Connect...the...dots...

Journalist James Burke asked many of these same questions in 1974.

The series he was part of was called Connections and is a good tale even for today.

Give it a watch and see if it does not 'spark' something with your children. It certainly has for mine.

Chilhood achievement

Slightly off-topic, but even today I can remember my pride - and relief - in learning to tie my own shoelaces, since I was the last in my cohort to do so.

Apocketahlips

Jezuz

http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/

It even has advice on how to teach your kids how to tie their shoelaces.

Seeds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

Dorothy, if the lights go out, we are screwed. If you're really that worried, learn the skills before the power goes out, a simple google search will find you what you need locally (note I said before the power goes out). But really a stockpile of guns, ammo (you'd better learn how to use them properly) booze and cigarettes are probably your best bet especially anywhere near a city.

Wanna really scare yourself. Read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.

Me? I'll just move to Cuba. They already have plenty of experience with this kind of stuff. :)

Seeds

"She shrugs and says, "The one thing I'm worried about is being able to get seeds." (In case you didn't know, Monsanto has been quietly buying up heritage seed companies for the past while.)"

Huh? I didn't know.

Looking for information....

it's the parents of generation velcro

It's the parents of generation velcro that are to blame here, not the kids themselves.

"Progress"

Old stuff, Zalm. One of the very first things the US saviors-of-Iraq did was to go to Iraqi farms and make them destroy all their traditional seed grain and replace it with Monsanto's "new and improved" varieties. It is illegal to plant the old varieties there now.

Gotta make the world safe for Free Enterprise, dontcha y'know?

This is a really good

This is a really good article. I like the way an complex socio-economic topic like the value of skills & learning in a changing society is introduced using a "down home" anecdote illustrating a commonplace skills-loss caused by lapses in the non-formal learning process due to the extreme commodification of convenience (exemplified by velcro shoes). And thank you for bringing Jane Jacobs into the scene - what a sharp thinker she was. I'm always coming back to her these days (as an aside: did you know she even warned us about the financial ratings system way back when? She got the current crisis down to a 'T').

Good stuff!

Let them play, I say.

I'm far more concerned that our youngest remain playful, than if they if they know how to do "practical" things (which sounds vaguely Thatcherite--didn't she want Brits, owing to the ostensible demands made by contemporary necessities, to stop studying English and the like, and learn how to make things?).

For sure, fear might inspire Spartan survivalist vigilance, but it won't do much to inspire Athenian play.

Maybe rather than look to Jane Jacobs, who with her depressing and conservative last book showed exactly why she ought to be left behind, we might look at other books to light the way forward. We might, for example, look to 1) Douglas Rushkoff's _Playing the Future_, 'cause he actually can say good things about what kids are doing on the net and with their Xboxs; and for sure to 2) Stanley Greenspan's _Secure Child_, 'cause here he really reminds us what happens to kids when they grow up forever worrying about wolves and scarcity.

patrickmh

Uh oh!

Can't tie shoes I guess they'll all have to wear boots. Now that's dark ages.

I've lost my family and have

I've lost my family and have become a homeless refugee in Austria, straight out of Grade 12, and after a short army service, at 18, when I met my wife, who then was also a 17 year old refugee with her parents.

It took us 6 years to be able to get together and be married in England, but what we have seen and learned in those years was that:

1. We never again trusted any political, or economic system, or theory.
2. To become self sufficient to the highest degree.

Apart from academic studies, we've been learning trades, crafts, arts and are still learning every day.

We have 3 large freezers full of the best organic foods and meats grown by ourselves and have a built in generator to cover power outages.

We survived in 3 tiny cabins out in the wilderness, without power, phone, running water, doing odd jobs, building fine custom furniture with a generator for 8 1/2 years, while we've been building our 3 level house from the ground up, installed the power and plumbing, built all our furniture, painted the pictures on the walls and carved the sculptures, as we're highly skilled professionals in all these fields.

Have a large organic garden, cattle, chickens, workshops where we can build just about anything in wood, weld, fabricate metal and even build machinery. My wife has her own studio, where she can do also just about anything in fabrics, arts and crafts, etc.

All this accomplished on very low income through our lives and now on pensions.

The difference is that we didn't spend our time and money on luxuries, fancy traveling, dinners and vacations, but have been buying land, materials, tools and equipment for every penny we could spend.

