From celestial navigation to sharpening blades, Ana Maria Spagna outlines 100 skills you'll find indispensable for life after an apocalyptic global catastrophe. She covers obvious needs like first aid and farming, while also providing suggestions on how to build a safe and culturally rich community through storytelling and music making. Full of quirky illustrations by Brian Cronin, this book will provoke surprise, debate, and laughter as it leads you to greater self-reliance and joy - whatever the future brings. This clever, illustrated handbook offers up a collection of the most valuable skills you'll need to survive and help rebuild a community after the world as we know it has ended.
Ana Maria Spagna lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington, a remote community in the North Cascades. She's the author of 100 Skills You'll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It), and after 15 years working on backcountry trail crews, she now teaches creative nonfiction in the Whidbey Writers Workshop low-residency MFA program. Her writing on nature, work, and life in a small community appears regularly in Orion, High Country News, Mountain Gazette, Oregon Quarterly, and elsewhere. ARE YOU READY?
Whether you're prepping for a shipwreck, economic collapse, a zombie attack, or catastrophic climate change, Ana Maria Spagna has you covered with her quirky collection of essential skills for a brave new world -- from blacksmithing and falconry to bartering and music making.
Future tense
• Animal Husbandry
• Barbering
• Bartering
• Basic First Aid
• Beekeeping
• Bicycle Repair
• Bird Listening
• Blacksmithing
• Borrowing & Lending
• Brining
• Butchering
• Cairn Building
• Canning
• Capturing Energy
• Carving
• Cheesemaking
• Child Rearing
• Chimney Cleaning
• Cloud Reading
• Cobbling
• Composting
• Conversing
• Cutlering
• Daydreaming
• Dental Health
• Disposing of Trash
• Dowsing
• Dry Farming
• Falconry
• Fence Building
• Financial Literacy
• Finding Your Way
• Fire Fighting
• Fire Making
• Fletching
• Foraging Locally
• Foraging Medicinals
• Foraging Weeds
• Frugality
• Gleaning
• Gliding
• Graffiti
• Grafting
• Growing Rural
• Growing Urban
• Handwriting
• Hiding
• Hoarding
• Homebrewing
• Home Childbirth
• Horse & Mule Handling
• Houseguest Hosting
• Hunting
• Identifying Mushrooms
• Ink Making
• Knitting
• Knot Tying
• Latin Names
• Latrine Digging
• Laughing
• Listening
• Memorizing
• Mending
• Music Making
• Negotiating
• Patching
• Planting Natives
• Planting Trees
• Porch Sitting
• Pottery Making
• Reading
• Revising
• Rigging
• Rowing & Paddling
• Sailing
• Seed Collecting
• Seed Saving
• Sharpening
• Shelter Building
• Sleeping
• Snowshoe Crafting
• Spinning
• Splicing
• Squatting
• Staying Home
• Stoneworking
• Storytelling
• Tailoring
• Tanning
• Tapping
• Tending
• Tinkering
• Using Leverage
• Walking
• Water Collecting
• Wearing Clothes
• Weaving
• Welding
• Wheel Building
• Whittling
Acknowledgments
While it's true I only have 10 of the 100 Skills You'll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It), thanks to Ana Maria Spagna's cheerfully reassuring text and Brian Cronin's charmingly practical illustrations, I am confident I'll be able to handle any and all catastrophes our planet throws at me!
- Susan Beth Pfeffer, author ofLife As We Knew It / The Last Survivor series
Move over, 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. In this trusty little volume, Ana Maria Spagna has created a handbook for how to be a better human: more self-sufficient, more cooperative and kind-hearted, more in tune with your surroundings. This is no mere primer on reskilling; it's a humor-infused explorati
