Every decently made object, from a house to a lamp post to a bridge, spoon or egg cup, is not just a piece of “stuff,” but a physical embodiment of human energy, a testimony to the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty.
— Kevin McCloud, designer
In southwestern Pennsylvania, an archaeological site called Meadowcroft Rockshelter marks an ancient stopping-off place for Paleo-Indians traveling on foot between the Ohio River Valley and the Allegheny highlands, dating back an astonishing sixteen thousand years. Today the site is quite far from any population center and protected from the elements in such a way that it has preserved the longest continuous record of human activity in North America: campfires, arrowheads, shards of pottery, and tools. Anthropologist Lucy Johnson of Vassar College says that we humans are obligate toolmakers: “We cannot exist without tools and are constantly thinking up new ones. Other animals both make and use tools, but the nature and sophistication of our tools are of an entirely different level.”
It seems we are also obligate repairers. There is ample evidence that pottery has been both made and repaired by North American Indigenous peoples dating back several thousand years. Archaeologists have found “drilled holes on each side of a crack that had apparently occurred before the vessel was completely broken and discarded. These holes have been interpreted as patching holes, through which a thong of sinew was attached, allowing the vessel to continue to be used, perhaps for storage of dry materials.…From this we might say that Indians have been repairing pots for as long as they have had pots.”
As our national story progressed, our tools and the way we made them continued to become more complicated. About a hundred miles to the northeast of Rockshelter, there is a bend in the Allegheny River where the river slows. This was homeland to the Erie and Susquehannock peoples and well known as a good place to ford or land a canoe or raft. In the 1820s, white settlers built a charcoal-fired iron “bloomery” and foundry there — a bloomery being the most basic type of furnace for making iron. Producing a fire hot enough to make iron required large amounts of charcoal, and today you will still come upon the chimney-like remains of charcoal furnaces throughout the region. The ratio of hard wood needed to make charcoal is about three to one, and whole valleys were clear-cut to provide it.
This little piece of northwestern Pennsylvania was also known for its prolific “oil seeps,” and in 1859, New England investors hired Edwin Drake, a former train conductor, to drill the nation’s first commercial oil well in nearby Titusville. Internal combustion engines were still fifty years away, but this subterranean oil was easily refined into kerosene, which was replacing candles and whale oil for lighting homes (we likely have this to thank for the survival of whales as a species), and the petroleum industry began its exponential growth. With it, economic progress was cast as moral progress. It seemed that the earth was ours for the taking, and over the next 150 years technology advanced in unimaginable ways. Petrochemicals gave us synthetics and plastic, and fuel was cheap and abundant. During the Gilded Age, from the Civil War to America’s entry into World War I, fortunes were built on the superabundance of timber, mineral wealth, and grazing land. Railroads closed distances and leveled mountain ranges. It was an age of astonishing economic growth and innovation. In the three decades between 1860 and 1890, some half a million patents were issued for new inventions — more than ten times the number issued in the previous seventy years. Manufacturing at a scale never seen before required workers, and millions of people moved from rural America and Europe to the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Everything grew. But this was a growth that depended entirely on extraction and depletion.
Thrift and the Roots of Sustainability
If growth and extraction triumphed as the dominant strain in American business, there has nonetheless always been an alternative story. In 1733, Ben Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac, a homespun compendium of calendars and weather predictions, recipes, and practical advice. Almanacs like these were the most widely read secular books in the colonies, and Franklin continued to publish a new edition every year for the next twenty-five years, providing him with a substantial income. Today, Poor Richard is mostly remembered for its aphorisms about industry and frugality: “All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful,” “He that is rich need not live sparingly, and he that can live sparingly need not be rich,” and in the 1758 almanac, “A penny saved is a penny got” (contrary to popular belief, Franklin never used the word earned in this saying).
Until very recently, repairing rather than replacing was a necessity of life. In A Museum of Early American Tools and other books, writer and illustrator Eric Sloane chronicles how in the 1800s and early 1900s things were made by hand — with ingenious tools — and then kept in good repair. Sloane does not trade in nostalgia. “Herein lies one of the strangest of American beliefs,” he writes, “for we honestly think the old-timers had more time on their hands than we do now. Nothing of course could be farther from the truth.” If you lived far from any general store, or if bartering was your essential currency, then making things last was the rule of life for most people — as it still is in much of the world. Self-reliance was a virtue. In 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men.”
All repairing must be done by hand. We can make every detail of a watch or of a gun by machinery, but the machine cannot mend it when broken, much less a clock or a pistol!
— Manual of Mending and Repairing (1896)
In the early twentieth century, American society at all levels was enraptured by the thrift movement, a collection of virtues with both individual and social dimensions. In his book Thrift, the History of an American Cultural Movement, journalist Andrew L. Yarrow tells a story that has been largely forgotten but that resonates strongly with cultural movements today. The social currents of the time gave it strength. The Industrial Revolution brought egregious income disparities — and there was an unease in the character of many Americans toward the rapid shift in values from self-reliance to the wage economy. Moral reformers sought to “better” the burgeoning working class in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, which arguably brought the first wave of mass-market consumer culture. Credit unions and savings and loan associations encouraged people to set long-term goals and work steadily to meet them. “There is a close intellectual lineage between the thrift movement’s antipathy toward waste, push to conserve and belief in stewardship,” writes Yarrow, “and the modern idea of environmental sustainability.”
