Imagining Freedom of Movement in a Solarpunk Future

On the latest episode of Demand Utopia: A Solarpunk Podcast, host Justine Norton-Kertson talks about the history and purpose of borders, then does a thought experiment imagining what a solarpunk future without borders—with freedom of movement—might look like. The transcript from that episode is below.

Demand Utopia: A Solarpunk Podcast
Season 5, Episode 8
Hosted by Justine Norton-Kertson

No Borders, No Barriers:
Imagining Freedom of Movement in a Solarpunk Future

Welcome back to Demand Utopia: A Solarpunk Podcast, where we explore radical hope and resistance in the age of climate crisis and collapse. I’m your host, [Name], and today we’re going to talk about something so entrenched in the way the world works that we rarely stop to question it—borders.

Let’s talk about borders. They’re not just the lines on a map. Not just the checkpoints, walls, and fences. But the entire idea that some people are allowed to move freely—and others aren’t. That crossing an imaginary line can be the difference between safety and death, between a future and a cage.

Here’s the thing: borders feel permanent, but they’re not. They’re constructed, and surprisingly recent in human history. For most of the time people have been alive on this planet, we’ve moved. Across valleys and oceans, across mountains and deserts. Sometimes welcomed, sometimes resisted—but rarely forbidden. The idea that movement itself is illegal? That’s a modern invention. And it’s not based on justice. It’s based on capital, power, and control.

So today, we’re asking a radical question—one we don’t hear enough in the mainstream:

What if borders didn’t exist to restrict human movement?
What would the world look like if people could move freely, live where they choose, and be welcomed with care instead of cages?

Would there be chaos? Would society collapse? Or would we discover something else entirely—a deeper form of belonging, a new kind of freedom?

And to answer that question, we’re turning to solarpunk—not just as a genre or aesthetic, but as a set of values. Solarpunk imagines a world rooted in decentralization, mutual aid, ecological interdependence, and justice beyond the state. It asks us to build systems that reflect our care for one another, not our fear.

And when you look at the world through that lens, borders start to look like exactly what they are: artificial walls propping up systems of inequality, nationalism, and climate apartheid.

So in today’s episode, we’ll start by exploring where borders came from—because no system of oppression exists without a history. Then, we’ll step fully into imagination mode. A thought experiment: what does a solarpunk future look like without borders? What does freedom of movement actually mean when we commit to it—not in theory, but in practice?

This isn’t just a critique. It’s a vision. And it starts right now.

***

To imagine a world without borders, we first need to understand where they came from—because the idea that a person can be ‘illegal’ for simply existing in the wrong place is not ancient. It’s not natural. It’s not inevitable.

In fact, for most of human history, borders as we know them didn’t exist.

Yes, people migrated. Yes, there were tribal boundaries, walled cities, and territorial disputes. But there were no international systems criminalizing movement itself. There were no passports, no visa applications, no embassies or immigration quotas. You could travel. You might not always be welcomed, but you were not committing a crime just by being somewhere else.

That changed with the rise of the modern nation-state, and more specifically, with colonialism and capitalism.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, European empires and settler colonial powers began carving the world into bordered nations—not to protect people, but to control resources, labor, and racial hierarchies. Borders were drawn not around communities but through them—splitting up Indigenous territories, natural ecosystems, and centuries-old trade routes, replacing them with artificial lines backed by violence.

At the same time, industrial capitalism was expanding. Elites in the U.S. and Europe needed cheap labor—but not too much of it. They needed to control where people could live, who could access jobs, and who could be denied them. And so, immigration laws were born—not to regulate movement, but to gatekeep power.

Take the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—one of the first major immigration laws in the U.S. It didn’t criminalize movement because of economic reasons. It did so because Chinese workers were seen as a racial threat to white labor. Or look at how Indigenous and Black people were denied citizenship rights for generations, even within the borders of the countries they helped build or were forcibly brought to.

As time went on, these laws became more elaborate—and more violent.

