[imgabe]

The lesson here is that everything comes with tradeoffs. Want to live in a an industrialized society and enjoy all the benefits that brings? Things like, modern medicine, indoor plumbing, independence from weather cycles for food? Well, yeah you're probably going to give up knowing how to live off the land. If your society collapses, you might not know how to survive. Most people view that as an acceptable risk.

That's not to say you can't learn those things even if you live in a modern society, but it takes some effort.

[perl4ever]

Many of the first Europeans attempting to colonize North America starved/froze to death until they utilized the knowledge of the people who were already living here. So I think the omni-competence that people like to believe in from living closer to nature doesn't actually exist.

[derefr]

That's a fun point: we aren't differentiated eukaryotic cells in an organism, each fixed in our purpose. We're humans with malleable brains that can—if some disaster befalls us—respond by finding the people with the specialized disaster-response knowledge and learning from them. We don't have to pre-load the compendium of all human knowledge into every human; we can just communicate skills as they become needed.