This is a guest post by Michael Foley (user Greenuprising) who is another academic-turned-farmer. This post makes a nice follow-up to Nate's What Do We Tell Our Children? essay. Perhaps we don't have to say a whole lot if our actions align with newly emerging realities. Want a sense of purpose? Want to belong and feel valuable in your social sphere? Reskilling might make a whole lot of sense. What do you think?

Reskilling for an Age of Energy Descent

Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins calls the educational work we need to be doing over the next couple of decades “the Great Reskilling,” acquiring and re-acquiring the skills we will need to manage the energy transition we face. I've already written a bit about the organizational skills we will need on the local level. Here I want to offer some thoughts about the sorts of practical skills adults and children alike could start learning now to cope with a world of drastically reduced and altered energy sources.

"Can we rely on it that a ‘turning around' will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer "yes" would lead to complacency; the answer "no" to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work." E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

I would rather have titled this essay "Where the Hoe Meets the Soil" but that phrase is not part of our cultural lexicon, which is itself a symptom of the problem I am working to address. Setting aside any prolonged discussion of whether or what about the modern world should be saved, this essay is primarily about what it means to "get down to work" as Schumacher puts it. But very quickly, to me saving the modern world means setting a goal for the human economy to be properly scaled relative to the global ecology, and maintaining a sufficiency of social stability necessary to manage a transition.

Over the past week, Stuart Staniford and Sharon Astyk have written thought-provoking essays on the nexus of Peak Oil and relocalization, with Staniford suggesting that peak oil will not result in relocalization of agriculture because the industrialization of agriculture is not practicably reversible, and Astyk rebutting that idea. I think that both essays make important points, but I would like to offer a third perspective: that we have insufficient information to reach a conclusion about when energy scarcity will result in relocalization of agriculture, but that we will likely cross this threshold in the not-too-distant future and should prepare accordingly.

This is a guest post by Sharon Astyk, a very small farmer whom the biofuels companies have yet to offer to buy out, and a writer with two forthcoming books about peak oil and climate change, one (Depletion and Abundance, Fall '08, New Society Publishers) about appropriate responses for families, and the other (A Nation of Farmers, Spring '09, same publisher) about food and agriculture. Her writings can be found at http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com .

Stuart Staniford's latest opus has taken a shot across the bow at those who advocate Relocalization and de-industrialization. Embedded in his argument is a compelling critique of the prospects of certain parts of the Relocalization analysis. Staniford shows his customary brilliance in analyzing the ways that the biofuels response is likely to overcome impetus towards Relocalization.

But that profound analysis is embedded in a paper that contains some serious errors of reasoning and misrepresentations of the Relocalization movement that I think deserve critique. And his final conclusion, that this should put an end to all hopes of Relocalization deserves some further consideration.