Skills we need to live a sustainable life.
Living a sustainable life isn’t just growing vegetables, raising livestock and eating berries and granola. A sustainable life also means having the knowledge and skills required to do things on your own. Sure, in some circumstances you can ask your neighbour to help. You can then repay their kindness with something that you can offer. That is the barter system. A system that has worked for centuries and still has its merit today. It is a good way to build community. However, there is a cost to that. An expenditure that needs to be limited. A sustainable life is one that requires no outside input or expenditure, or at least very little. No one is an island mind you, and living the life of a hermit (though sometimes that sounds marvelous) is not healthy in the long term.
Here is the problem as I can see it in my own life.
I think this is true for a lot of people also. We have a hard time sitting down in the middle if the day and do any of these things. I have been trained to the point of being brainwashed into thinking that I need to be doing other things. The need to be “Working”, whatever that means. For me as a landscaper/contractor that means doing things for someone else to pay me for my time. So I can then turn around and pay someone else to do these things for me. That puts these things I talk about below into the category of evening hobbies. Which categorizes them in my mind as frivolous things that are not meant to be taken seriously.
Society has deemed we can only do one thing.
If I am a landscaper, I can only work with the landscape. I can not spend a day sewing or baking. Even if it’s to fix my work pants. At least not a day during the work week. I can spend a Saturday doing it, I guess. Otherwise, I need to send my pants to someone who sews for a living, and pay them. Even if I pay them using the barter system. I can compensate their time by fixing their garden beds in some way. The same goes for cooking and baking and plumbing and everything else.
I guess to live a sustainable life, or a life of self sufficiency, means to live outside what is deemed to be normal by most of society. This is odd to think about, because only a century ago everyone lived a more sustainable life. If the people a hundred years ago looked at how most of us live now it would be so wasteful to them.
Skills we need to live a sustainable life
Sewing
I’m not saying that we all need to be able to make a dress or hem a suit coat. Although that would be cool. What I mean is to be able to sew a patch on the knee of your pants, or sew a rip in the shoulder of your shirt. These simple stitches would add to the longevity of the cloths we have. Therefore making us less dependant of a constant supply of cheap cloths. The whole fast fashion thing.
Knitting
Okay, knitting may not be as big of a thing these days. Weaving either. But, to be able to fix socks and blankets would cut down on how fast garments are replaced. It also makes for good gifts that last, literally for generations.
Vegetable Gardening
Vegetable gardening specifically makes for a sustainable life. Adding in useful flowers and herbs takes it from a Vegetable plot to Kitchen garden and then to Apothecary garden. Which is what we ultimately need for a sustainable life. It’s not just food, but year round whole life wellness. That is what we need from our garden.
Skills we need to live a sustainable life
Cooking & Baking
The benefit with being able to cook and bake for yourself and your family is not just nutritional, or financial. It’s both. It is also environmentally better. When we cook for ourselves we tend to use the same pots and pans and utensils over and over again. The leftovers are kept in the same containers over and over again. This equates to less waste, especially plastic.
Preserving
Storing what we have created from our gardens and kitchens is a major part of being self sufficient. Especially in the northern climates when growing things is not possible year round. Sure you can build a greenhouse, and if its passive solar, then maybe you can grow certain things year round. For the majority of us, this is not feasible. Preserving, pickling, freezing, etc., these things are lost arts really. Okay maybe not freezing, that’s pretty easy if you have a freezer. But, still being able to keep things and use things when you can’t produce them fresh. That is a real keystone to living a sustainable life.
Building & Carving
An issue that I have run into time and time again, and not just under the header of building and carving, but in general. I want everything to be perfect the first time. I want it to look like it just came from the store made by master builders, or elves, or something. When I don’t think I can make it look like that, I don’t want to do it. That is a real problem, and I think its a real problem for most of us. Much of the time, especially when talking about garden beds and tables and the like, I am the only one that sees the errors. The inconsistencies are what makes the thing awesome. It’s what makes it beautiful. I’m not saying we have to do carve every spoon and build every chair. But what if we did?
Fishing & Hunting
Admittedly, I’m not much of a hunter. I am a meat eater, and therefore, not against hunting for food at all. I also live in a agricultural area, so I know hunting to protect the heard is a necessary evil. This may be an are where bartering may be a good thing. A necessary thing. There is a lot that goes into hunting and properly butchering an animal. A skill that could be learned for sure. Like carving.
Fishing is like hunting-lite. There is a skill that goes into catching and cleaning a fish, but the margin for error is greater than hunting. But still a skill that is useful fir a sustainable life.
Repairing & Maintaining Things
We can’t all be master plumbers and electricians. And there are times that calling in a specialist is the right thing to do. However, being able to fix a leaky faucet, or a clogged drain for example, is a useful skill to have. Same with being able to hook up a new light switch. These things don’t last forever and being able to fix certain things around the house is a very useful skill to have. The same is true for our vehicles. being able to change a tire or the oil is a useful skill that will save you money and time and therefore make you more self sufficient in life. These are just a couple of examples also. There are many many things that are just not that hard to do. They are just skills we need to learn. Luckily the internet is full of tutorials.
Skills we need to live a sustainable life.
I don’t think this is an exhaustive list of skills needed for a sustainable life. I would also believe that you could live a sustainable life and not have one or two of these skills. What I will say in closing, is that loosing these skills on the whole, as a society is what is killing us. As these skills become less common and we are told we can only be one thing, we are loosing the ability to become self sufficient. Our ability to live a sustainable life is becoming less and less possible.
The take away from this should be that we need to have as many skills as possible. That will lead to a self sufficient and more sustainable life. We don’t have to be masters at everything, we don’t even have to be good at most of these. What we need to be, is willing to try. To be bad at something at first, but allow that to be okay so that we do it again and with time we get better.
Good luck.