Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures. Edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland

Abstract

Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland’s edited collection Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures is nuanced, thoughtful, and a joy to read. Solarpunk, as a movement encompassing (but not limited to) speculative fiction, art, fashion, architecture, activism, lifestyle, and philosophy, is often defined by its diversity—of identities, of sociopolitics, of theoretical styles, of activist strategies—and the Almanac demonstrates this in its wide variety of both essays and contributors. The Almanac exemplifies the solarpunk strategy of “adapting theory to local reality” (1), moving from context of the Anthropocene and a history of the generic roots of solarpunk (“Introduction”), to the historical forces giving rise to the events of this moment that affect our day-to-day reality and how solarpunk can affect our imagination of a better future (“Part 1”), to the way that individuals can use solarpunk thought and action in their personal lives (“Part 2”), to contextualizing the individual solarpunk in their community of human and more-than-human beings in their environments (“Part 3”), to how readers can put all of this careful thought into concrete action (“Part 4”) in service of making life better in the here and now.