A sustainable community is more than local food.

The sustainability puzzle can be broken down into numerous pieces. Some of these pieces include very important items like food, energy, and shelter, and smaller less important items like clothing and household items.  Some of the puzzle pieces are easier to acquire than others but all of them share a very complex deficiency.  We - as a social whole - are losing or have lost many important skills.

 In order to become fully sustainable our communities need to reacquire those skills  - but in order to reacquire those skills the people acquiring them need to be able to make a living using those skills. For the moment we seem to be caught in a catch 22.  People aren't interested in acquiring skills if there is no demand for them and we cannot demand skills when they don't exist.

Beyond the loss of skills our communities have also lost the ability to produce and refine simple resources.  Even when the actual resources still exist within our communities we tend to overlook  or discard them in favor of the convenience of already manufactured items or already refined materials.

It is our hope - that in putting together this blog and the soon to come Locavore Planet website - we can encourage and support each other in our acquisition of forgotten skills and development of new products in our own communities.  Look for future blog entries to include how-to instructions for a variety of household items, gardening tips, links to educational videos and support for all of your sustainable community endeavors.