Punk, Solar, Junk, Wind

I want to like solar punk. I do. But I find it pretty empty in practice. Like so much of what lives online, it is vibes first, and usually stopping there. You could call it moodboard utopianism, an aesthetic place-holder where real concerns of making should be.

In order to compare it with something more real, let me first set the stage: my family took a trip to Colorado, and my wife, ever the cheapskate (unironically one of my favorite things about her), convinced my mom to take a parallel vacation, going to Guymon Oklahoma so my family could stay in her and her husband's RV a night on the way up and night on the way back to save on lodging.

First of all, this RV park was retro-fitted from a former drive in theater. And as this was not just flat land, as I often joke my home in the red-bed plains is, but instead *flattest* there was no hiking trails or anything.  Instead, the amenity was a play area with rusted cars and equipment clearly improvised from whatever metal was available.

See, it was a drive in.

My angel gets to play in the post-apocalypse.

 Use what you got. Maybe that's the real punk?

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So is this solarpunk, something else, perhaps called #junkpunk?  -- or just trashy? I think these questions are worth asking.

Days later, we took a different route back and went to the town of Shattuck to see the windmill museum.  

I found myself immediately moved by the place. 

A kindly old man -- remember those? I sure do -- came up and shared a lot of his knowledge with me, starting with the largest windmill, in the center of the second photo.

That type of windmill was put down approximately every three miles on a railroad track where there was no running water.

To think, mechanical power prior to an electric grid... Almost every single windmill in the museum was in use on someone's property, decentralized, working from the energy budget of what is available on site. Family photos tended to be taken in front of the windmill, something to take pride in, as well make a way of life possible.

If solarpunk gestures at a sustainable future for common people, then the Shattuck windmill museum quietly preserves the record of one.