Kristine H. Harper's Blog, page 10

Building up resilience

I have previously written about resilience; resilient living and resilient aesthetics, and in this article I intend to dive a bit deeper into the concept.

Resilience is a term, which is often linked to ecosystems and permaculture. Ecological resilience refers to the ability of an ecosystem to respond to and recover from damage, disturbance or homogenization (often human led). The most resilient being; animal, plant — or human being for that matter — is a flexible, adjustable being. Simply put; if one is able to adjust to one’s environment: to get the most out of the nutrition available, regulate according to weather conditions, adapt to customs, enter communities, or if one can be both bendable and robust like the strong, tall, flexible bamboo that I am surrounded by here in Bali, well, then one is more likely to endure and thrive.

But how do you build up your resilience? And how do you encourage resilience in your children? Well, you could use the metaphor of a travel vaccination, which is given with the purpose of resilience; when you expose your system to a lot of different things (in the case of the vaccination-metaphor; bacteria), you become resilient to them.

In order to build up resilience, it is of great importance to break the comfort zone of familiarity and everyday life. Of course, not all the time, as resilience includes balance and finding the golden mean between extremes, but nevertheless challenges are of great importance when seeking a resilient life. Hence, being able to bounce back to a strong core of stable values and grounded senses after being thrown off course, like the tall, slender palm trees that surround my house, requires exposing yourself to unfamiliarity and trials. Not in a stuntman kind of way; I am not suggesting that we should all throw ourselves into bungee jumping or skydiving, but rather that we need to consciously seek experiences that are challenging and disruptive.

Breaching the familiar or momentarily pulling yourself out of routines and the daily grind can be deeply edifying and build up resilience. In Edmund Husserl’s philosophy, disruption of the familiar, or Epoché as he calls it, opens our minds and senses and is a way of elimination assumptions and prejudices. The process of breaching or disturbing the well-known can be initiated by traveling or relocating to foreign regions and being challenged by newness in relation to sense-bombardments or cultural barriers, by art or fiction, or by critical or thought-provoking design objects.

But challenging yourself and thereby underlining your core strength, flexibility and adaptability shouldn’t be solely linked to exotic travels or thought-provoking art and design experiences. The desire to seek challenges and to expand horizons is the cornerstone in resilient living. This desire can manifest itself as pursuing big challenges, like moving to another country, accepting a work-related passion driven challenge, hiking through the wilderness or seeking exposure to radically different cultures. However, and importantly, building up resilience doesn’t require big dares! It can be reflected in small daily adaptability and open-mindedness manoeuvres. Cognitive resilience and flexibility can for example be cultivated by being open to and even embracing believes and standpoints that are I opposition to one’s own (if they are well-argued, of course), or by understanding that fear is a feeling meant to guide us, not to control us, and that calculated risks must be taken in order to grow.

Being resilient means being able to find your core shape again after being thrown off course by something or someone. The cultivation of resilience furthermore involves fighting against homogeneity. The antithesis to resilience is homogeneity. When people, environments, communities, cultures, societies, companies – as well as organisms and ecosystems – become homogeneous they become rigid, stagnant and/or weak, and hence unsustainable and unenduring.

But, if the most resilient environment is a heterogeneous one; i.e. an environment full of differences and dissimilarities, then why are we (still) so busy pushing everybody and everything towards “normalisation”, which basically means homogenizing? Globalisation and industrialisation have basically constituted a movement towards a homogeneous world governed by sameness and standardisation. The hangover from drinking too much of the same stuff has started to show though: whilst crafts-traditions start to die out due to the hard competition from cheap machine-made products, big city restaurants look similar and serve similar food everywhere, cultural differences are levelled, and more or less everything is accessible everywhere, handmade and locally, seasonally sourced and produced goods have started becoming the new luxury, confirming the number one rule of thumb when working with cultural tendencies, namely that if there is an overload of something (sameness, smoothness, convenience), people start romanticising its opposite (variableness, textures, slowness).

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Additionally, one could raise the following question; why do we celebrate tamed and weeded nature in the shape of designed forests, parks and gardens, even though we are deeply attracted to the wild, raw nature-experience? 

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Living resiliently is sustainable and enduring because it is a flexible, dynamic and adaptable lifestyle – and because it involves repetitions, or rather; because it involves finding pleasure in repetitions. However, nourishing repetitions are not draining and wearisome. Resilient living is not an ode to dishwashing! Resilient repetitions are linked to e.g. the usage of aesthetically nourishing objects, to the appreciation of the rhythms of nature, to steadily, gradually refining a skill, to the pleasure of slow creation (and the appreciation of slowly created objects), to creating momentous rituals with friends and family, and to finding a stimulating work-life balance and enjoying meaningful daily routines that allow for both efficiency and stillness.

Resilient repetitions are nourishing because they have been consciously chosen by the individual.

 

Sustainable storytelling

For a long time now, I have wanted to write about the (at times, unfortunate) way we communicate about sustainability. So in this post I intend to do so. Not least because I am currently finishing a chapter for my forthcoming book Anti-trend, Durable Design and the Art of Resilient Living on this topic.

Additionally, I have felt the need to highlight the satisfying act of buying something beautiful; of getting attracted to a beautiful, intriguing, well-made object and acquiring it (without feeling naughty). Don’t get me wrong: I am all up for radical reduction of consumption! But, investing in aesthetically nourishing, emotionally captivating, functional objects that can beautify and enhance or perhaps improve or simplify our lives and homes is both enriching and edifying. It is important for me to make it clear that my immaterialist mission is not about suggesting nihilistic refusal of any physical attachment to the world, but rather conscious reduction by encouraging an anti-trendy lifestyle.

As Simone de Beauvoir equitably put it in The Ethics of Ambiguity:

“There is no way for man to escape this world. It is in this world that he must realize himself morally.”

Overconsumption and buy-and-throw-away mentality is at the one end of the scale of the golden mean, whereas nihilistic refusal and turning away from society altogether is at the other end. We need to find a balance. We need to seek durable permanence. We need objects that can satisfy our inherent need for beauty and aesthetic nourishment, only in a sustainable manner.

[image error]No, life is too precious to buy cheap, insignificant products on sale. However, it seems that this kind of communication, which is very rewards-based and straight-forward, is so much easier to get convinced by that threat-based stories of pollution and climate crisis.

Put differently; I am not on a mission that involves preaching doomsday. Yes, there are definitely a lot of pollution-based problems in the world. And, yes, we most certainly need to change our ways radically in order to stop the unfortunate development we see at the moment in relation to climate change, inequality and mindless consumption. But I think that one of the many reasons this “turning things around” seems to be so hard is that the way we are being told to change things is very lecturing-based and fear driven. Generally, we don’t respond well to these kinds of approaches. This can be compared to wanting to get a child to eat properly and variated by only saying: “don’t eat with your fingers” (or else you have bad manners), or “don’t only eat the pasta, you have to also eat the vegetables” (or you will get malnourished). What do you think the child will do? She will eat the pasta only, with her fingers. Drawing the line between the fun of eating with her fingers and something as abstract as bad manners, or between not eating boring vegetables and being malnourished is way too intangible and irrelevant to her.

Now, I am not saying that consumers, or people in general, are child-like. But there is some kind of reverse psychology going on here that is fundamentally human.

[image error]Yes, she does! Not least because she delivers a personal, passionate, present stories on why we need to act and change our ways now. What she is says is tangible and relevant.

A large part of the communication about sustainably and environmental issues is somewhat similar to the attempt to getting the child to eat properly and variated by saying “don’t”. It goes somewhat like this: “don’t use plastic bags”, “don’t travel by airplane”, or “don’t buy fast fashion”, or else “something bad might happen…!” There are rarely immediate alternatives served, and the consequences of not stopping our plastic-bag-airplane-fashion-based behaviour is presented as doomsday-scenarios: starving polar bears, melting poles, increased amount earthquakes and other natural disasters like heatwaves and ice storms etc. To the common consumer drawing a line between buying that cheap trendy dress and wearing it only once before discarding it — or saying “yes please” to that plastic bag to put tomatoes in in the supermarket and the melting Antarctic ice is (understandably) hard.

