I feel like I always think of solar punk as a macro thing where a lot has to change but there are still smaller wins we can implement, what have you been doing?
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.
To add about the dressing house up or down,
During the last winter even when it was snowing and in the single-digits outside, we didn’t have to turn on the heating for the house using the boiler. By dressing the house up, and ourselves dressing up a bit, the house was plenty warm and comfortable.
I’m thinking of buying the slate truck and kitting it out with solar panels and insulation. Rent rises faster than my income, and at some point it’s gonna catch up. If I can park on the edges of town then just scooter between locations, life might actually become financially sustainable.
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.
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!
- I’ve been vegan for 5 years and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.
- I only buying second-hand clothing. This is a recent change.
- I mostly stopped shopping online, except for specific items like my injection supplies.
- Using my local library!
- I crochet clothing and items for gifts.
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Moving my technological dependencies from big tech companies to self-hosted, open source solutions, running Linux on my machines etc.
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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 :(
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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
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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.
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Does it count if I already did it? Could say being car free, I suppose I am by choice now.
I’ve been lucky enough to be able to get a rooftop solar set up and battery for my house. I absolutely love it. We’ve barely used the grid since it’s gone up, only our electric shower draws too much for the inverter/ battery to provide it all, everything else runs off solar. It’s been especially good in the UK recently with the weather because it means I can run my (also recently purchased) portable aircon without feeling guilty. Makes me feel happy every time the sun is shining.
I keep thinking about getting a ground rod installed so I can run totally off grid.
We’re trying to eat less meat and having at least a couple meals per week with veggies or fish as the main. We’ve reduced how much landfill waste we produce and are recycling more.
I bought a portable solar panel and used it for like 2 days, before I stopped due to theft risk. Might start again, once we have the new camera around.
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.
What are you using it for?
Offsite monitoring. It runs Prometheus, Grafana, etc, and watches the rest of my selfhostables. Sends me alerts when stuff goes down.
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.
‘Thread Repair’ is definitely less grandma-esque than ‘sewing’ or ‘needle and stitch’.
Some youtuber somewhere is probably recording an introduction,
‘Welcome to my thread repair lab. This is where we pull, push, and stretch fabric to the limit…’
It writes itself! Theres a whole youtube channel in this!
The need to de-centre women from traditionally female technologies, crafts and occupations in order to appeal and cater to men’s interests, is kinda upsetting though.
I believe that’s actually a modern perception and textiles were originally a male dominated field. I’m told the book “Fabric of Civilization” by Virginia Postrel goes deeper into it, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it myself.
I believe that’s actually a modern perception and textiles were originally a male dominated field.
Yeah, fuck all the female dominated histories of all the various textile cultures around the world, someone on the internet told me it was men who probably did it first, and women obviously just copied them! So if men want to get into textiles again now they have every right to push out any reminder of women ever being involved!
Just to be clear, the above paragraph is sarcasm. Exasperated but unsurprised, sarcasm.
Okay, well my comment was based off the a Hank Green interview with Virginia Postrel where she corrected his assumption that it was a female dominated field, so Idk what to tell you. She’s literally the expert.
For what it’s worth there’s apparently a gendered difference between who did weaving and spinning, so my broad statement on textiles wasn’t correct.
On the other hand, the SciShow episode about knitting was so upsettingly wrong that Hank Green took it down, so I’m not particularly inclined to trust him on this topic. He angered the entire fiber art community by talking about how nobody understood knitting until scientists looked at it, which is actually pretty sexist.
@faythofdragons @Capitanmaroon
Good for them for realizing the truth, because It *IS* punk af.
And also awesome.
° 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?
absolutely!!
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.
If you’ve got a young’n:
- Go cloth diapers over disposable most the time. We went woth a diaper servce to start, then bought our own once we had it figured out.
- For the ebike: we waited until kiddo was old enough for a bike seat (10 mo in our case, but ~12 mo) for the ebike. This let us get a longtail that is cheaper, mechanically simpler, and we can store inside instead of a bucket style bike
Our daughter is 10 months so we’re just starting looking for bikes. I was thinking about getting a long tail because that’s what people around us seem to be using.
I know cloth diapers are better for the environment I just can’t.
Cloth diapers can definitely be hard if you dont have on-site laundry. We were lucky enough to live somewhere with a diaper service when we didn’t have laundry.
We have on site laundry but I already do so much laundry.
It takes something like 500 years for a store bought disposable diaper to decompose in a landfill, and we use billions of them every year.
If one can use cloth, I say one should.
We did use some disposables throughout (mostly for logistical reasons) but we still saved 5,000+ diapers fron landfill.
