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I always thought that the problem with stuff like the Solarpunk Manifesto is that it's like Soviet Aesthetic purged of workers and labor. I could make a drawing or a song based on the ideal of Communism, such as it may exist in the far (hopefully not too far) future. Soviet art tends not to depict that per se, instead what you see is workers labouring and happy to be labouring under Socialism, building out that Communist ideal. Solarpunk as an ideology is meant to be an antidote to despair, so the ideal Solarpunk world is already built.

The focus of Soviet art always seemed on people, wether they were working, fighting or building that Communist ideal. The focus of Solarpunk is on places, it is farms, gardens and green plazas, all devoid of mosquitoes, never being built but always being used - and I think only a minority of the Solarpunk artists caught up with that and started adding people on work suits doing the work of maintaining those places.

This is a picture I found online of a Sistema Agro-Florestal (Agri-Forest System) in Brazil. It is an idea that is arising under capitalism to combine local, native flora with staple foods and cash crops, in a way that permits you to more reliably control pests and cut back on both fertilizer and presticides. It also allows you to utilize land for food production without completely breaking down natural ecosystems, as native fauna like birds, mammals and insects, can make use of the Forest part of the system for transit and other purposes.

If I'm not mistaken, this sort of thing is also becoming a thing in upscale coffee farms in order to a) improve crop quality due to symbiosis, b) reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events such as heatwaves and extreme rains. There's also the idea to increase cocoa production in Brazil back to historical levels, as the country has had to deal with the Witch's Broom plague for decades at this point. So its not limited to small scale family farms either. Again, its an idea of that is arising in capitalist Brazil and, presumably, in many other places as well.

This is a drawing by a magazine in capitalist Brazil depicting an idealized version of Agri-Forest systems.. There's a guy using a hoe to till the soil and there's another guy climbing a ladder to harvest fruit. Idealized in a way, as there's no use of machinery, not even for watering crops. But its something human and achievable right away.

And this is a Solarpunk farm. Labor is only implied - the lady is having her cup of coffee in the morning, raring to go. But go where? The even larger implication is that everything is automated. The future is optimistic. Even the picking of delicate, fresh fruit has been optimized by ghibli octoarms machines.

Then you've got the floating gardens in places like Mexico, which harness native techniques to create pockets of extreme fertility and endurance in the middle of Mexico City. It really is something to behold but it is not something that can be appreciated without the labor involved in creating, maintaining and cleaning canal farms in the middle of a metropolis.

My hypothesis is that what forces of production remain in the US are so regressive that the people with a positive, environmental outlook into the future just aren't in industry or farming. They are city dwellers who, for the most part, wish their cities were livable spaces. Whereas elsewhere in the Global South, however regressive the landowners and capitalists may be when it comes to rewarding labor, environmental pressures do force them and their media to open the way for different ways of doing things. Even if it starts as a cynical ploy to acquire carbon credits or greenwash their initiatives of capital, something like a large scale sugar farm that doesn't do harvest burns respond to a real, social demand for fewer miserable months of mass air pollution in a year, for an instance - while also being a frontier for capital investment.