Education
Reskilling for sustainability
As George Bernard Shaw once said, "The capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale.” It's time to reclaim the native intelligence in our bodies, and re-learn the skills and arts of place-based living. We can learn land and hand knowledge and skills that have endowed human beings with the ability to make local livelihoods for millennia. We can decrease our dependence on the market and corporations, and find a deep satisfaction in attuning with the natural world at a human pace and scale. Get started now with the following Actions.
Reskilling for sustainability Actions
Learn how to grow organic food.
Learn how to grow organic food.
One of the best ways to participate in the local food movement is to grow some of your own. Doing so will connect you more closely to the place you live – the soil, the seasons, the sun, the rain, and even the wildlife, from beneficial pollinators to garden pests.
Take action
- A Crop-by-Crop Guide to Growing Organic Vegetables and Fruits by Mother Earth News explains how to plant, when to plant, best harvest practices, how to save seeds, and how to deal with common pests and diseases naturally for a wide range of vegetables and fruits. Primarily for use in temperate climates.
- Learn about, design and implement a permaculture garden in a tropical climate with the help of Volume 2: House and Garden of The Tropical Permaculture Guidebook by Permatil Global.
- Gain insight into a variety of composting techniques and approaches with the comprehensive guide Back to Earth: Composting for Various Contexts by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. This guide focuses especially on tropical Asia and is widely applicable.
- Learn to grow your own food and live more sustainably with free online permaculture courses from #freepermaculture, and free and low-cost courses by and for women with the Permaculture Women's Guild.
- Practice permaculture even if you are a renter, apartment dweller, or otherwise do not have access to a garden, with the guide Permaculture for Renters by the Permaculture Women's Guild.
Get inspired
- Writer Fran Sorin's blog post shares 13 Reasons Why Gardening is Good for Your Health. Among other effects, gardening reduces the likelihood of strokes, osteoporosis, and dementia. Sorin's focus is on growing ornamentals; growing food greatly expands the benefits of gardening.
Use passive (non-electric) renewable energy.
Use passive (non-electric) renewable energy.
One strategy to address the climate crisis involves shifting from fossil fuels to electric power as the energy source for common activities. But electric power has environmental costs, too, even when renewable energy is used to create it. Consider using human power and passive renewable energy instead.
Take action
- There are many ways to produce hot water using solar energy. Mother Earth News' article How to Build a Passive Solar Water Heater describes five simple, inexpensive heaters for home use. LowImpact.org's Solar Hot Water resource page provides a detailed overview of the topic, whether you choose to build a system yourself or hire a plumber and use off-the-shelf components.
- Solar Cookers International has been working for decades to design and promote passive solar cooking, especially in the "less developed" parts of the world. They provide solar cooker construction plans for many kinds of cookers, including a portable one made from cardboard and aluminum foil.
- Preserving food by canning or freezing usually requires fossil-fuel or electrical energy, but there are other ways to preserve food that are just as effective. The National Center for Home Food Preservation has put together a comprehensive overview of preservation methods for various foods. You can also build your own solar fruit dehydrator with these plans from North Dakota State University.
- Learn about various non-electric tools and techniques for satisfying basic needs from the Atelier Non-Electric in Japan. The text is in Japanese, but many of the design images are self-explanatory.
- Low-Tech Magazine contains a wealth of thought-provoking articles, from discussions of "obsolete technologies" to the possibilities of low-tech solutions to modern problems: a great way to encourage out-of-the-box thinking.
- Often the best solutions are the simplest. Rather than use electricity and fossil fuels to dry clothes, hang them on a clothesline. Rather than building fleets of electric-powered vehicles, promote walking and bicycling. Find other ways to satisfy genuine needs without using mechanical, fuel-based or electric means, and rethink technology with the help of No-Tech Magazine.
Get inspired
- In Can Decreix, a degrowth community outside the French town of Cerbère, the embrace of simple technologies is a joyful way of life. The use of solar ovens and cookers is standard practice, and their many self-designed tools include a pedal-powered washing machine. Website in French and English.
- Maya Pedal is a Guatemalan nonprofit that turns donated bikes into water pumps, grinders, threshers, tile makers, nut shellers, blenders, trailers and more. They also recondition bikes for their traditional use as transportation. In English or Spanish.
Learn skills for sustainable local living.
Learn skills for sustainable local living.
The conventional education system, along with modern high-tech living of which it is a part, has separated people from the basic skills needed to keep life going. Dependency on our hands, local resources, and legacies of craft knowledge have atrophied and shifted to dependency on electrical and other grids, complicated high-technologies, and global supply chains. Re-educating ourselves in the skills of local sustainable living is an urgent task for realizing the localization transition.
Take action
- Explore and put into practice the comprehensive set of Low Impact Living Resources from lowimpact.org, in particular the Crafts and Land categories.
- To learn almost any skill imaginable for a localized sustainable living, buy or borrow The Encyclopedia of Country Living, "the original manual for living off the land and doing it yourself" or, simply, homesteading and off-grid survival. Even better, use the Encyclopedia to learn and do these skills together with others!
- Enroll in a short course at the Centre for Alternative Technology (Wales), to learn a range of skills in areas including renewable energy, eco-building, ecology, woodland management, organic gardening and more.