The American Education Association and the American Bankers Association, among others, joined forces to promote the message: succeed and live well by earning, saving, and conserving. The YMCA organized National Thrift Week and planned it to begin every year on the birthday of Ben Franklin — the “patron saint of thrift.” Boy Scouts recited a Thrift Creed, “In order that I may become a Better American Citizen,” and Boy Scout promise number ten was to “avoid waste in every form.” Girl Scouts could earn a Thrift Badge and learned the couplet “A Girl Scout patches and darns the rift, for the Laws of Scouting are founded on thrift.”
Forebears
John recalls: My brother and sister and I inherited thrift values from our Midwestern parents. Our mother grew up in a small Iowa town during the Great Depression, and she too knew the rhyme “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” In an early memory, our mom is showing us photos of the dresses her mother made for her and our aunt — and a little later, photos of them wearing dresses they’d sewed themselves. The pictures were in black and white, of course, and she delighted in describing the colors of the fabrics as she remembered them — and asking us to imagine the colors too.
Our dad also grew up in a small town, in Wisconsin, and he attended the university in Madison. This is where the ideas of two giants of the modern environmental movement, John Muir and Aldo Leopold, were shaped. Each in his own time articulated principles of sustainability that are fundamental to the story of how we got here, in this time.
John Muir grew up on a farm in Wisconsin with no formal schooling. Farm work was all consuming two-thirds of the year, but during the winter months he had endless hours to invent and tinker. He was mechanically gifted and designed and built elaborate inventions, from wood mostly. Some displayed a wicked sense of humor, such as an alarm clock that tipped his bed up and slid him onto the floor. In 1861 — the year the Civil War broke out — the state university in Madison accepted Muir on the strength of his inventions. Muir’s fantastical eight-foot-tall alarm clock /study desk is still on display in the entryway of the State Historical Society Museum in Madison. Muir left the university after his second year for what he would later call the “University of the Wilderness.” But before he started out on the epic walks that would take him to the Sierra Nevada, he worked in factories, repairing and renovating equipment, and found he could also make machines more efficient. From the many books and countless magazine articles he published in his lifetime, perhaps the most-quoted expression of his philosophy of ecology and the wisdom of connections is this: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
In the 1920s, Aldo Leopold came to the University of Wisconsin from his early career with the U.S. Forest Service. A boyhood of hunting and fishing had taken him in and out of every type of terrain and habitat. As an adult, he opted for bow hunting, which required patience and an acute awareness of one’s surroundings. In time, Leopold put his bow aside for a notebook and applied the same keen attention to a different purpose. He did the field work that led to the establishment of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico as the nation’s first Wilderness Area. He believed that direct contact with the natural world is crucial to shaping our willingness to extend our ethics beyond our own self-interest. In the 1930s he and his family started their own ecological restoration experiment along the Wisconsin River, planting thousands of pine trees and restoring the prairie habitat on a worn-out farm. In Madison, he researched and ultimately defined a field that had no name yet: wildlife management. He articulated a deeply personal view of land and wildlife conservation that became widely known as the “land ethic.” In A Sand County Almanac (1948), Leopold wrote: “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.”
Muir and Leopold were forebears of what we now know as “systems thinking” — Muir through observation and intuition, Leopold through observation and disciplined research. In Leopold’s words, they understood “that man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes, and have effects more comprehensive than is intended or foreseen.”
Building the Consumer Economy
A quite logical challenge to the long-standing traditions of craftsmanship and quality emerged with the Great Depression. There is an inevitable tension between the cost to manufacture a product that will last a good long time and the need to increase sales. In 1932, a New York City real estate broker named Bernard London was among those who argued that the thrifty mindset of mending and saving had produced a “chokehold” on the economy. He addressed that problem in his pamphlet, “Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence.”
“People everywhere are today disobeying the law of obsolescence,” London observed. “Worn out automobiles, radios, and hundreds of other items which would long ago have been discarded and replaced in more normal times, are being made to last another season or two or three, because the public is afraid or has not the funds to buy now.” London believed such practices went against the natural order of things. “Furniture and clothing and other commodities should have a span of life, just as humans have. When used for their allotted time, they should be retired, and replaced by fresh merchandise.” Possibly most notable of all is his suggestion that this should be managed by the federal government. “It should be the duty of the State as the regulator of business to see that the system functions smoothly, deciding matters for capital and labor and seeing that everybody is sufficiently employed.” As historian Giles Slade writes in Made to Break, his study of technology and obsolescence in America, “Though the policy was not implemented at that time, all the elements of what would become known as planned obsolescence or ‘death dating’ were clearly in place by 1932. All that was needed was for them to come together. When exactly this happened is unclear, but by 1950 this combination had long since taken place.”
BRAVE NEW WORLD
In 1932, the same year that Bernard London distributed his pamphlet extolling planned obsolescence, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his novel depicting a different kind of “civilization.” In this scene we have an exchange between the Controller and the Savage:
“Why is it prohibited?” asked the Savage.
