solarpunk traveler
I’m planning to fly transcontinental once every 8 years for the rest of my life, but I’m being pretty strict with myself for anything shorter than that and going train or bus. For me it’s not exactly about the personal impact as much as doing it to make it easier for others in the future to do better. So every time I “suffer” a little because I take an extra day to travel by train/bus, I just think about how my doing it makes it more likely that train service with bikes will get easier for the next person to do the same thing. (Also I live in the US so most routes are much much harder than pretty much anywhere in Europe from what I hear.)
Totally amazing and the very most solarpunk way of doing it imho. Especially that really beautiful classic train getting the retrofit.
Imagine upping the size, running the vacuums on renewables and automating it though. You could distribute farm fresh veggies to the doorstep of everyone in an entire city. I think that’d be solarpunk as hell.
The challenge that isn’t covered here is that the grandeur of Singapore is far far easier to achieve with authoritarian centralization than the anarchic style of solarpunk. And people are compelled by the grandeur of a large expensive project in different ways than the DIY scale.
So how can a ragtag group in SF or Berlin make something that captures imagination just as well as Singapore?
I’m a huge fan of the ebike for camping too. In 2021, I took a year off work to ebike around the US.
This weekend’s adventure was low-key by comparison, just a 14 mile ride from downtown Madison, WI out to a county park campground.
If you’re around Madison, WI I’m running group campouts now! Have one coming up this weekend and will do more over the summer.
I have 3 bikes right now. An upright ebike for around town and short trips, a recumbent ebike for 50+ mile trips, and a mtb/commuter (mostly to handle the winters). I ride everywhere around town, and I do lots of bike camping around my area.
Haha, no I flew last in 2019. Did a 6 month tour in the US in 2021 and have just been doing more local tours or renting bikes since then. I’m planning on saving up and quitting work for a 3+ month journey around Europe in 5 years or so. That’s the plan at least, we’ll see whether life says otherwise ;)