Page 22 - The Lost Ways

We need to find that part of ourselves again, that willingness to stand up for ourselves
and our family and say, “I’ll look after you. I don’t need things that don’t help me survive,
and I don’t need objects for the sake of having them. I do need strength and health and
happiness and companionship. I do need the knowledge that my grandparents had to

‘make do and mend.’”

To cook and grow, build and learn. To produce but know when to stop producing. To have
enough but not too much.

As a species, we are reaching a tipping point. There are seven billion of us on this small
1
blue planet, with around 1 million more people being added every 4.8 days. Our world is
2
changing, and we have entered an era termed the Anthropocene , where the planetary
conditions and the wilderness are being profoundly changed by human beings.

We may well find that in the coming years, those old skills used by our grandparents
suddenly become needed again. The next major crisis, EMP, war, or any major disaster
that you can think of will teach us the hard way. Many of us will die because so many of
us are so detached from the real life.

We will find ourselves needing to replace social media with community spirit, and instead
of buying objects and clothes we don’t need, we will develop the “make do and mend”
attitude of our long-gone relatives.

We will embrace their lifestyle again and revel in the abilities we still have, as human
beings, to live our lives using our own hands and minds and bodies—to be explorers again

in our world and not passive users of it.

I may have been brought up “old fashioned,” but those of us with the skills to grow our
own food, treat our own wounds, and build our own houses—in fact, those of us living a
more conscious lifestyle—will reap those benefits in a world where the future is a very
uncertain one.

1 United Nations Environment Program UNEP
2 The epoch that begins when human activities started to have a significant global impact on Earth's
ecosystems (Borenstein, Seth -14 October 2014)

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