The Lost Cause

"The Lost Cause is very near-future, and I consider it solarpunk. Cory Doctorow has embraced the term solarpunk as well – some authors use the term, some of them have their own terms, but Cory Doctorow seems to be engaged with the solarpunk community. So it is very near future – around the 2040s or 50s – and it’s engaging with the politics of today. The premise is that a Green New Deal has been struck, and we are moving toward renewable energies and climate change mitigation, but there is still a contingent of people who are clinging to the MAGA ideals. They’re still in climate denial, and they’re actively trying to sabotage the Green New Deal as it’s happening. It’s a very political book. It presents lots of climate solutions of many stripes, but it’s focused on the political division that has led to our lack of climate action. It’s also very personal. The story is about a kid and his grandfather, who have completely opposite political ideas. It’s a very relatable situation these days, where often many of the people that we care about are just living in a completely different reality, and actively working against the things that we value. What’s solarpunk about it is the focus on solutions. That’s the way that solarpunk can relieve climate anxiety and help move people toward action. Because when we focus on everything that can go wrong, on just the doom and gloom narrative, it seems like there’s nothing that we can do – when in fact there are lots of things that we can do, both on the large scale and on the small personal scale. I think The Lost Cause does a good job of showing both of those. It shows the big political and economic changes that need to happen, but also shows how these changes happen on the personal level, and how we can have these conversations with the people around us who don’t believe what is happening, or don’t share our values. It’s a good story, and it’s also a good toolbox that can give people tools to move past climate anxiety, It definitely tends to be leftist. And there is a tendency toward anti-capitalism, or at least post-capitalism, which is a reaction to looking at the connections between late capitalism and the non-stop growth that has led to a lot of environmental destruction. So there’s a degrowth philosophy to a lot of solarpunk. But within the solarpunk community, there are many people who look at things differently, and it is definitely not uniform. We have healthy debates online – the solarpunk community has really grown online, initially through Twitter and now places like Mastodon and Blue Sky, and Tumblr was a big part of the solarpunk community in the beginning. So it’s grown through these online conversations, and there are plenty of healthy debates and even just straight-up fights about the way that we should move toward a better future. Everyone comes at it from their own perspective, their own background. So you can’t really pin one political idea. It’s definitely to the left, but within that, there’s a lot of variation, and I think that’s good. There is no one way that we can solve climate change. It is not one big solution, it’s a thousand smaller solutions working together. I think that’s true politically, as well as socially, economically, and technologically."