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I love making jelly. It roots me to generations of women in my family who at this time of year have stood over bubbling pans, wooden spoon in hand, mulling over whether the jam in question is setting enough or not. It’s an activity that connects me, in the middle of a city, to the changing seasons and the countryside that creeps in amongst the concrete and busy-ness. And somehow I’m never too busy to make jam.

Better still, the crab apples are free, ‘rescued’ from a tree planted on a grass verge and usually left to scatter its fruit on the road where they get squashed by car wheels. So, for a bit of patience, a pound or two of sugar (fairtrade please) and some reused jam jars, I get to capture the first signs of autumn and bottle them up to spread on toast through the winter.

In her Swarthmore lecture, Costing not less than everything: sustainability and spirituality in challenging times, Pam Lunn argued that people who are young now will need to learn new skills to survive in a world affected by climate change. I’ve been mulling over which skills she might have had in mind.

Whenever a society changes, the way that people are employed within it has to change too. We no longer have bottom knockers (from the pottery industry) or card nailers (from the woollen mills), both of whom were recorded in the 1891 census. Will we still have formula 1 car drivers and airline pilots when oil becomes an even scarcer resource? And should we be retraining to do bicycle repairs and manage woodlands for fuel? Or perhaps as renewable energy experts?

If we are to use less resources, then I think we’ll all need to get a bit better at making do and mending. And I don’t mean in a nostalgic ‘we won the war’ kind of way – let’s not send the women  back to the stoves and the men off to fight.  Rather, we need to re-learn some of the traditional skills from an age that used less carbon – preserving food for the winter without using an energy-hungry freezer is only one of them. Some of our fossil-fuel rich materials might become too expensive, so we’ll need to know how to work with wood and wool and stone again.

There’s a risk that this sounds like we’re going back to the stoneage. I don’t  think that’s the case at all. But we could look again at some of the things that we have inherited from previous generations and reassess what we learn from them today.  Humanity has an amazing ability to adapt, but a reckless tendancy to leave this to the last minute.

Jam making isn’t going to save the world. Making sure good food doesn’t go to waste is only one of our tasks. But it’s a nice place to start.