Relevance is the key word here! Relevance and applicability. Unless you feel that what is served to you in the immense stream of information we are all faced with on a daily basis as a part of our late-modern information society is relevant to you, as well as applicable to your life, you will most likely not feel inclined to act accordingly. Well, unless of course you are an idealistic environmental activist, which, let’s face it, the majority of people are not.

My take is that there is something wrong with the way the importance of acting and consuming sustainably is communicated. The stories told must resonate with people; they must feel relevant and applicable in order to be persuasive.

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The problem with communication on sustainability is often originated in the companies’ sustainability strategies and goals. These tend to be too abstract, too broad, too rational, and hence very hard to write applicable, relevant, touching stories about.

A good example of very abstract and broad sustainability goals is UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (often referred to as the SDGs) to be reached by 2030. The goals are ambitious, which is not a bad thing at all; we need ambitious objectives at the moment. However, they are virtually impossible to grasp and measure.

Let me exemplify my point by highlighting and analyzing some of the SDGs. Beneath each of the SDGs an array of targets is listed, which is actually a great way to concretize abstract and theoretical objectives. However, the target points remain all too non-concrete. If you, for example, take a look at goal no. 5: Gender Equality, and click unto the targets and indicators, the first target point is:

“End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere.”

Now, there is a lot to say about this target-point. One cannot possibly disagree with the importance of it, but how can it in any way be measured, or reached for that matter?

The same goes for the other SDGs. Like for example goal no. 7: Affordable and clean energy. The first target point you will find below this one is:

“By 2030, ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services.”

Universal access? Affordable? Modern? These terms are all extremely abstract and non-concrete. What is affordable? I guess that depends on a lot of things, and on where and who you are. And, what does modern mean? Up-to date? State of the art? High-tech? When one uses terms that are this open and broad, there is a risk of miscommunication, or at least of not getting through with important messages (which the SDGs most certainly are).

One must help the reader or listener to anchor the exact meaning that one wants to communicate; and making use of broad, abstract terms like the ones here listed is not a good way of doing so. A word like modern contains too many connotations and meanings, and it will therefore be very individual how it is understood. An option is a concept definition, or even better; a different, more distinct word.

Furthermore, goals must be reachable, which is why aiming for universal access might be slightly farfetched. Think about all the remote regions in the world; how would this ever be achievable? Unless of course, the minds behind this target point have something concrete in mind, like an off-grid package or something alike it. But, if that is the case, then why not exemplify it like that, in order to make the goal more understandable and reachable? The goals would be much more clear, plausible, and usable if they were made concrete and accessible.

Communication on sustainability, equality, and environment is often too intellectual and abstract – as well as way too facts-based and non-emotional.

A good example of the lack of ability to make the goals feel applicable is SDG no. 4: Quality Education. Underneath each of the goals you will find the progress that has been made towards reaching the goals by 2030, which in itself is brilliant, but the information is very rational and facts packed. Progress of goal 4 in 2018:

“At the global level, the participation rate in early childhood and primary education was 70 per cent in 2016, up to 63 per cent in 2010. The lowest rates are found in sub-Saharan Africa (41 per cent) and Northern Africa and Western Asia (52 per cent).”

Can you feel it? Can you imagine the lives of African and Asian children, who are not at school? I most certainly cannot. Even though the facts are remarkable, it doesn’t make me feel in any way engaged. And engagement is what we need in order for people to start taking action! Passion and engagement. Unless we are passionate about something; unless we can really feel that this is important, unless it has relevance and seems like a cause worth engaging in and fighting for, we might superficially appear betrothed in whichever good cause is on the societal agenda – but our engagement isn’t authentic or deeply felt, and hence it is short-lived.

In order to get people involved in the battle against inequality, oppression, unsustainable usage of natural resources, pollution etc. it is of great importance to engage them; they must feel deeply committed in order to act accordingly. In other words, we need sustainable storytelling that creates bonds between people; that is passionate and deeply felt and packed with anecdotes about the consequences that our current consumer-ventures have for people, animals, and nature rather than facts-driven doomsday-descriptions.

Travelling, and thoughts on what it means to feel at home

This post is written is three steps. Partly because the summer holiday didn’t provide me with as much writing time as expected, and partly because this text was harder to write than I initially thought: I wasn’t quite sure, and still isn’t, how to put words on these thoughts… so bear with me, please. I don’t mean to offend anyone’s culture or to solely tribute everything novel and exotic. I simply wish to pinpoint the way travelling can make you view things you previously took for granted differently, and how feeling at home is not necessarily linked to a physical place.

Part 1:

As I am sitting here in Denmark, my home country, looking out of the window of my parent’s summer cottage close to the dramatic shores of the North Sea, following the streams of the summer rain which is continuously pouring down, I am thinking about what it means to travel and to explore foreign regions. And non the least, what it does to your mindset and your sense of belonging.

[image error]Sand dunes by the dramatic North Sea shore in Western Denmark close to my parents’ cottage.

It feels safe and comfortable to be back in Denmark (despite the questionable summer weather): there are no street dogs, no mosquitoes, no tropical thunderstorms, and no crazy uncontrolled intersections and unruly traffic. There is no rubbish on the streets; as in all developed counties there is a well-organised system here, which ensures that trash gets picked up from each household weekly. There are walking paths and bicycle lanes everywhere, making it easy and safe to move around freely, which I found very hard to do without during our first Bali-months. And, non the least, my family and closest friends are here.

However, despite the comfort, homeliness, cleanliness, beauty in the shape of clean nature, well-organised towns and Scandinavian design, and the safety of this country, it is a very strange experience to come here for holiday after one year in Bali, Indonesia. I feel, honestly, slightly alienated. And this feeling surprises me. Everything – literally, everything – here is different than in Bali. The nature, the culture, the food, the aesthetics, everything. And coming here, after having gradually grown accustomed to life in a very small village in the middle of the jungle, has made me notice and wonder about a lot of things that I used to take for granted, and has furthermore made me less appreciative about things I used to praise.

[image error]Lighthouse by the North Sea. Beautiful Nordic cool colours and organic shapes.

Nature here is clean and beautiful, and it is still possible to find areas with “wild” nature, meaning nature than hasn’t been laid out, curated and tamed by man. The North Sea borders the entire west coast of the country, and here the unruly waves and tides still rule over man, and make you feel small and humble (and, I am somehow drawn to this feeling; it is as if I now, more than ever before, need to feel humbled by nature and need to feel struck by sublimity). Furthermore, there are forests and areas of heathland here, which are still untouched by agriculture. But the major part of Denmark consists of farmed land, residential areas, and forests that would be more accurately described as parks, and in which everything from walking a dog without a leash to walking outside the paths is prohibited.

I never before used to question this. These regulations might have even made me feel safe. But now all I want to do is let my parents’ brown labrador retriever run wild and leave the paths and walk through the bushes and branches.

[image error]The beautifully organised, clean, spacious forests in Jutland, Denmark.

Part 2:

I have been away from this unfinished blog-post for almost two weeks. And, am now in Copenhagen.

We are staying in our old neighbours’ beautiful spacious apartment built in 1889. I love walking through this apartment that resembles our old home and is laid out more or less exactly like it; I love the herringbone parquet, the floor panels and the stucco that is so characteristic for European 19th century homes.

The Danish summer weather is starting to behave, and it is truly amazing to see our friends. In other words; Copenhagen is in many ways blissful.

However, right now, in this writing moment, I miss Bali; I miss the chaos, the smell of durian and the scent of incense, the moist heat, the green tropical nature, the animal sounds around my house (chickens, crickets, dogs, cats, cows, goats), the colourful butterflies, the chanting from the nearby Hindu temples, the unorganised towns, the warmth from strangers in Ubud’s yoga centres, the dark tropical evenings, the sound of palm leaves that sway in the wind. I miss driving my motorbike on the foot path, if it makes sense in order to get past busy traffic (without anyone raising as much as an eyebrow), I miss eating nasi campur (local rice dish) at our local warung (shop/small restaurant) and speaking my broken Indonesian with the lovely lady who works there, I miss watching my boys bike to school through the jungle, I miss the new friends I have made this past year, and I miss the house we rent that suddenly feels like home.

Strange how things can shift, right?

