My background is in permaculture but there’s significant overlap between that and solarpunk. My point of view is that permaculture and/or solarpunk work at the individual level. They work even better at the household level, and even better at the community level, even better nationally, and best internationally.

You don’t have to change the whole world to be successful. You’re not responsible for the entire world, only your own actions. So be a part of the solution, lead by example and persuade others to do the same. But you’re not expected to carry 8 billion humans on your shoulders, all the other animals, the trees, the weight of all of the oceans, etc. People only believe this because it gets repeated incessantly but take a step back and realize how obvious it is that you can’t be expected to be personally responsible for basically all of existence. You’re not omnipotent. Let go of weird expectations that anyway are probably promoted by fossil fuel types to overwhelm people into inaction.

Be responsible for your own actions, be part of the solution, and let go of the rest.

We use a simple homemade compost toilet, saving 150kg of climate change emissions per person each year, and instead of creating sewage, we create compost.

Hence why I said to purify it, and I only mentioned propane in the context of cooking, which is virtually if not always off-grid, so no piping.

As an additional (future) option, I love the idea of creating biochar, capturing the resulting syngas, and purifying the syngas for use as a plug-and-play alternative to propane compatible with their existing cookware.

I think this is sound from ecological and social standpoints. Propane is basically a byproduct of fossil fuel refinement, and as that goes away, so too, will propane, leaving behind a ton of wasted cookware etc. including the embodied carbon in its manufacture. By replacing the propane with another gas that’s a byproduct of sequestration rather than fossil emissions, we save the embodied carbon and financially incentivize sequestration, while the people with cultural attachments to gas cooking can continue on.

DNS, web, mail, WireGuard, etc. I wrote the webserver in about 700 lines of Go and the other software is by other people. Currently I’m rewriting everything in Rust and will write an authoritative DNS server in Rust. Eventually I want all my services to run on my own software (except for WireGuard, which is best in-kernel).

My first professional mailserver was around 1996, with 400 users, up to over 3000 users by 2001. It was awesome then but now mail is the last thing I’d recommend anyone self-host. The ecosystem has been deteriorating for decades at this point.

Pathogen destruction is a function of time and temperature. Generally speaking, a compost bin at 140F/60C for an hour will kill most pathogens, or 130F/55C for a day, or 120F/49C for a week. And generally, compost bins will hold a peak temperature for between 24-72 hours before slowly dropping again, while adding fresh material will make the temperature rise again. Part of the reason time matters is because it isn’t just heat that kills pathogens - it’s also compost microorganisms that physically kill pathogens in the bin.

Getting compost very hot like 160F/71C like you say will kill pathogens quickly but it’s not only unnecessary, it’s also harmful, as a lower temperature will result in a more diverse culture of bacteria in the finished compost. Personally I aim for about 140F/60C.

And anyway, note that I said above 120F. It sounded like the GP was having issues with their compost that made me think that 120F would be a reasonable target to shoot for given their current situation.

Love the biking and zazen!

I did really well last winter then got out of the habit when it got warmer (I have a thing about smells).

Can you describe your setup? A properly maintained compost bin doesn’t smell at all.

How to make one: take some fencing (you can get it for free from Craigslist) and make a bin a little over 1 meter tall and roughly 1 or 2m around, outside, on top of soil. Put dead dry plants or leaves inside on the bottom at least half a meter deep. That’s your sponge material to keep certain things from leaking into the soil. Now it’s ready to start taking inputs like toilet material, kitchen and yard scraps, dead animals, etc. Form a hole in the center with a pitchfork or other tool and put all inputs into that hole. Then put cover material on top of the freshly added material. Good cover materials are hay, straw or leaves, and they prevent smells. This cover material should also be present on the sides of the bin. Finally, get a compost thermometer and stick it in the middle of the material. The goal should be to get the temperature above 120F/49C. This will take a good amount of material and consistently adding it through the winter.