An Uncertain Road to Solarpunk
Industrial civilization will most likely pass through phases of decline – declining resource availability, simplification, a period built on salvage – before anything resembling a solarpunk vision emerges from them, if it emerges at all. This is an analytical thesis, not a prophecy, drawn from three independent theoretical frames: the thermodynamics of declining energy return, Tainter’s complexity theory, and Greer’s catabolic collapse. What follows is the argument for it, along with the points where it remains contested.
This piece is intended as an extension of „Przez Złomowisko Ku Słońcu” (Polish only). Worth reading together, as an analytical-and-emotional two-voice piece. Neither cancels the other.
The Finitude of Resources
Industrial civilization runs on dense, non-renewable energy sources whose return on investment (EROEI) declines systematically as the most accessible deposits are exhausted. William Catton described this before the language of EROEI became common – as „ghost acreage,” an apparent environmental carrying capacity. Industrial civilization mistakes non-renewable resources, temporary by definition, for permanent income. The difference is structural, not just quantitative: it’s the difference between a flow and a stock. We treat a finite deposit as if it were a renewable income stream.
This recognition has its critics, though. Paul Ehrlich framed overpopulation as the central ecological problem of the era, captured in the equation Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology: even with improvements in the latter two factors, population growth alone generates rising environmental impact. Costa, drawing on Latour, notes that choosing population as the site of intervention – while leaving the model of resource distribution untouched – normalizes the dominant economic order rather than questioning it: it preserves an arrangement in which elites retain access to resources at the expense of the numbers of „potentially conflictual” people. This isn’t a counterargument against declining EROEI as a physical phenomenon. It’s a warning against confusing physical necessity with a political choice about who bears the cost of adaptation.
The Great Simplification
Joseph Tainter showed that societies invest in complexity to solve problems, but the marginal return on that investment declines: each further increment of complexity costs more and solves less. When the cost of maintaining complexity exceeds its benefits, the pressure toward simplification becomes structural, not merely political. This isn’t a claim about inevitable catastrophe. It’s a claim about the direction of economic pressure under conditions of diminishing returns.
The Scrapyard as Checkpoint
Greer describes a sequence: industrial abundance, scarcity industrialism, salvage society, an eventual ecotechnic era. His key qualification: the salvage phase isn’t a failure or a punishment. It’s a structurally necessary bootstrapping stage, analogous to medieval Europe drawing on Roman roads and aqueducts. The framing shifts from „punishment for industrial sins” to a logistical problem of transition between infrastructures of different complexity.
Asimov’s Foundation cycle depicts exactly this dynamic in fiction: after the catastrophic fall of the planet-metropolis Trantor, the survivors literally strip the ruins for parts and return to cooperative agriculture; the place comes to be called „the Hame.” Between heroic nostalgia for the past and pure dystopia, a third path appears. But the source text itself warns against romanticizing de-urbanization: the demographic catastrophe accompanying this transition – in Foundation, the near-total destruction of Trantor’s population – isn’t negligible.
There’s a rhetorical trap here, visible more clearly from an entirely different geographic context. Solarpunk Cambodia, an annual arts-and-organizing program preceding September’s Clean Energy Week, built one of its editions around a critique of the standard notion of resilience – understood as a return to the state before the shock. The organizers note that this understanding protects the system itself: those who most often absorb repeated shocks rarely have the power to change what produces them. They propose the concept of „NOWtopias” – futures rooted locally and regionally, in indigenous knowledge and existing technology, not imported from ready-made utopian templates.
This bears directly on the vocabulary of „salvage civilization.” As a bootstrapping stage, it’s structurally accurate, but rhetorically risky if it silently assumes rebuilding the same complexity, just with fewer resources – that would be exactly the resilience-as-return that Solarpunk Cambodia warns against. For the salvage phase to actually lead toward solarpunk, it has to be regenerative and locally rooted, not just a leaner version of what came before. NOWtopias functions here as a third illustration alongside Callenbach’s Ecotopia and Trantor: non-Western, contemporary, confirming that this pattern of thought isn’t purely theoretical speculation from the Anglo-American collapsology tradition.