As mentioned in part 1 of this blog-post, there are things I used to take for granted and suddenly feel foreign to, and one of these is the high degree of efficiency, convenience and the organisation of everything here. Everything in the cities is designed to accommodate the modern city life; fast and slow bicycle lanes, well-functioning, public transportation, grocery shops with a large variety of food on each street corner that enables you to quickly and efficiently do your daily grocery shopping, recreation areas; parks, harbour areas, play grounds, public squares that can recharge and sooth a busy mind. It is all very beautiful, well-planned, and lovely. But it also adds to the conformity of separating days and weeks into work and leisure time that is spend recharging and getting ready for yet more work.

I really longed for the big parks in Copenhagen over the past year; they were a very important respite to me when we lived here. They were the place I would go to recharge myself and find peace of mind after a busy work week. But as I walked through one of my favourite parks the other day I kept getting an unfamiliar feeling, which can be described somewhat like this: in this extreme taming and cultivation of wild nature in the shape of cosy little park lanes, colour coordinated flower beds, and artificial lakes something has gone missing. Something important and fundamentally, basically nourishing.

I have previously written about the concept of Rewilding. In British author and environmentalist George Monbiot’s book “Feral”, Monbiot describes how he, after moving to Wales, feels ecologically bored. The natural landscapes offers very little variation, and nearly no wildlife. He moved away from the city to be closer to nature, but he realises that: “The fragmented ecosystems in the city from which I had come were richer in life, richer in structure, richer in interest.” (Feral, page 65). In other words, the city offered more variety and edge than the “wild” nature, which had been deprived from variation and wildlife after many years of agriculture.

I have always, prior to moving to Bali, preferred the city to the countryside, and I think the reason therefore is to be found in the Monbiot-quote. The urban jungle has always felt more more diverse, more raw, more nourishing, and more intriguingly challenging than the homogeneous landscapes that governs the vast majority of the Danish countryside.

[image error]One of the big beautiful, well-organised Copenhagen parks.

Furthermore, the written as well as unwritten rules of this country suddenly strike me as something questionable. Why, for example, may a pedestrian not cross a street when the light is red if no-one is coming? Why not allow for the individual to assess whether or not to take that risk? And, especially, why comment it, if someone “breaks the law” and walks across the street on a red light, or rides her bike on a foot path, for that matter?

I feel my personal freedom limited when this happens (and it does quite a bit).

The other day I was walking with my five year old up one of the avenues that leads to a beautiful park in Copenhagen, and there was absolutely no traffic; the city seemed next to empty on that specific Sunday, perhaps due to the summer holiday. And so, by a traffic light that leads over a small street adjacent to the avenue, I told my son that it was fine for him to ride over the street on his little scooter despite the light being red. However, as we crossed a lady in her fifties, who was standing patiently waiting for the light to turn green turned her face towards me, and hissed aggressively: “nice one!” I was dumbfounded. And yet, not surprised. How very strange to feel like it was any of her business that I decided that it was OK for my son and I to cross the quiet street, whilst the light was still red.

There are of course also many unwritten rules in Bali, most of them which are connected to the Hindu rituals and daily offerings that are so predominant to life on the island (but, however, to me as a foreigner and a non-Hindu, they do not fill up very much of my daily life). And, there are rules and regulations everywhere, of course, which are necessary in order to avoid anarchy.

But, somehow the above described traffic light incidence describes perfectly the difference between openness to others taking calculated risks and thus exercising their personal freedom to act in one way or another, and viewing others’ acts of civil disobedience as a threat to the cultural consensus and unwritten rules.

[image error]Beautiful Copenhagen by night.

I know that I am longing for adventure, and I know that Bali, despite over a years experience with living on the island is still exotic and thrillingly foreign. I know that by praising these superficial things about Bali (incense, tropical nature, sunset sounds etc.), I sound and act slightly like Simone de Beauvoir’s adventurer, who is characterised by seeking a feeling of freedom and adventure above all else, and by doing whatever she wants in order to obtain leisure and enjoyment. The adventurer is actually really close to being truly free in the existentialist sense of the term, because she throws herself into life and chooses action for its own sake – and consequently doesn’t do this or that because of cultural, societal assumptions or norms. But, the adventurer cares only for her own freedom and self-indulged projects, and doesn’t engage in the community or in other people’s projects. In other words, true freedom is not a celebration of newness and adventures, true freedom requires engagement and commitment.

I need to exercise my freedom and get further involved in the local community and the culture I live in. I know this, and I will.

Additionally, I know that being negative about life in Denmark is not fair, as Denmark offers a good and safe lifestyle, and is characterised by equal and free education-options, affordable childcare, and environmental awareness. However, I believe that openness to other cultures and engaging in comfort zone breaking ventures is important in order to exercise a flexible, resilient mind.

I recently stumbled upon this amazing blog by American essayist Pico Iyer, and particularly this post made me understand some of the thoughts I have been puzzling with over the past weeks of our time in Denmark. This, among other passages, sums up some of the insights from the article well:

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in travelling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit. 

Part 3:

I have now been back in Bali for five days. It felt like coming home when we got here. Who would have thought it could feel like that a year ago?

Perhaps safety and comfort are not synonymous to homeliness. Perhaps home is not a place, but a mindset. Perhaps the most continuously comforting kind of homeliness contains stretching one’s horizon and allowing new impulses and new ways of life to enter.

[image error]Morning light shines through the palm trees of the jungle that surrounds our house.

I will to finish this hymn to travelling by yet another quote from the beautiful article on why we travel by Pico Iyer.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. (…) And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Fashioning Responsibility: A Report on the 2019 Copenhagen Fashion Summit

This year was the 10-year anniversary of the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, the tagline being, “10 years of rewriting fashion.” The bold tagline notwithstanding, fashion has yet to see a radical shift in terms of implementing fair labor practices and truly sustainable solutions. In the four years I’ve been going to the Summit, I’ve often left feeling dismayed by the gap between brand rhetoric and the reality of business-as-usual. This year felt somewhat different, however. Day 2 began with a rendition of Choir of Young Believers’ “Hollow Talk” (which will be very familiar to fans of Scandinavian noir series The Bridge) performed on stage by the Danish National Girls Choir. And instead of a “muted whisper of the things you feel”—the line concluding ”Hollow Talk”—the critical voices that followed spoke with great resonance.

Literally, women were going to be front and center this day when, among other highlights, the participants of the Youth Fashion Summit, hosted and coordinated by the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology, gave a rousing speech, exhorting the CEOs, politicians, brand managers, and designers in the room to give women working in the fashion industry their due—both in terms of fair and adequate wages and in terms of representation.

Most fashion consumers wouldn’t know that the women constructing their clothes often live and work in horrendous conditions, and most probably don’t often pause to consider the impact of ongoing sexism in fashion advertisements either. A salient point made by representatives of the Youth Fashion Summit was namely for brand managers to take active steps to break down the visual forms of gender oppression that circulate in the fashion media.

[image error]The participants from the Youth Fashion Summit presenting their demands to the fashion industry at this year’s Fashion Summit.

A step was taken this year to include more minority voices in the discussions, although most panels were still primarily what Vanessa Friedman, Fashion Director and Chief Fashion Critic at the New York Times, called “manels,” referring to the fact that most panelists were male (and white, not perhaps coincidentally). It was a welcome surprise to see Nazma Akter, president of Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation, from Bangladesh speaking on the panel about how to increase wages for factory workers in Asian countries.

Akter didn’t shy away from pointing out that whereas some positive changes have been implemented since the Rana Plaze disaster in 2013, fashion brands are only in Bangladesh for one reason: cheap, exploitative labor. Workers don’t receive the proper respect and dignity they deserve, and gender plays a huge role here, as Akter also pointed out in no uncertain terms.

As a recent report published by Asia Floor Wage (AFWA) and other NGOs makes clear, violence against women workers is rife throughout the fashion industry. Looking specifically at the H&M supply chain (but we should bear in mind that many brands operate concurrently in the same factories and the responsibility can’t necessarily be placed at the feet of just one company), the report exposes the wide spectrum of violence that women workers face: beatings, verbal abuse, and sexual assault.

