I've started researching reskilling, and there are festivals and expos happening around the country - pretty cool.  I've added the links to some of them to my favorite links list to the right.

Here is a list to start with of skills to be taught at a reskilling school or expo.

    Alternative Energy
    Alternative Medicine
    Animal Husbandry
    Aquaculture
    Ayurvedic
    Bee Keeping
    Bicycle Repair
    Biodynamic Gardening
    Bird Language
    Blacksmithing
    Boat Building
    Book Making/Binding
    Carpentry
    Ceramic Arts
    Cheese Making
    Composting
    Cooking (basics)
    Dance
    Fiber Arts
    Fishing
    Food Preservation
    General Repair
    Grey Water
    Hand Tools
    Herbal Treatments
    Indigenous Healing Wisdom
    Jewelry
    Knot Tying
    Music
    Native Plant Identification
    Natural Building
    Natural Paints
    Orchard Planning
    Permaculture
    Plant Propagation
    Poetry
    Pruning
    Seaweed Harvesting
    Seed Saving
    Sewing
    Solar Cooking
    Solar Water Heating
    Story Telling
    Vermiculuture
    Water Catchment
    Wilderness Skills
    Woodworking
    Yoga / Meditation

What happened to 2011?  A whole year went by without my posting a single thing.  I guess I put my dream of re-skilling for Ecotopia on the back burner.

I think in some ways I moved away from it emotionally because living in fear 24/7 of what is going to happen was completely stressing me out.  I don't live in or near a Transition Town (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns) so I'm not living in a mode of seeing what is coming as a challenge and an opportunity for living a better life.  I'm just living in the fear of what might happen, the chaos and violence that those books I read envisioned.

I've come back to this because I was writing out 10 Random things about myself on my Weight Watchers blog, and #10 was this dream, of creating a re-skilling school & agrarian ecovillage so that my life would be living and working in the solution, in the preparing for a post-peak oil, post economic crash world.  I pointed them to this blog, and in the process remembered that I had created it.

I have done some things over the last year that relate to this dream.  I visited Old Sturbridge Village a couple of times (http://www.osv.org/).  I also spent some time looking for land to buy in the southern Vermont/NH area, including close to Putney and Brattleboro, both of which are Transition Towns.  In the course of doing that, I thought more about this dream, about what kind of land I would need, about whether I could really do it.

I also learned about Flintlock Farm in Harvard, MA, where they are setting up a "Lost Arts" collaborative: http://www.lostartsna.org/

I've realized that part of me would really like to join up with an organization that already does this, rather than start out on my own.  I need to research more what is out there.