The Controller shrugged his shoulders. “Because it’s old; that’s the chief reason. We haven’t any use for old things here.”
“Even when they’re beautiful?”
“Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people attracted by old things. We want them to like new ones.”
The national emergency of World War II rapidly pivoted and ramped up domestic production to meet the nation’s all-consuming war aims. Economists disagree about whether the war ended the Great Depression, but it clearly had the effect of “institutionalizing” frugal living, at least for a time. Scrap collecting and recycling became patriotic overnight. One tank required eighteen tons of metal. The nation’s wartime motivations were clear — we were all in this together — and participation was extraordinarily high in towns and cities across the nation. Citizens were encouraged to raise their own vegetables by planting “Victory Gardens,” and by 1943, about one-third of all the vegetables produced in the United States came from these modest plots in backyards and vacant lots: “Eat what you can, and can what you can’t” was just one popular slogan created by advertising copywriters for the Office of War Information. Educational pamphlets on every imaginable home-husbandry subject — including basic repairs — were written, illustrated, and distributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it is important to say that these programs continue today through cooperative extension offices in all fifty states. After the war, the behaviors that made the scrap drives indisputable morale boosters were mostly abandoned, even as scrap yards became thriving “fringe” businesses located in the poorest section of any town. By 1951 there were already an estimated twenty-five thousand automobile junkyards dotting the American landscape.
In the postwar period, Bernard London’s cherished goal was essentially realized when President Eisenhower’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Raymond Saulnier, stated, “The American economy’s ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods.” In an era of perceived limitless resources, this may have made sense. In our own era, we know that this kind of overconsumption is fundamentally unsustainable.
Homecrafting, DIY, and Access to Tools
The virtues of thrift and home economy have been in keeping with the American character for generations. Our natural can-do impulse is rewarded by the deep satisfactions of individual creativity and curiosity, which in turn give us skills and knowledge that others admire in us. Home sewing and home electronics are two examples with broad cultural sweep. Both exploded in popularity in the twentieth century, enabled by entrepreneurs who thought up ways to give amateurs the tools and instructions they would need to do it themselves.
In 1863, in their home in Sterling, Massachusetts, Ellen Butterick told her husband, Ebenezer, a tailor, how useful it would be if dress patterns could be “graded” — that is, if you could buy them in different sizes. At the time, patterns came in only one size, to be used as a guide, and the home seamstress had to enlarge or reduce it.
By the 1860s, women everywhere were making clothes for their families. The Industrial Revolution, which began with the mass production of textiles, had made cloth affordable, and the first home sewing machine had been introduced by Isaac Singer in the United States in 1851. Ebenezer took his wife’s idea seriously, and before long, the Buttericks were producing graded patterns out of their home in more than a dozen sizes for both men’s and women’s clothing. From this simple idea, the Butterick sewing pattern company began a history of innovations that served the interests of home seamstresses (or sewists, to use a newer term). By 1900, the Buttericks were receiving thirty thousand letters a week, which they welcomed because they believed that “listening to the customer was the best way to ensure a successful product.” They also started one of the first general interest magazines for women, The Delineator, which chronicled the activities and accomplishments of progressive women here and abroad and introduced European designs. Many other pattern publishers entered the market, and while the Depression decreased spending power, home sewing sales increased. When World War II mandated textile rationing, pattern makers redesigned their clothing for a slimmer silhouette, shorter lengths, and patterns with fewer pieces. In the sixties, E. Butterick & Company licensed the Vogue name and introduced patterns for Paris couture designs. By the seventies, sewing and knitting magazines were for sale at every supermarket check-out in the nation.
All the while, men and boys pursued their passion for projects requiring tools and a different type of schematic. In natural progression, Popular Mechanics began publishing in 1902, the first Heathkit home electronics kits came out immediately after World War II, and Popular Electronics followed in 1954. These resources did more than provide instructions on how to build or fix things. They were adept at generating excitement and fueling the dreams of American boys. The cover of the January 1953 issue of Popular Mechanics announced: “Wanted: 50,000 Engineers!”
Frank Szenher, a Repair Cafe volunteer and recently retired IBM engineer, suggests that his own boyhood interest is a good example of what led many boys into careers in engineering. “I’ve wanted to take things apart for as long as I can remember,” he says. “As a kid I started asking for radios as birthday and Christmas presents and checking out books from the library about electronics.” Frank used circuit diagrams he found in Popular Electronics, Popular Mechanics, and the ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook. He remembers that his first kit was for a Philmore AM transistor radio — which he still has. “I built several transmitters and receivers ‘from scratch,’ scavenging the parts from old TVs and radios.” This kind of learning is still readily available, he says. Several companies in the United States make kits, online user groups are constantly trading information worldwide, and the maker movement is engaging kids nationwide.
In the midst of all this mainstream marketing of how-to information, an influential counterculture version was introduced. In 1968, a writer named Stewart Brand conceived The Whole Earth Catalog. It was a profusely illustrated large-format catalog, with listings, reviews, and mail-order information for more than 2,700 books and products, along with essays that reintroduced values such as “Local Dependency” and “Voluntary Simplicity” to a new generation. It promised to provide “Access to Tools,” and its statement of purpose was a manifesto of the times: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.…A realm of intimate personal power is developing — the power of individuals to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share the adventure with whoever is interested.”
