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?

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

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...

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

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

Absolutely!

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.

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

Love ALL of this! LoL, just starting to make friends in the GoblinCore. <3

Potato IS Life! LoL

Oh mushrooms, I wish I had time to get back to those!

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.

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.

I like your mini bike repair service!

Its fun! And I show the kids and parents what I'm doing, which tools I need to do it, etc. Its mostly simple stuff too, like adjusting tension on a brake, set screw for the limit on the derailleur, or patching a tube and pointing out to not forget to check the tire before you put the tube back in. More annoying tubes (or if I'm out of patches) I pop into a small bin to patch later, I have a couple spares for 20" (kid size), including the ones I patched up since the last time.

I also really like that everyone kind of learns that these tubes are for everyone, you won't necessarily get the same one back, and it really doesn't matter because you've still got a working tire again. Good for the kids to learn that it doesn't matter, and honestly good for some of the parents to learn that too.

Since I started doing it another dad has been learning too, and started doing the same thing. Though anything he's not sure about he tells them to ask me.

Plus a really good way to meet a lot of the people in the area, I like doing it

• 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

none

Whatt it even inspired a copy-cat? That’s some wholesome community building and a good use of little league hours too

Seems pretty solar punk to me.

I bought a mushroom log last year that was sprouting so I harvested it. I haven't got anything else from it since last spring. I'm bummed because I love mushrooms

We were at the playground and one of the other parents asked me about my bike because my wife told her how much I liked bikes.

He said he'd need to ask me some questions because of a problem, I told him it was easy and described it and said I could bring my tools by (the playground is like two blocks from me, his house is like 4), and he got excited and asked if I knew what sizes he needed and that he would do it.

He just kind of got into it after fixing his son's bike, bought a set of on the go tools to take with him when they all went for a ride, and he just... Kept going with it lol

So if I'm there doing my thing and another kid needs help he gets his tools out and helps too.

This community has always been really friendly, and I think things like the portable bike repair just adds onto it! I'm hoping to see more stuff like this happen, though I'm not sure what just yet.

We did see a few little libraries put in around town at the parks recently, and I've been chatting with others about natural lawns, so we'll see where it goes next!

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.

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.

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.

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 reduced power usage significantly by running a small e-ink monitor for reading/writing and office tasks. It uses so little energy that I can't even notice a difference in the power meter.

Also, for the people that keep the pc on most of the time, you're probably going to have the same overall experience if you activate auto suspend

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

Never thought to use an e-ink display as a monitor, great idea!

Also 100% worth using auto suspend :D

Who throws out a kitchen aid mixer? That shit is expensive and fancy

° 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 ♡

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.

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 know, right?!

It doesn't run, but I haven't dug into it yet to figure out what's actually wrong with it. (First world problems: we've already got a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, so getting it working isn't particularly urgent. This bowl-lift one would be a slight upgrade from our Artisan, though.)

Still, I'm pretty sure these things are a holdover from back when things were designed for repairability instead of planned obsolescence, so I have little doubt that it's fixable for a lot less than the cost to replace it.

MeshCore and MeshTastic

Also check out Reticulum, while there.

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.

All of this sounds great, especially +1 for avoiding unnecessary travel! A lot of people start to drive more once they get an EV, as it's "more eco-friendly", in the worst case creating a rebound-effect. It takes willpower and thoughtfulness not to fall into that behaviour

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.

'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!

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.

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

Does it count if I already did it? Could say being car free, I suppose I am by choice now.

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.

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.

I know the motors are supposedly super high quality. I wouldn't know how to fix one but I am sure it's going to be worth the effort. Especially if you sell it as used afterwards

An EV is never going to be more efficient than a bike or walking. My EV's mass is enormous compared to my bike or a pair of sneakers. I don't know about willpower, for me, as bikes are so fun to ride.

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.

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!

We did use some disposables throughout (mostly for logistical reasons) but we still saved 5,000+ diapers fron landfill.

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.