Teach a man to fish ....

Our good friend Jim Juczak at Woodhenge.Org made an interesting observation recently:

The old quote; if you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day, if you teach him to fish he'll feed himself for a lifetime" isn't quite enough. It should be more like "if you give a man a fish he'll feel he's entitled to get one from you every day, if you teach a man to fish he'll be hungry until he gets good at catching fish".

I don't want to tell people how to survive a crisis. That's too short of a timespan. I want to show them that sometimes the simple stuff works the best, but just like advanced technologies have their pitfalls, so do simple technologies. The problems of modern technologies are pollution, resource depletion and depersonalization of peoples. The problems of simple technologies are having to learn them and practice them until you become proficient at them. No instant gratification here! You actually have to ask and talk to people to learn how to do stuff efficiently. Yes, you can learn from a book or how to DVD, and I do this a lot of the time, but I find my efficiency level goes up at least an order of magnitude when I learn directly from 'them that's doin'.