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Bearing Witness: Extinction
If I hadn’t asked a roomful of students and young professionals to raise their hands if they knew what reupholstery was, and if I had not bore witness to no hands going up, I might not have believed it. I was at a zero waste conference, in SF, in 2018. No awareness? None? A skilled craft that creates local resilience and reduces waste has already gone extinct in some young minds. Who will be the future customers, employees, and business owners of reupholstery services? Is this cause for worry? Yes, and during a climate emergency and with untenable economic inequality, the answer is a resounding yes. Flush with huge investments…
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Prime Days Did Not Spark Joy
Over 175 million items were sold and shipped in one day or less during Amazon Prime Days—its two day birthday party which ended yesterday—boasted Amazon’s press release. What speed! What scale! Now, where do we squeeze in these millions of new things? In our clogged closets? The shelves are already bursting, or maybe not— maybe Marie Kondo was just preparing us for Prime Days? Way back in January it was reported that thrift stores nationwide were seeing huge increases in donations due to the popularity of Marie Kondo’s show, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” One donation center in Washington DC saw a 367% increase over the same week the…
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Regenerative Niches Unite
Farmers are being recognized as climate change warriors. When they adopt regenerative practices, they can suck carbon out of the air, improve soil health, and create diverse ecosystems. Its radically beneficial on many levels and I love it. But I don’t live in a rural environment, my neighborhood is covered in pavement. Surely cities have players who are regenerative practitioners, too. Right? All ecosystems need to be nourished in some way. What about repair/reuse practitioners, like reupholsterers? Don’t they fill a regenerative niche? They strengthen the social fabric, diversify the economy, and reduce natural resource consumption by extending the life of goods. Plus, they keep money flowing locally and are…
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Shift Economic Power -> Mitigate Climate Change
My town is struggling. Reminders are everywhere. Old approaches to how we house, employ, consume, and communicate continue to fall terribly short. We can all imagine what the caption to this image would say using conventional thinking. It would likely be negative, blaming, shaming. Reductive and extractive. What if, instead, we saw opportunity, promise, shared prosperity? What if our systems operated with a larger purpose, a regenerative approach that drove community wealth and circulated capital locally? If this couch was a valuable input to a robust local supply chain would it still be left outside to degrade? Can shifting economic power be a climate change mitigation strategy? Why not? #climatejusticenow
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Market Transformation or Cultural Transaction
We know how to account for embedded carbon and energy in products, but what about the cultural training to find beauty and seek potential in slightly imperfect things? Who provides the skills and training to work with existing materials rather than virgin ones? Our future climate reality will demand this mindset and this skill set. How are we preparing–do we see this as a market transaction or a cultural transformation?
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A Couch, a Crescendo, or Both?
A sofa on a curb. No big deal; life changes, we get new things and discard old ones. Sending furniture to a landfill is considered a benign activity. Why? Who says? When is it time to revisit the merits of old assumptions? Who’s job is that? What if instead of just a sofa on a curb, it is really a window into an enormous system playing out all around us. It’s like background music that we’re so used to we can’t hear it anymore. That noise we can’t hear is the sound of extraction: take natural resources for lowest cost. Take human labor pay lowest price. Turn into goods for…
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If You Had One Word to Describe What You See, What Would It Be?
This chair is a beautiful opportunity. How can we leverage it to better our community?
