“All the old old people are dying, and the new old people are just like us.”
— Greg Brown
singer-songwriter, from “Things Go On.”

I’ve always taken this line to mean that we’re losing that generation of people who grew up in materially different times from ours. People whose early life experiences predated the technologies of daily life many of us wouldn’t know how to live without, now. People, in fact, who know things, and know how to do things, that we don’t. People we might think of as “elders,” rather than simply elderly.

My grandfather was one of these people. He knew where to go in the woods to find ginseng and slippery elm, and a host of other herbs. He knew the lineage of the rural families in his valley, and folks came to him to ask about the lives of their ancestors and relatives. He knew how to sharpen knives by hand, using five to six different surfaces, from stone to leather. He knew how to talk to mules.

Even in his 70s, he was capable of standing stock still, holding an old-fashioned, heavy Kentucky rifle at the ready, watching for a rat that was menacing the chicken house. He managed to live on his farm to the age of 96. I told so many stories about him that my college roommate posted a sign on our dorm room door that said, “Grandpa Stamper Fan Club.”

There are still people around who know how to do the things Grandpa Stamper knew, people with manual skills and local knowledge. And he wasn’t perfect — Grandma Stamper would have told you that. I don’t mean to idealize his generation just because their lives were different. But I do think we need to look about us and take stock of what we may be missing in our daily rush toward the future. Especially because certain aspects of the future may turn out to look a lot more like the past than we can imagine. How much generational know-how is not being passed on? What happens when we’ve lost our link with the people who really have “been there, done that”?

Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan, and his fellow researcher, Sara St. Antoine, wanted to find out what different generations of Sonoran desert residents knew about the wildlife of their home area, along the border with Mexico. Two out of the four groups interviewed were Native American, yet even in these two groups, the majority believed they knew more about plants and animals than their grandparents did, and that they had learned this from books and school. But these same children could only identify, on average, about four plants and animals shown in 17 photos, while their grandparents could name about 15.

It might be easy to think that this kind of knowledge is not essential to modern life, and that we have simply traded it in, for a larger world of technology and science that will matter much more in the future.

I’m not convinced we can really count the costs in this way. First, why not have both kinds of knowledge, by making certain we continue to value our hard won legacy from the past? Second, the loss of the traditional knowledge is almost sure to mean the severing of important links to special places, distinct regions — links that may actually be a lifeline for psychological health. Third, we don’t know when we may need this knowledge again in the future.

A fascinating documentary, “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” illustrates this last point. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, Cuba was thrown into its “Special Period” by the loss of more than half of its former oil imports and 80 percent of their food imports (www.communitysolution.org). They had to figure out how to feed themselves, and fast, in an agricultural landscape that had long ceased to grow domestic food crops, and had become entirely reliant on fossil fuel inputs.

They searched out the few surviving old men who still knew how to farm with oxen, and asked them for a crash course in handling draft animals, which became an essential part of the “new” farming methods. As James Howard Kunstler points out in “The Long Emergency”, even in the U.S., “many farmers were still using horses as recently as the 1950s. Yet the loss of knowledge and traditional practice since then has been stupendous.” Case in point: My uncle was using mule teams to snake logs down out of the Kentucky hills in the late ‘60s. I’d put money on it that today my cousin wouldn’t have a clue.

Even if we don’t have to return to working animals, as Kunstler predicts, most of us don’t know how to construct or repair most of the devices that support our lifestyles. An interesting feature of post-Katrina New Orleans was that skilled manual laborers suddenly enjoyed an elevation in their status: They were the only ones who knew how to fix things in the midst of all the mess. If the upswing in nasty weather is any indication, we’re only going to have more messes to clean up in the coming years, as climate change bears down on us with greater intensity.

There’s also much to be said about the sheer accumulation of experience and wisdom that comes with age. I was fortunate enough to share — quite literally — the earliest years of child rearing with my husband’s parents, as we all lived in a two-family house for nearly a decade. Even when we moved, we found two houses on the same street. So widespread is the notion that in-laws are a barely tolerable form of relation, that people often looked terrified when I told them about this “old-fashioned” living arrangement. But I will be eternally grateful for that grandfather who was an expert at getting a fussy baby to nap, and that grandmother who could tell at a glance whether a sick child needed to be taken to the doctor, or just put to bed for a good night’s sleep.

Yes, some older people are opinionated, crotchety, and difficult, just like the rest of us. And yes, some members of earlier generations also made horrible mistakes, acted badly towards their families, and wreaked havoc on the landscape. But there is a third way, between romanticizing and relegating to the trash heap. I recently watched the documentary, “Young@Heart”, about the Northampton, Mass., choir made up of 70 to 90 year olds. I was struck by two things. First, it pointed up how seldom we see the elderly on the big screen, in numbers, up close and personal, with their liver spots, wrinkles, and chin hairs in full view. It was shocking, then refreshing, to see them released from their long exile.

Second, it showed us a relationship with real give and take, both between the choir and their younger director, Bill Sillman, and between the choir and their audiences. Sillman egged them on, into musical territories they probably would never have entered without him. Would your grandmother sing “Talking Heads” and “Sonic Youth” songs? But he also clearly learned volumes from their dedication, their fortitude in the face of health challenges and the death of fellow choir members, and their sheer spunk. And they and their audiences absolutely energized each other and gave each other hope, in what felt like a mutual celebration of just being alive and having a voice.

I think if we are going to find a way to live sustainably, and address the challenges facing us and our children, we’re going to need to cultivate this third way more often in our lives. We all still have so much to learn.

About the author: Ruth Ann Smalley, Ph.D., is an educator and a certified Eden Energy medicine practitioner with a practice in Albany.