"Gandhi was a middle-aged man when he first asked his wife Kasturba to teach him to use the spinning wheel. Once he had mastered the wheel, he practiced spinning every day for the rest of his life. Home-spinning became a symbol for independence and self-reliance throughout India under his encouragement and direction."
(http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1998/3/98.03.05.x.html)
Gandhi would spin for an hour each day, usually producing a hundred yards of thread, and helped develop a simple spinning wheel (charkha) that allowed many to do the same. He believed that spinning was the foundation of non-violence. This type of practical labor may have to be the core of any sustainable ecological action.
We need a solar swadeshi, an ecological practice on a daily basis that allows us to live within our solar income. Gandhi used the charkha, the spinning wheel. What would be an ecological charkha, a solar charkha?
One option could be a $25 solar LED http://www.bogolight.com (buy one and they send another to somebody in a country and through an aid program of your choice). The Bogolight uses standard rechargeable AA batteries, useful in case of emergency. After all, Solar IS Civil Defense.
More literally, we could extend the idea to a personal generator or dynamo, hand cranked, foot pedalled or treadled, even a string pull generator like the one with the $100 laptop. Work it for 30 minutes a day and generate watts and watts of electrical power for your own use, charge your own batteries, or send the power back into the grid for the benefit of others. Solar swadeshi. Hand-made electricity. 21st century khadi cloth. Real electrical power to the people. True energy independence with minimum waste, at least in terms of generation and on an AA battery scale. Doing what Gandhi did with cloth but now with electricity.
In this "deregulated environment" with oil used as a weapon and national security identical to energy security, direct ecological and economic action toward renewables and away from the nuclear, gas, coal, and oil that we presently use can be a primary political as well as an economic act. A treadle/pedal/crank/string pull powered generator (perhaps with a flywheel?) can be the solar swadeshi, an ecological and economical electrical charkha.
One humanpower is about one sixth horsepower. A healthy person can put out 100 watts of power for hours on end and 300 watts in a sprint. Let's not be batteries in the Matrix but generators in a net metered ecological Network.
This is an updated version of Solar Swadeshi for a comment in the discussion between Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben, Jon Lebkowsky and others at Worldchanging.