What’s Life Skills Unschool?
“Eco Life Skills for Kids and Grownups” is the title of a zine I’ve been working on that probably won’t be out for a long time. It’s a collection of DIY projects and short articles made for grownups and kids to work through together to build skills in things like finding/making and preserving food, maintaining homes, and making medicine without being dependent on civil services or industrially-produced products. Since I’m writing up these projects and articles piecemeal anyway, I figured I’d release them periodically in a newsletter format!
Goals
I think the undercurrent of a lot of the goals of this project are summarized by: Building informed, smart trust in ourselves and others.
Address climate anxiety realistically: There’s no sugarcoating here, but there is a lot of empathy. I don’t want to lie and say halfway measures are going to save the world somehow—but I do want to emphasize the value of doing it anyway. Foraging for the majority of your diet might not be a realistic goal; but it could improve your access to micronutrients and be important in the future.
Address food safety and sanitation anxiety: Foraging and home food preservation scare a lot of people, and it’s natural to be even more frightened about eating something you’re scared of with a kid you’re responsible for. I’ve even met a lot of parents who are afraid to forage with their children because they’re worried that teaching their kids that eating wild plants is okay sometimes will result in accidental poisoning—when that’s actually the best step we can take to help them make informed, safe decisions! In the same vein, any kind of sanitation practices not dependent on civil services or industrial products (like composting toilets or homemade cleaners) can be frightening because they’re unfamiliar and could go wrong—but it’s actually a lot easier to not screw up than a lot of us have been led to believe. Learning how to do things safely also teaches us when they’re unsafe.
Build confidence for further learning: These are beginner projects that don’t immediately lead to local communal self-sufficiency, because we all start as beginners. I firmly believe that the most important lesson we can learn as beginners is that we are capable of learning more.
Build communal relationships with humans, other animals, and plants: Ecological reciprocity is the most important thing we can do now for ourselves that will pay off later. Beans in a bunker will run out someday and do nothing to help anyone outside; but a vibrant community of humans and wildlife means our grandchildren eat.
Have fun: The future is scary, but it’s not black hole filled only with boring days, hard labor, sickness and terrible food, either. These DIY projects aren’t purely for recreation and every one of them might not be everybody’s cup of tea—but knowing what living without civil infrastructure or factory-made goods can be like helps us actually understand the boring or annoying things (which, I promise, are not nearly as bad as what our imaginations can conjure up), and also shows us all of the wonderful foods, incredible experiences, and just plain joy that’s ours to have if we know how to make it happen.
Why?
I decided to do this project for a few reasons:
I know a lot of parents, educators, aunties, careworkers and just people who spend a lot of time with children in general who would like to pass on more non-industry-dependent life skills to their kiddos, but don’t know where to start or how to do it.
I know a lot of people with climate anxiety who spend a lot of time with children who have climate anxiety and aren’t sure how to talk about it in a way that’s genuine and realistic (no “well we’ll stop using plastic water bottles and then it’ll be okay” or “You kids will figure it out! It’ll be okay”) without just spiraling into that fear. I want to help people—kids, grownups, whoever—make real space for that fear and grief while turning it into realistic and genuinely helpful steps that support both them and their communities (human, other animal, and plant).
A lot of contemporary resources in this area and especially resources aimed at families and children are made by and for tradwives and other conservative demographics with reactionary anti-industrial sentiments, rather than from any material analysis of climate collapse or how pressingly unsustainable modern infrastructure and production is.
Likewise, a lot of contemporary resources are geared towards middle-class parents; and a lot of the resources I grew up with (like Foxfire) weren’t written for modern city dwellers—I want to make something for any kid or grownup. Not every project on this page is going to be accessible to every person, but my goal is to write as much as possible for full- and part-time caretakers of kids of all types with an emphasis on developing usable skills in cities and suburban areas.
A lot of my work is very adult-centric and I would like to change that.
About me
I’m an herbalist, independent health educator, forest farmer and real-live mountain hermit. I was homeschooled as a kid and am very passionate about childhood education, especially when it’s centered around self-security.
Many of these projects are remixes of things I did as a kid, either as part of intentional education efforts or out of my own boredom and passion for DIY, with more intention paid towards building a foundation for effective life skills and synthesis of the issues my friends and community members are facing with raising children today.
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All content is available for free! Donations from those who are able are strongly encouraged. I am dependent on optional financial support from my writing and teaching to meet my personal needs. More support means I’m spending less time scrambling to fill in the gaps and have more time to focus on this & other accessible, community-focused projects.