Demographic Scale
Precision of language matters here. It’s easy to fall into phrasing that conflates a structural mechanism with an act of acceptance or choice – sounding, as a result, like approval of mass violence it is not. Greer offers demographically more precise language: a rise in the crude death rate of just one percent a year, with the birth rate unchanged, is enough to reduce a population to five percent of its starting size within three centuries – without war, famine, or epidemic on a catastrophic scale, just through slow, cumulative deterioration of living conditions. At three percent a year, the same thing happens in a single century. This is a predictable, impersonal structural outcome, categorically different from genocide or a „cost” decided upon, despite comparable numerical scale. We’re talking about a demographic mechanism, not a cost accepted by anyone.
This distinction doesn’t excuse us from asking who bears these consequences, and why, in the first place. That’s a political question, not only a demographic one, and this text doesn’t resolve it. Catton offers useful ethical language here: he describes the ecological crisis not only as conflict between groups, but as „diachronic competition” – intergenerational conflict, in which the present generation’s prosperity is paid for by the deprivation of future generations. This framing avoids the language of a cost accepted by any particular party; it shifts responsibility onto intergenerational structure.
Collapse Has Already Happened
Kyle Whyte, a philosopher from the Potawatomi Nation, formulates a thesis that doesn’t let us absolutize our own narrative frame. For Indigenous peoples of North America, climate change isn’t an approaching threat. It’s the third wave of the same colonial process that already dispossessed them, geographically and culturally. Gross, quoted by Whyte, puts it directly: Indigenous people have already lived through the apocalypse of their worlds. The question isn’t „what will we do when collapse arrives” – it’s „what does it mean to already live after it,” with practical knowledge built over generations of experience, not theoretical extrapolation.
A text like this one carries a specific risk. Whyte describes a pattern in allied literature that folds Indigenous voice into Anthropocene narratives as „survivors of the Holocene” – witnesses on the edge of disappearance, from whom something must be learned before they’re gone. This pattern lets allies position themselves as people who’ll act differently than their colonizer-ancestors: a symbolic innocence that doesn’t translate into any real change in the arrangement of power. A project narrating its own future industrial collapse, and reaching for analogies in Indigenous experience, stands right at the threshold of this pattern.
We don’t resolve this tension. We flag it directly. Indigenous futurisms aren’t invoked here as an illustration confirming the thesis about phases of decline. They stand beside it as a separate epistemology of time – spiral, not linear (the Anishinaabemowin aanikoobijigan, „ancestor and descendant at once”), operating through counterfactual dialogue with ancestors and descendants rather than forecasting. The Menominee Forest, sustainably managed since 1856 on a reservation fifty times smaller than the original territory, is an example of this method in practice.
Agency, Not Fatalism
None of the models invoked above – catabolic collapse, complexity theory, declining EROEI – guarantees a specific outcome. They give a probable pattern, not a prophecy. The conviction that history is inevitably heading toward a predetermined destination, whether catastrophe or renewal, is historicism, not analysis.
Climate scientists, like collapsology writers, tend to be ignored until their predictions come true. That’s not a reason to give up on action. Describing a probable pattern of decline isn’t the same as accepting passivity toward it. On the contrary: knowing the pattern – which stage requires what, which skills will be valuable – is a condition for preparation and resilience, not the obstacle.
The Garden and the Scrapyard
The key factor enabling the transition from the salvage phase to a solarpunk society is local symbiosis between technical skills – repair, material recovery – and food production, grounded in energy-and-material sovereignty and closed loops. Without this connection, both sides remain in shortage: those with technical capability lack access to food; food producers lack access to tools. A scrapyard without a garden won’t even feed itself. A garden without a scrapyard has nothing to defend or rebuild itself with. Together they form something that outlasts a single generation – and whether we build that connection before it’s needed is up to us.