Brand described the function of the catalog as an evaluation and access device, and he specified the criteria for inclusion; an item could be listed in the catalog if it had the following characteristics:
1.Useful as a tool
2.Relevant to independent education
3.High quality or low cost
4.Not already common knowledge
5.Easily available by mail
It would be hard to overstate the impact of this publication on the counterculture of the pre-internet world. Steve Jobs, in his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech, famously proclaimed that “The Whole Earth Catalog was one of the bibles of my generation.…It was sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” What seems remarkable, even now, is that the “cultural fix” or corrective offered in The Whole Earth Catalog — that is, reclaiming personal agency — captured the spirit of the times so astutely, and almost surgically addressed the social maladies that Brand diagnosed.
HOW TO KEEP YOUR VOLKSWAGEN ALIVE
In 1973, Andrew Willner’s ancient and abused Volkswagen bus was breaking down. It was burning almost as much oil as gasoline, and with very little money, he decided to rebuild the engine himself. He knew something about cars and could do a basic tune-up, but, he admitted, “This would be my biggest, scariest project by far.”
Andrew was an avid reader of The Whole Earth Catalog, and there he found a book, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir (his real name — he was a distant relative of the famous naturalist). “When the book came in the mail, I began the rebuild,” he says. “As promised, the book described step-by-step how to remove the engine and take it apart, even telling you to buy the large wrench needed to remove the nut from the crank shaft at Sears, because they would replace any Craftsman tool that broke, and that I would break that wrench.”
Following the book’s recommended steps, Andrew put down brown paper on the workbench, and drew a line around each part as he took it out. Then the book instructed him to take the resulting basket of pistons, heads, valves, camshaft, and crank shafts to a machine shop to have them milled to new specs. “The book made it clear that I would be ignored at the machine shop if I did not use the exact words and appropriate dimensions — especially because of the culture clash between my hippyish appearance and the machine shop culture. So, I wrote a script based entirely on Muir’s advice, memorized it, walked into the shop, recited exactly what was on the script, and handed over the parts with a small wad of cash. I was told to come back in a week. I must have said the right thing as the shiny new looking parts were waiting for me, and the guy behind the counter only gave a passing look to the hairy guy (me) picking up the parts.”
Andrew spent the next week, watched by a largely skeptical group of friends, putting the engine back together with the new parts, only to discover one piece that didn’t seem to go anywhere. Going back to the book for advice, he found Muir’s assurance that leaving out one or two extra pieces wouldn’t do the engine much harm. New plugs and wires, new oil filter, exhaust manifolds, and maybe $100 in cash later, the engine turned over and ran for another 150,000 miles. Andrew concludes, “After that, pretty much everyone I knew started rebuilding Volkswagen engines until my grease stained Manual for the Compleat Idiot was reduced to compost.”
The Age of the Anthropocene
We have been describing some of the trade-offs between the use of natural resources and conservation of natural resources. Looking at it through another lens, social psychologists try to track how changes in economic well-being and other factors drive changes in our attitudes toward nature, that is, how we make decisions about the resources we use, both personally and institutionally. The American public has generally balanced protection of the environment with the desire for economic growth, perhaps with the beauty of our National Park System prominent in their minds. But in a 2016 Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who identify as “environmentalists” had dropped to 42 percent from a high of 78 percent in 1991. Now we have entered the Age of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch signifying that human activity has become the dominant driver of change for the Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Discarded garbage, plastics, and e-waste have risen to unheard-of heights. “With the possible exception of China in the twenty-first century,” writes thrift historian Andrew Yarrow, “no society has embarked on so much consumption so feverishly as the United States in the quarter century after World War II.”
A number of critics helped define the era by challenging consumerism and blind faith in progress. Journalist Vance Packard’s book The Waste Makers (1960) exposed the concept of “planned obsolescence” built into products so that they will wear out quickly, while his Hidden Persuaders (1957) revealed the subliminal techniques used in advertising to make us buy stuff we don’t really need. The power of “perceived obsolescence” instilled in consumers “the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary,” as so pithily described by industrial designer Brooks Stevens in 1953. In the fifty years from 1920 and 1970, the volume of waste generated in the United States rose five times faster than the population itself. And practically all of it is thrown “away.”
The strands of inquiry that led to the concept of sustainability in the twenty-first century (the word was barely used before 1990) are as much social, political, and economic as they are scientific and environmental. In his 1997 book, The Politics of the Earth, social theorist John Dryzek gets to the heart of the matter: sustainability is the subject of a broad debate or “discourse” that is attempting to reconcile the conflict between economic and environmental values. In the sixties and seventies, new insights fueled a string of cautionary books that found wide readership: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Anne and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, Stewart Udall’s The Quiet Crisis, Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle, Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons, and E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. The ideas that these writers — mostly scientists — brought to our national consciousness are still with us today. “In many ways,” historian Jeremy Caradonna observes, “the sustainable society envisioned by so many is a modernized revival of past wisdom.”
A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.
— Dorothy L. Sayers in Creed or Chaos (1947)
Repairing Our Rivers
America’s rivers and inland waterways have historically been treated as sewers: the most convenient way to carry away anything unwanted. Perhaps no modern story illustrates the epic work of environmental repair better than the fight to restore the health of our rivers.
