Solarpunk

Is taking an electric bus to the native plant gardens to take care of them solarpunk?

Lately, I've been teaching people how to repair their clothing! At least one guy has come to the conclusion that hand sewing is actually punk af, because knowing how to fix your shit is Sticking It To The Man.

I do a lot more food related DIY stuff, like balcony gardening, food preservation (bought from local farmers directly), planning to grow mushrooms etc.

1. Moving my technological dependencies from big tech companies to self-hosted, open source solutions, running Linux on my machines etc.

2. Gardening on my balcony. I am growing tomatoes, broad beans, peppers (chilis, bell) and an assortment of salads and herbs. I am mostly self-sufficient on herbs, during growing season I am fully self-sufficient on salads. Pretty far from it on tomatoes and peppers, and especially on beans as they are not fruiting :(

3. In general getting more in touch with local flora. I've been photographing flowering plants in my neighborhood lately and identifying them, trying to learn what grows around here. Goal is to be quite well-versed in local flora, including what is edible (and how to use it) and not

4. Contributing to OpenStreetMap, both in my neighborhood and also through tasks.hotosm.org where I help trace missing buildings in disaster-struck places for first-responders to use (and in preparation for possible disasters in the future). This kind of collaborative project I find to be very solarpunky.

Living in a rented apartment, there is only so much I can make changes here. There was an initiative to install solar panels, but it was voted down for some reason - not being an owner, I am not involved in those discussions. Dream is to find a small house outside the city to expand my garden and to become as off-grid as possible.

Where goblincore swamp and solarpunk forest meet, where the sacred grove is being tended, the bog creature has been up to this:

• Lots of DIY food production. This year I'm probably at 50% home grown and home raised.
• Continuous learning and improving to work low tech as well as low energy input (short transport paths, few step processes) around house and garden.
• Recycle and reuse. Got no money anyways, great chance to learn how to reuse everything. My furniture is punk as fuck, most is self-build or recovered. Sewing machine shall be my powerful ally for making new clothes out of old ones.
• Small, smaller, still smaller, and very quiet. I practice degrowth as a spiritual practice. I try to notice and to consider my many non-human neighbours and consciously try to keep a tiny footprint and to do a slow and steady work instead of big interventions.
• I used to be more active in community work, but it's not within my means and capabilities at the moment. Seeds I helped plant in the past are growing though, so that's not lost and I will pick it up again in the future.
• Returning to joyful creative work. My spirit of creating had been fucked over for years by the power of the algorithm and I am rediscovering my true roars and whispers.
• Remain open to new ideas out there and try to keep a bit updated about what the youngsters do and want and like, to not become a fossil.

° Eating plant-based & living vegan

° Going car-free while using an e-bike

° Reducing consumption habits while lowering waste production & plastic use

° Long-term goal of owning land & building off-grid, renewables-powered tiny home ♡

• utility biking
• repairing stuff instead of throwing it out
• using stuff found on the curb that other people threw out (my wife rescued a $500 Kitchen Aid stand mixer the other day -- it's wild what people throw out around here!)
• DIY renovations with careful deconstruction so materials can be reused

I was thinking I haven't made much progress but writing it down, I have a few going right now.

• Purchased a used eletric car (With a new baby we couldn't get by without one, but we are considering an e-cargo bike)
• Continue gardening and urban foraging skills
• Planted a large native garden in my front yard (Over 400 sq ft.)
• Continuing my herbalism practice for my own healthy and family (my lotions and salves are working great)
• Continue to purchase the majority of my child clothes used or second hand. Getting lots of things free
• Continue my practice to try to give things away instead of throwing them away
• Volunteer with a native lead oprganization doing prairie restoration. (I went to one of their interesting hands on demo on three sisters gardens and learned tons about drying food).

So I am making some progress but plently to go. I want to try to reduce my food waste but I haven't gotten in the practice of saving or drying things when getting low.

Let's see...

• Ive got a bunch of small devices powered off USB battery banks that are solar rechargeable
• indoor and outdoor gardens, with sensors also powered by those little battery banks
• My kids do a bunch of sports throughout the year now, I bring my bike toolkit so I can help fixing bikes for the kids in their school that show up
• Sharing what we get from gardening with neighbors. Except potato. Potato is mine (seriously though, we go through them quick)

Nothing else I can think of off the top of my head

Organic gardening including composting

Shop the Co-Op and Farmer's Market - diet is mostly organic vegetarian

Ride Bikes

Drive an EV when needed + solar panels on the roof - It's like riding on sunshine!

I avoid un-neccessary travel.