Crazy ? Perhaps, but when old people today are surviving on dogfood and endless medications in city shoe boxes, we're free out in the open, have the best of everything, take no medications, still working full time 7 days a week and enjoying every minute of our lives.

Ed Deak, Big Lake.

velcro

Velcro was a great invention , I like it and am so addicted that I am having a hard time adjusting to a buckle watch strap.
As a Senior, I too look for velcro shoes.
Just so much easier and quicker.
No tripping on laces.
What I notice to be the big difference is that when we were growing up, the great outdoors was not an extra curricular activity. We were out the door as soon as breakfast was over. We had to be called IN for supper.
Now, children have to be pushed out the door and pulled away from the videos and computer games.

PS to my

PS to my previous:

Incompetence is carefully nurtured by big business, as it leads people into enslavement and is the most wasteful and therefore the most profitable economic system. Now called "globalization".

This is why they're buying parties and paying politicians to make it a governing factor and an addiction.

Miseducated economists also love and promote it, because they can call it "growth" that jacks up their fraudulent GDP figures.

We're building things and doing arts all the time, but only a small part, the materials we have to buy, register in their phony GDP figures, because we're doing it for ourselves and/or give it away to our models and friends, selling only a few to cover costs. One of my models ended up with 13 paintings, after they've been exhibited in a one man show, as NFS.

I've built a new sorting corral this summer, that jacked up their precious GDP only by about 25 bucks.

Ed Deak.

Practical knowledge vs. "education"

I find it ironic that in the last hundred years of human existence, the idea of status has shifted from being a person who knows how to do things and produce things, to being one who knows NOTHING but how to live off others or manipulate information or people rather than real products. Kind of like the 3 inch gilded fingernails and white skin valued by the Chinese aristocracy...it showed that they were so richt that they didn't have to work. Which is fine for you, until the revolution dumps you out of power and you starve. This is totally the opposite of natural selection proicesses, where organisms that can feed or care for themselves most effectively are the ones that survive.

I work in software, but have a pretty dim outlook on the future, so I actively learn and practice the skills I need to care for myself and my family. I can garden, butcher, and handle/care for/breed/slaughter and process livestock. I can train animals, and ride and drive horses. I understand basic herbal remedies, and keep my first aid skills up to date. I am a lousy seamstress, but I can sew and knit after a fashion. I know what local plants are poisonous and basic survival and orienteering skills. I can build fires and shelters, and survive at night in the woods. I know in theory how to make soap from wood ash and fat, although I've never done it and wouldn't want to try.

Admitting knowledge of most of these skills causes my colleagues to look at me like I'm insane. After all, grubbing in the dirt is for peasants! However, if more people understood how to produce the basic necessities of life, or at least had a basic grasp on what's required, I think society would be completely different, and certainly much better prepared for the future.

True story: My friend lives on a farm with an extensive garden. Her husband's coworker brough his wife and small kids to visit. They were in the garden when my friend pulled up a carrot. The wife (typical trophy wife, doesn't work, has 2 nannies) and kids had never seen a carrot growing in the ground. They thought they grew on trees. Sad.

Rhea..... Thanks for your

Rhea..... Thanks for your input.

It is always nice to meet, or hear from people who consider life something more than just a waiting period to be spent on swallowing in BS between birth and death.

Keep it up....who knows, it might be catching.

Cheers, Ed.

Boy am I relieved?

'If your first impulse is always to protect your children, are you actually doing them a disservice?"

Glad that I am not the only one living with this cognative dissonance.

Oh and thanks for the Jane Jacobs references. Just reading or hearing her name makes me motivated to do something.

Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

Dorothy makes reference to, but doesn't fully go into this hierarchy of data, which is at the bottom and is unorganised and unprocessed. Information is organisation of data, while knowledge is the analysis of such data. Finally, wisdom is the ability to use knowledge to make decisions and act of that knowledge.

In our present culture, we LOVE information (try communicating a thought rather than logistics through a text message) and loathe long and complex ideas. The move away from blogs (or more realistically, essays and articles), which featured personal insights and expressions to facebook updates and Twitter accounts, which stress "status" and discourage anything complex. They actually feature word limits. And people like this.