Nineteen sixty-nine was a landmark year in so many ways, and here is one more. On June 22, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire. It was national news. To most people it made no sense: how does a river catch fire? However, as we soon learned, this was not the first time. National Geographic’s article about the fiftieth anniversary of the fire quotes Frank Samsel, an eighty-nine-year-old Cleveland native who on the day of the fire was piloting his boat, the Putzfrau (German for “cleaning lady”), as usual, sucking up chemicals and scooping up debris. “It smelled like a septic tank,” he said. “It literally bubbled and produced methane in July and August. It wasn’t bad — it was terrible. You can’t describe it using printable language.” A fireboat extinguished the fire in thirty minutes or so, but the controversy it ignited was historic.
That same summer, iconic singer Pete Seeger and his crew began sailing up and down the Hudson River in a 106-foot sloop named the Clearwater. Their purpose was to raise awareness of just how dirty and toxic the river water had become. Seeger’s idea was simple, says Betsy Garthwaite, a longtime ship’s captain and unofficial Clearwater historian: “Build an extraordinary boat and people would come in droves to the banks of the neglected Hudson, then described as an ‘open sewer,’ where they would see its condition for themselves. The sloop might be just the thing, Seeger figured, to show people that the river was beautiful and worth saving.”
The idea that the Hudson River could ever be returned to health seemed far-fetched to nearly everyone. Seeger saw it differently. He had experienced the transformative power of music through the social travails of the previous decades, from McCarthyism to the civil rights movement. It was the infectious Pete who had made “If I Had a Hammer,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “Turn, Turn, Turn” into the inspiring ballads of the movements for civil rights and social justice. Now, in the summer of 1969, Pete and the Hudson River Sloop Singers had a new batch of songs, including Pete’s “My Dirty Stream,” which became the Clearwater’s theme song:
Still I love it and I’ll keep the dream
That someday, though maybe not this year
My Hudson River will once again run clear
The day after the Cuyahoga River fire, Cleveland’s mayor, Carl Stokes, held a press conference and requested help from the state government to clean up the river. Stokes was the first African American mayor of a major city, and his response caught the attention of the nation, all the more so because just a few months earlier, in January 1969, an oil rig off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, had released a million gallons of oil into the ocean, creating a thirty-five-mile-long slick. Media coverage showing thousands of dead birds and marine animals galvanized public opinion. The modern environmental movement was being born. The first Earth Day was a year away, and soon after came the landmark passage of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, all with strong bipartisan support. These were significant changes in national policy, specifically enacted to repair and restore the environmental damage that had proceeded unabated for generations.
Meanwhile, the Clearwater was docking at every river town from New York City to Troy, and the Hudson River Sloop Singers gave a concert at each. Hundreds of concerts — and a number of contentious and lengthy lawsuits — later, and the Hudson River slowly began its return to relative health. Further epic battles would be fought for the health of the Hudson, some led by the Hudson River Fisherman’s Association, exemplifying what came to be called “blue-collar environmentalism.” The resulting court decisions set important precedents for environmental law and policy for rivers across the United States and for the Great Lakes. Back in 1969, Pete had said, “If towns up and down the river start putting in waterfront parks instead of messes, if people all get involved in the work of cleaning up the river, then we’ll have something.” He lived to see that transformation. Pete Seeger died in 2014, just six months after the death of his wife, Toshi, who was also instrumental to the work.
Today, about seventy species of fish thrive in the Cuyahoga River, along with recreation and real estate. However, mercury and PCBs are still persistent in the river’s sediments, and the same toxicity is still to be found in the Hudson and many other American rivers. The work of repairing our rivers continues.
The first recorded fire on the Cuyahoga River was in 1868. Just thirty-seven years earlier, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville had visited Cleveland en route to New Orleans, and he described the region’s waters as the most pristine he had ever seen. In 1835, de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America: “The great privilege of the Americans is to be able to have repairable mistakes.”
Beyond the Recycling Economy
There is plenty at stake where public policy meets the business of where our garbage goes. Since the 1980s, the recycling industry has largely been an export business focused primarily on four commodities: plastic, glass, paper/cardboard, and electronics, mostly shipped in containers to China and remaining remarkably “out of sight, out of mind.” And all the while, our own nation’s ability to process recyclables — that is to say, to actually recycle materials in the way the public thinks we do — has atrophied. Nearly everyone sees recycling as a “bridge” to a sustainable future. It’s easy, it feels good, and the message fits nicely into elementary school classrooms. For more than a generation, recycling has received reinforcement from every sector of society, including manufacturers and advertisers, because it seemingly gives us permission to buy everything we want, guilt-free. In fact, the results of a social marketing study conducted at Boston University in 2015 reinforced that supposition, suggesting that when people have the ready option to recycle, they may feel it’s okay to use more — and so they do.