Today, we live in a world where borders are militarized zones. Where millions of people are funneled into dangerous, illegalized pathways just to escape war, poverty, or climate disaster. Where asylum seekers are detained in cages. Where the border itself has become a profit center—fueling surveillance contracts, private prisons, and death technologies.

And yet, even now, the global elite move freely.

Billionaires have passports in multiple countries. Corporations cross borders for profit. Resources are extracted across boundaries without question. It’s only people—especially poor, racialized, displaced people—who are blocked, detained, or killed.

So let’s be honest: borders aren’t about safety. They’re about power.

They don’t protect us. They protect capital.

They were built to preserve inequality—between the Global North and the Global South, between the colonizer and the colonized, between citizen and non-citizen.

And yet, we accept them as normal. As permanent. As necessary.

But what if we didn’t?

What if we took seriously the idea that movement is a right, not a crime? What if we dismantled the systems that made borders lethal in the first place?

In the next segment, we’re going to ground ourselves in that possibility. Because the world as it is—with its walls, its quotas, its surveillance drones and biometric checkpoints—was built by design.

Which means a different world can be built by us.

***

Now that we’ve dug into the roots of borders—their invention, their violence, their purpose—let’s shift gears.

Because the next logical question is: What would it actually mean to open the borders?

To allow people—not just capital or corporations—to move freely across the world without fear, without paperwork, without persecution?

It’s a question that provokes fear for some—but when you step back from the propaganda, from the nationalism, from the myths about scarcity, what emerges is a vision of freedom, justice, and abundance.

So let’s break it down. Why open borders? Why now? Why ever?

First, let’s talk about economics—not in the cold numbers-and-charts way, but in the human sense.

Right now, borders act like barricades to opportunity. They trap billions of people in countries with few resources, poor wages, and unstable governments—many of which have been destabilized by the very countries now shutting their borders to refugees.

A growing body of research—including from economists who are not radical at all—shows that opening borders would be one of the single most effective ways to reduce global poverty. Some estimates suggest it could double global GDP.

Why? Because people are productive. People want to work, contribute, build, share. When they can move to where they’re safe and supported, everyone benefits. Wages rise, innovation increases, and communities become stronger—not weaker.

So from a purely economic standpoint, open borders don’t threaten society—they make it more just, more dynamic, and more resilient.

But economics aren’t the only reason. There’s a deeper, moral truth at the heart of this issue: no one should be criminalized for trying to survive.

We’re living in a world shaped by uneven violence. Wars, climate collapse, extractive industries, and authoritarian regimes are displacing millions of people every year. The people most impacted often had the least to do with the causes—and yet they’re met with walls, cages, and deportations.

Opening borders is about restoring dignity to people who’ve been denied it for generations. It’s about honoring the truth that all of us have the right to seek safety, build a home, and choose our own future. Not just those lucky enough to be born in the “right” country.

Let’s bring in another urgent reality: climate migration.

As temperatures rise, coastlines flood, crops fail, and water sources dry up, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced in the coming decades. That’s not speculative—it’s already happening. From Sub-Saharan Africa to the Pacific Islands to the U.S. Gulf Coast, people are being forced to move.

So we have a choice. We can militarize borders even further, criminalize climate refugees, and create a world of gated fortress-nations…
Or—we can choose solidarity over scarcity.
We can choose to adapt together.

Open borders, in this context, are not utopian—they’re necessary. They’re a survival strategy. A way of distributing risk and building resilience across communities and continents.

Another reason for open borders? Culture. Connection. Liberation.

Borders don’t just block people—they block ideas, relationships, and transformative collaboration. When people are free to move, cultures don’t disappear—they expand. Art, language, cuisine, music, and knowledge cross-pollinate and flourish.

And open borders are an act of decolonization.

Colonial powers drew lines on the map, divided people into ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’ and used borders to hoard resources while pillaging others. When we tear down those artificial barriers, we begin to heal that legacy. We acknowledge that the land doesn’t belong to the state—it belongs to itself, and to the people who care for it.

So when people say, ‘Open borders? That’s unrealistic,’ what they really mean is: ‘A more just world is threatening to the one we’ve built.’

