Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast Conversations with the People trying to save us from ourselves. Do you know what solar punk is? Neither did I, which is why I reached out to Nate Crosser. Nate is a VC in sustainable food and agriculture who, in his spare time, writes about cool things like this on his sub-stack. In this interview, he contextualizes solar punk among some other punk movements and gives us some movie tips to get us on board. I reached Nate in Kansas. Nate, it's great to see you. Welcome to the podcast.

Nate Crosser: 1:14

Ryan, I'm excited to be here. Thank you.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:17

You're a sustainable food and egg VC at Blue Horizon. I counted we actually have six active investments in common. I really hope you know what you're doing, because on some of these I don't feel like I always do. That's pretty cool. I have lots of overlap, but I don't want to talk about investing right now because you wrote on LinkedIn. You posted an article that you'd written about solar punk. It is the first time that I've ever seen that term. I should say that I'm a 42-year-old man without Instagram. It's not that I'm the most plugged in person in the world, but it caught my eye and I wanted to dive into it a little bit. I thought, rather than going down the rabbit hole online, I thought I'd just send you a message and see if you want to talk about it here. That's why we're here.

Nate Crosser: 2:06

Cool. Well, yeah, super excited to talk about it. I think you'll find by the end of the conversation you are, and have been, a solar punk person for quite some time. You can put the label on it, maybe.

Ryan Grant Little: 2:16

Right on. What is solar punk?

Nate Crosser: 2:19

It's a literary design movement or you could say an aesthetic or a media genre, basically centered around imagining a future where people actually live in harmony with both each other and with nature, and at least in part, typically, that's in thanks to responsible use of technology, namely green technologies like solar. If you look at a technology and project a future out in the way that sci-fi typically does, let's look at other analogous movements like cyberpunk. What looks at, what does the future look like if we go really far down the path of digitization and cryptography and all of that stuff? What does that world look like? Another example would be steam punk, an aesthetic around how do we use machines and what does society centered around that look like? Solar punk is asking us what does a society centered around solar power and use of green technologies like fungi for food instead of industrial agriculture, all these kinds of interesting technologies and, I would say, cultural innovations or cultural rememberings that can make society better and flourish? I think it's important to also point out that this is not just like being a little bit optimistic, this is like being grandly optimistic.

Nate Crosser: 3:47

Matt Flynn, who's one of the early writers kind of coining the term solar punk, challenged us to think about thinking in cathedral time a thousand year effort towards building a better world with some of the most advanced technologies and standing on the shoulders of multiple thousands years of human philosophy and achievement. What can we achieve as a society and as a world? If we can imagine that, then we can build towards it. If you look at the media landscape almost all of the sci-fi and anything that looks at the world more than 20, 50 years in the future it's almost always negative. It's the matrix, it's Blade Runner, these worlds that you wouldn't want to live in, you wouldn't want your grandkids to live in. It's important for us to start writing more media that projects a world that we do want our grandkids to live in, and that's what solar punk is.

Ryan Grant Little: 4:47

If you place it in the timeline or the spectrum with these other, I'll call them dash punk movements. You mentioned them already. Steampunk, which I think we started to get to know through Japanese anime, and cyberpunk Does it live in opposition to these things or is it an offshoot of some of them? Is it newer, is this a newer concept than those ones?

Nate Crosser: 5:10

I think all of these punk movements are in essence counter-cultural. They're not necessarily in reaction to each other, but they're in reaction to the mainstream culture. Solar punk is maybe a reaction to a lot of these sci-fi genres or just climate doomism or potentially corporate greenwashing about whether we can continue to consume in the same economic patterns and with the same technologies that we have now. Solar punk is kind of a reaction to all of that. I think it's a much more desirable future than what is described in cyberpunk, which is maybe the most popular punk ideology. I think most people, when you ask them, would rather live in a verdant world than a digital one. They don't necessarily want to plug into a video game, even if it is very immersive, but they would be very happy to plug into an off-grid farm community Maybe a bit of reaction to cyberpunk as well.

