What does a sustainable, equitable, and renewable future actually look like? Do we really want to live in a Blade Runner future or would we prefer to live in a future filled with abundance? 

Our Solarpunk Future will include sustainable technologies like vertical farming, farmbots, lab-grown meat, free food parks, LED underground pinkfarms, biodigesters, 3d printed housing, gravity energy storage, and regreening permaculture technologies. 

Wikipedia defines Solarpunk as an art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability problems such as climate change and pollution. Although solarpunk refers to emerging sustainable technologies it also embraces low-tech and DIY solutions like gardening, permaculture, and circular systems thinking. 

However, the most powerful concept within the solarpunk movement is the decentralization of resources and redistribution of individual personal power. Solarpunk technologies must act as an agent of empowerment in the future. Nature has the answers. The question is..will we listen? 

Futurists like Buckminster Fuller and Nikola Tesla knew that biomimicry was the key to understanding our future. This is why I always say  “If you understand how a forest works, you will understand the future.”  

Solarpunk technologies may act as a map or guide to help humanity survive the catastrophic inequalities of the coming climate crisis.

The only way for our species to survive and thrive is to empower the individual. 

Corporate and industrial supply chains will be irrelevant and ineffective in a future filled with superstorms, massive wildfires, and extreme temperatures that will trigger drought and crop failures beyond our wildest dystopian imagination. 

In September of 2020, the sky above San Fransico turned orange as the air filled with smoke from wildfires that raged across the western united states. Thousands of homes were destroyed and many lives were lost. Words like dystopia, apocalyptic, and hell dominated the national zeitgeist. This is a forecast of what is to come even if we act right now to change and reverse our destructive ways. 

Referred to as climate lag the time between cause and effect of CO2 in the atmosphere has been estimated at around 40 years. The implications are devastating. Even with our best efforts we may see a 30-40 year crisis that may or may not be survivable. Our survival during this climate lag will depend on what we do right now. 

Our solarpunk future will become more obvious as we see disruptions in infrastructure, supply chains, and food production. Food and water will need to produced and harvested locally. Cities will need to be retrofitted with emerging technologies that can produce clean food and water and farmers will need to invest in underground greenhouses and upgrade existing greenhouses with LED grow lights that can be used to supplement and grow food in case of “brownout” atmospheric conditions that could last for weeks, not just days, in a future filled with dust storms, wildfires, and unpredictable blizzards.  

Flooding and saltwater contamination after major storms can make local water undrinkable for weeks. If roads and bridges are also affected these water shortages can cause dehydration and increase the chances of contracting dangerous waterborne diseases.

Emerging technologies like atmospheric water harvesting, the process of extracting water from ambient air, can render local atmospheric water potable and could be one answer to supplementing localized water shortages during droughts and environmental disasters.  

This emerging technology is already available commercially.

According to an article written on January 7th by Jeremy Kaplan for DigitalTrends, a company called Exaeris has created an atmospheric water harvesting generator called the AcquaTap that should start shipping in late 2021. 

The Aquatap is a portable device that weighs around 30 pounds and could sell for less than $2000 dollars. The device can run off of solar power. It requires very little power. The company describes the technology as hyper-acceleration of the condensation rate enabling the device to produce 3 to 5 gallons of water a day for just pennies a day.

Nature, mastered atmospheric water harvesting millions of years ago. In a process called transpiration, trees and plants pull water from the ground and release vapor via their stomata, tine pore-like structures on the surface of the plant’s leaves back into the air. This circular process of transpiration should be used as a guide in future biomimetic technological applications. As I said before, we need to understand the forest. 

Mushroom mycelium, the tiny hairlike fibers found throughout the soil in forests around the world,  has been coined as the Wood Wide Web or nature’s internet.  We now know that mycelium is responsible for moving water, nutrient, and chemical information from tree to tree and plant to plant that are sometimes separated by long distances.

I believe this wood wide web structure is a fractal system that is embedded in our collective unconscious. The mycelium structures and the way they move nutrient and information around is almost indistinguishable from our current worldwide web. The cosmos truly is a geometric fractal system.  

Humans are slowly catching on. In episode one of the futuristic now podcast I stated that “We are nature and Nature is technological.” It is something that I have said many times and the Solarpunk movement and the technologies that we create within this movement will reflect this idea at the quantum level. It is in our DNA to produce biomimetic technologies. After all, humans are one of Earth’s most amazing technological innovations. We are indigenous biological machines capable of complex thought, self-awareness, and consciousness.  We have the codes of nature’s technological secrets built into our DNA. 

It won’t be easy but I am optimistic that we will rise to this moment. We are a resilient and resourceful species. We have an amazing capacity for empathy and kindness. I believe that if we let nature be our guide we can successfully navigate and overcome our environmental and societal obstacles that are just over the horizon. 

If we build emerging technologies that work with nature and not against it we may be able to survive and thrive in this brave new future. 

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