We like to imagine that there’s a clean border between technology and nature. Out there are trees, rivers, fungi, and weather; in here are laptops, data centres, and motorways. One is wild and ancient, the other human and new. It’s a neat, precise division — and completely artificial.
Humans are natural beings, products of the same long evolutionary processes that gave rise to coral reefs and mycelium networks. Everything we make emerges from those same impulses: tool use, cooperation, pattern recognition, the desire to shape our surroundings. The first chipped stone, the first loom, the first line of code — all are extensions of our biology. In that sense, the iPhone and the termite mound share a lineage.
The idea that technology stands apart from nature is a cultural construction, not a scientific truth. It’s a story that took shape alongside industrialisation and empire, reflecting a way of seeing the world as material to be organised and exploited. Over time, that mindset hardened into common sense, shaping both our technologies and our politics. The division isn’t neutral; it emerged from power relations — from the ways societies built on extraction learned to understand themselves.
In fiction, solarpunk offers a way to dissolve that border. It imagines technologies that behave like ecosystems: adaptive, regenerative, interdependent. Solar panels become leaves, networks mimic root systems, architecture turns into habitat. In that world, technology doesn’t dominate but participates. And while solarpunk remains a genre of imagination, the fictions we tell have power: we see the world through the lenses our stories create, and sometimes those stories can help us remember different ways of living.
The task, then, isn’t to make technology more natural — it already is — but to make our relationship with it conscious again. To recognise that every machine is part of a larger organism, every algorithm an ecological act. When we design and deploy technology as though it were alive, connected, and accountable, we remember what was always true: that we have never stood outside nature, only forgotten that we belong to it.
Perhaps the next question is evolution itself: if technology is part of nature, what forces are shaping which forms survive?