Additionally, and crucially, the report also emphasizes that malnutrition and relentless working hours constitute violence as well, since the combination is hugely detrimental to the health and dignity of the workers. However, the tragic reality is that many of the large companies doing business in Asia are probably not even aware of what transpires on the factory floors where their goods are produced.

[image error]Nazma Akter on stage at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit.

Whereas women rarely hold managerial or supervisory positions in the supply chain, men continue to occupy primary positions of power in the fashion industry. The structuring of labor and profit along gendered lines is innate to the industry. Ever since textiles began to be manufactured on a large scale, most workers have been young women.

In the US, at the beginning of the 19th century, Francis Cabot Lowell (who gave name to the Lowell System of production) staffed his new textile mills (the first of their kind in North America) with girls and women, aged 15–35. As Chaim M. Rosenberg notes in his biography of Lowell, “These young women had experience in weaving and spinning from home manufacturing and worked for cheaper wages than did male employees.”

Thus, gender inequality is at the root of large-scale modern textile manufacturing. It is our shared responsibility now, finally and much too late, to disavow the very foundation of the industry: cheap, gendered labor (hence the hashtag #humangender that the Youth Fashion Summit promoted in their performance).

I want to use this moment to reflect more thoroughly on the word “responsibility.” I heard it pronounced often from the stage at this year’s Summit, but what does it actually mean to assume responsibility, especially in relation to the chimera that is the fashion industry?

Among the most prominent modern thinkers, perhaps no one has grappled more with the concept of responsibility than the French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida. The originator of deconstruction—a rigorous analytical method designed to uncover how language sustains power relations and vice versa—Derrida not only examined strenuously the words of others but also his own. As such, when he discovered that one of his closest friends (and of the most celebrated and controversial literary critics of the 20th century), Paul de Man, had written for a Nazi-controlled newspaper in occupied Belgium between 1940–42, he took to his typewriter almost immediately.

De Man had died from cancer in 1983, but the discovery of his wartime writings wasn’t made until 1988. Without going into detail about the entire controversy, I want instead to turn to Derrida’s mode of responding to this difficult information, which cast an entirely new light on his friendship with de Man (Derrida was Jewish). In a long essay, with the poetic title, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Derrida takes great pains to respond to the idea that his friend had once been a Nazi sympathizer:

“This thing will always be difficult to think and perhaps it will become more and more difficult. He, himself, he is dead, and yet, through the specters of memory and of the text, he lives among us and, as one says in French, il nous regarde—he looks at us, but also he is our concern, we have concerns regarding him more than ever without his being here.”

Like Derrida, we cannot ignore difficult information or revelations, of which there have been a constant stream over the last several decades in the fashion industry. For many of us, fashion is integral to who we are, to how we perceive the world and our own role in it. Fashion is not unlike a friend that we have come to depend upon to make us feel a certain way; we identify with shapes, colors, and, of course, specific brands. There is no denying it: We are what we wear—which is why we must take seriously the ramifications of what we choose to put on every day (insofar as that choice is truly our own—but I won’t get into that difficult question here).

[image error]One of the talented weavers from The Sudaji Weaving Project in Northern Bali. The most sustainable clothes are clothes charged with time and pride. How can you call anything sustainable if it is produced in an unethical way?

We must not look away from the sometimes-unbelievable reality of supply chains; the humans suffering are our concern. We may then feel a sense of urgency, a quickening of the pulse as we speak words of solidarity and indignation. But we must further ask, What has prompted us to speak up in the first place? Is it a sense of guilt, of shame—the recognition that we’ve been complicit in the exploitation of thousands, perhaps millions, for decades, that we’ve pushed deep underground our sense that something was very wrong with the industry?

Before we can truly take responsibility, we must examine our motivation for wanting to do so. Since responsibility concerns the other—the garment worker in Bangladesh, for example—we can never know in advance where the act of taking responsibility will lead; but one thing is for certain, we can’t not respond in the face of what we now know to be the truth. As producers and consumers of fast fashion, we are all responsible for the low wages, the violence endured at the hands of factory managers, and the illnesses suffered.

Becoming a responsible participant in the fashion industry means, first of all, educating ourselves to the facts of what goes on (if we haven’t done so already), of finally staring the truth in the face. Brands, big and small, have become master weavers of vague sustainability statements intended to quash our nagging concerns before we complete our checkout, but surely we can hold ourselves to a higher standard (Positive Luxury seems to be on a right track, involving academics and industry professionals in evaluating the sustainability efforts of brands).

Yes, invariably, bad feelings follow in the wake of becoming responsible; we might not even feel like wearing certain items anymore. But it is imperative that we linger with that which is difficult and uncomfortable. However bad we feel, after all, is nothing compared to, say, the plight of Uygur Muslim women and men interred in Chinese work camps who have been forced to make sportswear ending up at prestigious American colleges, or the Cambodian seamstresses that regularly faint due to malnutrition and exhaustion while making sneakers for big brand-name companies.

At the Summit, a recurrent theme I heard certain CEOs and brand managers articulate in different ways was that one brand or company simply can’t do enough on their own; the industry is too complex for any one player to push for real change. If this is true, it certainly isn’t stopping these companies from claiming all sorts of victories on behalf of the workers whose labor they have been benefitting from for years. The trouble, of course, isn’t only that the industry has become so unbelievably massive but also that the companies themselves, in some regards, have lost track of their own operations. It is almost impossible for fashion companies to achieve a true level of transparency because they rely on subcontractors in various locales to keep production profitable (and enormously so) for their shareholders.

Why is it, for example, that large foreign companies operating in the province of Xinjiang haven’t put pressure on Chinese authorities to end the persecution of Uighur Muslims there? Recently, there have been calls for foreign governments and institutions to take action, and companies should be included in such demands, as they have the economic power to influence local authorities. After all, multinationals are duty-bearers, and they should meet their obligations accordingly.

[image error]As the big fashion companies have apparently lost track of their operations, and hence have difficulties serving transparency to their consumers, maybe it is time to invest in garments made by small, up-and-coming sustainable fashion brands. (“Fold me jacket” by Susanne Guldager, alias La Femme Rousse)

The problem isn’t that companies are driven by evil intentions (they are not); rather, the prevailing concern is that, as Rosi Braidotti of Utrecht University points out, we are living in an epoch of advanced capitalism: “This is a ‘spinning machine’ that fabricates quantitative proliferations of objects, commodities and data which leave the power structures unchanged and unchallenged.” It seems entirely apt that capitalism should be compared to a “spinning machine”—even as Braidotti doesn’t explicitly mention the fashion industry, it is clearly a foremost example of how the status quo remains firmly in place as long as profit rules the day. Capitalism opposes “qualitative value” (workers’ rights and well-being), but a renewed authentic concern with responsibility—rather than counterfeit sustainability statements—has the potential to disrupt the mechanical and inhuman operations of the industry.

This is a time for radical demands. In my last post (Rerooting Veganism), I explained how the word “radical” means origin, but instead of going back to the origins of the fashion industry we need rather to sever the roots of those origins.

In today’s post, then, I want to add the following meaning of radical: the need for “great or extreme social or political change.” However, the overarching obstacle to implementing real and enduring change is that the fashion industry has come to resemble a rhizome, a massive system of rootstalks that can’t be traced back to a single origin anymore. As such, there isn’t just one solution or one obvious place to start fixing things. But the only way forward, as I see it, is by insisting on and repeating the demands for responsibility that were heard on stage at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit this year.

Fast fashion might seem colorful and fun, but it is entirely toxic. I hope that the Copenhagen Fashion Summit will start partnering with even more NGOs and educational organizations that are truly committed to change and that are not constrained by corporate interests. That would promote a venue for substantial and progressive discourse with no room for hollow talk.

Cover photo: Land art “5,000 Lost Soles” at Potato Head Beach Club, Bali, by liina klauss

Resilient aesthetics

Resilient aesthetics and resilient beauty; these terms immediately sound like oxymorons, as beauty and aesthetically pleasing experiences and objects tend to connote something fleeting, and something transient and volatile. We are used to viewing beauty as something that fades, and thereby as synonym with newness, with youth, with unwrinkled faces and garments, with fresh flowers and polished tables, with newly painted walls and with undented floors; all of which diminishes with age, usage, and wear and tear.