Look at advertising and see how often "information" is stressed as being crucial. Information superhighway, information economy etc. How often do you hear "knowledge is power" anymore? Has the internet, that great storehouse of information (not knowledge of wisdom) made us smarter? More aware?

Disconnected-ness

We're getting disconnected from real production and the real world. Our evolution to an information economy means we do little to actually produce anything tangible.

Take your kids out camping or use a rustic cabin for a week.

Grow fruit and vegetables, then process them (jam, frozen, puree, etc.

Build a windmill (see otherpower.com), learn how to repair and tune up your own bicycle, etc.

Further on Rhea's point...

A student told me of a study done in Japan a few yrs ago with Japanese school children born and raised in Tokyo. They were asked about (or perhaps shown) a dead mouse and queried as to how one could revive it, if possible. Most of the kids said "put a new battery in it". They didn't know animals are live creatures. Given the popularity of "robot pets" in that country, I suppose one can hardly blame the children for this, and the fact that a love of nature isn't exactly on the top of the agenda in cities like Tokyo, but talk about SAD (and disturbing??).

I never had velcro in my day

I never had velcro in my day but I do see it with the next generation with my nieces and nephews who all have velcro.

I remember learning to tie my shoes and it was 'annoying' but I figured it out and it was sort of like bragging rights in school too (as only kids could do ha) if you could tie your own shoes and the ones that could not were laughed at. but this was the 70's and I dunno if velcro shoes were even around then as I do not recall anyone wearing them.

I have heard things similar but with telling time, as apparently many kids can only tell time if it is a digital clock not with a normal clock with 'hands'....

Good Stuff, Tyee

Very timely, Ms. Woodend. A brief perusal of John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Crash of 1929" (recently reprinted) is in order. We are reliving that decade. As indeed the citizens of 1929 had to do. Not by choice. But they survived and became stronger. As we must do.

The only difference is that we have a tiny bit more knowledge of what came before, and what is in store. So all of those who read the non-mainstream press will be better prepared. I too have enjoyed immensely the works of Kunstler and Jane Jacob. More recommended reading that says it all.

As a number of commentaries above have stated, this is certainly not the fault of Louis (or my children). It isn't even the fault of the majority of citizens. Fault lies in those who have the power to change policies, but refuse. The established elite. No surprises there.

Strap on your seatbelt, folks.

Telling time, Monsanto &

Excellent article Dorothy.

Another thing people want to do is their own little research project. Ask all of the kids you know under 19 to tell the time on a non-digital watch, or clock.
My brother recently pointed out to me that his young girlfriend, an intelligent, employed and hardworking person cannot tell time on a non-digital clock. I started to wonder how many other kids are impacted in this way.

I too have become concerned about my ability to survive our move back to what I call "simpler" times. I am one of those "knowledge workers" we hear so much about of the new generations. I have few practical, land-based skills, or capabilities. However, I think what will become real again, is our interdependence and what we each have to offer our communities that will help us survive and thrive in the new days ahead.

I think it's important to have compassion for generations that have been raised en masse to fear being outside to play (all those stranger pedophiles & allergies), to sit in front of TV's & computers, while our parents worked and commuted longer and longer hours to support the lifestyle we've all been sold is the way to live.
Scarcity, frugality and necessity are not things a majority of kids have been raised with. Instant gratification, desire/want vs. need and being handed everything on platters, with gold stars for walking in the door ("self-esteem movement")have made their mark.

For those interested in the Monsanto thing, India is really struggling with this too and the dirt poor farmers there are reporting a lot of skin problems from spreading the genetically modified seeds and grains that they have no other choice to use. Also, some of the GM grains have a "killer" structure to them, where they actually kill other seeds. Just google: indian farmers, monsanto and scads of stories show up, including this one:

Millions of India Farmers Join Lawsuit Against Monsanto & Biotech Industry over GMO Contamination

Over 6.5 million farmers from every state in India are asking the Supreme Court to let them join the case before the Court, saying GM crops risk irreversibly damaging India's farmland and biodiversity.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4778.cfm

The ancient history of shoe laces.

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

One might think it should be more important to know how to cobble.

Reality check

People like Ed Deak are justified in bragging about their ability to survive in a truly rural environment, but life would get very much harder for them if the various things they now purchase were to suddenly become unavailable or too expensive. So lack of cash would present the biggest problem, as it did in the Depression, with the need for purchase of tools, gasoline and lamp oil being prime examples.

