With the kind permission of Jerri Jerreat, we are happy to add this recently published article as a free resource for teachers and librarians.

Why We Need Solarpunk Stories

By Jerri Jerreat

Simon Fraser University has been studying the troubling rise of climate anxiety and climate depression among youth. They now offer climate anxiety and grief seminars (1). Then Lakehead University published their survey of Canadian youth, age 16-25. Nearly half reported that they think humanity is doomed. Thirty-nine per cent feel they should not have children. Seventy one per cent are angry at the government’s response to the climate crisis and sixty-nine per cent feel abandoned (2).

Those reports emerged before the summer of 2023. June’s deadly heat wave in Western Canada of 2021 should have woken up the country; somehow it did not. In 2022, the University of Waterloo released a paper naming fifteen cities across Canada that were likely to experience the urban heat island effect next, if the cities did not reduce their carbon footprint.  (3).  Mine was on the list. Perhaps yours, too?

Then came the summer of 2023. Wildfire smoke from Québec and northern Ontario blanketed our capital city, then Ontario, Québec, then spread outward. New York City shared the same dystopian yellow-grey skies as Toronto. Folks in B.C. already knew about keeping children inside, windows closed, from previous wildfires, but it was new to Ottawa. This period was followed by a heat wave across most of Canada, then terrible flooding in Nova Scotia, tornadoes touching down in Ottawa, and over 40,000 people evacuated from homes across B.C. and the Northwest Territories due to wildfires.

The planet’s oceans reached their hottest recorded temperatures ever.

What can science fiction writers do about this? Rather a lot. This is the time we need sci fi writers more than ever.

Writers are changemakers. If we can create a believable world on another planet, we can also write stories on future Earth so vivid, characters so relatable, that we’ll shift the mindset of our readers from —climate despair to hope. If we put our research and talents to work and write solarpunk.

Solarpunk is a science fiction, art, and social movement which shows us how things might improve if communities work together. Solarpunk shows us, at its most basic level, society with far better social equity and no fossil fuels.

How could your own region look, fifty or a hundred years from now, if everyone switched to cold climate heat pumps and we invested in excellent public transportation that was fossil fuel-free? Naturally all our electricity would have to be created from solar, wind, river, waves, tides, and other renewable methods. As well, we would have to create food a better way—without synthetic fertilizers. There might be a lot more plant-based meals on a future menu.

This takes research.

I wrote a dystopia long ago, after the Taliban first took over Afghanistan and stripped away women’s rights. I have read and enjoyed many dystopias. However, I see many youth now daily, and I am turning my back on dystopias or post-apocalyptic fiction.

Our youth are frightened about the future. Will there even be a future for them? I’ve met university students and people in their late twenties who don’t think they will have children because of the climate crisis. At Queen’s University, an extremely tall student, second or third year, approached me after my workshop on positive climate solutions. I was feeling ebullient.

He hesitated, frowned, appeared shy.

“Did you have a question?” I asked.

He blurted, “How do you—” He struggled to get the next word out, “hope?”

The news in biology is all bad, another student explained. Different species are going extinct every single day (4).

These conversations led me to create a festival for local youth called “Youth Imagine the Future”. It seemed like a great way to mentor young writers both in writing and in becoming active citizens. There can be a better future. We all have to work together on it.

Writers can show us how.

“Youth Imagine the Future: A Festival of Writing and Art” is now held in a large chunk of eastern Ontario. I created a slideshow of inspiring ideas that countries around the world are working on to help us to reduce fossil fuel consumption, to mitigate the climate crisis, and to restore biodiversity. I update the slideshow constantly, but there is never enough time to show it all. Jamaica and India are restoring their mangrove wetlands, both for biodiversity and to buffer their shorelines from hurricanes and erosion. Toronto, too, has been restoring their wetlands, creeks, and rivers as well. One story Toronto’s RAP (Remedial Action Plan) told us on a webinar was of a large wetland that had been drained and farmed for a century. RAP was able to revert the stream back into the area, and they were ready to replant native species. To their surprise, all the plants appeared in that first spring once water had been returned. The seeds had been lying dormant under the field for a hundred years. Fish returned, turtles, amphibians, butterflies, bees, a whole ecosystem.