Enjoy "The Great Outdoors"

Connect with my like minded community (getting off corporate social media is a piece of this)

I've just come across the term Solar Punk in the past year or so. A lot of SP has been what I've felt was the best way to live harmoniously on the Earth. I'm still learning, and hope to continue.

Electrification is a big topic. But you can always start with little things like changing to an electric mower instead of a gasoline powered one. Community work is also important, but I honestly don't know where to start...

I've been reducing my technology dependence and usage. Does that count?

Buying secondhand over new. I love thrifting so that's a bonus for me! Also using what I have, repairing what I can, or just going without something versus buying something in the first place.

Eating less meat, and prioritizing locally grown veg when possible.

Taking public transit, walking, or biking everywhere. If going long distance, I try to take ground transportation (trains, buses) over flying.

Reducing energy use eg turning off lights when I'm not in the room. You'd be surprised how many people still don't do that, haha!

Besides gardening? I built a low-power, right-sized server out of an ancient phone. It draws around a watt of power, less when idle.

A lot of our life has been trending solarpunk for decades; we just finished processing the early crop of cooking apples, from two trees, and gave away the surplus, for instance.

But notably utopian design stuff: we're building a bathroom with a composting toilet and greywater drainage.

Heating in the bathroom will be by on-demand infrared panel, and the small multipurpose building with the bathroom is getting a heat pump. Construction is mostly new materials but we did manage to reuse a lot of salvage.

I purchase as much of my produce as possible from a farm co-op

I try to walk for errands as much as possible rather than drive

I’m slowly learning basic electronics repair

I have a small hydroponic garden that just about meets my salad needs

I already had a professionally installed solar system on my roof, but the capacity isn’t great (12 years old) and adding to it isn’t feasible. I do have a pergola over my backyard patio, so I bought 4 new (and large) panels, an off-grid inverter, and 5kWh battery. I put the panels on the pergola, ran wiring into the garage, and hooked up the inverter and battery in there. I then wired one of my level 1 chargers to the inverter. I use it to help charge my cars. I try to plug the charger in during the day as much as we can to charge the cars directly, but the 5 kWh server rack battery is there to soak up electrons when the cars are in use.

I thought about skipping the server rack battery for a cheaper setup, but it’s been worth it considering how often a car isn’t available to charge directly. It’s not integrated into the house circuits, so no permit needed.

My wife’s family has property out in the forest (Navajo reservation) with a house that doesn’t have running water or power, so we’re going to start fixing it up for her mom to live there (she recently retired) and will be setting up an off-grid power solution and water system soon. We’ll have to haul water from the nearest chapter house, but there’s a program to provide and install a 1200 gallon storage tank underground that we’ll use. Probably augment that with a rainwater catchment setup. Maybe even start raising sheep again, no one in her family has used their grazing rights for years, since her grandmother passed away. My wife spent many summers at that property. Used to be summer only due to the snow and dirt roads, but thanks to global warming, it’s a viable year-round housing site now.

@Capitanmaroon we replaced our front lawn with raised garden beds a few years ago. Do we grow a lot? No. Are we especially good at gardening? Gosh no. But tonight I went outside, picked a cucumber and a handful of tomatoes, and really enjoyed my dinner. Planning on setting up a little table soon so we can give away any tomatoes beyond what we can use.

I picked up an old used SFF (Small Form Factor) office PC a couple years ago to use as my daily driver instead of my gaming PC. Based on a Kill-o-watt power usage meter, my gaming PC would idle at around 40w, while the office PC (with a fairly power efficient i7-7700 and integrated graphics) idles at 10w, so 3x more efficient. Now I only ever boot up the gaming PC when I actually need its performance. As a side bonus, the DDR3 RAM it uses is still very affordable on the used market. It browses the web and plays videos really well, and even plays most games I'm interested in nowadays :)

For anyone else interested in doing that, Dell, HP, and Lenovo are the big makers of those SFF PC's, and they can generally be had pretty cheaply on eBay, but you can also sometimes find them locally at recycling facilities or the local dump drop-off area. You may want to avoid anything older than the 6000 series of Intel CPU's, since the older ones don't support modern video codecs (meaning they'll use more power playing youtube videos, decoding them on the CPU itself instead of the build-in decoder), and they aren't as power efficient overall.

I also found that reducing your monitor's brightness to around 50 to 60% reduces power usage significantly, though that may not be viable if you are in a room that gets very bright.

Boycotting big business/unethical anti competitive practices. Businesses that lobby or have lobbied (aka legal bribery) for Republican officials or AIPAC democrats.

