Couple offer lessons in life after doomsday

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Tuesday August 30, 2005
from <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1558744,00.html" target="new">The Guardian</a>

While world leaders squabble about whether climate change is real and what action to take, one couple has retreated to rural Wales to help humanity plan for what they believe will be a dark future.
Bob Smith and his partner Jules Wagstaff are convinced that time is short after reading the science and the signs of increasing temperatures and severe weather.

They have set up a school to teach age-old skills of coppicing, green woodworking to make furniture and tools, shelter construction, and alternative business models such as cooperatives.

Their tools are not computers but rope, lathes and hand axes.

Wales, which is used to local people practising alternative lifestyles, has not been entirely welcoming. Both the Welsh assembly and the local authority, Ceredigion council, regarded this vision of the future as eccentric and until the past few weeks had no place in their apprenticeship schemes or training programmes for it.

But Mr Smith and his family, and local people acting as trustees for his Deassartation School, are patient people. Understanding almost lost craft skills and adapting the design of Mongolian yurt shelters to suit the British climate took time.
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"The fact that we spent five years living in a yurt meant at first people did not take us seriously, but you have to do that to get the design right," Mr Smith said. "At present we live in a cottage while the Cilgerran school uses the yurt as an outside classroom, so we are temporarily respectable, but I am going to build more yurts soon so we can teach other people how to do it."

One of the couple's two children was born in the yurt. "It takes some getting used to living in a yurt and I think you need two, even three, for a family," Mr Smith said.

"They are roomy but you often need somewhere separate to go and work, sleep and to cook and eat."

Ms Wagstaff has a postgraduate teaching qualification and while Mr Smith ran short courses in rotation coppicing, hedgelaying and stone walling, she began getting the school on a more formal basis so it could offer apprenticeships in craft skills to survive in the later 21st century.

The couple have a large stretch of woodland to manage for a local farmer, to provide material for yurt making and a training area for woodland skills.

Ms Wagstaff said: "The problem is that the current system is geared towards a highly educated workforce to meet international competition with paper qualifications and numeracy rather than practical skills. What we want to do is rekindle craft skills so people can make the countryside productive and, if current society breaks down, use the same skills to survive."

Instead of teaching people who already have paper qualifications, the couple plan to take the long-term unemployed and teach them to earn a living hedgelaying, producing charcoal, coppicing, stonewalling and using other craft skills now back in demand.

Matt Flye, the Welsh assembly spokesman, said Wales was proud of its sustainable development policy but admitted that the idea of craft skills was outside the role of its apprenticeship schemes and education system and it had been unable to help.

"The Welsh assembly government does not offer direct grants to support this kind of development," he said.