What is Solarpunk?
Solarpunk is a movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability, human impact on the environment, climate change, and pollution. Instead of a future turned dystopian, with people marginalized by technology, we imagine a future where people have been empowered by technology equitably to solve humanity's hardest problems.
Although solarpunk is concerned with technology, it also embraces low-tech ways of living sustainably such as gardening, permaculture, positive psychology, and do-it-yourself ethics. Its themes may reflect on environmental philosophy such as bright green environmentalism, deep ecology, and ecomodernism, as well as punk ideologies such as anarchism, anti-consumerism, anti-authoritarianism, and civil rights.
In order to solve the major contemporary challenges that humanity currently faces, there will need to be thousands of new businesses that focus on viable solutions. Those businesses will grow rapidly and become wildly successful and impactful to the world, or else our entire civilization will be at risk of destruction.
When we say "viable solutions" we mean: community composting instead of wasteful meal delivery, micro-mobility instead of electric cars, decentralized information networks instead of mega media giants, pollution reduction instead of carbon capture, and other overlooked, underestimated ideas. While we are tech enabled, we acknowledge that low-tech is often better.
Solarpunk VC will invest at the earliest stages in companies with novel ideas, that fit in with the solarpunk ideology. We write very small checks for founders just getting started, to help apply for that first patent, get those first sign ups, finish that first prototype, etc., and provide the support needed to get a startups off the ground.
Dealflow comes from LP intros, events, and involvement in sustainability and ReFi minded orgs and communities. Want to make an intro? Email [email protected]