One can only dimly conceive of the massive chaos which would arise if suddenly millions of urbanites, hungry and out-of-work, fled the cities. It takes years to set up for an even moderately independant lifestyle, and those who still own guns would within months quickly eliminate any game available as a source of meat, provided they didn't freeze to death in the first overwintering.

Even suburbanites with their gardens already in place, would have a hard time making it.

Obviously, by far the majority of those living in cities would HAVE TO stay there and then be subsidized, lest rioting ensued. The basic necessities, such as water, sewer, hydro, and food would be heavily subsidized. Few would starve.

But just as in rural areas, the prime problem would be lack of money, and just as with Ed, those who would fare best would be those who have sought quality in the goods they buy, with an emphasis on repairability. That in turn would require the ability to do simple repairs and having the tools to do so. Forgotten by those who advocate the three Rs, the first, Repair, requires quality rather than the junk we so routinely buy today.

A major step away from our wasteful consumer society would be something like the Volkswagen - Hitler's "people's car" - which was easily repairable and not programmed to start disintegrating in ten years after the warranty has run out. The second "R", Reusing, would demand parts that are interchangeble well beyond the yearly model, rather than today's practice of modifying each year's model of identical parts so that doing so is impossible.

Perhaps a spinoff might be a return to an honest form of business ethics which when I was young meant more than giving out free T-shirts and ball-caps with a logo on them to "proudly" wear as today's brain-dead consumer does today.

correction

To be perfectly clear, in the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph, a comma should have been placed between "....in ten years" and "after the warranty...."

It's more like Trailer Park Boys

The sentimental tears in my eyes were soon interrupted by abrupt laughter at the silly romantic notions that this article tried to revive. Without having thought through any of the real world implications, regressing our current urban society to something more rural or near medieval would be funny if it wasn't downright crazy.

BC is full of Marxists who can't bear the vulgarities of our current capitalist system and want everyone to grow their own vegetables and live from the text of The Farmers' Almanac. Unfortunately, that kind of shift in labour and resources would prevent us from inventing things like computers and medicine.

I guess this is the time to romanticize the Great Depression and how swell it was to live on a farm. But remember all the diseases that killed people back then. You may despise today's consumerism, but what you want to take us back to- a lower standard of living means a harder living and lower life expectancy.

Now if you are miserable enough to plan your life on the basis of total social collapse- a return to 'Mad Max' anarchy then I think it's more important to stock up guns and ammo. With those two, I can come and take everything you have. I mean, if you want to go Medieval, let's go all the way.

"..If your first impulse is

"..If your first impulse is always to protect your children, are you actually doing them a disservice? If suffering breeds character, does a complete lack of suffering foster utter helplessness? .."

Yes. Everyone in this blog so far has focused on the practical abilities. The mental ones are just as important. And, you do not achieve them by reading books, but by going through what your mind does and how to handle it, when you forget your sweater at home, it gets colder than you thought, and no teacher will let you spend your breaks indoors, because it's your screw-up. When one of my kids was so unfortunate, and a teacher was hanging on the phone, commandeering a parent to bring a coat, I knew what kind of insanity I was up against. Consequently, we spent all our holidays in the back country, not bringing even a flashlight, for somehow, they have to learn it, the mind thing.

Otherwise, Ed Deak has said all that can be said, better than I would be able to, except, that this society going bad started, when we accpted that anyone could be landless. Think about it. This is where the downward spiral starts.

Except, Bobby....

"You may despise today's consumerism, but what you want to take us back to- a lower standard of living means a harder living and lower life expectancy".

How do you connect having a "lower standard of living" with being closer to the earth, knowing where your food comes from and having basic survival skills?

We all know the stats- that we work far more nowadays (to get nowhere) than our grandparents did.

Consumerism is slowly turning humans into stupid robots, and I think that was the gist of this article.

More crunchy granola...

Realistically, urban dwellers don't want to be too close to the earth. Eliminating the need to farm or grow your own food means we can spend more time on inventing computers, video games, researching new medicines.

Fii, 'basic survival skills' is a relative concept. Tieing shoe laces isn't one of them. Maybe living off the earth like Rambo is a true skill.

