What is Soilpunk?

I’d like to talk about Soilpunk. A new, unestablished, and perhaps even redundant term to describe an artistic and literary genre that has only a couple of articles, a video essay, a game, and maybe a couple of books that we can retroactively say are kind of soilpunk.

*Check out my companion moodboard on Cosmos.*

Trà Phạ @camelia.pham via Instagram. Inspired by a view from a bus between Edinburgh and Birmingham.

Now, I’m the first person to say that we really don’t need to name every single aesthetic on the internet with the suffixes -core and -punk, but I think this one has a lot of potential.

I saw this video essay by an account that I really enjoy called: *What is Soilpunk?* By the Forest and the Trees. It introduced me to a new niche genre of art and literature. As a solarpunk fan, I was intrigued. What else could there be to a green future?

The term soilpunk was coined less than a year ago, but its themes align with my own special interests so much that imagining a world like this has become a load-bearing hyperfixation for me, carrying me wistfully through my workdays and lunchbreaks.

I’m going to summarize a bit of the video and propose my own amendments to what it is, what it should be, and why it’s important to imagine a future where our communities are humanist and our growth as a society is limited by what our soil can sustain.

This is part personal essay, and part genre manifesto.

Steampunk

Steam-powered Victorian era, underdog stories of coming of age, and rags to riches.

Cyberpunk

Needs no introduction. It’s a techno-dystopia, a corporate feudal society full of crime, tech slaves, corporate corruption, and indoctrinated organization men.

Solarpunk

A green utopia. A continuation of our economic growth, but in a way that can sustain life on Earth. It imagines a world where our houses are run on solar panels, shoes are made of algae, and robots harvest our fruit. It depicts a world where personal gardens can be big and beautiful when large families can be supported by the power of automation and enabled by the peace of mind that a wind turbine brings.

In the same way that steampunk glorifies the wealth inequality of Victorian times, solarpunk ignores the social effects of green robots paving the path for leisure and art.

In my opinion, Solarpunk is a utopia. An imagination that our current technological trajectory as a society will eventually bring us a world that we can live in peacefully and harmoniously, where apple trees are abundant and where the labor of production and commerce continues out of sight of the people who can afford peace and leisure. I think solarpunk is a future where rich people purchase sustainable technology and materials so they can feel better about themselves.

I understand the need for some works of fiction to occupy a “popular” space in the Overton Window without being too radical, but it can’t be the limit of what we imagine. For example, my all-time favorite solarpunk fiction, Monk and Robot, ignores the corruption that’s inherent to centralized power and assumes, for literary purposes, that technology and therapy will liberate us from corporate greed and government overreach.

This will not be the case. Even in a vagugely solarpunk socialist future, where generational trauma has conditions to heal and the wealth gap is reduced as much as it ever can be, our culture’s consumption and the psychological exploitation that ships inherently with selling products and platforms, as well as the rigid pecking order of authority will never lead to a just, free, or fulfilling life for everybody.

ande ˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗ @andewitt.art via Instragram

Soilpunk

I think soilpunk should imagine a world of empathy, where we treat our human and animal neighbors with empathy and the soil and sea with respect, not as a domineering force that knows what’s scientifically best, but by having a close relationship with them and listening and acting. I think it should also have a healthy and well-illustrated fear of what will happen if we don’t.

I think soilpunk should differ from solarpunk by being a little less utopian and a little more political.

If solarpunk is the ideal continuation of our society, achieved through regulation, green energy, and a close eye on inequality, soilpunk is a proposition to retire economy and commerce altogether. It acknowledges the uncomfortable reality that our current system will cannibalize the earth and proposes the alternatives, however alien to us they may seem.

Motifs

Soilpunk could be like grimdark solarpunk. Not in that it should be intentionally evil or brutal in its themes, but that the gritty parts of the world should be central to an ironic optimism, that despite the horrendous past of exploitation, humans can relearn what exactly it means to be native to a place, and to illustrate that through the metaphors of native and invasive species.

It should show the depleted soil wreaking havoc on communities and ecosystems while showing the community-wide process of rehabilitating it. It should illustrate in a very clear way the worst-case scenario at the hands of a detached corporate oligarchy, and show the decentralized communities of the world shrugging it off and establishing a new normal.

