When the Future Blooms: Building Communities of Care in a Solarpunk World

There’s a quiet revolution taking root, not in corporate boardrooms or our government offices (sadly!), but in gardens, art studios and neighbourhood parks. It’s a revolution that begins with small acts of care and imagination, where people are daring to envision a world that prioritises life, in all its forms, over profit. Pockets of people re-imagining together a better way forward for their communities.

This is the world that Chicago-based Solarpunk artist Joan_de_Art brings to life in her luminous illustrations. Her work, she says, is “inspired by my community and the good people I am lucky enough to call friends.” It’s not just art for art’s sake, it’s art as invitation, as blueprint, as a crowbar wielded to pry up what was originally laid, and to reimagine a new way to build.

A side note before we get stuck in: forgive me, this one’s a long one. I may be a little bit in love with everything I have learned about this artist and her visions she’s been so kind to share with me. I reached out to her after stumbling across her Instagram and she was generous enough to write me what’s likely the most inspirational email I’ve ever received. I could have just published it on its own, but felt that might be considered lazy.

It’s beyond me how anyone could find fault with what we discuss in this blog, but to reduce the amount of hate mail this artist receives (yes, she actually receives hate mail from time to time), we’ll be referring to her as her online name Joan. 

Now, buckle in for a deep dive into the Solarpunk movement and what building community is all about.

A tree of grief and belonging

In one of the neighbourhoods Joan calls home, a simple act of remembrance began with a tree…an ordinary tree that became something extraordinary. Locals began hanging the collars and photos of their deceased pets from its branches, creating a public place of grief and love. No one planned it, no committee approved it; it just happened.

That spontaneous act of care became a seed for something larger: a vision for a community dog park that would include a ceremonial wooden “rainbow bridge,” offering space for people to grieve their companions together. “Everything is a circle,” Joan writes, a reminder that healing often begins when the private becomes shared, when sorrow is witnessed by others, when we are invited to belong even in our loss.

These are the moments where community takes root, in acts of shared humanity, in spaces reclaimed for tenderness, in circles that hold both joy and grief.

What is Solarpunk?

For those unfamiliar, Solarpunk is a movement, both artistic and practical, that imagines hopeful futures grounded in ecological balance, social justice and cooperation. Unlike dystopian visions of decay and despair, Solarpunk dares to ask: What if we built a future that worked for everyone?

It seems like such a natural question to ask, doesn’t it? And yet, instead, we’re living in societies that have been built from the patriarchal, colonial and capitalistic blueprints that have failed to ask this question again and again. This is made all the more clear when exploring Joan’s artwork as we are confronted with examples of such simple design choices that make a world of difference for the people using those spaces. Its clear that Solarpunk is asking us to look through a different lens.

Solarpunk is a vision that celebrates creativity, sustainability, and equity. It’s technology that serves humanity and nature, not the other way around. In Joan’s words,

“Everything you see in my Solarpunk illustrations already exists in real life. There is no magic except for thinking of others first.”

Solarpunk invites us to look at what’s already possible; to see that the tools, technologies and practices for a better world already exist. What’s missing is the will to centre people and planet over profit. 

Learning from Indigenous wisdom

Joan grew up in New Mexico, surrounded by the teachings and worldviews of Native American communities. She speaks about this with deep respect and awareness, acknowledging the harm and ongoing injustices faced by Indigenous peoples, while also recognising their wisdom that continues to guide and protect us all.

“Every time some oil pipeline is threatening an old-growth forest or water source,” she writes, “it is the local tribes that fight back and win. That is community care. That is putting people over profits.”

These communities remind us of what it means to live relationally, to understand that all life is interconnected, that every act of harm ripples outward, and that every act of care does too. Their survival and resilience are living proof of what Solarpunk envisions: societies rooted in reciprocity, respect and shared responsibility. They got it right, but settler colonialism came and created a new lens to look through that prioritised financial greed and the world just followed, leading us to the broken systems we’re fighting to survive in today.

Joan went on to say, “All our liberation is tied together. We fight together, we grieve together, we live together” and if those words don’t impress upon you the importance of community, I don’t know what will.