Like it or not. Higher consumption comes with a higher standard of living. And that doesn't just mean running shoes and 7-11 slurpees, it also brings along expensive medical treatments.

In our economy, you have to take the good developments with the vulgar ones- like reality TV. Unfortunately alot of the left thinking people in BC think they can control the economy to create output that's tasteful in their opinion.

Survival

The Right wouldn't last 10 minutes if taxation didn't provide them the protection of police and society. For them "survival of the fittest" actually means "survival of those behind the walls, gates and thin blue line".

Unfortunately, when there's no more taxation an encyclopedic knowledge of Rambo movies won't be very useful.

Of course, Bobby is right.

Of course, Bobby is right. At least within the current, fraudulent definitions of "living standards", covering the Earth and suffocating humanity with destruction, pollution, garbage, destitution, illnesses never known before, with dozens of poisons in the blood of all living creatures.

This is what my 1991 Efficiency Principle was and is about.

"Wealth can not be created, only taken from other sectors, the environment and the future"

"Costs can not be cut, only transferred on others sectors....etc".

The world could have very high living standards and enough for everybody, but not under the present destructive, criminal bolshevik capitalist system with the economy under the control of a despicable, multinational corporate mafia.

And all based on imaginary money created by some banks from the air for colonization, robbery and world control. Even when it is called "free trade".

Ed Deak.

November 24, 2008
Democrats' Stimulus Plan May Reach $700 Billion
Spending Package Would Rival Financial System Bailout
Facing an increasingly ominous economic outlook, President-elect Barack Obama and other Democrats are rapidly ratcheting up plans for a massive fiscal stimulus program that could total as much as $700 billion over the next two years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/23/AR2008112302064.html

Shabbaranks said - "The move

Shabbaranks said - "The move away from blogs (or more realistically, essays and articles), which featured personal insights and expressions to facebook updates and Twitter accounts, which stress "status" and discourage anything complex. They actually feature word limits. And people like this."

This is pervasive now. Management and decision-makers are basing decisions on the thimble-full of information that can be contained on a single blackberry screen (without scrolling). It's an attention-deficit world we live in, or *seems* that way for those caught up in it (Plato's cave again). We won't escape the consequences. The shortcut represented by a single tech innovation - velco - is now being replicated across the full range of skills and functions. And it's no coincidence that the blackberry is now the premier status symbol in corporations, government organizations and educational institutions (it's the new phallus). It contributes to a paradoxic loss of connectivity and brain function, as our knowledge workers fade out of conversations, lose trains of thought, and obliviously block high-traffic stairwells and escalators as they answer a continual summons from out of the ether.

In other words, the mental

In other words, the mental capacity of the world's rulers, since the beginning of history, has never reached past the next battle, or now, past the next quarterly "bottom line".

As I've been writing about it in the past 20 odd years, there are no "bottom lines" in economics, because everything started and ends in infinity.

And, of course, the main culprits, again, since the beginning of history, have always been the priesthoods and now the pseudo priesthood of miseducated economists, who have always developed and defined the false theories for the next quarterly "bottom line", leading their empires and civilizations into self destruction.

It only happened a few hundred times since beginning of written history, so we have a long way to go before we finally learn the lesson, that road systems and economics can not be permitted to become killing grounds. Even if the damage is accounted by the idiots as "growth of the GDP".

The question is, how much time do we have left to learn the obvious?

In the past self destruction happened in certain localities, but now the blundering fools are killing the whole human race while reporting it as "competitive productivity".

Ed Deak.

Yes, but...

"Like it or not. Higher consumption comes with a higher standard of living. And that doesn't just mean running shoes and 7-11 slurpees, it also brings along expensive medical treatments". He quotes.

Expensive medical treatments so that.... people who can't have children, rather than adopt a child who is starving, can have one through artifical treatment and further add to the 6.7 billion on the planet causing it to burst at its seams and destroy/wipe out (see Ed Deaks' post just above) most of all the other species we share this planet with... not to mention allow people to hang on to a life that perhaps isn't really a life after all- oh I missed that part- WHY are humans so perfect and wonderful that we can justify forging ahead at the cost of all other living creatures, multiplying like rats and pretending our way of life now is of such a "higher standard", and something to be proud of??