCC reports are pretty clear that we’ve already lost. Even if somehow we achieve world revolution, we will still end up in an apocalyptic 1.5C scenario. There’s nothing to debate: a 1.5C scenario is already inevitable and it will be pretty bad. What isn’t inevitable is a 2.0C or higher scenario. That’s where we come in: solarpunks and anarchists alike have to struggle for reaching a 1.5C world and things like degrowth and just transition.
The world as we know it will end, but that doesn’t need to mean mass death and devastation. That’s where I depart from Desert because it seems to say that the mass death and devastation will create new avenues for freedom. Cool I guess, but I rather save as much people as I can.
Solarpuk is a reaction to this very mindset.
Yes, we will (and we did) damage the environment but the overall will to mitigate and fix these damages is what makes us hope. Solarpunk authors think it is achievable, Desert’s authors think it is not. We disagree and that’s find, but this is just the 1364th iteration of an ecological dystopia, solarpunk it utopian.
Also note that we DO KNOW about these issues and are concerned about it, we are just SICK of the tone of despair and helplessness that is prevailing. We do not live in Solarpunk 100% of the time, that’s just our 0.5% window into a future that is not crap and that we want to try to build.
You made me think of an analogy: when I started driving my instructor told me not to stare at obstacle. When driving we need to look at where we want to go, because our hands will follow our eyes.
The more we stare at the obstacle the more we tend to go towards it.
I feel like now we are really focusing on climate change but not enough on the alternative. There is no direction, we are trying to change society without changing it.
Solarpunk is a direction, it a way of saying “this is where we want to go”. I don’t know if we will manage to go there, but I know for sure that if we don’t have any direction we are not going anywhere !
Insert Mad Max meme here
I think its really well done, which I guess puts me in the minority. I don’t think nihilism and hope are incompatible inherently, but also I don’t see desert as particularly nihilistic. Also I don’t think saving the climate is a thing humans are going to do. All humans have an impact on the environment, but most people I interact with are not interested in environmentalism at all. I would write that off as anecdote, except all the polls bear this out in the US at least. In polls I’ve seen over the last few weeks anywhere from 3-8% of people think the environment or climate change is our most important issue, while anywhere from 12-60% of people feel its’s the economy. So those are pretty dismal numbers given the IPCC’s latest report. Furthermore most of us can’t make hugely effective choices. We can go vegan, ditch the car for the ebike, etc. Those things matter, but a lot more so in aggregate. This is why population matters. If roughly 5% of the population is willing to modify their own behaviors to help save the environment, then 1.5C is just the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, more modern studies show that the earth cannot support 8 billion people sustainably no matter how we live and we blew past that number last year. The world desert imagines is actually inevitable. Mass death and suffering is inevitable. That doesn’t mean we have to succumb to the despair. I think it means its a matter of cruelty to have a child given what little the future holds as far as hope goes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make life better for those of us that are here and will be having to live through this cursed timeline. There are going to be opportunities to live according to mutual aid as governments collapse in the wake of what’s coming. Creating ways to survive this is crucial, but wwe shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking there is actually a future where humans don’t destroy the entire earth. We are at a point of accepting and reducing harm.
