The City Mouse in the Country

As I write this the temperature is climbing.  We have a window or two open, knowing that soon enough we will be shutting up the house for the next three months or so we can protect ourselves and our cats against the onslaught of winter.   Our wood stove burned overnight to take the chill out of the air and I found myself buying new boots and gloves and driving home with the windows down. This is the nature of autumn in Western Pennsylvania and as I sip on my pumpkin flavored coffee, I cannot help but praise the fruit of the season, and yes it is a fruit, the simple pumpkin. A few things are still growing in our garden, the last of the herbs and tomatoes...a stray pepper or two that needs to be picked.  Yet I find myself interested in growing pumpkins next year after realizing their potential and that they are high in nutritional value.   It's easy to forget in our modern world just how easy we have it as compared to our great grandparents and their grandparents.  For the most part

The original post that inspired this piece was removed by the moderators of the Solarpunk subreddit.   In a nutshell it was a comment about how many in the Solarpunk community are simply not grounded in reality.    Or at least that was the way I interpreted it.   The original poster could have simply been trolling the group, but before I get into the meat of this opinion piece I need to take a moment and introduce those that are unsure of what Solarpunk is to some of the concepts of it. Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement primarily but has grown into a movement that strives for the integration of community, technology and nature.  It's a hopeful future that imagines renewable energy as our primary sources of power; this includes geothermal , wave energy and other sources as well as solar and wind power.   What I love about the movement is that it encourages action through a variety of means and understands that change, real change, requires actions that are based in the