I've put solar panels everywhere.

On my house, on my tent, even on my hat.

Nothing beats getting free energy from the sun. Found some cheap solar power banks that I repurpose for all kinds of things.

I ride a bike to work, compost, recycle, repair wherever possible, have a small solar panel array and battery bank with plans to expand, and grow some food. I also have a semi-wild yard (there's some grass, but mostly it's clovers and edible stuff) and am pretty big on nature in general.

About ten years ago, when I built my house, I decided that solar power would suffice. It did not - got a grid connection last year - but solar power is giving me the biggest part, so my grid connection is a laughable 3 x 6 amps. :)

Around 2009 or so, a fellow anarchist linked an ecological footprint calculator in a forum. I ran it, and found out that 60% of my footprint came from driving a lot (I don't fly, except for flying drones), and most of that from buying fuel. So I built an electric moped-car. But I built it wrong and had to dismantle it, sell the metal for scrap and build another. It lasted a few years, then I was forced to switch to a temporary gas-powered microvan. When the microvan broke down, I spotted an auction: someone was selling an electric microcar which the social ministry had crashed. So I got it, managed to fix it, and finally I could produce my own fuel for driving. The road here has obviously been steep and littered with failed projects, but now I can even support other folks who drive that kind of stupidly made microcars, while I bide my time to build a proper electric moped-car.

I am working on the part of communications - not being a passive consumer but giving some and getting some in return. Found out that some folks have started experimenting with MeshCore and MeshTastic in my town, so I intend to join those nets and see if they're usable for chatting with a friend.

I am also working on other kinds of communications (agile ultra wideband frequency hopping with SDR) but sadly, this is less solarpunk and more like miltech.

Only real thing is I have become an EV enjoyer since february. Buying a brand new EV felt intense but I am happy I did. Sending a strong signal to the market, to the utilities and to society is important imo.

I can't think of small things which probably means I should look for them.

For me I admit not as much as I'd like.

I was unable to get solar panels for my house, due to the city's rulings. My house being a dome lacks a traditional roof for solar panels, and the city has a lot of strict rulings against solar panels not on roofs, mostly because the city council hates solar energy. Of course, I have small solar panels with power stations in the yard.

The house also is specifically one that is efficient for such purposes, and we practice dressing it up during the year. Currently we have blackout curtains over the windows that get hotter during the day-time barring the south-facing in my office, where I simply close that door. We also have curtains over hallways. While we have to use a rolling air conditioner due to the house's setup, we focus on only cooling the room that we are in or sleep in during the day-time, and during the night even if it is still 70s to 80s outside, we do what we can do to cool the rest of the house.

I have my own garden I grow vegetables and herbs in, as well as having an indoor garden in a south-facing window with a trellis shelf I built. I am able to grow plants year round. I pickle, dehydrate, and similar methods for everything I grow for the purposes of usage throughout the year, including using the brine from pickling for recipes. Also we make stuff during the night-time and put it to cool, making it able to be eaten several meals instead of every meal-time turning on a stove and cooking.

My spouse and I both have knowledge on repair, both around the house but also clothing, adding our own bits of charm when needed. I also have experience with repairing my bicycle as well as repairing my car, having been a mechanic in the past.

I compost, dumpster dive, and collect manure to the point of weirdness at work. I'm trying to garden. I've got a bunch of chickens and a few goats. I take people in when they're in bad situations. I'm trying to get solar and an EV. Sold my diesel pickup. (I really did need it for my last job. But not anymore.) Now I'm carless except for a work truck I'm not allowed to use for personal business. I do have an ebike. My career is in renewable energy. I'm stockpiling material I've collected to try and build an earthship in the next year or so.

• Thrifting, sewing, and mending my clothes instead of buying new
• Using the AC as little as possible and participating in peakbusting as much as I can
• Reading a lot to learn important concepts - currently reading Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
• Teaching myself the basics of coding so I can make my own personal website
• Hosting a monthly community night at my house where folks can connect in a comfortable environment
• I've recently gotten into kandi and so far I haven't bought a single pony bead new!!
• Setting up a balcony garden
• Making eraser stamps so I can customize my clothes and make patches

I'm most proud of the balcony garden, if we're being honest. I've never gardened a single time before but my tomato plants are apparently growing me some tomatoes and that's insane. Truthfully, most of what I've grown (tomatoes) isn't offsetting what I'd buy, but learning about the natural world has been really special given that my disabilities mean I can't really go foraging or hiking or anything like that. It's also given me the opportunity to say hi to my neighbors when they're outside!