“The Rebellion of Optimism: Addressing Environmental Vulnerability Through Solarpunk Fiction” In recent years, the escalating destruction of physical ecosystems has increasingly manifested in traumas to the collective emotional landscape. Unprecedented mass phenomena such as eco melancholia and climate anxiety are on the rise particularly among young people. According to a recently published international survey, a majority of respondents aged 16 to 25 “perceive that they have no future, that humanity is doomed, and that governments are failing to respond adequately” (Hickman et al.). But this eco-melancholic zeitgeist is not only a direct reaction to political and economic inertia, but also a long-term product of cultural autosuggestion. Most notably, the decades long prevalence of the dystopian mode in speculative fiction has conditioned audiences to think of humanity’s prospects as inescapably bleak, suggesting over and over that we are irreversibly headed towards environmental cataclysm driven by the unstoppable mechanics of hypercapitalism. As several conservation psychologists have observed, this fictional mantra is now becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only does the culturally entrenched sense of futility result in environmental inaction, but it even fuels climate change denial and unrestrained material consumption as devil-may-care hedonistic coping strategies. Hence, there has been an increasing emphasis in the ecological humanities on fostering “a new set of ecological virtues, which include courage and radical hope against despair and hopelessness” (Kretz 277). Supplying such positive visions is the declared goal of the emerging solarpunk movement, which understands itself as a “rebellion against the structural pessimism of how the future will be” (Owens). Counter to the dystopian bias of contemporary speculative fiction, solarpunk is dedicated to imagining pathways to a socially and environmentally sustainable civilization. However, despite this emphasis on hopefulness and optimism, solarpunk is far from being an escapist feel-good genre. To the contrary, it directly engages with the painful implications of ecological precarity as a necessary step to developing possible solutions. If “our failure to deal with the collective and individual pain generated as a result of our destructive economic system is blocking us from reaching out for the solutions that can help us to find another direction” (Confino), then solarpunk provides a much-needed venue for the public articulation of environment-related feelings of anguish, sadness, and guilt. This paper takes stock of the budding solarpunk movement with a special focus on the creative strategies it employs to address our shared environmental vulnerability. In particular, it explores how solarpunk fiction uses optimism as an epistemic approach to unlocking new conceptual territory beyond the dominant capitalist paradigm – and thus foster a sense of human (and more-than-human) solidarity in the face of existential crisis.