There are an incredible number of amazing ecological inventions for the tech lovers being used around the world. The James Dyson award has been won by some of them. There is an “O Wind,” a small turbine in the pre-production stage in the UK, the size of a basketball, kinetic tiles creating lights in a soccer field in a Rio di Janeiro favela. In Heathrow Airport, stunning helix wind turbines being installed on tall buildings, and flexible, transparent solar panels are in the works thanks to a young Filipino inventor. Another Dyson award winner. It is made from the cellulose of old vegetables.

In Stockholm, Sweden, and in north London, UK, the body heat of commuters going through a train or subway station is being used to heat many other buildings, homes, and hot water. Other companies are working on more sustainable ways to store solar and wind energy to use at night or when it is not windy.

Brilliant? Yes. Science fiction? No.

But it could be.

A good dystopian novel can make a strong political statement and make us think. These days, the news is enough dystopia. Our youth need stories and novels to inspire them. They need stories to help make them picture a better future.

What might we see in a solarpunk setting of your next story?

In a solarpunk story, (an action-adventure, a comedy, a tense drama, or romance, etc.) the setting should show how the community has worked together to switch away from fossil fuels and old “Big Ag” methods. Enter community gardens, rooftop gardens, or hydroponic sprouts grown easily in a couple of windows. Enter regenerative farming, smaller co-ops, permaculture. Parking lots might have been pulled up, the dead dirt layered with leaves, compost and straw and become a large community food garden or a Miyawaki forest to return biodiversity, pollinators, and to lower the city’s heat. Indigenous people might be leading the projects, or even running the government. It could be better. Imagine.

Wave turbines might be working on old piers to create electricity, but shorelines will be replanted with native shoreline plants to help buffer extreme storms and shelter many species again. According to the United Nations, about 40% of the world’s living species live in or breed in a wetlands. Cities need ribbons of green running through them, and never lonely soldier trees lined up in a row every three metres, surrounded by pavement. A solarpunk future would show that.

Future cities should have sustainable, non-polluting public transportion. Vancouver has a small fleet of electric buses that recharge in five minutes. Sweden has a strip of road that EV vehicles can drive over to recharge. Germany has fast hydrogen-fuel-celled trains between cities—made in Canada. Japan has mag-lev trains (magnetic-levitating) for speed.

Sci-fi writers can research what is on the cutting edge today and show us a better tomorrow.

Even if we electrify our buildings, our transportation, improve our farming methods—a solarpunk story can show us more. Paris, France, has closed a main thoroughfare to cars, reduced the number of parking spaces, and shut some smaller side streets. Pop-up markets have emerged, dance classes, food gardens, tree plantings, bicycles everywhere, pedestrians. Paris hopes to revise itself into a “15-minute city,” where citizens can walk, bike, or hop a quick bus to anywhere they need to go regularly: school, work, medical centre, grocery store, sport centre, park. This has started a movement across Europe.

Solarpunk cities might have green living walls (moss concrete, perhaps?), or green and solar roofs. They aren’t wasting their rooftops, that’s for sure. There will be gardens under solar panels or wind turbines up there, perhaps another Canadian invention, the “ridgeblade” turbine, lying horizontally across a peaked roof.

There will be a “library economy,” attractive multi-family housing, more sharing in the future. Why? Because there are 21.5 million climate refugees right now, according to the U.N., but over a billion are predicted by 2050.

We are going to have to give up the notion of a McMansion on a large non-native grass lawn, every house owning a lawnmower.

Will everyone co-operate and act peacefully and kindly toward each other in the future?

(Er, do you know humans?)

A solarpunk future, a better future, should show optimism regarding the climate crisis and social justice. However, humans will still be humans. There will still be conflicts. Don’t worry, writers, there will still be exciting stories to write.

