From the first time I dove into a solarpunk submission pile, I noticed a trend: gardens. The genre is full of gardens: from greenwashed skyscrapers dripping flora to multi-species spaces, the garden in its many varieties has become a staple of the genre. Indeed, I’ve written a solarpunk garden story and find the community garden an easy way to explain certain solarpunk ideals (anticapitalism, food sovereignty, community-building, etc.). Yet, the garden bothers me.
The garden seems to be the solarpunk story in the U.S., in part due to the prominence of garden stories in early solarpunk like the wonderful Glass and Gardens anthologies (World Weaver Press) or the guerilla gardener in Phoebe Shalloway’s fun indie game Solarpunkification. It should be noted that solarpunk is a global genre, but at the same time, “western” storytelling tropes have dominated anglophone literature. And that’s really what I think the garden might be: a comfortable, western motif or plot. In my solarpunk writing, I work to shift each story away from different aspects of “western” storytelling in order to not repeat the ideology that pushed us toward climate change.
The garden is deep in our imaginings, which makes it worth questioning. In this essay, I will explore the garden and question why stories featuring gardens flourish while other, much needed, stories depicting alternate ways we can separate from capitalism seem less prominent. I don’t think we should never write another solarpunk garden story, but if solarpunk is to be useful beyond the page, then we need to use stories to demonstrate the steps toward a thriving future. Personal gardens and a change in agriculture are part of how we create that thriving, but it’s a sliver of the required changes. Our storytelling needs to expand beyond the garden to envision communal forms of not just food but wellness, protest, fun, art, infrastructure, community building, and so much more.
The Garden Plot
I grew up in a religious household and have read the Bible multiple times, so I was well-served when I studied American literature due to the amount of Biblical imagery. The connection of the American “frontier” with Eden, a return to God’s chosen place devoid of humans due to sin, was easy fodder for class discussion. Similarly, I was raised to believe God had placed mankind in dominion over the animals and plants, and that it was our God-given right to treat the earth as we wished for capitalism. If the old growth forests had to be cut down in order to help the economy, then God’s will be done. While I no longer hold these beliefs, I am hyper-sensitive to these biases and how they influence my perception of the world. Being aware of how Christian Nationalism wired my brain is part of my solarpunk writing process. Indeed, Christian imagery is so prevalent in U.S. literature that an understanding of Christian beliefs impacts a person’s ability to read early U.S. literature and a lot of the literary “greats” that are touted as required for any “good” writer. With that Biblical imagery interwoven into U.S. art comes an ideology that influences a writer’s cultural understanding of story, whether they are Christian or not.
Much of the U.S. storytelling tradition grows from a worldview and mythos rooted in the garden. In The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, the Cherokee writer Thomas King compares the Christian Genesis story with his version of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.” Each creation story is quite different:
The elements in Genesis create a particular universe governed by a series of hierarchies—God, man, animals, plants—that celebrate law, order, and good government, while in our Native story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations—Charm, the Twins, animals, humans—that celebrate equality and balance (23-4).
King goes on to question what the world would look like if we routinely heard the story of Charm, the woman who fell from the sky, rather than the story of Adam? The story of Genesis and the Garden of Eden is so ubiquitous in U.S. literature that a writer or scholar does not need to have attended church to be familiar with the plot. No Native story has reached that prominence due to genocide and colonization, which King also grieves for in a later chapter when he wonders how Native literature could change people (118). As King points out, the creation story that influenced western culture and literature is a story about a garden that is the dominion of the first man. For U.S. writers, and perhaps for most anglophone writers, a garden is not just a garden, but carries a cultural and literary history that we must at least be aware of if not reckon with directly.
Any other type of writing is easier for me than writing a solarpunk story. I have to investigate my worldview every time I sit down to imagine such responses to climate change and work through my own pessimism and frustration with U.S. society when trying to figure out how we could thrive. Often, my education is a wall to imagining these futures. I was taught that western storytelling craft was the best and only way to write a “good” story. Yet, as scholars like Amitav Gosh, Rob Nixon, and Shelley Streeby have argued, we cannot encompass the impacts of climate change with the three-act structure, the hero’s journey, the linear story. Additionally, these stories have contributed to our reliance on capitalism, state authority, and hyper-individualism. To that end, we must break with these storytelling traditions in order to create new stories that help us imagine these futures. The garden is an easier imaginary leap to these futures, but it’s also deeply rooted in western storytelling traditions.
