Common Ground: The Past is the New Future

January 2008 | From the Editor

The Past is the New Future

By the time you read this, the champagne will have popped, the ball will have dropped, and you’ve probably had at least a couple of days to get used to 2008. Well, people of the future, for me it’s still one week before Christmas, and I’m only halfway through what is proving to be an uncharacteristically hands-on holiday season. While most years a few feeble e-cards are the best I can muster, this time around I’m like an eco-obsessed Martha Stewart, whipping up the contents of my CSA delivery into tasty, homemade treats for friends, découpaging old magazines into greeting cards and compulsively raiding the recycling bin for items that might (with the help of a glue gun) pass for holiday decoration.

This DIY ethic has infected my gift giving too. Whatever gifts I haven’t been able to make or rejigger on my own — which, lacking sewing, knitting, sculpting, carpentry, tech or tinkering skills, is quite a lot — I’ve tried to buy handmade. From Nicola Harper, a former “waste management engineer” turned recycle-happy designer (acornstudios.ca), I picked up monogrammed cufflinks crafted from reclaimed computer keys, and from Jill Bliss (blissen.com), a beloved Bay Area designer, I scored an adorable wallet sewn from 1970’s thrift-store bed sheets.

I’ve been feeling pretty good about myself for sidestepping the mall-crawl holiday insanity, supporting indiepreneurs, and turning trash into kitschy handmade treasures. My boyfriend — slightly less bemused by the fact that our apartment is currently doubling as Salvage-Santa’s workshop — is usually calmed into compliance with some strategically-timed baked goods.

As much as I’d like to pat myself on the back, this newfound holiday cheer is not just some unique expression of my savvy, do-it-yourself spirit. Apparently, according to a recent NY Times article, I am the product of a larger ideological/cultural/consumer movement. (Well, no surprise there; that’s only been the theme of practically every editor’s note I’ve written all year). If you found yourself using the holidays as an excuse to flex your inner punk rock Martha, you too are a part of this phenomenon, dubbed “Handmade 2.0” by the Times.

Our rallying point was “The Handmade Pledge,” a highly successful online collaboration between some of the key players in the DIY scene — Etsy, Design*Sponge, Craft magazine — launched last October at BuyHandmade.org. The pledge, which at press time numbered 10,451 signatures, was simple: “I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request that others do the same for me.” The logic was much higher minded — nothing less than a “call to action” against the big-boxification and globalization that “has left people dressing, furnishing and decorating alike.” Summarized by the Times, “The idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of shopping is all about the past.”

The stories in this issue are all about emerging ideas in design — from reclamation and salvage (a sister trend to Handmade 2.0) to architecture for maximum happiness and wellbeing, to biomimicry, the new discipline of “innovation inspired by nature.” But as cutting edge as these ideas may be, they all seem to recall an earlier aesthetic, a time before fossil fuels made fad-driven, mass produced and inexpensive more valuable than pride of workmanship, originality or human to human connection.

“Fossil fuels put us on the end of a long lever,” says Janine Benyus, President of the Biomimicry Institute and our “Conversations” interview subject this month. “We figured out ‘better living through industrial chemistry,’ and we pulled away from the natural world. [But] perhaps because we’ve been faced with some unintended consequences of our technologies, we’re circling back. Biomimicry resonates with people because it’s what we did naturally when we were hunters and gatherers, which is about 99 percent of our time on earth.”

Asked the best way to incorporate biomimetic principles into daily life, Janine does not hesitate: “Get what you need locally. Nature shops locally. Most organisms use the most abundant thing in their surroundings as their raw material, food and nutrients. It saves them incredible amounts of energy.”

While it’s debatable whether thrift store sheets and salvaged computer keys count as raw local materials, I still feel good about ringing in 2008 with the handmade pledge. And, in the spirit of reclamation, I whole-heartedly embrace the values of the past that seem to be resurfacing in our post-carbon future. If what goes around comes around, then perhaps I will be the recipient of some fabulous homemade gifts next year.

—Eliza Thomas, Editor in Chief

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