In a media landscape filled with dystopian environmental collapse, how can we make the future fun?

With politics a mess and the climate spinning out of control, taking a break can be guilt-inducing, and going on vacation becomes a stressful addition to our carbon footprint. Meanwhile our traditional forms of recreation are being disrupted by heat waves, air and water pollution, and disappearing winters, and our new media-rich lifestyles are set to be a big driver of energy use in the coming decades. 

Solarpunk is a hopeful sci-fi genre that imagines a world of sustainable technologies and lifestyles. Solarpunk offers an aesthetic blueprint for how we can use games, sports, and relaxation to transform our society and thrive through the planetary crisis to come. The things we need to do to save the planet are often also the things that will make our lives more restful, social, meaningful and fun.

From bicycle camping to the Renegade Olympics of 2040, speculative fiction writer Andrew Dana Hudson will discuss solarpunk visions for activist sports, low-carbon leisure, and down-shifted enjoyments. This will include The Games That Got Us Through, a 2016 work of speculative fiction and game design that immersed the Emerge Festival in the politically-charged sports of tomorrow's climate migrations, and touch on sci-fi concepts from Cory Doctorow, Octavia Butler, Michael Aylwin and more.