In the U.S., this garden imagery is rooted in the rhetoric of settler colonialism. In his foundational work Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith demonstrates how writers and artists depicted the U.S. interior as a “utopian fantasy” in order to inspire colonists to go west (11). Smith writes:
The character of the American empire was defined not by streams of influence out of the past, not by a cultural tradition, nor by its place in a world community, but by a relation between man and nature—or rather, even more narrowly, between American Man and the American West. This relation was thought of as unvaryingly fortunate. The myths of the garden and of the empire had both affirmed a doctrine of progress, of gigantic economic development, even though the myth of the garden at the same time implied a distrust of the outcome of progress in urbanization and industrialization. (187)
The garden is therefore linked to American empire and colonization, especially through the depiction of the mythical “west.” Additionally, it’s worth noting Nash’s point about “man and nature” as a defining aspect of American empire. These ideas are evident in U.S. literature as well as rhetoric, from Faulkner’s plantations in Absalom, Absalom! to Twain’s log raft in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Melville’s whale in Moby-Dick. While the agricultural Eden of the Great Plains region and the “west” is vastly different than the solarpunk garden, yet, I question whether the solarpunk garden is unintentionally tapping into a literary tradition used to colonize and expand the U.S. empire. Just as the solarpunk garden works to imagine a future in the midst of climate change, so did the “garden” of U.S. history imagine a future of white settler colonialism that resulted in genocide, slavery, and environmental devastation. In order for solarpunk to be truly revolutionary and liberatory, it cannot repeat the literary transgressions that got us where we are today in terms of colonization and environmental injustice. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, we cannot use the master’s tools.
The purpose of this essay is not to criticize any author or anthology. Rather, I describe a common plot I’ve witnessed in solarpunk writing, especially on the garden. Often, the garden becomes a point of connection with the larger environment, providing the main character with an epiphany, or it becomes a plot of “man versus nature” where the main character must figure out how to support or save the garden. Additionally, a garden is aesthetically pleasing and fits with the “look” of solarpunk. While the garden touches on solarpunk values, such as food sovereignty, the repetition of these plots common in western literature also include western values that are responsible for the crisis and social justice issues we experience today.
Gardens are also easy to imagine in the U.S. One of the most difficult parts of writing a solarpunk story for me is imagining that thriving future where we would want to live. Gardens will be a part of that future, and compared to something like a community health clinic, I suspect more people have accessed or experienced a garden. For many people, myself included, the sliver of the future featuring the garden is easier to imagine than many of the other avenues, from transportation, medicine, decision-making, community mediation, and so on. I argue that part of this ease comes from the U.S. imaginary. The literature and historical documents building the U.S. empire carefully invoke the idea of the garden for its utopian and Edenic aspects. A garden is under the dominion of man, and if it’s connected to Eden, then under the domain of the good, Christian farmer or plantation owner. In the U.S., we’ve imagined the garden over and over to mask imperial violence—is it so hard to believe we could accidently use the garden to mask the violence of climate change and continued settler colonialism?
The garden can also grow the toxic individualism that solarpunk works against. In the U.S., lowering our personal carbon footprint was part of many discussions I had with fellow environmentalists a decade ago, and gardening was often on the list of ways to lower one’s footprint (“Actions for a Healthy Planet”). While we now know the carbon footprint was a rhetorical tactic of big oil, gardening is still pictured as an activity for the environmentally conscious and capitalized on (Solnit, 2021). Unlike, for example, a bike repair shop, a garden can be done individually with little planning. It can also be accomplished for a few dollars. While this type of gardening is not what such solarpunk stories promote, it’s easy to revert to an individual experience from a more communal garden description.
Furthermore, the garden plot offers the chance to “end” the story. As writers and critics struggle with articulating the scope of climate change and environmental justice issues, there is no traditional “ending.” In the U.S., there’s lots of craft advice for writers around a “satisfying ending” or “earning” an ending, but when writing about climate change, the concept of an ending is pointless. There’s no three-act structure to encompass our current and future experiences, and writers focusing on these issues should find a way to embrace that. Yet, the garden story allows for an “ending” of sorts. In the U.S., we’ve written the agriculture story over and over, with the satisfaction of a successful harvest or the family coming together after a disaster. There’s familiarity in that story, whether scaled down to the blooming of a single flower or scaled up to a community farm. We are satisfied with an ending focused on a blooming garden in the face of larger issues. It offers a seasonal completeness to an issue with no end in sight.