[image error]Loved clothes last. These are a pair of my favourite leggings, and despite the fact that they were definitely not designed to last and not made to grow more beautiful with usage, and that they are literally falling apart, I still wear them. Imagine if these leggings had been designed to be mendable in an aesthetically pleasing way. Or, if they were biodegradable, so that I could burry them in my flowerbed…

But resilient beauty is not smooth and spotless. It is mature and open. Charging a design object with resilient aesthetics is a celebration of usage, and hence it means creating an object, which is made to be used, made to grow better, more beautiful or more intriguing and sense-stimulating with age, as it gets infused with and developed by the hands that touch it and the occasions for which it is used.

“Regardless of when the objects’ optimal state takes place, there is a sense of process applicable to all material existence, and it is generally one-directional. After the optimal state, the objects are considered “past their prime” and we get the feeling that things are “downhills from here,” and most of our effort is directed toward “repairing” and “restoring” the deteriorating objects and “turning back the clock.””

(Saito “Everyday Aesthetics” 2007, p.150)

As Saito points out in this quote from Everyday Aesthetics, our linear way of looking at things often causes us to praise newness and the beauty related hereto, and hence define beauty as something unblemished, flawless, smooth, and pristine. In the linear perspective there is a starting point, and a development that moves towards an end-point (which is either defined by malfunctions and unrepairable or non-upgradeable elements, or by the shifting winds of fashion, i.e. perceived obsolescence). Resilient beauty however is enduring; it is open to development and even embraces the tactile qualities of unevenness, roughness as well as irregularity and decay. Resilient objects are created to be used, and therefore the traces that usage leave must naturally be incorporated into their central concept.

[image error]A floor made of ironwood, made to last, made to be used, made to hold wear and tear beautifully.

A good example of an aesthetically resilient object is a vintage object. When garments, furniture, or bicycles for that matter are described as vintage it basically means that the specific object has become more beautiful and more valuable because it has aged and because it has been frequently used or worn. It seems as if the previous owner’s love for the object has left enhancing aesthetic traces on its surface. And hence its beauty can be described as resilient.

But not only after a long lifespan can an object be described as resilient, because it has then, so to speak, proven to be so. New objects can also from their conception be infused with resilience. The design process should include more than considerations on how to attract consumers and convince them to buy yet another new thing. It should contain well-thought through and transparent intentions or even calculations on how to prolong the user-phase, and hence ensure a long product-lifespan.

[image error]I used to collect vintage chairs (before selling everything and moving to Bali) – and I would always think of this quote by Marcel Proust from ‘In Search of Lost Time’: “In fact, she could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive an intellectual profit, and especially that which beautiful things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasure elsewhere than in the satisfactions of material comfort and vanity. Even when she had to make someone a present of the kind called “useful,” when she had to give an armchair, silverware, a walking stick, she looked for “old” ones, as though, now that long desuetude had effaced their character of usefulness, they would appear more disposed to tell us about the life of people of other times than to serve the needs of our own life.”

Resiliently aesthetic objects are sharable, durable, and furthermore, they contain a certain heaviness. The term heaviness often connotes something dreary or gloomy. Nevertheless, in order to live sustainably we must invite more heaviness into our lives in this sense: more substance, more stability as well as more significance and more challenges. Resiliently aesthetic objects are charged with heaviness, connotatively speaking; and thereby in relation to the undertones, associations and feelings that they awaken in the receiver. The sensations that are stimulated by an aesthetically resilient object are heavy in the sense that they don’t pass immediately. They linger.

However, the heaviness that the aesthetically resilient object is infused with is also very hands-on in a physical kind of way. The hands-on heaviness that the resilient object encompasses consists of sensuous, material stories; stories about the time that has been literally put into the object (which might even be viewable on the object surface), stories about the time that has been spend conceptualizing and constructing or shaping the object, or stories about the time that is meant to be spend using the object, which are materialized in the newly designed object’s openness to usage. And furthermore, the heaviness of resilient objects is connected to the sublime aesthetic experience.

By emphasizing that it is not only the “privilege” of the vintage object to be resilient (because it has by definition proven to be so), but that resilient aesthetics can also be charged into a new design product, I wish to highlight the importance of making user-phase considerations a vital part of the design process. Furthermore, when I write new design product it is important to stress the fact that a new product could very well be an upcycled product or a product made of recycled materials rather than virgin materials.

We are at a point right now where designing new products can really only be legitimized if these are created to be very long-lived or in other ways improve our ability to live sustainably.

Rerooting Veganism

Veganism has become fashionable. On Instagram, a search for #vegan returns almost 80,000,000 hits. The top posts are dominated by glamour shots of food dishes, but content related to cosmetics and other fashion-related items are prevalent as well; this new visual expression of veganism is paradigmatic of the “cruelty-free” trend, which is tied in with the greater global trend of sustainability.

[image error]The cruelty-free trend: save the rainforest while you snack…

When I became vegan 17 years ago, veganism was tightly associated with the animal rights movement—and, believe me, there was nothing fashionable about going vegan. Rather, people outside the movement viewed veganism with suspicion, if not with ridicule or downright hostility. Today, veganism has entered the mainstream, and even celebrity chefs—like Gordon Ramsay who used to be contemptuous of vegan food—have now realized that veganism can be good for business.

Indeed, veganism offers many companies an excellent opportunity to add a “sustainable” or “green” element to their brand. Most recently, here in Northern Europe, international peddler of chocolate and other sweets, Fazer launched a new brand called Yosa, which is made up of a line of different oat-based products. Of course, a company like Fazer, with no relationship to veganism, has undoubtedly taken note of how Oatly, a Swedish vegan company, has become very successful at selling their oat drinks and other products to a young audience using a humorous and funky branding strategy.

But veganism is more than colorful Instagram posts and clever marketing. At its core, veganism is radical. The word “radical” comes from Latin radicalis, meaning of or having roots. In the 17th century, the denotation of radicalis, in English, took on the metaphorical meaning of origins. It is this meaning of radical I associate with veganism. The origins of veganism as we know it today can be traced to 1944 when Donald Watson coined the word “vegan” out of the beginning and end of “vegetarian.” As the word itself indicates, veganism is about sparseness and intentionality—leaning out vegetarianism, so to speak—and we need to remind ourselves of these twin connotations as we continue to champion the ever-relevant original values of veganism while navigating the current era of fast-paced communication and hyper-commercialization. The definition of veganism was solidified in 1949 by Leslie J. Cross, another Vegan Society member: “to seek an end to the use of animals by man for food, commodities, work, hunting, vivisection, and by all other uses involving exploitation of animal life by man.” In 1988, the final definition of veganism was arrived at:

[Veganism is] a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is

possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

[image error]Balinese woman preparing red chilis for local farmer’s market

From the more practical earlier definition, by the late 1980s, veganism had assumed a loftier connotation. Neither definition, however, manages to emphasize the pleasure and joy of what it means to be vegan. Having grown up in a country with a long-established tradition of eating meat and other animal products, I was excited to discover so many new and different ways of eating when I went vegan in my late teens. What we have today, of course, in mainstream expressions of veganism is an overabundance of images displaying sumptuous veggie dishes and those who enjoy them.

[image error]It’s difficult not to get swept away by (and to feel the need to add to) the abundance of delightful vegan meals presented on instagram

Although it does feel good to witness the new availability and exposure of veganism, we should not forget why veganism exists in the first place. There may well be more vegan food options available at the grocery store, and we shouldn’t disregard the rise in visibility and acceptance of veganism broadly speaking, but despite the mainstreaming of veganism, the consumption of meat hasn’t declined. Isn’t it a good thing, then, that vegan “meat” is now showing up in the most meat-friendly places, like in the fast-food industry?

Impossible Foods have partnered with Burger King to offer a vegetarian version of the Whopper, simply called the Impossible Whopper. The Impossible burger patty is made from plants, but what makes it so “meaty” is the addition of heme, an iron-rich molecule, which is what makes meat “juicy,” so to speak. But the heme of Impossible Foods is entirely grown from plants.