Soilpunk shows the regreening of the earth, the development of a new animism, and the growth of a metaphorical mycelium that bridges that gap between the animate and the inanimate. I think it should also show the strength and resolve of maintaining a community in a world that only functions on the isolation and exploitation of the individual.

Soilpunk should consider reframing what we think we need in order to survive. It should show people going through the process of choosing to live without the things they thought they needed for comfort, and show the uncomfortable process of adapting.

We should be able to experience stories about people navigating hardship in a slice-of-life kind of way. Pointing fingers at profiteers of psychological exploitation while laughing about how the cabbages didn’t grow the way they imagined, then weathering the winter with limited resources available to them.

*omnia on Flikr. scribbly bark*

Rhetoric

There are a lot of appeals we can make when presenting new, radical ideas without making anyone’s hackles rise. We can follow drama and action conventions while slipping in positive ideologies can work subconsciously. We can piggyback on New Age Spirituality principles that have been sold to us in order to shunt people off the natural-medicine-to-antivax pipelines.

Tenacity and strength in the face of adversity is something that drives many stories of our modern generation. Where I think we go wrong is acting against adversity without motives and without kindness. Empathy and generosity require the same tenacity and courage that it takes to weather a storm. We don’t need to seek ruthless justice or domination to have an entertaining story, we can explore the conflicts that arise from living in a community, fighting against imbalances and authoritarians, and healing generational trauma.

There’s something genuine about the slow-paced Taoism and psychedelic Transcendentalism that’s dug its roots into certain subcultures in Western society. It’s become a marketable lens to apply to just about anything, imbuing itself into some aspects of corporate culture, permaculture gardening, electronic music, the list goes on.

In our society that is fast-paced, obsessed with status, and programmed for anxiety, it’s appealing to take it slow and to experience a moment of peace. This kind of rhetoric is only actually practical for capitalism in one way — manipulating people to feel some ounce of control over their lives. It can help people slap a Band-Aid on their lifestyle, and combined with some antidepressants, you can actually get to someplace sane.

Soilpunk, on the other hand, necessitates this rhetoric. It needs you to stop to look and learn from the world around you. You can’t rehabilitate anything without understanding how it works, how it feels, the narrative of your actions, making those actions incrementally, and having the patience to see how those actions are impacting the world around you.

In addition to looking and listening, soilpunk should have a heavy inclusion of plant, animal, and inanimate characters. The fox and the fish, like the soil and the sunshine, contain their worth within themselves for no one’s sake. We need to be careful not to anthropomorphize nature. It persists without moral or mission, outside our human realm of cognition. When we conserve and harmonize with nature, we must do it for the right reasons. Not because we expect personhood, love, connection — or god forbid — commercial value, but because it exists in its own right, with its own role to play ecologically.

No matter what angle we push, we will appeal to a somewhat smaller but more enthusiastic audience that daydreams about moving to a ranch to change their day-to-day life with the support of their chosen family surrounding them.

Mushishi

Ginko from the anime Mushishi perfectly exemplifies the slow-paced approach to diagnosing and rehabilitating, and the lack of anthropomorphization of nature. To him, nature is to be listened to, understood, yet not projected upon. Its balances should be considered, but he never projects a motive onto it.

I’m going to quote the Forest and the Trees here, because despite Mushishi being my favorite anime before watching this video, I couldn’t have said it better than he did.

“Mushi are a hidden form of life that many people can’t see. Mushi go about their lives generally without causing any problems, but every once in a while, they can become imbalanced. That can result in problems from taking away someone’s sight, to taking away an entire village’s ability to grow crops. And Ginko is a sort of doctor who specializes in Mushi. He travels between villages trying to understand those imbalances, and to the best of his ability, he sets things right.

What Ginko has that a lot of modern detective or doctor stories lack is that he is patient — more so than many of us would think is practical. Sometimes he’ll wait around with someone for a month, or come back year after year to the same problem, if it means he’ll be there with you at the right moment to figure out what’s happening. He understands that to find the root cause of a problem, he needs to follow the threads; he can’t just act on the symptoms, because without understanding what’s actually going on, the problem will just keep poking its head up.

So even if he thinks he knows what is causing the problem, he is constantly counseling people to slow down and learn as much as they can before they act.”

Revolution

What does it take to bring about this kind of reality? Let’s get political.

