Today one of the members of my book club told me about an upcoming solarpunk event in Toronto!
It is the “We Create Our Futures 2026” event, taking place at the Centre for Social Innovation at 192 Spadina Ave (north of Queen), Friday to Sunday, 16-18 October. From the site:
What if the future isn’t something we wait for, but something we create together?
We Create Our Futures is a 3-day festival of Climate, Culture & Arts, taking over the Centre for Social Innovation in downtown Toronto, October 16–18.
For three days, we’re bringing together artists, activists, neighbours, makers, thinkers, dreamers and doers to explore what a more beautiful, regenerative and connected future could actually feel like.
Expect art and music, food and fashion, engaging conversations, hands-on making, climate solutions, community wisdom, dancing, learning, repairing, imagining — and lots of unexpected encounters along the way.
Edit: I’m going!
Vacation has been approved. Accommodation booked. Event ticket purchased. Train tickets bought. Yay!
This is important because it’s a direct call-back to the old dreams I had, the dreams of high-school me before the Oligarchs’ Counterrevolution changed the world.
In 1978 or so, high-school me found an excerpt from the book YV88 in the magazine CoEvolution Quarterly in the high-school library. It broke my mind open. I had to find the source. And this was the source:
I was thrilled by the vision of an electric solar-powered future built on a human scale.
At the end of high school, I had a choice to make. What to do next? I’d been drawing and writing for some time; Mom wanted me to go to art school. However, I could not even imagine how I would make a living with art. It required social fluency that was far beyond my limited autistic skills.
So in part to pursue these solar dreams, I chose architecture school. And it was a disaster. By this time, it was 1981 and the Seventies dreams were fading; the architecture school was more into post-modern political symbolism. I flamed out from architecture and switched to electronics. This gave me a job. But the old dreams never went away.
I tried animation school and wrote a story with a Gaian solar background. But I talked myself out of continuing in animation (not my most optimal decision) and went back to work. I got involved with actual passive-solar houses for a while. Eventually I ended up in technical writing and started drawing, writing, and publishing books.
And I started to encounter the term ‘solarpunk’ more and more often. I started to find artwork. I started to follow specific artists and styles and groups.
With the help of my book club and editor, a short story I’d written is now turning into a novel. And I’m realizing it’s going to end in a world influenced by solarpunk…
