chelidon

woo hoo! The catalog I ordered from Lehman's about building and maintaining composting toilets came in! Okay, it doesn't take much to make me happy :>

Anyway, continuing the previous thread about community-building, if you were going to put together a fairly self-sufficient intentional community in a rural area, what skills would you put on your "must-have" list? I'm considering both specific "hard" skills, like farming, animal husbandry, etc, and broader "soft" skills, like leadership, parenting, and so on, but this first list is just for hard skills. No, I'm not building a survivalist walled compound, but I am interested in exploring the possibility of becoming more self-sufficient over time, and am interested in what essential skills all you exquisitely clever folk can think of.

Those of you who write fiction can consider this an exercise in alternate-future visioning, too, if you like: consider a possible future where gas costs about $6-$8/gallon, and supply is tight and/or rationed and intermittent. Heating oil and diesel fuel costs about the same ($6-$8/gal), when you can get it. Since road and air transportation costs are so high, and due to faltering maintenance the roads have begun to deteriorate, and our rail system is already in such poor shape from decades of neglect, shipping goods long-distance (food, clothing, manufactured goods, etc) has become very expensive within the U.S., and even worse from overseas, so a larger proportion of goods have to come from local sources. The electric grid is in pretty poor shape both in terms of supply and maintenance, blackouts and brownouts are semi-regular in at least some parts of the country, and what energy you can get is pretty darn expensive, say at least 2-3 times what you'd pay now. Because of the transportation/manufacturing issues, spare parts are hard to get, particularly for complex equipment, far worse for anything made overseas (like, say, almost anything in consumer electronics or computers). Most food production is local, and any farms which depended heavily on electrically pumped water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and complex machinery (huge combines, etc) to operate are iffy at best, possibly out of commission, so much more of the farming, dairy, etc is small-scale and local, and tends to occur where land is good and water is easy to get. Bottom-line, you can still get most stuff, but not quickly and it costs an arm and a leg. Put another way, not a collapse, but a time when spiking energy costs mean that economic growth stagnates or contracts, everything moves a bit more slowly, there's much less energy available, and the standard of living is lower (but perhaps more sustainable) than today. There's an emphasis on "make it if you can, use it 'till it breaks" instead of "buy cheap, use once, throw away."

Alternately, oil turns out to exist in infinite quantities and global warming is a hoax (right...), but it's still good to be able to live sustainably, I figure.

So here's some of the hard skills I came up with -- what am I missing?

Medical (human) -- (first aid, trauma/paramedic, M.D.)
Vet -- (large animal)
butchering
tanning/hide preparation
leatherworking (general, saddlery/harness and tack)
Farming, gardening (grains, vegetables, fruit, nuts)
Dairy, including milk, butter, cheese prep
beekeeping
brewing/vinting/distilling
Food prep and storage (milling/grinding, canning, drying, etc)
Cooking
herbalism
permaculture (whole range of skills here)
carpentry (timber, framing, finish, repair, fence-building)
furniture-building
forestry (planting, felling, pruning, timber harvesting and prep, firewood prep, syruping)
rough lumber preparation (logs, posts and timbers)
plumbing
welding
machining and other metal fabrication
blacksmithing
animal husbandry (chickens, goats, llamas, sheep, cow, horses)
fishing
hunting (firearm, bow, trapping)
basic gunsmithing
stone and brick masonry (foundations and walls, chimneys)
electrical wiring and repair (general, generators, water-driven pumps and generators, solar equipment)
excavation
road/trail creation and maintenance
rope-making and repair
spinning, weaving/looming
dyeing
sewing
small motor repair (chainsaw, etc)
large equipment (car, tractor) maintenance and repair
teaching (children, adults)
music, art

(edit -- just thought of another good one, ceramics/pottery)