Nate Crosser: 6:13

I don't know. This whole movement is probably 10 to 15 years old. We're the first blogs that we're explicitly calling out solar punk that I can find. But if you look back to Art Nouveau, some of the design elements have been around for decades, if not longer. Like any literary design movement, there's threads. You could look back probably all the way to Play-Doh and find some of this stuff.

Ryan Grant Little: 6:38

I'm interested in the psychology of this as well because, as you say, this has a more verdant, it has a more optimistic future than the cyberpunk and the matrix and all of that kind of thing. I wonder what are your thoughts about how that drives our actions today? Are we going to be scared straight by the matrix to consume less and work towards a greener future, or do we work more when we have this picture of hope and opportunity in the future? Does that drive us more so?

Nate Crosser: 7:11

Yeah, that is a great psychological question. I think it depends on the individual. Are you the person when you're playing sports that wants to be encouraged by your coach or yelled at by your coach? What's going to make you perform better? Everyone's different and everyone needs both. I would say we've been very heavy on the spectrum of cautionary tales. Those are a really important purpose. If you look back to Seminole Works or Wells 1984 or Animal Farm or Huxley's Brave New World, that really cautions us to avoid fascism and overuse of drugs in these things in society, and that is really important. But then it's like well, what's the alternative? You need thinkers and designers who can help us think about what's the alternative to 1984, other than just more of the same. So I think you definitely need both.

Ryan Grant Little: 8:04

Interesting? Yeah, because if we only see what we don't want, then we don't have a picture of what we do want in the future. So this gives us at least some kind of maybe blueprint that we can work towards, and some of the stuff's already kind of panning out. You wrote, for example, that cultivated meat first showed up in a sci-fi novel in 1897, which is super cool and maybe also not surprising. And cultivated meat is slowly making its way to the market globally. I've even had two cultivated meat founders on this podcast already, which this is episode 20 from Magic Valley and Biocraft Pet Nutrition. Are there any other kinds of trends that you've seen from literature start to pop up or where you're like, aha, this is starting to happen now?

Nate Crosser: 8:49

Yeah, certainly it happens all of the time. Life certainly imitates art. I think it was Atwood who said that, and if you look at what was it? One of the first few movies I think probably a silent film was the man on the Moon, about somebody going to the moon, and what was it? Probably 100 years later we actually have people landing on the moon.

Nate Crosser: 9:13

You have to think that that plants a seed in someone's mind or in the, as what Le Guin would call the social organism, like that idea gets planted and carried into the social organism. And yeah, I think we see it all the time with some of the spaces that we look at and invest in in terms of food and agriculture. So I think fungi, for example, is an area where people are really excited about what the long-term future of fungi could mean for society, how we can use this technology, this domain of life that's been around for much longer than humans, and how can we kind of co-adapt with it to help solve some of the biggest challenges around food, around construction and plastic alternatives, and how we can live symbiotically with those organisms, by having them consume our waste, for example. There's probably lots more examples we could go into here as well.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:15

Yeah, I mean I'd love to. On the topic of fungi, nathan Palmier will join us in a couple of weeks on the podcast to dive into that. We're also going to have the winners from the Future is Fungi in November on the podcast. I think we're just kind of scratching the surface on what that can mean to us for nutrition materials, medicine and more right Remediation of waste and everything. So it feels like that's very much kind of just at the precipice right now and you talk about it as being kind of like a literary and artistic movement. I wonder if you can talk a bit about some of the canon from literature, from music, from film even that got you interested in the genre and that you would recommend people to check out if they're curious about it.

Nate Crosser: 11:03

Yeah, I think the closest thing we're going to get to canon in this space, in my opinion, are the films of Hayami Izaki, Studio Ghibli. Castle in the Sky, for example, or Nasaka of the Valley of the Wind are really excellent examples. Most of the books, especially I think it's the Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, are really excellent examples of Solar Punk. One that probably everyone has seen is the movie Black Panther. Wakanda Seems like a super Solar Punk place to be, but yeah, I don't know if there's really even a canon yet. I think we're still building that. I think we're on the verge of a maybe a mainstreaming of this movement, but I think we're still really we need to build that canon.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:46

You say that we're on the verge of mainstreaming. What indicates that? What are you starting to see? Where is this popping up? Are people dressing in a Solar Punk way? What does that even mean?

