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.

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.

° 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 ♡

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

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.

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.

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.

• 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

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

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

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.

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.

• throw away trash you see wherever you go.
• splash fecies into double parked, idling vehicles.
• cement huge rocks to the ground to block the entrances and exits of gas stations
• have your dog shit on trad-lawns
• write a message in Trad-lawn by stomping a green message in the morning when the grass has frost
• plant wildflowers, weed, apples everywhere
• graft fruit tree branches into useless urban landscaping
• don’t rake in the fall

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

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…