Replace the content, but keep the form. Is that the extent of our ambition? Perhaps veganism can lead us down a different, truly alternative, path that stays true to the ambition of the movement’s pioneers. The corporate food industry doesn’t benefit humanity or the environment; making it marginally more palatable by substituting animal with plant-based meat doesn’t change the fact that the kind of meal fast-food purveyors promotes is ultimately rooted in exploitation, causing harm to the environment and the people that consume it regularly (considering the potentially addictive qualities of fast food, it is no surprise that, despite the popular belief that mostly poor people eat junk, all social classes are equally affected).

[image error]

Vegans care about more than the exploitation of animals; in fact, I would wager, all forms of exploitation are linked in some way (materially or ideologically). As such, eating an Impossible Whopper, as opposed to a regular meat burger, can be considered more ethical, but it is not nearly ethical enough according to the original definition of veganism, which includes “the benefit of humans, animals and the environment.” The fast-food meal experience appeals to the lowest common denominator, which, from rich to poor, we are all susceptible to.

Turning to veganism involves a process of reflection about where the contents of our meals came from. Veganism is based on thinking about food: the ingredients and who was involved in putting it together and harvesting the ingredients, and so on. In other words, there can be no veganism without active thought (hence the “philosophy” part of the definition of veganism). And it is for this reason that veganism and fast food—and here I’m not thinking only about actual food but also the food we “consume” on social media—are diametrically opposite each other.

As technology has made it possible to offer plant-based food products that resemble the “real” thing so closely, it is essential that we re-examine and devote ourselves to the radical meaning of veganism, as laid out by Watson and The Vegan Society in the 1940s. And I want you to consider the following questions: Can’t we find a better use for plant life than making it into yet another high-caloric burger? Why are vegan food producers stuck on imitating meat? From a pragmatic point of view, the availability of meat alternatives can help ease the transition from a meat-based diet to a plant-based one. Additionally, there is pleasure in novelty: After years of not partaking in fast food, I would also be curious to try an Impossible Whopper.

We shouldn’t forget, however, that capitalism thrives on novelty. Without the occasional (in some industries, like fashion, daily) appearance of new products, the system of capitalism would start to slow down, to grow stale, producing less profit. The mainstreaming of veganism thus feeds more than hungry fast-food patrons; it feeds capitalism itself.

Veganism isn’t about perfection; chasing purity isn’t the point. The point, rather, is to think about the kind of veganism we want to see going forward. Food trends come and go, after all. To ensure that veganism remains sustainable, we should therefore support the companies that were around before mainstream veganism appeared. But, more to the point, if we lose touch with the roots of veganism, we can never hope to fulfil its radical promise of creating a better world for all creatures.

Tactile nourishment

Last week I visited The Sudaji Weaving Project, which is an artisan collective of weavers in the small Sudaji village close to Singaraja in Northern Bali.

Around fifteen women from Sudaji and the surrounding villages work there creating sarongs and fabrics in traditional Balinese patterns from cotton and silk.

The weaving collective was shimmering with beautiful colours and patterns and fabrics and yarns that were just “asking” to be touched. And, once again, like in my previous visits to artisan collaboratives it hit me how deeply nourishing handcrafted products are.

[image error]Traditional pattern made from indigo blue organic cotton.

The women are allowed to bring their children to the weaving collective, which enables them to work and earn their own income. The children are between one and ten years old, and whilst the smallest ones are breastfed and pampered when needed, the bigger ones seem to have a wonderful companionship and a lot of fun.

Yet, juggling between work and childcare must definitely at times be challenging for the weavers, especially since some of the pattern designs are very complex and require concentration.

[image error]One of the women at the weaving collective juggling between work and childcare. 
[image error]This little girl is taking a nap next to her mother’s loom after being breastfed. 

In many parts of the world, traditional crafts-traditions are endangered. They are threatened due to the societal and cultural development, aesthetic challenges (which I will return to in a later post), and particularly due to the fact that they cannot keep up with the industrial evolution.

When working with handcrafted textiles, competing with the automated, machine-made textile and fashion industry that can imitate anything from handwoven fabrics to bobbin lace details is next to impossible. How is it possible to convince a consumer to buy garments, which rightfully (due to the amount of time and the skills used to create them) cost at least five times as much as pieces that resembles them? Well, it most certainly requires insight into the immense burden that fast fashion puts on our natural resources as well as on cultural heritages and human work conditions. But perhaps most importantly it requires an understanding that buying and using a piece of mass-produced clothing deprives us of an important kind of nourishment. Because, something is most definitely lost in the equation that favours a cheap machine-made product in comparison to a slowly crafted one: the aesthetic, tactile nourishment that a thoroughly crafted piece of garment is “charged with” cannot be fully imitated by a machine – and neither can the bond between be creator and the user, which is established through the product. 

However, this kind of understanding and insight does not come out of nothing. The consumer, or the user, must be informed and empowered to make a difference. And that requires a very special cocktail consisting of a mix of storytelling and a shift in the current consensus on what luxury is (i.e. simply put: does luxury mean buying lots of new items on a regular basis, or buying very few things and using and wearing them often and with pride, even when the wear-and-tear starts to show?).

[image error]It takes up to three months to create a sarong with a pattern as detailed as this one. The products created at the Sudaj Weavery are currently only sold in the small shop attached to the workshop. 

In my book Aesthetic Sustainability I discuss a concept that I call designing the temporal object.

Designing objects with temporality in mind can be a way of creating an emotional bond between an object and the user, and hence establishing the potential for durability. When an object becomes a container of time (and thus physical, material, or concrete stories) it is charged with emotional and tactile value, which makes it more than just a thing.

A way of charging a design object with time is to implement the time of creation or to make visible the design process in the object. In my book I have named this method the time of becoming. This way of charging time into a product is an important way of generating value based on a connection between the product and the user. 

The story about the time of creation can appear as verbal and visual storytelling, focusing on the process, methods or techniques that have been used in the design process, or it can be told by implementing concrete traces of the process into the finished product.

By emphasizing the time of becoming the hands behind the product almost become visible, and hence a closeness between the creator and the receiver is established.

Having the time of becoming manifest as visible or tactile traces in the object can also be a way of avoiding that the object will seem too “polished,” and hence disinvitining use. In the case of polished objects, normal use tends to leave unflattering signs of wear-and-tear very quickly. But the wear-and-tear of object surfaces that have been designed to be touched and used can easily make the object appear more beautiful, more interesting, or more attractive. Furthermore, this form of wear adds a continuous sense of renewal to the object that can help maintaining a strong bond between the product and its owner, and thus encourage sustainable behaviour.

[image error]The hands behind a product leave their visible or invisible mark behind.
[image error]The Sudaji Weaving Project uses naturally dyed cotton from Tarum Bali. 
[image error]More examples of the beautiful naturally dyed cotton.
[image error]A little girl staying close to her mother.
[image error]Some of the beautiful, cheeky children at the artisan collective.
[image error]These children followed us around everywhere when I visited The Sudaji Weaving Project together with my beloved friend and colleague La Femme Rousse from Copenhagen. Sustainable fashion designer Susanne Guldager who is behind La Femme Rousse is planning on a collaboration with the weavers using some of their fabrics in her designs. I am excited to follow, document and mediate the process.

My dear friend Putu Shelly from OmUnity Bali has been engaged in the empowerment of the women from Sudaji and the surrounding villages since 2014. Putu is currently in the process of raising money for more looms as well as establishing a weaving program in order to teach more local women how to weave, and thus sustain the crafts-tradition and the traditional patterns.

Together with Putu I will help the women reach a larger audience, which will hopefully aid them selling more of their beautiful handcrafted products. The goal is to enable the managers of the Sudaji Weaving Project Pak Made Radjin and Ibu Endang to educate and employ more local women.

The first step in this process is creating a website for the weavers and assisting them in designing some beautiful, simple garments. Stay tuned!

Resilient living

It’s been a while since my last post – but I have quite a few posts lined up, so expect more immaterialist action in the approaching weeks!

In today’s post I will reflect on the term slow living, as I am currently in the process of writing about slowing down in my upcoming book on anti-trendy living.