Nate Crosser: 11:57

I think I got interested in this idea five, 10 years ago I don't really know. I think I approached it initially through an interest in like techno-guyanism, which is this really just wonky technological idea? But then, on the other end of the spectrum, I was also interested in like permaculture, and these kind of two worlds collide in the world of Solar Punk, and so I've been following it for a little bit and it just feels like we're starting to see it move from the blogosphere to more mainstream pickups. There's now actual Solar Punk named venture capital firms. Representative AOC shouted out Solar Punk in a recent speech. We just saw a crowdfunded Solar Punk video game. There's a subreddit. Now there's like you look up Solar Punk on Spotify, you find 20 playlists. So it's a word that's gotten out. I'm not really quite sure why.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:49

And is it mostly Gen Z?

Nate Crosser: 12:51

Yeah.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:51

Is it Gen Z? Is it Teenagers? Is it US or is it kind of? I mean, maybe it's coming from Japan, where there's like a big tradition of the esteem punk and everything like that.

Nate Crosser: 13:02

Yeah, I don't know. That's a great question. I would imagine it's more like, yeah, us, japanese, south Korean, some of these more like technologically advanced and progressive societies where it's really caught on. But you know like I work with a lot of European colleagues and they're super enthusiastic about these concepts, so I think it has got global appeal. And to your question about wardrobe, I guess probably the most solar punk thing that you could wear would be what you already have or stuff from a thrift store. Maybe we can get into this later, but I don't think it should be like a utopian appeal to infinite consumption. I think there's also needs to be cultural technology in terms of what our expectations are. But I mean there also are really cool material science companies out there, like Pangaea, that are creating, to the extent you want, new clothes like really awesome sustainable materials from Fungi or algae or recycled products or it's just designed to last a lot longer. So there's a lot of interesting material science work as well.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:07

So I shouldn't just rush out to the Patagonia store and toss that on and call myself a solar punk.

Nate Crosser: 14:13

Maybe I mean Patagonia stands by their products long term, yeah. So I would say, yeah, patagonia is probably up there.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:19

All right, okay, I've mentioned Adam Flynn before, who's a solar punk researcher, who expressed concern also that solar punk could be co-opted for greenwashing. Basically, I wonder what you think about that. Have you seen any of that? What does that look like? What should people be on the lookout for?

Nate Crosser: 14:37

Yeah, he's absolutely right. There is a risk that we continue to just believe what the corporations tell us and what we want to hear and what the politicians say, that we can just continue on as is and technology will basically sort things out. Technology can certainly help us sort things out and we probably can't sort things out without technology, but we need to be also updating our culture and really thoughtful about how we implement these technologies and need to maybe make sure that they're incentivized properly, et cetera. So I think there's definitely a risk where this just becomes an appeal to infinite consumption through technology. And yeah, like I said earlier, this is not an appeal to utopia where everything is easy and nothing hurts. I would imagine in a solar punk world, people are having a relationship to the land and live in communities where people help each other out and aren't just playing video games all day or doing exactly what they want at all times. I just hard to imagine that being, at least in my solar punk vision. That's not a society that we should work towards. That's the society of like WALL-E for people to sit on their floating chairs and like make the robots do everything and I don't really know what they do. No-transcript and in terms of things to look out for.

Nate Crosser: 16:02

So Chobani has actually made a really beautiful advertisement that they put on YouTube. Just look up like Solar Pump Chobani and you'll see. It depicts basically a group of family or friends sitting around a table sharing a meal, together with solar panels in the background and floating blimps, and they're basically on a farm and you can see all this technology integrated into the farm and there's happy cows in the background and whatever. That's a really beautiful image that they conveyed. But they're also doing it to sell industrial yogurt or industrial dairy products, which have a lot of harm associated with those products. So you appreciate that they did that, but also be skeptical. That's not really the world that most industrial dairy is ushering in. So I think we should always remain vigilant, especially here.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:59

It's almost a bit of a catch-22 trying to spread movements like this. I mean, movements generally are being spread on platforms like X and Instagram and yet these are platforms that live on promoting products, basically, and live from consumerism, and so the algorithm basically exists to push products on that. So it could be like a bit of a cannibalistic way to push this movement.

