You know the old saying, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he’ll never go hungry.” Well cod fishers in Newfoundland and salmon fishers on the West Coast are going hungry, as are loggers, and soon, oil field workers.

Yet some folks — those with well developed resilience and creating ing and other intuitive generic skills — more easily make the shift to a new life/workstyle and a new identity. A fisher retrains as an electrician and starts his own business. A logger uses her generic mountain/woods skills to start an outdoor adventure company and sell her services to professionals seeking adventure and growth in the wild.

I think we should think about consciously developing generic skills such as resilience and creating. I focus on those things in my work, coaching people through difficult and challenging transitions on a 1-1 basis. Schools don’t do this; most businesses don’t do this. Who then should teach people generic skills?

Good thoughts on slums and community – this needs more attention. There are a lot of positives (along with the obvious negatives) in squatter communities.

I wonder about using forms of the Hexayurt http://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt for such communities – it has a lot of advantages over the ramshackle housing often built.

Also see http://www.appropedia.org/Resilience – seems to be up your alley.

Now back to practicing my dance moves. If I correctly remember that late 80s WELL party I attended, it was when John Coate (Tex!) and his band began playing the Dead version of Goin’ Down The Road Feeling Bad that I really got wound up. Say hi to Nancy!

They match returning veterans with opportunities in farming, mostly small farms and gardening operations working local markets…for locavores.

I used to lurk on the WeLL a lot, so it’s cool to bump into you commenting on Jamais’ blog.

I’ve set up a site called hyperlocavore.com – which Jamais characterized – aptly I think – as “open source peer-to-peer agriculture.” It’s a social network built to hyper-localize folks in their neighborhoods, and to help people build and develop yardsharing arrangements for urban/suburban agriculture, in order to grow more organic food, as close to home as possible. It’s also about promoting the kind of neighborhood social spaces that City Repair has creating in Portland Oregon.

Two posts that might be of interest:

What is yardsharing?

http://tinyurl.com/dg55zy

And for fun
!00 Reasons to Become a Hyperlocavore

http://hyperlocavore.wordpress.com/100-reasons-to-be-a-hyperlocavore/

It always makes me happy when I bump into someone from my happy days on the WeLL.

Take care,

Liz McLellan