Yours is just one of many versions of ‘why I personally don’t do anything’: I’m all for change, but the others don’t want!

Society will never be fully aligned on the solutions and you cannot expect everyone to agree with you, but you still can work for your preferred solutions in smaller groups?

What are you even trying to say? I am still trying to find something actually useful where blockchain is necessary that doesn’t spend as much energy as a small country. Every ‘explanation’ of why I should adopt this tech for my project/business/government/younameit is intransparent as heck. Lots of hot air, especially emanating from all those data centers. Fuck blockchain and AI.

Stopped reading at blockchain technology.

Not really, and @[email protected] has explained above why saving seeds can be technically quite challenging even for advanced gardeners. However there is another side to this - it is good that people consider saving seeds again, and learn how to. Because a lot of regionally adapted (easy to grow in certain places) varieties got lost when people stopped saving seeds and companies started doing it instead.

That’s a very good point. If the seeds people get from a seed library tend to be unreliable the idea will not thrive in the long term. A regular education offer about seed saving will help people and plants. Or people could note on their contributed seeds if their seed saving efforts are advanced or just ‘I collected a seed’.

I could imagine a sort of ‘plant patronage’ in a seed library where groups of people specialize in and care for certain plants or groups of plants.

Hahahaha I feel called out. Also, ‘Too butch for cottagecore, too granny for punk’ is a perfect slogan for Solarpunk

No. This problem has been solved long ago, with water. Water is already providing gravitational energy storage all over the world. I don’t think using different types of weight adds value to the process.

That is a beautiful and impressive list of inspirations you have collected on here, thanks for putting together and sharing! May it inspire many to personal action and towards working together for an abundant future.

I’m sure these drawers can be combined in an ecologically useful way!

Also who are those weirdos having neither an onion nor a mealworm drawer? Whatever is it people keep in their drawers these days, socks? Cutlery?

This isn’t really about “You can only be one of the cool kids if you’re at least 89.5% self sufficient.” It’s more on the line of “Hey, try to grow at least one sad plant in the best way you can manage, it’s going to make everything a little better.” Back when I only had a balcony I had boxes and bags with sad plants, now I have a garden with happier plants. We learn while our plants keep us company, and maybe one day can apply what we’ve learned in luckier circumstances. No attempt of caring for life is ever really lost.

By the way, if light conditions where you live are really bad you can always grow mushrooms instead of plants, they are not as demanding as plants.

Or hell, here’s a dodgy pro-tip if you are a die-hard bacon fan but can’t handle the environmental impact: go for a mealworm farm in a drawer. I promise the buggers taste similar to bacon and are the most sustainable animal protein you can imagine. All they need is food scraps and a dark space where they can crawl around. (Don’t let them escape into your kitchen)

Depends a little on how and where you live

• Learning to grow some food (even just herbs on your balcony or windowsill)

You need a large enough container (bucket, bag, pot), with some holes for drainage (plants don’t want to sit in water). It needs to be warm enough for the plant you want to grow, and moist enough. Getting the moisture right for seeds and plants can be tricky at first, it will get better with experience. There needs to be sufficient light, some plants need more than others. Research a few easy to grow plants and start with these. If you have little space, grow some kitchen herbs rather than vegetables, they increase the quality of your food by 99% and are expensive to buy, plus they are medicinal as well.

• Joining or creating a local sharing circle

Is there a preferred online portal where a sharing circle in your country might exist already? Facebook? Whatsapp? Telegram? A physical space somewhere? Search there first. If there’s nothing, create the space yourself, as an online group, a sharing box in a public space, or an actual group of people you know.

Very good analysis, especially about purity and inaction. The thought palace is such a neat place, as soon as you get out there it gets messy. I so much enjoy the much needed change in narratives. They make something really powerful happen in real life, the first seedlings of change rising from the tiredness, with better focus on what matters.

Kids are curious, so I guess one could work with that. If they are permitted, they will ask a million questions to grown ups when nobody stops them, and can spend hours trying to figure something out.

I would like ‘school’ to be an environment where this can happen safely. Smaller kids might have a more traditional school where several adults supervise them, answer their questions and show them how to do stuff. The school grounds have a library and several different workshops or rooms for different activities. Of course older kids will go out (under supervision when they are younger, alone when they get older) and learn directly from professionals. Professionals might book regular teaching sessions (to avoid too many interruptions during work) as part of their job.

Showing instead of convincing. Everybody can talk, what counts is the tangible outcome.

It goes hand in hand with avoiding putting someone in the defensive. I find it hard sometimes, I usually make my opinion clear but try to change topic and remain open to talk about other stuff. That’s not great and I’d like to be more skillful in being silent.

I appreciate you taking the time to write this up.

I used to have some Bitcoin before I understood how it really worked. Got out because all the scammers before I understood how it really worked. Now as I get involved in community projects, and crypto stuff creeps up everywhere, I feel like I have to understand what’s going on in the background (the environmental issues, the pointlessness of it) to help others not fall for it.

Being uneducated on web3 is like being uneducated on the benefits of Amway. Some information isn’t worth the neurons it takes to store.

I’m afraid being uneducated on web3 makes a lot of non-tech people vulnerable to scams. And as the arseholes keep inventing new terminology for their scams it can be difficult to keep track of things. It’s good to confirm from time to time that there are still no benefits to Amway, or crypto stuff.

We’ve been planting native trees. The acorns and chestnuts spent all winter resting in sawdust/sand. Now they are sprouting and we replant them in recycled milk cartons, to be planted out next year. Bf has another raised bed built and already planted with strawberries, and he seeded a lot of plants for the garden.

When we are not busy we are setting up a framework for a real-life community center and are currently inquiring about a space for it. I’m building some online documentation/presentation for the project and we will be starting to contact possible participants and supporters. All this is still very vague but I plan to document our steps so if things don’t work out we can analyze to improve, and also help others to create similar spaces. If it wasn’t for this very SLRPNK instance where I find inspiration and resources this project would still be stuck in my head but some bits are actually materializing.

From my very limited knowledge of history I would wager a guess that humans went gradually from ‘natural forces are more powerful than us, therefore godlike’ to ‘our human-shaped god has given us the power over nature and we must tame it’ to ‘ooops neither seems to be correct, what do now?’. Quite a few sustainable approaches had been implemented by traditional societies in the past, and we should learn from what worked back then and combine it with what works now. No need to copy the past 100%, no need to reinvent the wheel every week.

Revolutionize your thirst with more radical freshness than ever! Makes your barricades burrrrrrn!!!

I was missing one aspect as to why so many of us are drawn towards cottagecore, which is that the return to a more simple life means a return towards more connections with non-humans. People and their different non-human allies (plants, animals, fungi) go way back and recently we’ve lost touch. We don’t miss the sourdough for aesthetic reasons. We miss the sourdough because it’s an old friend.

The world we have created is entirely human-centric, and now we feel alone.

As to the aesthetization and commercialization of subcultures - that has always been a risk and is in no way limited to stuff liked mostly by girls. As soon as a subculture gains a name the vultures arrive. Just waiting for the new range of solarpunk softdrinks to be available in my local store tbh.