http://www.permacultureforum.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=849&p=4151#p4151

The very best lawn mowers are sheep, rabbits and geese. They all leave messy droppings though, maybe that’s why our modern ‘hygenic’ culture dislikes them, and prefers carcinogenic petrol fumes, but at least they give something to eat as a bonus

You’re right about the toughness and expertise of past generations, and about our current dependency. The machine works by making us dependent, which is why I personally applaud all and any effort, however small, and whether or not it involves courses, to take back a measure of independence. The crucial thing about those old communities though, is surely that they were communities. There’s never been a time when an individual has had to do everything alone. You trade and barter and share, everything from hay ropemaking to barn-raising to childcare and that, as much as anything else, gets you through the winters. That’s something else the machine has taken from us, turning us into individuals and consumers, and it’s something else we need to take back. But I reckon that learning how to live in inter-generational communities again is going to be a lot harder than learning to make fish hooks or hay rakes.

Bob – that’s intriguing! Do you have a picture? I’d love to see what that looks like.

John – a very good point. In Cumbria the folk are patched together from bits of Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Scot. The words for mountain (’fell’) and stream (’beck’) amongst many others are from Old Norse: evidence of terrible upheaval. It’s been under English, Scottish and Danish law in the last thousand years so yes, there has been much upheaval, and I’m sure there is a pattern in which new skills are learned as a response to settlement and change, then settle down to become a ‘tradition.’

Perhaps what is hard for us now is that we can see the end of an old tradition fading away, but having nothing new yet to replace it: or rather, the picture of what is coming is not clear, and probably will not be in our lifetimes. This can be hard to live with for some: though others may relish it; it depends on how you cope with change, I suppose. But yes, it would have been a lot harder in the past. The old Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin gives some impression of what it must have been like to live in a country full of great ruined cities, evidence of a collapsed civilisation the makers of whom were only dimly remembered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin

Picking up scraps of older and more viable technologies is something people have always done in times like ours, when they’ve had their wits about them. You learn what you can and make do, and a thousand years from now your attempts have evolved into something graceful and traditional.

I own one, but have never gotten much use out of it. From time to time I think I ought to try mowing or edging with it, but I have to go over the same ground multiple times to get an even cut.

Perhaps there’s a technique that would make it more effective, but I’m not sure who would know it. I dimly recall seeing them in use in the past, I think by men on a road crew or chain gang.

Re ‘frivolity of courses’… compared with about a billion people out there, almost everyone in this country is a rich as those pre-revolution French aristocrats were relative to the peasantry, and as divorced from the reality of pre-industrial rural toil, although you are right, it’s not their fault or any deliberate choice, not even a moral failing, just the way history has unfolded. Anyway, I’m delighted that people do scything. It’s tremendous, an inspiration, didn’t mean to sound as if I was knocking or belittling the achievement.

I agree with your reply to Andy, the skills are indeed almost infinite. The arrogance embedded in the British class system means, ( or meant ), contempt towards traditional physical labour and the skills of artisans, etc, is/was ubiquitous and automatic. I’m speaking from direct personal experience. It’s just part of the culture, unconsciously absorbed.

For example, say you want to catch a fish, to eat. First make a rod, perhaps a reel, ferrules, bindings, then a line, then a hook, then find the right bait or lure, and do all this using natural materials found in the local countryside, no bought artificial bits from shop or specialists. Ah, before that, make the tools you’ll need… then learn how to knot the line, where the fish are, and then… well, what if you spend all day without a bite ?

Yer BSc, MA or PhD or fat bank account or smart motor car or luxury home or pension prospects or ability to write nifty computer code or beautiful wife or connections to important people or your No.1 record in the charts or your successful career in the city or rank in the forces or … nothing is going to help you, if you can’t catch a fish to eat. You’re going to be unable to sleep, because of hunger.

Because you never learned what all ragged grubby scruffy little village kids learned, once upon a time…

Then, similarly, make yourself clothes, from wool, starting with raising some sheep…ever tried making a spinning wheel, without any plans or one to copy or anyone to show you ?

This same formulation can be extended to all daily requirements, from building and roofing your dwelling, to knowing how to sow vegetables and grow them successfully into food, or killing and cutting up an animal, making kitchen utensils, digging a well…

We are all pitifully, woefully ignorant and, as you put it so neatly, Paul, ‘riven from the land’, and the fundamental knowledges which were accumulated and passed down over millennia. We assume we can just ‘do a course’ or two or three…

We are all infantilised, dependent as babies, upon the industrial consumer soceity for…just about everything… it’s undignified and pathetic, but it’s very hard to get free.

It can’t be that difficult to make a rope out of grass. Or to snare a rabbit. Or kill a goose. Or make a scythe or a hayrake. Can it ?

The winter is the Great Teacher, the Examiner. If you don’t get things right, if you don’t know your stuff, you don’t make it through to the next summer.

I tell you, the humble molluscs, the slugs and snails will break a strong mans heart, when he’s laboured diligently to prepare soil, raise seedlings, a nice crop in a neat row, healthy and strong, until a suitable damp night. You turn your back for a day, and the rabbits have eaten every one, or the pigeons…or you sore the veg in a place that’s too warm and damp and they mold and rot.
Any and every mistake means you go hungry…

That didn’t used to happen, because the rural folk *knew* how to do the art and craft of feeding themselves.

We are here because they knew their stuff, knew how to build and sail wooden boats, and build pony traps and calve cows and work with horses and oxen and pletch hedges and thatch hay ricks and weave blankets and clamp turnips and preserve fruit, and on and on, and every task had tricks of the trade, ways that worked well, and ways that didn’t… and they worked, very, very, very, hard.

If only it *were* that simple and easy…

Will any of this ’save the world’? Probably not, but it doesn’t follow from that that it’s all a frivolous exercise either. The fact that we need ‘courses’ because we don’t pass on the skills is precisely the point I was making. People are struggling out from under the weight of a system that has systematically riven them from the land and each other, and replaced human and natural relationships with commercial ones. That’s not an easy process, but it’s a good one in itself, regardless of the end results.

Knutty – that’s fascinating and heartening. Andy – I hope you’re right. Perhaps I am too pessimistic. Though I think that if you really want to manage a piece of land and an associated household without fossil fuels, the number of skills to be learned is actually almost infinite. I don’t think we have any real idea how de-skilled we have become as individuals. But we will find out.

I attended Joanna’s workshop last year – the work that reconnects. It helped me understand that feeling despair at times is entirely human & natural. I didn’t feel like a freak afterwards. I heard Paul speak at the Big Tent in Fife. Dark Mountain helps square this circle & gives a voice to the disillusioned eco-warriors like me.