Peoplenomics Skill Banking: A Reply...

One web site that I can highly recommend is George Ure's Urban Survival http://www.urbansurvival.com/. I am a paid up subscriber to the private section of his blog http://www.peoplenomics.com/ and I can highly recommend this section as well. It is certainly well worth the $40 a year-mine of information and all that.
Well last week, he was talking about skill banking, so I thought that I'd put in my 2c worth here.
Skill banking is vital. It is vital not just for your own survival and for that of your friends and family, but for the survival of your community as a whole. The Twentieth Century was in many ways a marvellous time to live, but it was also a very sad time. One of the saddest things about the latter half of the 20th century was the phenomenal loss of specialised skill sets that happened and is still happening to this day. A lot of these skills were vital cogs of industry even as recently as 30-50 years ago, but now are all but lost. Take, for example, blacksmithing and the hot shoeing of horses. You cannot get a horse hot shod these days for any amount of money. Nobody does it. Likewise, the only blacksmiths you are ever likely to see are in heritage museums (if you are lucky). Who cares? We all will, if petroleum products ever become unavailable. A hot shod horse is many times less likely to throw a shoe because the shoe is burned into his hoof, giving a smoother fit. It doesn't hurt the horse BTW, as the only thing burnt is dead keratin. A horse in work on hard surfaces needs well fitting shoes. If it is not well shod it will go lame. If it throws (loses) a shoe, it cannot do any work on hard roads until the shoe is replaced. Before fossil fuels conquered the world, the world rode on the horse's back. If (when) there is a constriction to the supply of fossil fuels, who will cart the freight? Not the prime movers! A sixteen-horsepower engine will though! A team of sixteen shire horses can move a semi-trailer full of freight. But hang on... Sixteen times four is sixty-four shoes. What do you suppose the odds are of one of these sixty-four cold shod shoes coming loose on any one day in the four weeks between farrier visits?
This is why working draught horses were hot shod. You can get away with cold shoeing if you have only one or two horses in work, but not when that shoe is one in a team of sixty-four others.
Freight companies in that day often had a farrier blacksmith on staff and he was kept well busy. It is not as easy as it sounds to replace one horse in a well established working team!
This skill is all but lost, but not quite. There are a few farrier blacksmiths still out there, but they are a rare breed indeed. It is truly a skill worth banking.
What about spinning and weaving? This is a skill set I have personally banked. I can tell you, most spinner-weavers that I know are grey haired. They are very good and have spent a lifetime perfecting their art. This is a skill that will be vital to survival, especially in cold areas, but it just isn't getting passed on because it's not "sexy!"
Forget Sexy! Being alive is very sexy, as far as I'm concerned (especially given the alternative!)
I could add to that list...

Tanning
Cobbling (shoemaking)
Canning and preserving, salting and smoking meats
Cooking with fire
Knitting
Smelting (iron and copper especially, but tin also)
wheelwrighting
barrel making
general carpentry
horse breaking
humane animal slaughter and home butchery
dog training
glazier work
tinsmithing/coppersmithing/sheet plumbing (leadsmithing)
Brewing and distilling

This last one is not just for pleasure. Distilled alcohol is an effective antiseptic and a still can also be used to refine important essential oils such as eucalyptus, tea tree oil and others that are hugely important medicines. The operation of a still is a fine art but one that unfortunately has been legislated out of existence in many areas. 
Fortunately, home brewing is in no danger of extinction, at least not here in Aussie! Few people seem to realise though that they will become as important for the cultivation of yeast for bread making as for alcohol production in a collapse situation!
No yeast, no bread!

Make up your own list and bank a skill now, while you can!