In my opinion, decentralization and syndicalism. Decentralization is the end goal, and syndicalism is the method.

When a community removes itself from “the system” to live by alternative means that they think are reasonable, sustainable, and healthy, they create a node in a larger system — a syndicate.

Each syndicate may have a specialization, not to the extent of a business, but a community-wide good or service that they can contribute to support other syndicates. Each node associates with the nodes directly around them, creating a network of communities that support each other and their own way of life. This is the core of syndicalism.

If there is a need for a central organization in this type of infrastructure, they would function more in the role of a press syndicate that disseminates information rather than functioning as a central governing body.

Compared to some syndicalists, I don’t believe that we should transition our system of government to “power to the people”, which I believe to be tyranny of the majority, nor being subject to the rule of workers’ unions. I also don’t believe that one small reform after another will get us anywhere in any amount of time. What we need is to build infrastructure from the inside that enables us to operate within both worlds until the former is no longer useful or needed, and fades away. Many think that a new just world will arise from the ashes, but instead of a Cambrian explosion of governments scrambling for power, we need to use the current system as controlled scaffolding for the new.

In other words, we will all work full-time jobs while organizing our communities. We will revise building and zoning codes to avoid committing crimes or losing capital. Our children will go to public schools until we can teach the curriculum of the community. We will have land trusts and crowdfunding until there are enough syndicates to support growth without the old system.

Going to the grocery store, buying your own tools, and purchasing your own knowledge is replaced by community stocks of food, tool libraries, and skill sharing.

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a village to make someone happy, too.

Joyce Gehl. Mixed media with resin on panel

Why it’s important to tell these stories

In a world full of revolutionary fantasy novels that imagine the purging of corruption without proposing what comes after, such as Hunger Games, it will be refreshing to me to see works that propose the what-comes-after scenarios and depict the unglamorous aspects of living harmoniously with the earth in close proximity to other human beings as the balance between work and life collapses.

We desperately need stories that show the indomitable human spirit as part of a collective that collaborates equitably for the survival of their ecosystem, rather than as an individual at odds with a cruel world that actively plots their downfall. To imagine a world where we live and die free, we need to counter the mythos that links human nature and capitalism.

We indoctrinate children in school with the following philosophies. All of these ideas assume that indigenous people and our ancestors were stupid, violent, covetous, and above all, individualistic, which is something that I think we were all raised to believe, even if we didn’t realize it.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s assumption that it’s society that inherently corrupts humans, and that we have a binary to choose from: primitive “savage” bands of people, or sophisticated yet corrupt “society.”

— Thomas Hobbes asserted that humans need to be controlled by a central government because we are inherently corrupt and can’t help but fight against each other over natural resources in a selfish and competitive Darwinian way.

— Lastly, one of the most damaging assumptions was Adam Smith’s proposition that currency evolved naturally from the barter system, becoming the capital and credit out of necessity because trading chickens for goats simply became too complex.

— This was later expanded on by William Stanley Jevons with his “double coincidence of wants,” or two individuals who simultaneously covet each other’s possessions.

These myths all share one assumption, and it’s wrong.

Humans do not covet when their needs are met. Humans do not steal when their neighbors provide for them. Humans do not buy when everything is given freely by the soil. We have intelligence and foresight that we can use to hold up our end of our bargain with the Earth.

The world is already cruel and lovely, we don’t need to steal the joy that’s inherent to life by exploiting our neighbors.

Soilpunk Reading List

Let’s build the groundwork.

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2014) The blending of Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber, David Wengrow (2021) David Graeber debunks capitalist myths about humanity and proposes a new canon.

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) A quintessential work of sci-fi anarchist fiction. Le Guin doesn’t offer any easy answers, but explores an alternate structure of society and the struggle of keeping revolution alive.

Unbecoming, Andrew Mitchell via Tractor Beam (2025) A beautiful and poetic short story about empathy, and the making and unmaking of society. A soilpunk version of The Last of Us. I recommend reading it twice.

What is Soilpunk? the Forest and the Trees (2026) Exploring what this shiny new genre of fiction has the potential to be.

The Veldt, Ray Bradbury (1950) A short cautionary tale about indoctrination told through an innovative electronic nursery. In todays terms: why shouldn’t we rely on automation for leisure and social media to raise our children?

Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler (1993) In 2024, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.