Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the cellar of my parent’s house sit a series of tools that have served my father and grandfather and great-grandfather, for they were created before the throwaway world was conceived. … They were made for a nation of craftsmen, of people who bore in themselves the power that all humans once had, to reshape wood and hide and stone into a human landscape.
Just a few years ago, sheep wool was considered little more than trash in France. Today, initiatives are springing up all over the country to re-valorize this renewable resource. “More and more people question waste, long transport routes, manufacturing practices, the way we use natural resources,” says Marie-Thérèse Chaupin, founder of an association called Atelier Laines d’Europe, which represents about 250 activists from the industry. “There is a movement to encourage local development,” Marie-Thérèse adds.
Such ingenious craft opened up new industries, crafts and food sources for ordinary hunters or farmers, allowing them to traverse lakes and rivers easily and travel between islands.
In India, economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods, wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life with no sharp division between work and leisure, and replacing them with dreary assembly line jobs.
We need an economy which follows laws of physics and of nature.
The old adage “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” could be the motto for the project Reform Studio.