In November 2017, the organizers of New York State’s annual Reduce-Reuse-Recycle conference invited several repair activists to give a presentation about repair as a new “R” word in the materials management lexicon. The conference title was “Keeping Cool in the Age of Climate Change,” and the program description of our presentation read: “Repair Cafes offer a unique opportunity to engage communities in taking action to reduce carbon emissions from solid waste.” Coauthor John was joined by repair organizers from Schenectady, Syracuse, and Buffalo. What we did not know is that a bombshell was about to hit the materials management world. Keeping cool was going to be a challenge.
The bombshell was China’s just-announced decision to stop importing most types of foreign waste and to dramatically tighten its standards for impurities in scrap bales. Five years earlier, China had instituted its “Green Fence” rules; but this new and considerably more stringent import policy was given a much more attention-getting name: “National Sword,” and the packed conference session that morning was titled “Preparing for the Coming Storm.” As Dan Lilkas-Rain, the session moderator, later recalled, “There was a lot of uncertainty in the room about what the policies would mean. We were getting updated information that morning, and the anxieties people were feeling then have played out in a very intense way.”
China’s National Sword policy went into effect in January 2018, and it disrupted the global market for recyclables. A year later, Fiona Ma, the treasurer of the state of California, told the New York Times, “We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now.” The Chinese standard has proven to be impossible for most U.S. facilities to meet in the short term. But Neil Seldman, a founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington, D.C., says bluntly, “I think the Chinese have done us a tremendous favor. It is forcing us to clean up our act. Recycling has been the first thing we do. It should be the last thing we do.”
The Hidden Value of “Waste”
The role that all of us, as consumers, might play in this is complicated. Brands push single-use, disposable, convenience packaging on us. There is a lack of communication between package designers and recycling facilities to develop materials compatible with North American recycling infrastructure, and so about one in four items that U.S. residents put in recycling bins are not actually recyclable. The feel-good phenomenon known as “wish cycling” decreases the value of truly recyclable material. Recycling still plays an important role in waste reduction and management solutions, but where is the incentive to take care of the things we own — to clean and maintain them — when the cost of buying something new is so cheap? How do we add additional “R”s to the Reduce-Reuse-Recycle mantra when it’s hard enough to manage the first three?
Neil Seldman’s argument for local resiliency is that almost everything that enters the so-called waste stream has significant value. When we replace the term waste management with resource recovery, we are talking about the economic principle of value retention. By recovering as much of our garbage as possible and wasting very little, we are rewarded with a rich source of “raw materials” for reuse and remanufacture — and a valuable source of local capital. To prove his point, Seldman offers this analysis of the economic payoff: It’s estimated that if just 2 to 5 percent of the materials headed to the landfill were recovered, reused, repaired, or resold, the combined value could be greater than all of the recycling revenue earned from everything else, at today’s market prices. (Combined value includes the avoided costs of what you would have to pay to manage those resources in any other way.) The proverbial alchemy of turning trash into treasure is well within our means.
Seldman has seen the alternative to incinerating our garbage or filling up landfill after landfill. It is called a “resource recovery park,” essentially an industrial park for companies engaged in recycling, composting, and manufacturing from recycled materials. Their efficiencies are increased because of their proximity to one another. Only a handful of resource recovery parks exist in the United States. Perhaps the best example is the recycling-based business run by the nonprofit St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County, in Eugene, Oregon. The operation realizes a “quadruple bottom line”: they responsibly reuse and recycle products, provide quality goods and services to the community, provide jobs and job training, and generate revenue to fund other charitable activities. The facility reclaims, repairs, and prepares for reuse a remarkable range of materials. They repair appliances, recover maximum value from e-waste, and upcycle window glass into architectural accents. What’s left gets radically recycled, as in their mattress recycling operation, the largest in North America. They even recycle clean polystyrene foam by compressing a forty-foot shipping container’s worth down to the size of a single palette of super dense polystyrene — weighing one ton — which they sell for remanufacture. All of this economic activity stays within the local economy, converting what used to be landfilled (44.1 million pounds in 2018) into a continuous supply of local capital with real value. Other examples of the resource recovery park, or “radical reuse center,” are Urban Ore in Berkeley, California, which began as a “scavenger organization” in 1980, and Second Chance in Baltimore, Maryland, whose business model focuses on deconstructing buildings, selling the salvaged materials, and creating “green-collar jobs.” You have to ask yourself, why doesn’t every city and county in the country launch one of these?
The Netherlands is on a path to do exactly that, starting with the creation of “circular craft centers” in ten towns in 2020. “Almost every municipality has an environmental street [where containers are lined up for disposing of electrical appliances, plastics, wood, foam, garden waste, etc.], a thrift store, and a Repair Cafe,” the initiative’s website (charmingly translated from the Dutch) points out. “But nowhere are those forces combined. This is unfortunate, because it is precisely because of this that more products could be used for longer. And fewer resources would be lost in error. Circular Craft Centers can be valuable in many ways. Not only because there is a focus on repair, high-quality reuse, recycling, and waste separation. Also because such a center provides new employment and learning workplaces.” The expectation is that every region in the Netherlands will have a center within five years.