Nate Crosser: 17:28

Well, I think any literary movement, design movement, should be grassroots. It should come from artists and writers and designers and everyday people and definitely not be pushed down by large corporations or Hollywood establishment or whatever. I think it's going to well up, just like any of these other punk movements have.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:50

True, but I'm wondering, even as artists and writers and activists pushing that message through these platforms that find ways to monetize it. We're a long way from zines and even blogs, where blogs were independent, and everything kind of lives on these platforms. So it almost feels like there's some work we need to do to just decouple these types of things also so that we can get pure messages out there that aren't then. You know, it's almost like the algorithm is going to greenwash things for them, for us.

Nate Crosser: 18:23

Yeah, I mean I think that's a really great point that you make. There is some. One example I can think of is there's some movement towards analog publishing again, which, if you think about it, it's like okay, well, we're cutting down trees to create paper, or maybe it's recycled paper. Maybe that's not a good thing, but to the extent that this kind of media can inspire people to really engage with the media and slow down and get off some of these platforms that encourage consumption and are always pulsing with ads, like maybe that's a trade off that we want to take in that one example. But yeah, I mean I also don't want to make it seem like Solar Punk is anti digitization or anti internet, right, like there are really amazing affinity groups of people on places like Reddit where you can engage in really rich conversation on Solar Punk topics or whatever topic you want, and I think those are amazing tools because, depending on where you live, you're probably not having those kinds of people right around you. So obviously there's the good and the bad.

Ryan Grant Little: 19:21

Yeah, I mean, I even think you know we might look back at the 2000s with blogs with you know people had independent blogs that they hosted themselves, as kind of like this, this glorious age of independent thought right when nobody can delete your post or your comment or advertise against it, basically without kind of your knowledge or consent.

Nate Crosser: 19:42

Yeah, I mean there's like sub stack has gotten really big again, right. Like people don't necessarily trust institutional media, but they can trust an expert on US genre relations who's got a post weekly newsletter, right. I think that's a really encouraging development.

Ryan Grant Little: 19:56

Yeah, indeed, and is that the best place to reach you? You have a sub stack, right.

Nate Crosser: 20:00

I do. Yep, it's called fifth industrial. It basically highlights some of the interesting technologies that I come across in my work in venture capital and just Wikipedia surfing et cetera that I think can help solve some of the ecological and maybe cultural issues in society. So it's usually like a landscape of a different technology area, like like cellular agriculture or plant cell culture or material science, innovation areas, things like that. But yeah, the last one was a article about solar punk, so you can kind of read all my thoughts there.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:35

I'll post a link to your sub-stack and also to the books that you mentioned in the show notes. And I wonder, just as a last question, some of the movies you've already mentioned the Matrix, terminator, blade Runner, dune which are kind of not maybe the solar punk future, but the kind of cyberpunk or kind of these more dystopian futures, can you recommend a movie or something? You mentioned a couple earlier, but what are your go-tos for solar punk?

Nate Crosser: 21:05

Yeah, I would say, in terms of a film, studio Ghibli is unbeatable. I love those films Pretty much. Any of them are going to have some of these themes but, like I said, nostica Castle in the Sky are really excellent. I'd also say I'm Reading Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin right now for the first time, which basically depicts a post-apocalyptic, neo-indigenous Napa Valley, which is somewhere that I used to live. So it's really interesting to hear the take of this absolute master group. She lived in Berkeley and probably spent a lot of time up in the valley, and to hear her take on what that society could look like about 100 years in the future has been really fascinating.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:49

Okay, awesome. So yeah, I realize I already asked you that earlier on, but it doesn't hurt. And again, I'll put links to those in the show notes and I'm looking forward to checking them out as well, because I haven't seen any of those. Nate, thanks a lot for joining today.

Nate Crosser: 22:02

Yeah, this is really fun. It's glad to be here.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:05

Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.