Love What Gives You Air

Precious trees. You spoil us with shade, natural air conditioning, water filtration and retention, oxygen, carbon sequestration, habitat, sound absorption and calming beauty. Your incredible functions make life on this planet possible, and you provide all of these benefits, free of charge.

Our reliance on you doesn’t stop once you’re felled. Your wood, the natural resource you grew while freely giving us air to breathe, is an incredible and beautiful material from which we build our homes, our fences, and our furniture. These meaningful, long term investments can stand the test of time because of your material quality.

Though wooden products can last for generations, humans are operating on ever shorter consumption cycles. How do we account for this mismatch? Old furniture didn’t change, we did. Authenticity, patina, character, craftsmanship, and durability have lost their shine. We’ve focused our investments on building global systems of hyper-consumption, expanding immediate access to an endless assortment of cheap, new products; whereby, extending the life, the appeal, or the ease of acquiring old, used goods, has not received the same attention.

Real wooden furniture, built to last generations, litters my streets—discarded, like a gum wrapper. Short-lived, fake wooden pieces pile up, too. Is this the extractive economy on full display? Take valuable natural resource, turn into products for sale and use, discard products–no matter their intrinsic or functional value, and repeat and repeat and repeat, while receiving social affirmation and corporate encouragement at every step.

Let’s not overlook this linear system of plunder when we try to understand why we’re haunted by heaps of discarded furniture when we’re just out walking our dog.

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
― William Shakespeare