[image error]Slowing down at Suara Glamping in West Bali 

Slowing down probably sounds appealing to most hard-working, busy, diligent people in post-industrial societies. Due hereto silent retreats, off-grid resorts, slow food restaurants, and traditional crafts workshops seem to be popping up everywhere in order to meet the rising need of nourishing, luxury, hands-on slow experiences.

However, letting slowness into one’s daily life is slightly harder than spending an evening, an afternoon, a couple of days or a week on slowing down one’s senses and mind. Letting slowness into one’s everyday life means allowing for moments of non-activity or even boredom to enter, and it is often linked to the celebration of slow everyday activities; like making one’s bed, cooking, washing the dishes etc. Not all slow activities are as instantly nourishing (spiritually or tactilely) as engaging in group meditations or learning traditional embroidery techniques.

Slow living is not necessarily Instagram-material. It is the antidote to a “life in the fast lane”.

[image error]Natural dye batik workshop at Threads of Life Bali. Tactile presence for a day.

Slowness is often intertwined with simple living. Slowing down hence encompasses simplifying things in order get out of the “hamster wheel” of a typical stressful city life, in which a satisfying work-life balance seems next to impossible. Perhaps the act of simplifying involves downscaling as well; limiting expenses and consumption can be the key to regaining control of one’s time, since it tends to allow for less work and more spare time.

In my opinion, simple living is a thought-provoking term though: the word simple can be synonymous to dreary adjectives like down-to-earth and ordinary, and even to naïve and gullible, which are typically not meant as flattering characteristics. Hence, living simply could indicate that one lives an average, ordinary life without any excitement – or even that one is unadventurous or a stay-at-home kind of person that doesn’t engage in much. The passion that de Beauvoir so eloquently links to the authentic life seems absent.

Terms connoting the wrong associations is a common problem in relation to sustainable living-tendencies like simple living, slow living or downscaling. Living a mundane, simple, routine-based life just doesn’t sound very sexy. Who wants to be the unadventurous person that never goes anywhere and finds pleasure in simple, slow activities like washing the dishes or making the bed?

The communication on sustainable living and sustainable products could generally benefit from being “jazzed up” a little. Simple, slow, sustainable living must connote another range of adjectives in order to have more clout. We need more stories and examples of simple, sustainable living connoting balance, freedom to do whatever one is passionate about, non-complicated human relations, communal engagement, humbleness, nurturing nature experiences, tactile nourishment, activism, and playfulness — rather than stories on women choosing stay-at-home parenting, families detaching from society and prohibiting any kind of “screen-based” activities, or the glorification of leavened bread.

The majority of the stories currently attached to simple living are too fictitious or inauthentic to be resilient. They might seem appealing, when browsing through them on Instagram, whilst eating a quick lunch in between a busy day’s endless meetings, but they are like a broken record; repeating the same unstimulating scenarios over and over again.

[image error]Symon’s Art Zoo, North Bali. Simple living in the shape of a sanctuary for creative expression. 

Sustainable, simple living should be synonymous with resilience. There is nothing healthy or resilient about the occasional “sugar-rush” in the shape of consumer-ventures or luxury holidays (needed to survive one’s stressful, busy daily life). I would even go as far as to rename the sustainable way of life known as slow living or simple living resilient living.

The majority of the connotations currently linked to simple living are too dreary and too monotonous to be resilient. As previously mentioned (in relation to skipping the term consumption in favour of usage); when seeking to change the status quo linked to an unfortunate pattern (personal or societal) or to limiting norms, or perhaps in relation to a well-meant and timely new tendency that doesn’t seem to catch the crowds, the words we make use of are of great importance. Resilience connotes robustness, flexibility, adaptability and strength, which are much more convincing and suggestive terms than those linked to simple living.

Being resilient involves finding the golden mean in the Aristotelian sense of the term between too much and too little. Living simply and resiliently does not mean living in asceticism, as does it of course not involve decadence.

[image error]Beautiful ceramics by Eclipse Pottery, Ubud. Objects can invite to nourishing repetitions

Resilient living involves repetition, or rather; it involves finding pleasure in repetition. However, nourishing repetitions are not draining and wearisome. Resilient living is not an ode to dishwashing! Resilient repetitions are e.g. linked to the usage of aesthetically nourishing objects, to the celebration of the rhythms of nature, to steadily refining a skill, to the pleasure of slow creation (and the appreciation of slowly created objects), to creating rituals with friends and family, and to finding a stimulating work-life balance.

Rewilding

I recently stumbled upon a term that I had never heard before: rewilding. I was watching the TED Talk by British writer and activist George Monbiot, who in this talk tells about his devotion to the term, and I was immediately captivated.

When you look up rewilding the definition goes somewhat like this: rewilding means to restore an area of land to its natural uncultivated state, or to a wild state.

But perhaps rewilding can also concern nurturing an uncultivated side of human nature? I will get back to this, but firstly, let’s take a look at the way Monbiot explains the concept of rewilding in his talk.

Monbiot initiates his explanation of rewilding by talking about the effects of the 1995 reintroduction of wolves in the Yellowstone National Park in the US. The park was suffering from the increased number of deer, because there were no animals to hunt them, and as a result a large part of the diverse vegetation had been reduced. When the wolves were reintroduced at first, as intended, they of course started killing some of the deer in the park.

But importantly; something else slowly started happening as well. As the deer were hunted by the wolfs, they moved away from the valleys where they were vulnerable and could easily get caught, which resulted in the bare valleys quickly turning into forests with a great diversity of trees and other plants. And because hereof, birds started to move in, and the numbers of beavers started to increase, and the dams the beavers build in the valleys created habitats for otters, muskrats, ducks, fish, and reptiles.

The wolves also kept the population of coyotes down, which resulted in the number of rabbits and mice increasing — and that meant more hawks, foxes and badgers. Furthermore, the bear population began to rise; probably because of the berries on all the trees that were growing in the valleys.

On top hereof, the wolves changed the behaviour of the rivers. More pools were formed, more narrow streams were made; all of which is great for wildlife. The reason for the changes was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks of the rivers, and hence mudslides were limited.

Conclusively, the small number of wolves that were reintroduced to the park not only transformed its ecosystem radically; they also changed its physical geography. They reversed it to a natural state, which allows for the diversity necessary in order to foster resilience.

The wolf-story highlights an important point: Making everything and everyone homogeneous is not a resilient, sustainable way of life. Allowing for and fostering diversity on the other hand is!

[image error]Glamping in Yellowstone Park, Montana, July 2017

In Denmark, where I am from, wolves (that have been extinct for a very long time) were recently seen in the countryside of the Mid and North-Western part of the country. And a lot of residents felt really scared. Even though the number of wolves spotted was extremely low (we are talking somewhere between five and ten), and despite the fact that in Denmark’s neighbouring country Germany wolves have lived freely since 2000 without any registered attacks on humans, people were concerned. The wolf-discussion filled up the news for a while, and there were stories of sheep being eaten by wolfs during the night etc. For and against wolf-groups arose, and families in the areas where the wolfs were spotted were afraid to let their children play outside and of walking their dogs. Hence, in June 2018 it became legal in Denmark to shoot down wolves that were considered a problem. The problematic wolves were defined like this: 1. wolves that are not naturally aversive near people, 2. wolves that prey on farm animals, 3. wolves that attack dogs, and 4. wolves that are dangerous to humans.

Obviously it is uncomfortable to feel threatened. And particularly to feel that your children could be in danger. However, wolfs and other wild carnivores and humans have lived side by side for centuries, and the wolf is an original part of not only the Danish, but the European nature. And, as the Danish Nature Association points out; wolves are natural foresters (as also demonstrated in the Yellowstone Park example), and they fill out a void in the Danish nature, which hasn’t contained large predators for over 200 years. Furthermore, the wolf is an endangered species.

Rewilding involves bringing back some of the missing plants and animals to a region – and then stepping back and allowing for nature to develop its diverse magnificence. It is a way of helping nature finding its own way.

[image error]The vast, windswept part of Mid-West Denmark

Another dimension of the concept of rewilding that deeply fascinates and resonates with me is the idea of rewilding human nature and human life.

In Monbiot’s TED talk he starts of by talking about how he as a young man spend six years of “wild adventure” in the tropics, and how he, after returning to England found himself ecologically bored — and quickly longing for a richer and rawer life.

