Compost Modernity!

For Aeon, Yogi Hale Hendlin explores solarpunk, a vision of the future in which humans take their cues from nature’s living systems rather than working against them. Hendlin, an environmental philosopher and public health scientist at the Feral Ecologies Lab, highlights ecologically grounded cities built within Earth’s limits—and asks “what it would mean to make the built world hospitable again.”

Solarpunk’s point isn’t that a ‘solar future’ begins and ends with the devices we already know. It widens the meaning of technology to include Indigenous and place-based practices such as chinampas – raised garden beds woven from reeds, anchored in shallow lakes, and refreshed with nutrient-rich silt from canals. They don’t produce electricity, but they do produce abundance: food, soil and a stable local ecology. Solarpunk puts that kind of low-energy, high-yield ingenuity beside high ecotech like atmospheric water harvesters to pull drinking water out of the air, and regenerative microgrids to store power. In other words, it treats science and technology as plural: shaped by culture, landscape and values, not dictated by a single industrial blueprint. That’s why solarpunk often turns to biomimicry – learning from nature’s designs – to aim human ingenuity at repair: restoring ecosystems while also restoring the ways we live with one another.