I salvage "waste" building materials and build home furniture and crafts, such as this picture frame, out of it. One of the beauties of the craft is in saving perfectly good materials from the landfill where it would become the next generation's problem. On a walk today, I saw this scene(picture) at a new development in our neighborhood. The typical building process is so wasteful, it makes my heart heavy to think about. At large scale "cookie-cutter" development, there is no room for mindfulness of resources. Waste is just factored into the cost of business. Whats worse is that new construction uses such crappy materials that not much of it is even worth salvaging. Most of my salvage comes from remodels and rebuilds. In these cases they are removing good, sturdy older wood and replacing it with laminates(particle board), flimsy aluminum and plastics.
This craft is one of symbolic beauty more than anything, and it is very satisfying. It is tough to want to build ones livelihood from it since it would be necessary that our building practices stay the same, not to mention it is logistically tough. Financially it wouldn't necessarily be impossible if one found their niche among the population that could afford to purchase it. But again, this would also assume the status quo in building would remain, else you'd be out of a job.

This doesn't change the fact that I still want to make a life out of building things with my own creative method and reclaimed wood. So in this vision of a life as a craftsman, I look at it from the root of the problem and see a solution in developing craft/local economy in general. And I find the answer in a different way to redesign and rebuild our houses as one of it's foundational principles.
My secret passion is Passive Solar Design. From accessories like solar slow cookers, to houses, I enjoy the forms that follow the function and hope one day to help build infrastructure that aligns with and harnesses the energy that the sun rains down on us everyday. Until we do this at the foundation of our society, we will always be using energy(fossil fuels) that is stored from a different time and is finite in a short-term sense. The sun too will one day run out, a finite source in the long-term. But humans could peacefully live with the sun's energy for millions, perhaps billions of years. It would not limit us to the scope of 50-100 years that our experts predict in our current mode of powering our society. And fuck nuclear all together, it's dirty. Period.
Above all the usual arguments for or against >insert power source here<, I rise and point out that passive solar is more than just a opportunity to run most of our society on today's energy. Passive Solar Design is at most an opportunity to completely rearrange the way we learn, work, and live all at the same time. Reading on requires that you have some sense that we already find ourselves in a position that needs to choose between two roads at a fork in our present reality. Even if you don't, please give me a moment to explain my thinking. If not,

peace.

The key to passive solar design is aligning a structure to the sun's path maximizing solar gain in the winter and minimizing it in the summer. Now, take any suburban development of which the houses are not oriented to the sun to maximize passive solar principles, and we have an infinite diversity of design/rebuild solutions ready to work on. This could be a craftsman/apprentice realm. The materials in the structure would be mindfully removed, re-purposed, and rebuilt into a new form where possible, each case a unique opportunity to express creativity while setting a new example for the coming generation to build structures that we don't just throw away when they begin to fail for lack of care in the first place.
All the good legislation and top down laws promoting a "greener" future are great steps, but can only take us so far. Ultimately the change must come from the individual's direct understanding of and willful participation in a different way. Small scale passive solar structures are intimately human scaled examples of living in accordance with the rhythms of the earth. If each city in the U.S. had a dozen of these examples at first, I think people would quickly begin to imagine a different life style; one that is healthier and connects us to the earth and each other.

Outsider Insight

The following is a quote from a Yahi Native American named Ishi who is well known to be the last remaining "wild" Indian we have record of. He wandered into a gold rush town in northern California in 1911. He was the last one remaining of his people after being wiped out during the white man's relentless pursuit of "the shiny rocks". He lived with an anthropologist who befriended him at a museum in San Francisco until his death in 1916. After decades of observing and living hidden from them, then later living amongst them, he had this to say about the "saldu"; white man.

The saldu gods and saldu heroes are beyond the understanding of a Yahi. They are clever...they give their people wheels, quick-fire, and the strong iron and steel for making tools; they give them many, many good things... but it seems to me that they do not much care that their people should be wise. They seem not to have set a way-- a clear Way-- for the saldu to follow.

back to the future

Aligning human society with the earth's sun is not a new concept. Before the industrial era of the energy-dense fossil fuel powered freedom we are currently questioning, humans knew no other way. Just about every culture on earth exhibited some understanding of aligning their structures to the sun's path. A great document of this is a book called Shelter. So it seems, we have only to rediscover our way, choosing the path at the fork that rejoins our past and heads into a long future.