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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how anthropology can contribute to regenerative SolarPunk world-building through historical ecology research into past and ongoing sustainable, biodiversity-enhancing land management practices.

Paper long abstract:

SolarPunk is one of several emerging creative “Punk” movements, one that - through art, literature, lifestyle experiments and inventive zero-carbon technology - seeks to provide an eco-socialist, optimistic imagining of the future. Positive and necessarily as this kind hopeful imagining is, it can be prone to both Euro- and “Future”centrism. In fact, through historical ecology we know that collectively we already have an incredible wealth of experience with sustainable, symbiotic, bio-diversity enhancing, low-carbon modes of farming and living, developed by communities throughout the world over thousands of years. This paper briefly describes some examples of such regenerative practices (drawn from my own research in Nigeria and Tanzania as well as Amazonia, Japan and the UK) and outlines how historical ecology as a whole provides useful approaches to imagining regenerative futures. It then attempts to think through, firstly, some practical ways that anthropologists can help to insert these existing knowledges and practices from all corners of the world into not just SolarPunk imagining but transformative world-building as a whole; and, secondly, how the justice and equity questions such learning or, indeed, appropriation raises, might be addressed through reflexive, decolonial anthropological approaches.