Time to Rethink
IBM staked out the progressive high ground early in the twentieth century when it branded itself with a single word: Think. Now sustainability is being reimagined under the new prescriptive: Rethink. In the early twentieth century, the thrift movement’s anathema to waste and overconsumption penetrated deeply into the culture because of its broad range of motivations: moral self-improvement and sobriety, responsibility and self-sufficiency, economic stability in a time before Social Security, antipathy toward wastefulness, and even land conservation. It took root also because of the wide reach of the interests and stakeholders promoting it: the White House; virtually all government agencies; the banking and insurance industries; Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish hierarchies; women’s organizations, men’s service clubs, and youth organizations; and on and on. This book contends that in order to make the profound cultural and economic changes needed to respond effectively to the climate crisis, a new ethos must penetrate at least as deeply as the thrift movement did. One encouraging sign of this is in the work of students on college campuses across the country. The Post Landfill Action Network (PLAN) was started at the University of New Hampshire in 2013 to support student-led zero waste projects. Now PLAN is active at more than eighty colleges and universities in the nation.
In the early twenty-first century, the mandate to “rethink” has emerged with an unprecedented urgency. We are sitting on what has been described as a consumption time bomb. The global middle class is more than doubling, a growth that is driving consumption with what economists call high material intensity, that is, the cumulative impact of the materials and energy required to make something, or do something, from cradle to grave. All of this is happening at the same time that climate change is measurably decreasing the global environment’s ability to sustain our most fundamental resources. We believe that the repair ethos — with its wide resonance of meanings and applications, is critical to that rethinking.
The “classical” economic model, variously termed the “linear economy,” the “materials economy,” the “extractive economy,” and the “consumer economy,” is predicated on the belief that natural resources are unlimited and that markets can solve all environmental problems. But this model is flawed, and here is one reason why. For the last century, economic activity has been measured as gross domestic product (GDP) — a quantification of the total market value of all the goods and services produced in a country or region. The fundamental error in this evaluation is the fact that GDP balance sheets do not account for all the costs of producing goods and services. Missing are so-called external costs: unacknowledged and untaxed costs, the hidden costs of doing business that the free market generally ignores. These significant expenses, effectively subsidized by society at large, include the cost of producing clean, “free” drinking water, the cost of sending toxic waste downstream, and the costs of childhood obesity and diabetes linked to diets of snacks and soda.
What is the true cost of the twelve-cup coffee maker you just bought for $14.99? When these external costs are factored in, it far exceeds the $14.99 you paid for it. Someone else is paying. To put this at scale, the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University analyzed data for the decade from 2007 to September 2017 and identified the social costs of climate change (including extreme weather and the health impacts of burning fossil fuels) in the United States alone to be at least $240 billion every year. The corrective is not a mystery. More than a hundred years ago, British economists recognized that measuring economic activity without an understanding of negative external costs is an error that needs to be fixed; they were tipped off by the extreme air pollution created from burning coal, known as the London Fog. Since then, many methods have been developed to account for the complex environmental and economic impacts of the goods and services we produce. We just haven’t chosen to use them.
Why does this matter so much? Because corporate executives and boards are required by law to maximize shareholder value. As long as they are not required to account for the real long-term costs of their operations, they often have no choice but to make decisions that may be shortsighted. In this we recognize the decisions that have led us to the climate crisis, what biologist Garrett Hardin described as the “tragedy of the commons”: when the freedom of all to exploit resources vital to the common good of all leads to destruction for all. When economic activity is truly and accurately measured, CEOs, CFOs, and corporate boards will at last be free to make sustainable, long-term decisions — because it will be in their fiduciary interest and their responsibility to do so. As Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever and a highly respected voice for corporate responsibility, states: “We need to decouple growth from environmental impact and move financial markets to the long term. CEOs are basically good people. There are no CEOs who want more unemployment, or more people going to bed hungry, or more air pollution. But then why do we behave so miserably? It’s because we spend too much time on dealing with the impacts and not with the underlying causes.”
Another driver of this change is us. Businesses respond to market conditions, which include incentives determined by consumers. The choices we make and the products we demand fall solidly within our sphere of influence.
There is no “away” to throw things to. Not on a spaceship. And that’s where we’re living.
— Garrett Hardin
Economic Foundations for the Future
One of the most commonly accepted definitions of sustainability comes from the United Nations World Commission on Environment: “meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In response, a range of new economic models has been presented to us with a variety of names and overlapping attributes: regenerative economy, sharing economy, attention economy, artisanal economy, collaborative economy. Aiding a transition to a post-carbon future is part of the dynamic of each of these, but some are more focused on sustainability than others. Plus, transition by any means is not acceptable. It must also be a “just transition” that addresses the vulnerability of populations whose livelihoods will be disrupted and that strives to provide for the well-being of all. Such a transition has virtually no historical precedent.
The economic model that is gaining the most momentum on the world stage now is the “circular economy,” predicated on the idea that sustainable biological ecosystems operate in a circular fashion. Waste produced by one part of the system becomes resources for another. This model allows us to design waste and pollution out of our production processes, keep products in use for as long as possible, and radically reuse materials — even down to the molecular level — to regenerate natural systems. This is the vision of “eco-effectiveness” articulated by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart in their influential 2012 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. In it, they insisted that we ask the most fundamental — and ethical — question: “What is the entire system — cultural, commercial, ecological — of which this made thing, and way of making things, will be a part?”