Because open borders challenge every assumption of racial capitalism, of nationalism, of colonial control.

But they also open the door to a world of belonging, freedom, and shared responsibility.

***

That brings us to the heart of today’s episode:

What might that world actually look like?

Let’s leave the present behind and step fully into a solarpunk future—a thought experiment in radical freedom and global kinship. A world beyond walls. A world beyond fear. A world without borders.

Imagine waking up in a world where there are no passports. No checkpoints. No border patrols. No razor wire slicing through the desert. No detention centers filled with people whose only ‘crime’ was trying to live.

In this world, you don’t need to prove your right to exist where you are. You don’t need to show a document to move to a new place for work, to escape rising seas, to follow the person you love, or to join a community that shares your values. Movement is sacred. Not regulated, not surveilled, not punished—celebrated.

You leave your home in what used to be called one country and cross into another region with nothing but a backpack and a sunhat. And no one stops you. No one asks for your papers. The people you meet greet you with curiosity, not suspicion. They say, “Welcome.” Not, “Where are you from?”

Because in this world, there is no ‘from’ that defines you. There is only who you are and where you’re going.

Children learn about the old world—the age of border walls and biometric checkpoints—like a strange dystopia that somehow passed for normal. They learn that people used to drown in oceans, suffocate in trucks, and die in deserts trying to get from one place to another. They ask why. And their teachers sigh, and say, “Because people were taught to fear what they didn’t understand.”

But that fear is gone now.

People migrate for seasons, for opportunity, for joy. Climate migrants are not seen as a threat—they are seen as teachers, bringing knowledge of adaptation and resilience. Festivals spring up around annual migration routes—honoring the movement of humans the same way we once honored the migration of birds.

In this world, migration is not a crisis—it’s a rhythm. A pulse. A story we all get to be part of.

The old nation-states have dissolved. Not through war, but through disuse. They just stopped being useful. Now, the world is made up of thousands of autonomous regions, shaped by shared values, languages, and ecosystems—not by old colonial borders.

Governance happens locally, in circles, assemblies, cooperatives. You vote with your neighbors on what matters to you. You help decide how your food is grown, how your water is shared, how your energy is used. There are no presidents, no embassies, no border bureaucracies—just people, connected across distance by trust and technology.

And if you choose to move? You’re not uprooted. You’re replanted. Your voice joins a new assembly. Your labor strengthens a new community. You bring your story, your skills, your traditions—and they are folded into the fabric of that place, just like seeds woven into soil.

People don’t belong to countries here. They belong to each other.

And because no one’s hoarding power anymore, no one goes without.

Housing, healthcare, food, and education are considered foundational rights—not prizes to be earned with the right passport. Mutual aid networks crisscross the planet like neural pathways. You arrive in a new place and immediately find access to a care node—a community-run center that offers orientation, housing leads, childcare, job boards, medical help, translation circles.

Instead of refugee camps, there are welcome centers. Instead of detention facilities, there are community kitchens. Instead of border walls, there are networks of support, powered by open-source platforms and maintained by volunteers, teachers, elders, and neighbors.

When someone moves, the first question isn’t, “Do you have documents?”

It’s, “How can we help you land softly?”

In this world, the absence of borders doesn’t create chaos. It creates solidarity. Not the kind that comes from treaties and trade deals, but the kind that comes from shared humanity.

In this world, national militaries have faded away. Why? Because there are no more borders to defend. No more oil fields to invade. No more resource wars justified by maps drawn in old boardrooms.

Without borders, the logic of militarism dissolves. Troops are no longer stationed in faraway lands to ‘protect interests.’ Arms manufacturing is obsolete. And instead of military budgets, we have restorative justice councils—local, regional, and global—composed of healers, mediators, historians, and elders.

When conflict arises—and it does—there are no airstrikes. There is dialogue. Circles. Accountability processes. Conflict is not a failure of security—it is an invitation to transformation.

People don’t fight for flags anymore. They fight with each other—for food sovereignty, for climate repair, for collective dignity.