- In North America, tap into the extensive Folkschool Alliance, a network of centers teaching skills in everything from traditional agriculture to music, hand crafts, construction, community building, sustainable living, and much more.
- Take a short course in heritage skills at West Dean College (UK), to save endangered crafts from extinction, ensure their survival into the future, and create truly beautiful artifacts of natural materials by hand.
- Visit and take a course at Fibershed's Learning Center in California (US) for a hands-on education in fiber arts and creating a local fiber economy. Connect with--or create!--a fibershed project in your area through their Affiliate Directory.
- Participate in The Human Path's 5-week online Homestead Basics course, designed for anyone who envisions creating a mini homestead. Skills taught include: growing and preserving your own food, making your own medicine and exploring plans for off-grid self-sufficiency.
- Sign up for an online course from the Sustainable Living Guide to learn from practitioners around the world in skills ranging from gardening and permaculture, to holistic health and personal development, to community organizing and climate change emergency response.
Get inspired
- Jeevana Shaale, 'Life School,' in Melkote, Karnataka, India offers an alternative education model focused on traditional knowledge and skills relevant to local needs and fostering self-sufficiency. Skills taught include organic farming, hand weaving, natural dyeing, and bull-driven oil extraction. Read more in the article In Melkote, an experiment in alternative education rooted in traditional knowledge and sustainability in The Hindu.
- In Folk Schools Revitalize Traditional Skills of the Past, Terri Peterson Smith shares about the surge of interest in folk schools in the US, both as a reaction to the increasingly high-stress, high-tech modern world, but also as a means of reconnecting to one's own skills, body, and place, and as a means of self-realization and meaning-making.
Discover natural building.
Discover natural building.
Conventional houses and other buildings are predominantly made of energy-intensive, polluting, and often toxic and otherwise unhealthy and uncomfortable materials, and designed without regard to local ecological and cultural contexts. The movement for natural building seeks to reverse all of these problems, re-embedding the structures we build and inhabit in their local environments, and creating high-performing, beautiful, non-toxic, restorative and healing dwellings. Luckily, the resources--both materials and knowledge--that we need to re-learn natural building exist all around us.
Take action
- Get familiar with a range of natural building techniques in the Shelter category of lowimpact.org's extensive resource hub. Topics include natural floors, plasters, paints, and roofs, among others. For learning straw bale building in particular, follow their free online Straw-bale building course.
- Gain hands-on experience in natural building design, earthen building, timber framing and joinery, and more by joining courses at the Pun Pun Center for Self-Reliance in Thailand (in English and Thai); School of Natural Building in the UK; Rancho Mastatal in Costa Rica (in English and Spanish); and The Year of Mud in the US. In Canada and the US, find a natural building course with the directory of Home Building Schools of North America by Dirt Cheap Builder.
- Join an online course in diverse natural building techniques with Build Outside the Box Mastermind or Earthbuilding Academy (New Zealand).
- Ask questions about natural building projects and get answers from experts on the Talking Natural Homes Facebook forum, and learn about and connect with inspiring natural building projects all over the world on the Natural Building Network Facebook group.
- Learn all about adobe construction in the 1-year Adobe Construction Certificate Program from Santa Fe Community College (US).
- Advocate for the legalization of natural building techniques in formal building codes, as was successfully done by the Cob Research Institute in 2021.
Get inspired
- In A revival of natural building in Ladakh, read about a project Local Futures spearheaded to restore an abandoned traditional house using only local natural materials and time-tested local skills, and about the values of natural building more broadly.
- Built by Hand: Vernacular Buildings Around the World, by Bill and Athena Steen and Eiko Komatsu, is a compendium of stunning natural buildings from a wide diversity of cultures, and a testament to the aesthetic and design genius of common people rooted to and dependent on their particular environments.
- In Thailand, Thongbai Leknamnarong learned earthen building from the Pun Pun Center for Self-Reliance, then applied it in her village of Maejo, building five houses for homestays, a local school, a generator building for the village, a house for a local monk, and a meditation centre. Now she also teaches permaculture and natural building. Read her story in Maejo Baandin: The Maejo Earth House.
- Thanks to advocacy by the Cob Research Institute, in 2021 a Cob Construction Appendix was approved for inclusion in the International Residential Code in the US and other countries, which legalizes cob construction (previously it had not been permitted).
Voices from the field
- The interview series Low-impact Living, by lowimpact.org, features 33 interviews with people pioneering more sustainable ways of living, from creating a flax textile commons, to starting a bicycle co-op, to building houses that don't require heating.
- The short documentary Traditional House Restoration in Ladakh, by Local Futures, shares the why and how of natural building and the importance of restoration of old buildings.
- The documentary film portrait Didi Contractor: Marrying the Earth to the Building, follows the life of the late self-taught vernacular architect-builder in India who is renowned for reviving and innovating houses built from clay, bamboo, slate and river stone, constructed in tribute to their natural surroundings.
Resources
- The Encyclopedia of Country Living is one of the most exhaustive guides to vital skills for homesteading and off-grid living.
- The book Cræft_, _by Alexander Langland, explores the histories, and present-day relevance, practicality, and environmental superiority of traditional, hand-made crafts and tools.
- The book Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, by Julia Watson, travels between 18 countries exploring "millennia-old human ingenuity on how to live in symbiosis with nature."