Ecologically bored? What does that mean? Or rather, what does it include? When I think of this term, I think of the dullness of experiencing only one, homogenous, tame kind of nature. But being ecologically bored also means that our instincts are dormant and sedated. In our late-modern, capitalistic reality there is no use for natural instincts and intuitive hunches; rather, being able to make rational choices and act in a cultivated, normal, civilised manner is celebrated.

Rewilding one’s life does not (necessarily) mean moving out into the woods to engage in an offline and off-grid lifestyle a la Thoreau. Rewilding is a mindset! And it is closely connected to freedom. Not freedom in the way we usually think of it, as Monbiot rightfully points out in this column: i.e. freedom to develop ones business, to carry guns, to say whatever we want, or to believe in whatever or whoever we want. No, the wild kind of freedom is related to our inner wildness; to listening to our intuition, our instincts, and to going against the societal and cultural norms if necessary.

In this article by Positive News’ Lucy Purdy the following questions in relation to rewilding human nature are raised:

“Just as ecological rewilding succeeds by letting nature do what it is designed to do, could we take the same approach towards ourselves? What would happen if we were more aware of and driven by our own dynamic processes?”

Purdy suggests that we perhaps (just as nature) are tamed and restricted; limited and held down by should-do’s and cultural norms. That we too are becoming uniform and monocultural. That diversity is disappearing – and that that is not a resilient, sustainable way of life.

There is something very Michel Foucault (1926-1984) about this notion. In his seminal work Discipline and Punish from 1975 he argues that modern society is the most efficient “prison” that has ever existed. It doesn’t even need prison guards! Its rules and restrictions are stored in each of us, as well as exercised by each of us. Just like in an actual prison the modern social prison disciplines and forms us into good employees, good consumers, good neighbours, good students, good friends etc. And on top of this we are constantly told through tv-programs, magazines and social media what our bodies should look like, what beauty is, what our homes should look like (and how we should tidy them up), what we should eat, what we can and cannot say etc. etc. No prison can make people do what they willingly do to themselves in our modern social prison.

We have created a world in which we are under constant surveillance by ourselves and others; a world in which we seek to meet societal expectations on everything from what we should look like to where we should go on holiday.

As Monbiot says in the previously mentioned column:

“We entertain the illusion that we have chosen our lives. Why, if this is the case, do our apparent choices differ so little from those of other people? Why do we live and work and travel and eat and dress and entertain ourselves in almost identical fashion?”

I plan to return to Foucault and the “modern prison” (which by the way has become even more efficient since Foucault wrote his book in the 70’s) in future posts, as I am currently writing about his thoughts in my forthcoming book on Anti-trend. And, I recommend highly the podcast Philosophize this! for a more thorough – and very entertaining – introduction to Foucault.

[image error]The Kindergarten at Green School Bali is packed with evidence of the children’s wild explorations of nature

The longing for rawness, for a rawer life that Monbiot mentions in his TED talk makes me think of our current smooth, friction-less reality. A lack of tactile stimuli characterises our late-modern cityscapes and work spaces. Or rather, a lack of anything that can “endanger” our safe, smooth comfort zones. We shelter ourselves from natural temperatures through air conditioning, we only experience cultivated nature, we celebrate convenience, and we allow for our senses to be tamed and sedated by the smooth surfaces of endless tablets, smartphones and computer screens.

But something is lost in this equation. We have become alienated from the natural world. And when you don’t feel connected to nature, you are, simply put, less inclined to take care of it – and perhaps also more inclined to feel that nature poses a threat (apropos the Danish wolf-story).

[image error]Everyday I find myself nurtured by the tactility of these natural, odd-shaped rocks that are laid out on the paths in our garden. I love how rough and uneven they are – and how they store the heath from the sun, and hence feel warm in the evening and slightly cooler in the morning. They are anti-smooth and asymmetrical, and as such; aesthetically pleasing.

My friends and family in Denmark often ask me how I can live with the presence of huge spiders and other oversized insects, scorpions, snakes and big bats — not to mention wild dogs, the threat of mosquito borne diseases, and the sudden heavy tropical thunderstorms. The truth is that besides the street dogs, by whom I have felt threatened a few times (but am now finding my way to cope with), I don’t give it much thought. And, the truth is also that I kind of like the wildness and the rawness of this place.

Living in a state of fear and worry is something that you choose. And, as it is with choices; you can also choose not to.

[image error]My youngest son’s wonder book. This morning he found a big dead spider and was thrilled to add it to his treasures (despite the fact that it lost a couple of legs in the process).

Homeliness 2.0: lightening fields and street dogs

In my previous post, I promised that I would continue my homeliness-chatter. So, here we go.

What does it mean to feel at home? As written earlier, “mastering” one’s surroundings is an important part of feeling at home. If everything you do, and everywhere you go involves insecurity and being in “survival mode”, you might feel intensely alive and alert, but not at home. I experienced this on a first-hand basis last week, when I was riding happily home from the Green School through the jungle on my bicycle. Suddenly two big, very loudly barking dogs came running furiously towards me. I totally panicked, and started riding as fast as I could, only to experience the dogs following me, trying to snap at my feet. When I finally shook them off, my heart was pounding and my hands shaking. I surely felt alive, but most certainly not at home.

Such experiences remind me that I am still not in a place, where I am fully in control of my surroundings or feel 100% comfortable.

[image error]My eldest son walking down the path that leads to our house. Most of the time, it is calm and beautiful.

By the above anecdote of me fleeing ferocious street dogs through the jungle on my bicycle, I am not suggesting that full control and being familiar with everything in your environment is a precondition for feeling at home. Not at all.

And this notion actually reminds me a lot of the sublime aesthetic experience, which I have previously touched upon.

Having a sublime experience involves being shaken up and challenged, but it doesn’t include feeling threatened. In the English philosopher Edmund Burke’s important treatise on the division between the beautiful and the sublime from 1757, Burke encourages the reader to picture a wanderer climbing a steep mountainside, in order to explain the sublime aesthetic experience. After a while, the wanderer reaches the top, and he is met by a breathtaking view. But suddenly, dark, threatening clouds appear on the horizon. The wanderer seeks refuge in a rock-side cave, from which he can safely observe the scene unfolding outside. And so the storm hits. Rain, hail, and lighting erupt from the sky. The wanderer senses danger. The situation is overwhelming and sensuously intense. But, at once, the threat seems to dissipate, as the wanderer realises that he is not really in any physical danger; he is sheltered by the cave, and the storm will eventually pass. Instead of being alarmed, the wanderer is now able to experience the power of nature as fascinating. And he feels a great sense of relief and calmness. His senses, which only moments ago were in a state of high alert, are beginning to pleasantly intensify, and he feels alive and present.

There is one thing that is very important to notice when reading this anecdote (as opposed to my cycling-like-mad-through-the-jungle story); the sublime aesthetic experience involves intensified senses, challenges and even being forcefully pulled out of one’s comfort zone, but it doesn’t involve danger nor a feeling of being genuinely threatened. 

A similar way of explaining the sublime aesthetic experience, although through art, can be found in American artist Walter de Maria (1935-2013) amazing piece of Land Art “The Lightning field”. The artwork is located in the desert in New Mexico, in an area known for its forceful thunderstorms. It consists of 400 stainless steel poles set up in a grid-like pattern on a vast, empty plateau. Due to the height of the poles they attract lightening strikes, and hence intensify the already powerful storms in the area. In order to experience the artwork you travel with a small group of spectators to the remote area, and are protected by the safety of the vehicle or an onsite shelter, as the natural spectacle unfolds.

The distance, which is created between the viewer and the object in “The Lightening Field” is a crucial part of the aesthetic experience. Not because aesthetic experiences involves beautifying alienation, but because the aesthetic distance to extreme, challenging, thought-provoking experiences is needed in order for us to experience them as meaningful. And, in order to allow for them to alter our world-perspective, shake us up, challenge our assumptions, or whatever they are meant to do.

[image error]This is the jungle that surrounds our house. I love standing outside our house in the evening, when the sun sets and the cicadas scream; the experience is sublime. It is a perfect sensuous cocktail of warmth, comfort and unfamiliar sounds and scents.