Hi all!
Long time lurker here on slrpnk.net and just signed up to participate more. I have myself been moving on a fairly slow but steady trajectory towards a life aligned with solarpunk values (although not with zeal or even the knowledge of solarpunk for most of this time). I still have a good distance to go, but I also have some concrete ideas in mind going forward.
So I thought I’d make this post where people could share their stories to inspire each other to take bolder steps: what steps have you so far taken and what do you plan to do going forward to live more true to a real solarpunk? What turned you onto these ideals in the first place? If not all ideals speak to you, which do and why? etc. etc. Anything goes!
I’ll post my story in a separate comment.
It wasn’t “solarpunk” at the time, but I am vegetarian now for 15 years ish (since my early 20s). I do think better would be to go vegan and I have been trying to reduce dairy, but it’s a bit tricky since a) we also have a small daughter and nutrition is such a complex topic for her as well and b) my wife while having gone veggie due to meeting me is not on board with giving up cheese. It is something I want to tackle more in the future though. I’ve been mostly motivated by animal suffering and factory farming initially, but ecologically it just makes so much sense as well for climate impact, space usage, water usage, etc.
A small solarpunk thing that I am doing now is choosing regional insect friendly plants for my garden and also learning more about ecological aspects there.
Also while kinda ineffectual, I started editing Wikipedia. IMO shared knowledge building like that is also very solarpunk. It’s also some “direct action” that is suitable for a lazy couch sitter like me who struggles to do “practice” otherwise.
Also very much just a point of privilege on my side, but we did manage to build a house and I have literal solar panels on my roof. Not very punk, but very solar wow.
I cut out landbased meat almost 8 years ago now (I still eat fish, and I do plan on continuing, but not farmed fish). I approached it from a animal welfare and environmental impact vantage point, and started by cutting out any “uninspired meat usage”. By that I mean whenever I made some kind of stew, instead of putting in a lump of ground beef, I would use beans instead. Same when I had tacos - the flavor was in the seasoning anyway.
I am very much on the dairy train still though, and I don’t have the same kind of restrictions holding me back from cutting this out. I have picked up baking again recently, and I plan to experiment more with plant based spreads going forward.
Lovely! Me and my partner intends to spend next year systematically learning about the local ecology. Instead of an expensive vacation as we’ve done before, we will up our hiking game, and learn to be better foragers (berries and mushroom). The systematic learning includes giving each other presentations about a kind of topic of the week. I think it will be fun and educational.
I’ve come to a realization that this way of thinking ( i.e. “this is ineffectual”) is part of what has kept me back from participating more locally and in smaller things before. I think my (our?) generation has been fooled into believing only large contributions are impactful. Like many other millennials, I’ve been told that “we can do anything” and “we can save the world though our work” etc. So I went to engineering school and started working for a big company that (at least claims to) tries to solve big problems. The result being that I have overlooked many, much more impactful smaller contributions.
I definitely think agree with you that shared knowledge is very solarpunk, and I commend you for contributing to Wikipedia. I think they have plenty of work to do to counteract the abuse of LLMs these days, so having good people contributing is certainly not “ineffectual”. I have not done such direct contributions, but I have recently donated to them.
One of the things that disgusted me in academia was the insane system of journal paywalls. I am proud to have had all my publications made open access, and there are some movements in that direction more broadly (Plan S for example, more and more journals allow for open access publishing - but the cost model is still wack…)
Local electricity production is very solarpunk! Local resilience is in my opinion a very important foundation of a true solarpunk society.
i really like the wiki contributing idea. Do you think its worth creating a local wiki for local info or better to contribute to a bigger wiki?
Mhm I just contribute to the Wikipedia… that one I feel is super worthwhile - it actually has been under heavy criticism by the US right lately, because they only want their version of “truth” to be the only one represented. Obv inconvenient for the powers that be, if there is freely available information that they can’t control. I’m not contributing on any hot topic though (mainly music/bands) - but I still feel like everything that you can find on Wikipedia strengthens its position as a tool that people go to for info.
A local wiki also sounds cool, but I have no idea what I would contribute there.
Fully agree on the wiki editing. I think of it as provisioning the knowledge commons, i.e. knowledge commoning. Sharing good info is very important. IMO a community wiki (local or not, could be an online community) is just as good as editing Wikipedia. Even just posting what you know on your own blog/wiki/digital garden is valuable. One of the most visited pages on my personal site is my notes on how I fixed some crappy cat feeder, not going to foment a revolution but presumably it’s helping people to fix theirs too and stopping some e-waste.
I love this!