Reclaiming our third spaces

If the home is our first space, and the workplace our second, then our third spaces such as parks, cafés, libraries, gardens, places of worship, community halls and local sports grounds are where connection blossoms. They are where we meet, grieve, learn, and play. Yet so many of these spaces have been lost or privatised, replaced by shopping centres and pay-to-enter venues.

Joan imagines their return: “Parking lots owned by private companies can be transformed back into playgrounds, theatre stages, ofrendas, community gardens, wildlife preserves, skateparks, benches, public pools, rivers, and ponds.”

When we look around our towns, we see so many empty storefronts, abandoned buildings, disused green spaces neglected and often not accessible simply due to private ownership, or, even worse in my opinion, council-owned properties that are simply rotting away because of budget cuts that get more severe year on year.

Joan also pointed out, “when building community, it is critical to have multiple perspectives. Often, there are historical contexts that you will miss because of your own background. People are not a monolith, and that's an important perspective to keep too.” Indeed it is, one I can confirm as a foreigner who has made my home in a country that is not my own. There is so much backstory and cultural relevance to take in before understanding the state of a place.

Allow Joan’s illustrations to inspire you the next time you walk past a bus shelter in your community, or the abandoned shop on the corner. This reimagining isn’t utopian fantasy, it’s a reminder that public spaces belong to the public and that creativity and cooperation can transform even the most ordinary landscapes into sanctuaries of belonging.

Collective grief and community

Then she touched on something so directly pertinent to conversations I’ve been having with peers in the death work space I spend so much of my time in these days: The pandemic left many of us fractured and disconnected, carrying unacknowledged grief.

“Where are our rituals?” Joan asks. “Where do we put this grief? We were completely abandoned by every institution, and those wounds don’t magically heal without some real work.”

She’s speaking my language here. It’s been so interesting the amount of meetings I’ve sat in and casual chats I’ve had this year where this idea of collective grief and no where for it to go has come up. 

In the absence of official memorials or shared ceremonies, artists and communities are creating their own, through remembrance trees, street altars, murals and public acts of mourning. These gestures help us begin to process collective loss and rebuild the connective tissue of care that our culture too often neglects. 

Here in my little part of the UK there are pockets of action in this arena, such as with the Good Grief Festival and the recent opening of the Bristol Centre for Grief Research and Engagement, but there is a longing for so much more to address the collective grief we’re carrying not only from the experience of the pandemic, but the current state of the world as a whole. It’s something I have been making an active effort to address, taking time to acknowledge our collective grief, creating space for it, and exploring the value of ritual and connection at the events and gatherings for This Mortal Life.

Realistic hope

Solarpunk is hopeful, not naïve optimism. It’s a belief in our capacity to reimagine and rebuild. It’s art that shows us what it looks like when we put nature, people and accessibility first. When universal design and ecological harmony are woven into the fabric of everyday life.

As Joan reflects on her time in Japan, she notes the beauty of thoughtful design: textured sidewalks guiding the blind, ramps for elders, toddler seats in public bathrooms. These small acts of consideration that collectively create dignity. “No culture is perfect,” she says, “but we have a lot to learn from each other.”

That spirit of learning, of exchange and adaptation, is what Solarpunk calls us toward. It’s a living ecosystem of ideas and practices, continually growing and rooted in compassion.

A crowbar for change

Joan says she keeps a quote by Mariame Kaba pinned to her wall:

“Our goal is not simply to label or identify our oppression, but to upend and dismantle it.”

And the final line of her email to me read, “My art is my crowbar. You can borrow it if you like.”

And perhaps that’s what all acts of creation, care and community are… tools we lend each other to help open up space for a kinder, fairer and more sustainable world.

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Be honest, you’re a little bit in love with her now too, aren’t you? It looks like Joan’s Etsy is taking a break at the moment, but you can read more about her and her work here.

And if you’d like to read a beautifully written piece on Solarpunk literature with a queer author’s personal story, I recommend this piece by Sage Agee in the Earth Island Journal.

And for a proper deep dive into the origins of the Solarpunk conceptualisation with lots of visual examples, have a look at Solarpunk: Radical Hope by Alexandria Shaner from Resilience.org.