Now, let’s walk through an open green corridor that stretches across what used to be multiple countries. This region—once fractured by trade agreements and extraction zones—is now a bioregion. It’s managed collectively by those who live within its watershed, its forests, its soil.

People move seasonally—like plants, like birds, like everything alive. Migration patterns emerge not from desperation, but from ecological logic. When the air becomes dry, when crops shift, when monsoons move—so do we.

And this movement is not chaotic. It is collaborative. Cities communicate with each other. They plan for arrivals. They share resources. They anticipate needs. Climate adaptation is not hoarded by the rich—it is shared, like seeds passed between neighbors.

And because people no longer compete for dwindling land or closed borders, there is less fear, less hoarding, less desperation. We don’t build walls against collapse. We adapt together.

Imagine walking through a neighborhood—a blend of what once might have been Tokyo, Cairo, and Mexico City. The signs are written in three languages. The air smells like fermented tea, wood-fired bread, and citrus. You hear music that combines steel drums, throat singing, and synth bass.

This is not cultural homogenization—it’s cultural polyphony.

In this world, traditions are not erased. They are offered, exchanged, and honored. You might see someone leading a dance that has been passed down for centuries. You might see a kid remixing that same dance into a holographic art project. No one owns it. Everyone contributes to it.

There’s no dominant language. There’s translation hubs on every corner, and people speak in hybrid tongues—code-switching not for survival, but for joy.

Heritage here is sacred, but never weaponized. It isn’t used to exclude or divide. It’s used to teach, to connect, to celebrate the many threads of what it means to be human.

And so this world continues to unfold.

Without borders, we don’t just gain freedom of movement—we gain freedom of imagination.

We’re no longer trapped inside someone else’s vision of who belongs and who doesn’t. We are free to shape belonging ourselves.

We’re no longer asked to pledge allegiance to arbitrary lines. We’re asked to care for our neighbors, our ecosystems, our histories—and to do it without fear.

And here’s the most important part:
This world isn’t perfect. But it is possible.

It starts in the cracks of the old one. In sanctuary cities. In migrant justice camps. In the art of border-crossers. In the gardens of undocumented workers. In the language schools, mutual aid pods, and solidarity caravans already moving across this world like mycelium beneath a fallen empire.

This world already exists—in pieces.

Our task is to stitch it together.

---

So let’s come back to where we started.

Borders—those sharp lines etched into maps, guarded by guns, reinforced by laws—are not natural. They’re not eternal. They’re not even that old.

They were built to protect the powerful, to divide labor, to hoard safety and resources for the few at the expense of the many. They were built to justify empire, to disappear Indigenous lands, to criminalize care.

And yet, they feel so normal. So unquestioned. So permanent.
But as we’ve seen today, they are none of those things. They were made.
And what is made… can be unmade.

In today’s episode, we walked through that possibility. We imagined a world where movement is a right, not a crime.
Where people migrate with celebration, not fear.
Where communities—not nations—shape governance.
Where culture thrives through connection, not conquest.
Where the lines that once divided us are replaced with bridges of solidarity, care, and imagination.

That’s the solarpunk future. Not just one of solar panels and lush gardens, but one where liberation crosses every border.

So what now? What can we do?

Here’s where we start:

• Challenge anti-immigrant narratives when you hear them—in conversations, in media, in your own mind.
• Support migrant justice groups doing real work on the ground—providing housing, legal support, and sanctuary.
• Join or create mutual aid networks that welcome and support newcomers in your area.
• Vote against policies and politicians who use fear to justify violence at the border.
• Read, share, and uplift stories by people who have crossed borders—because storytelling is resistance, and memory is power.
• Dream boldly. Talk about a world without borders—not just as metaphor, but as strategy.

***

Borders were drawn to control us. But the future will be drawn by us.

A future of movement, care, and connection.
A future where no one is illegal.
A future where solidarity isn’t limited by geography, and where belonging isn’t bought with paperwork.

Because if they built this world on division…
We can build a new one on unity.

Until next time, keep resisting, keep imagining, and never stop demanding utopia.