Last spring, I wrote on my (sigh) Twitter account:

“I need happy endings. I need movies and books showing a better future—realistic, believable, with social equity and a community coming together to fight the Climate Crisis. Not a cartoon utopia: I still want drama, tension, humour. Give me those.”

Last year, I gave about ten workshops to classes of youth across eastern Ontario. This year, we have sixty booked. Yesterday I gave workshops to four classes in a high school. Today, I’m exhausted, doing some festival admin and replanting a couple of baby trees from a ditch before they are mown. My friends are presenting at another high school. Tomorrow I’ll give three workshops to keen grade seven and eight students. I will ask them if any have read a dystopian novel recently and, as usual, about ten to twenty students will offer up the Hunger Games or Divergent.

Those are the students who need our workshop of solutions around the world more than others. They are becoming cynical about the future, at age thirteen, a step on the road down toward feeling hopeless. You are what you think. You are what you read.

I will tell them that I, too, found the first Hunger Games novel very exciting. However, I’ll add, I think we can do better than that future, classic corporate dystopia. I’ll ask them to imagine they are urban designers of the future. I tell them that I’ll show them amazing ideas that are real, that people are working on or using, right now. I’ll say, sketch or jot down a few.

After the slideshow, many will be excited, inspired. I’ll ask them to do a short bit of creative writing or sketching, in a better future they get to design. Perhaps set it right here, in this town, this city, or anywhere that you know well. It’s the future you’re designing, I’ll remind them. You can start with these ideas, take it further.

Many will participate, hands shoot up. Some have seen EV bikes or scooters for rent in different cities. One student, the feisty one, will ask how could their parents get to work without a car? They’ll be late! And aren’t heat pumps super expensive, anyway?

I love those kids. I feel maybe our workshop is just as much to shift their mindset toward a better possible future as the ones who are already frightened. However, it’s the young people who want to help their communities, help the world, who have heart and courage, but who are frightened by the climate crisis whom I particularly hope we are reaching.

There is hope. If we can write solarpunk, and if we can mentor youth to write solarpunk and imagine how that future might actually look, together we might shift everyone’s thinking toward positive action. We need active citizens. Climate protestors. Renewable energy technicians and engineers. Eco lawyers and politicians and adults with a positive future vision. It’s no longer about economy and profit, and will I make the money back soon enough if I switch to a heat pump? We humans are part of an interconnected web of living creatures. If half of them go extinct, that’s a very, very bad sign. However, the Netherlands, for example, has created artificial islands and over 30,000 seabirds have come back. And you, yourself, can plant a pocket Miyawaki-style little forest on your apartment building lawn and demand one in every park and public space. We can help bring biodiversity back.

Recently, I started a furor on a Facebook page when I dared to write the following:

This is from my heart:

It is very easy and tempting to write a dystopia. (Read the news.) I even wrote one, long ago. Dystopias, however, create pathways in the brain leading the mind to, over time, travel quickly toward pessimism, despair, and inaction.

Solarpunk writing is more challenging to write, but an exciting story that is written inside a world where people are working together to cope with the climate crisis and where there is more social justice—is the future we all need to see, and to imagine.

Writers can lead readers toward hope, and positive action.

What will your legacy be?

References:

1. https://www.sfu.ca/students/health/get-support/support-groups/groups/climate-anxiety.html
2. https://www.lakeheadu.ca/about/news-and-events/news/archive/2023/node/75487
3. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/extreme-heat-report-university-waterloo-deaths-1.6426392
4. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/what-animals-are-going-extinct
5. https://littleforests.org/blogs/news
6. For your interest: “Solarpunk and How We Escape Dystopia” with @Andrewism (Andrew Sage) & Professor Carl Williams on “Pop Culture Detective- Episode 10” on You Tube.
7. Check out our festival: https://youthimaginethefuture.com/

Please note that “Youth Imagine the Future” has a toolkit, nearly complete, that we would be happy to share with anyone interested in mentoring youth in their region. Do it your own way.  #ABetterFuture