From 2012 to 2014, the World Economic Forum, the Ellen Mac-Arthur Foundation, and business consulting firm McKinsey & Company produced three volumes of a report entitled Towards the Circular Economy, which identified the opportunities for businesses and industries, addressing in sequence durable goods, “fast-moving” consumer goods, and global supply chains. The 2014 report estimated the economic benefits of building circular supply chains could be more than 1 trillion a year in U.S. dollars for the global economy and 100,000 new jobs by 2025. The foundation’s 2019 follow-up report further describes a framework of economic resiliency for businesses able to reduce their dependence on raw materials subject to climate risks by implementing strategies — including designs for repairability — to keep materials in use longer.
In 2018, the International Resource Panel of the United Nations Environment Program issued a report entitled “Re-defining Value: The Manufacturing Revolution.” The report analyzes “re-manufacturing” technologies that reuse, refurbish, and repair the same materials used in the initial manufacture of products, significantly reducing the amount of new material needed: by 80–98 percent for remanufacturing, 82–99 percent for comprehensive refurbishing, and 94–99 percent for repair. “Re-thinking how we manufacture industrial products and deal with them at the end of their useful life,” the panel claims, “could provide breakthrough environmental, social and economic benefits.” A 2019 survey of U.S. business leaders showed a large increase in “circular thinking” — even if what that means is not always well-defined. In the long run, implementation is not something a company can do by itself. Industries will need to work with their supply chain partners, customers, financing partners, and even competitors. How do we imagine this transition might actually happen? The authors of Towards the Circular Economy had this to say:
We do not know how the shift will come about. It would come slowly or in a sudden sweep, as a reaction to external shocks. It may be the outcome of stirring public stimuli or of a killer application, as a silent manufacturing revolution. It could even emerge as grassroots consumer activism, or as voluntary, inclusive industry commitment. History has seen all of these patterns lead to breakthroughs: we do not know which of them will tip consumption into a more regenerative mode. We do expect, however, that the shift will play out between pioneering industry leaders, discriminating, well-informed consumers, and forward-looking public constituencies.
“If it was that easy, it would have been done,” says Paul Polman. “It’s hard work. The road to change has a lot of skeptics and cynics.”
The Trust Factor
John recalls: When I was a kid, my dad suggested to two of our suburban neighbors that rather than all three families each needing to own a power lawn mower, they should go in together, buy one mower, and share it. This was a pretty radical idea in an era when “lawn pride” said as much about you as the model of the car parked in your driveway. As the principal lawn mower for our family, I don’t recall being consulted about this social contract, but I do remember thinking that it made sense, and feeling proud of the role my father played in initiating the neighborly cooperation.
On a rather larger scale, Rachel Botsman, a researcher and lecturer at the London School of Economics, addresses the generational shift toward shared prosperity, in which access is more valued than ownership, and the critical role of trust in that shift. In her 2010 TED Talk, “The Case for Collaborative Consumption,” she offered the observation that the typical electric drill is used for only twelve to thirteen minutes per owner in its lifetime. “What you need is the hole, not the drill,” she says.
The generation that grew up with peer-to-peer file-sharing is discovering a new belief in the importance of community, such as we see in the growing popularity of Tool Libraries. A society that collaborates through sharing, renting, lending, and bartering things and skills, says Botsman, may well be the defining economic shift of the twenty-first century. Technology has provided us with the means; the key is trust. “Trust between strangers is the social glue, and is the revolutionary component of the share economy,” Botsman says.
Trust is also at the heart of the repair ethos, and community repair reinforces the shift toward shared prosperity by emphatically and compellingly creating trust among neighbors who might not otherwise have had the chance to meet.
Rethinking Resource Recovery
“What if all the effort spent on recycling over the last fifty years had been equally distributed over the rest of the R’s, including reuse and repair?” asks Joel Newman in his blog for Portland Repair Finder. “What could we do to smooth, simplify, and scale the repair movement? What could movements like Repair Cafe and Right to Repair become if repair achieved the cultural and institutional buy-in that recycling enjoys?”
Policy makers are beginning to respond to these questions, and New York City was among the first cities to implement some answers. The Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board and the Citizens Committee for New York City funds neighborhood projects that help develop replicable models for reducing, reusing, and repairing in all five boroughs of New York City. Individuals, nonprofits, for-profit small businesses, schools, professors, researchers, and student groups at educational institutions are all invited to apply. Many observers point out that in the Reduce-Reuse-Recycle mantra, reducing represents the biggest challenge. A decade ago, New York State made it a priority to significantly decrease the volume of waste disposed of at landfills and incinerators. Since then, the state has achieved a reduction from 4.1 pounds per person per day in 2010 to 1.7 pounds projected for 2020 — a difference of more than half. The goal is to reduce that number further, to 0.6 pounds per person per day by 2030. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has supported repair as a strategic way to meet those goals, and those of us who signed up for this revolution in sustainability envision several hundred community-run repair initiatives in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts within the next five years and many more nationwide, perhaps matching Europe and the UK, where there are more than two thousand repair initiatives. We are setting an example for other states to follow. As they do, the result will be changes in mindset and behavior — and a new kind of materialism. “Repair economies don’t regard material things as expendable,” writes journalist Katherine Wilson. “They relocate value in the workings, relations and meanings of things.”