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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

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.

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?