While I’ve pointed out the problems, gardens can also provide a path to more nuanced critiques of capitalism and the first roots of environmental justice issues like food sovereignty. But I worry the garden is attractive because it is controllable, quick, and beautiful. It is easy to tell a satisfying story about gardening in fifteen pages, and in most parts of the U.S., it is simple to go to a grocery store or a Wal-Mart and buy a packet of seeds. While this accessibility is a strength of the garden as starting point, I worry that has become the solarpunk aesthetic.
Imagining Beyond the Garden
Whenever I write or give a talk about solarpunk, I return to this definition in Almanac for the Anthropocene:
A solarpunk imagines new futures [in the midst of] and in opposition to environmental collapse, then works to create those futures. […] A solarpunk might approach a problem with the following questions: How do my actions impact my human and nonhuman community? What intentionality fuels this issue? Does the following action dismantle a damaging system like capitalism, white supremacy, or colonialism?” (2)
Here is where the garden story becomes a worrisome sticking point for me. If solarpunk is truly to become this movement in the midst of and in response to the climate crisis, we know the garden cannot be our most prominent tool. We have to imagine beyond those confines. The garden is one story, but there are so many more. The recent storytelling game Solarpunk Futures by Solarpunk Surf Club really captures this idea. Their storytelling game contains a stack of “tool” cards which feature a wide range of community responses—including gardens. Pulling a few off the stack, I find: Reparations, Disaster Relief, Journalism, Direct Democracy, and Solidarity Clinic. For me, trying to write a story about any one of these would be much more difficult than writing about the garden currently greening my backyard. As I said, solarpunk writing is hard. Every time I wrestle with a solarpunk story, it changes my perspective of the world a little bit. If I were to write stories about Disaster Relief or a Solidarity Clinic, my worldview would change because I’d have to learn, partner with, and engage with my community in a different way to accurately write this story.
If solarpunk is going to be a tool to shift our understanding of climate change and social justice issues, then our initial instincts as storytellers and creators raised in the U.S. empire or influenced by British and American imperial writing standards must be questioned. Instead of reaching for the garden or the larger agricultural story, what would happen if we reached for the mutual aid network? Stories of transportation? Near-future protest?
In my experience, I reach for the garden out of familiarity. It’s a convenient source of inspiration that has worked for the so-called “masters” of their crafts: from Dante’s Garden of Eden and its many other literary depictions, to the Romantic poets, to Tolkien’s Shire, to the “solarpunk” cities dripping gardens down the sides of multistory buildings. To break out, I turn to the previously mentioned Solarpunk Futures, but I also love Paweł Ngei’s post “22 Solarpunk Communities and Story Hooks.” Not only do these hooks have a bit of tension right in the wording to help get a writer brainstorming, but it returns solarpunk to a foundational point: community. When writing a solarpunk story and working to break away from the familiar, the first questions I ask are about my local community. What does my community need right now to thrive? What local issues might be exacerbated by the climate crisis? What social justice issues are impacting my neighbors? What will my community look like in fifty years? What about a hundred? What problems might arise as the climate crisis grows more dire and how could I imagine solutions or responses to these local issues?
This essay is not a call to stop writing about gardens, but rather for solarpunk writers to interrogate the garden and consider the influence of American rhetoric, colonialism, and Christian Nationalism. Before writing, first ask: What does my community need in the midst of this crisis? How could my story address that need? How could I use this story to change my understanding of the world for the better—and then hopefully share it with others?
Works Cited
“Actions for a Healthy Planet.” United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/actnow/ten-actions.
Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures. Edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, West Virginia UP, 2022.
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. U of Minnesota P, 2005.
Ngei, Paweł. “22 Solarpunk Communities and Story Hooks.” Alxd, 23 Oct, 2021, https://alxd.org/22-solarpunk-communities-and-story-hooks.html.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Harvard UP, 1950.
Solarpunk Futures. Solarpunk Surf Club, 2022.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook.” The Guardian, 23 Aug, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook
Phoebe Wagner is a writer, academic, and editor of three solarpunk anthologies, including Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation. Publishers Weekly called their novella When We Hold Each Other Up a “fresh take on climate fiction.” She holds a PhD in literature and is an assistant professor of creative writing. Follow them at phoebe-wagner.com.