100 Skills You'll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It)

by Ana Maria Spagna, Brian Cronin (Illustrator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612124568
Publisher:	Storey Publishing, LLC
Publication date:	05/05/2015
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	865,005
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Future tense

1. Animal Husbandry
2. Barbering
3. Bartering
4. Basic First Aid
5. Beekeeping
6. Bicycle Repair
7. Bird Listening
8. Blacksmithing
9. Borrowing & Lending
10. Brining
11. Butchering
12. Cairn Building
13. Canning
14. Capturing Energy
15. Carving
16. Cheesemaking
17. Child Rearing
18. Chimney Cleaning
19. Cloud Reading
20. Cobbling
21. Composting
22. Conversing
23. Cutlering
24. Daydreaming
25. Dental Health
26. Disposing of Trash
27. Dowsing
28. Dry Farming
29. Falconry
30. Fence Building
31. Financial Literacy
32. Finding Your Way
33. Fire Fighting
34. Fire Making
35. Fletching
36. Foraging Locally
37. Foraging Medicinals
38. Foraging Weeds
39. Frugality
40. Gleaning
41. Gliding
42. Graffiti
43. Grafting
44. Growing Rural
45. Growing Urban
46. Handwriting
47. Hiding
48. Hoarding
49. Homebrewing
50. Home Childbirth
51. Horse & Mule Handling
52. Houseguest Hosting
53. Hunting
54. Identifying Mushrooms
55. Ink Making
56. Knitting
57. Knot Tying
58. Latin Names
59. Latrine Digging
60. Laughing
61. Listening
62. Memorizing
63. Mending
64. Music Making
65. Negotiating
66. Patching
67. Planting Natives
68. Planting Trees
69. Porch Sitting
70. Pottery Making
71. Reading
72. Revising
73. Rigging
74. Rowing & Paddling
75. Sailing
76. Seed Collecting
77. Seed Saving
78. Sharpening
79. Shelter Building
80. Sleeping
81. Snowshoe Crafting
82. Spinning
83. Splicing
84. Squatting
85. Staying Home
86. Stoneworking
87. Storytelling
88. Tailoring
89. Tanning
90. Tapping
91. Tending
92. Tinkering
93. Using Leverage
94. Walking
95. Water Collecting
96. Wearing Clothes
97. Weaving
98. Welding
99. Wheel Building
100. Whittling

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

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 of Life 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 exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet while getting in touch with your more virtuous self.
— Jennifer Sahn, editor of Orion magazine

From the Publisher