Topic: Symbiosis between energy and nature
Description: Upon crossing the countryside surrounding the solarpunk city on a bike, a boat or a train, a visitor from our world would feel a bit disconcerted. Where are the monocultures that once upon a time spread as far as the eye could see? And what are all those solar panels doing there? And most of all, who let the sheep out in the olive grove?
Agroecology techniques have replaced for the most part the industrial agriculture paradigm of the Late Stage. Fields are no longer “flat factories” meant to extract resources, but fully realized eco-systems which support biodiversity as well as human wellbeing. Concepts like food forests and agro-silvo-pastoralism are very popular, people talk about them at the bar, as much as once they talked about the stock exchange. Climate adaptation has changed farmers’ habits: some crops, no longer suitable to a hotter, more extreme climate, have been abandoned, while others have been introduced (bananas from Puglia and coffee from Sicily are now common sights).
To protect their precious crops from the Sun, some farmers have converted to agrosolar, installing solar panels between crop rows or shading the whole field. Some of these covers have curious shapes: the solar panels are arranged in a semi sphere. Berries, salad leaves, citrus fruits and tea (from Liguria, like pesto) are much happier, and rural communities have a source of energetic sovereignty without having to sacrifice either Nature or Agriculture.
Now that profit is no longer the main decision-making factor, the solarpunk world is full of creative and innovative solutions.