Solarpunk
Solarpunk technology, built and running
Green Fire builds solarpunk technology that runs now: open source bioregional software, AI for land projects, eco village tools and low energy 3D maps.
Solarpunk is a picture of the future where technology serves living systems instead of eating them: solar on every roof, food growing in the streets, neighbours who know their watershed, and machines that are small, repairable and owned by the people who use them. Most of what gets written about solarpunk is art, fiction and mood boards. That matters, because a culture has to imagine a future before it can build one. But at some point somebody has to write the software, map the land and run the meeting.
That is the work Green Fire Research and Innovation Center does. We are a small solarpunk lab that builds tools for land projects, eco villages and bioregional communities, and then uses them ourselves. This page explains what we mean by solarpunk technology, what we have actually built, and how a community can use it.
What makes technology solarpunk
Not every piece of green tech is solarpunk. A solar farm owned by a distant fund and a phone app that harvests your data while telling you to recycle are not it. When we decide whether something we build belongs in a solarpunk future, we ask five questions.
Is it local first? Solarpunk tools keep working when the internet does not. Our bioregional commons software runs on a single laptop, keeps its data on that laptop, and ships with an offline copy of every EPA Level III and Level IV ecoregion in the United States, so a chapter in a valley with one bar of signal can still use it.
Is it owned by the people who use it? The software we publish is open source under the AGPL, which means a community can run it, change it and share it, and nobody can take it private. The rest of our work is built so the client owns their copy, their data and their map.
Is it light? Energy use is a design choice. The interactive 3D land viewer on our tech page is hand written WebGL with no 3D library, about 13 kB compressed, so it loads on an old phone at the edge of a field. Heavy software is a quiet tax on every person who has to run it.
Does it ask before it takes? A solarpunk future is a consent based future. Our commons software will not mark Indigenous consent as given because a dataset says a place is on someone's territory. A dataset can prompt the question. Only people can answer it.
Does it make the land more legible to the people on it? The point of the technology is relationship: to the watershed, the soil, the species and each other. If a tool makes people stare at a screen instead of the creek, it has failed, however clever it is.
What we have built
BioRegional OS, an open source bioregional commons
BioRegional OS is the heart of our solarpunk work. It is a local first operating system for a bioregional commons: a group of people organising around the place they live, its watershed, its soil and its living things. Give it a point on the map and it finds the ecoregion and the watershed, then pulls in public soil surveys, river gauge readings, species observations and hazard data, and keeps the source and licence of every fact. It walks a chapter through twelve stages, from the first signal that something in the watershed needs attention, through listening, council review and co design, to a tested project the next community can repeat, and it refuses to skip the gates that protect people and land. The code is public on GitHub, and an AI assistant can use it through the Model Context Protocol under the same rules a human does.
Civil X, task and proof software for land projects
Civil X is the day to day tool for a land project or eco village. Everything happens on a 3D map of the land: the projects, the areas, the tasks. Each task can carry a before photo and an after photo, and each photo is fingerprinted so the record of work cannot be quietly changed later. Members earn credits on a ledger where every entry is chained to the one before it, so the history of who did what holds up. A crew lead works from a phone in the field while a steward plans on a big screen at the office. Each community gets its own copy, and decides for itself whether work is paid, budgeted or simply recorded.
Interactive 3D for land and fundraising
People fund what they can see. We build interactive 3D maps of land projects and eco villages, so a donor, a county planner or a new member can turn the land in their hand, switch layers for water, buildings and gardens, and understand the plan in a minute. See the interactive 3D work.
AI that runs the repeat work
A regenerative project drowns in admin long before it runs out of passion. We build AI dashboards that do the repeat work, drafting the emails, tracking the tasks, filing the documents, and always ask a person before anything goes out. Jordan runs his own touring music business on one, every day. Read more about AI for land projects.
Solarpunk is a practice, not an aesthetic
It is easy to make something look solarpunk: green glass, vines, a sunset over turbines. It is harder to make it work the way solarpunk asks. Over the last year of building, these are the rules we hold ourselves to.
Write down where every fact came from. A bioregional map full of numbers with no sources is just another authority asking to be trusted. Every layer in BioRegional OS names its source and its licence in one registry, so a credit line is never typed by hand and never drifts.
Never locate what should not be found. Threatened species are named and counted in our software, never pinned to a map. Cultural sites are never downloaded automatically; they are a conversation with the people they belong to.
Let the land set the pace. Our tools have no streaks, no badges for logging in every day, and no red dots designed to pull people back. A watershed changes by the season, and a commons should too.
Keep humans at every gate that matters. An AI can draft, sort and remind. It does not send the letter to the landowner, accept a new member or close a consent gate on its own.
Who this is for
Eco villages and intentional communities that want shared tools without handing their data to a platform. Land projects and regenerative developers who need to show people what is coming and organise the work to get there. Permaculture designers who want better site data, see permaculture AI. Bioregional groups and watershed councils starting from nothing. And solarpunk makers who want to see what the movement looks like when it is running on a laptop in a barn, not only on a poster.
Common questions
What is solarpunk?
Solarpunk is an art, fiction and design movement that imagines a hopeful, ecological future where technology, community and nature work together. In practice it means renewable energy, local food, repairable and community owned technology, and cities and villages designed around living systems.
What is solarpunk technology?
Solarpunk technology is technology that serves people and living systems together. It tends to be local first, open source, light on energy, owned by the community that uses it, and built to help people understand and care for their place. Green Fire builds bioregional software, land project tools and interactive 3D maps in that spirit.
Is Green Fire a solarpunk community?
Green Fire is a research and innovation center with a solarpunk mission: council, creativity, regeneration and community solutions, with Indigenous Elders invited to guide values and stories. We build tools for communities and use them in our own work.
Can I use Green Fire's solarpunk software for free?
BioRegional OS is open source under the AGPL and free to run, change and share. Help setting it up, Civil X copies for a land project, interactive 3D maps and custom AI work are paid services, which is how the open work stays funded.
How do I start a solarpunk project in my community?
Start with one real problem, a few people and a map of where you are. Find your ecoregion and watershed, hold a listening session, and choose one small useful project. BioRegional OS walks a new chapter through those first stages, and you can get in touch if you want help.