The Environmental Craftsfolk

Experiencing Alienation

Much of this section focuses on ideas from Steven Vogel’s book Thinking like a Mall. Vogel argues that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether – and instead, spoke about the "environment” - namely, the ones we build, the ones we inhabit, the ones that are all around us. The argument against nature is a complex one, but what is important to know is that Nature, despite being the center of environmental thinking, turns out to be counterproductive, a thing whose end has always already taken place, and an outdate philosophical paradigm for Vogel. And so, we should instead focus on the built world around us.  

We build the world, not through our ideas or conceptualizations, but through our material practices. The environment in this context, is “that which environs us” - not only our physical surroundings, but the social, cultural, and economic contexts that shape our material practices. The issue is that we fail to “recognize the humanness” in the objects we have created (72). This, Vogel contends, is the state of alienation – our failure to recognize the builtness of the world we inhabit.  

It is the state of alienation that I wish to connect to the broad discussion of craft. Vogel views alienation through a Marxist lens. 

First, capitalist conditions have generated a system in which objects produced by laborers are handed off, and the value becomes co-opted by the owner – this produces an effect where the worker “loses” the objects. This severance of our practices from our creations has produced a façade where we see the built objects of our world as “ordinary, external, nonhuman, permanent, and above all given” (86). The abstraction of subject from object has led to an endeavor of trying to “know” nature- but since we are the creators of the world, there is nothing beyond the surface of our objects that we can truly know – there is no nature, and so, we become alienated from our environs.  

But this effect is not limited to workers in factories. No one person produces the world in isolation – a worker’s practice may occur privately, but the production of objects is almost always for public consumption. Labor is “always implicitly social labor = socially organized, and oriented towards social goals” (75). Our environment is created, supported, and littered with objects produced by humans to fit their needs, yet we do not experience them as such. They are viewed as if “they had simply come into existence” (85).  

The problem is twofold: first, complex manufacturing systems, including resource gathering, item production, distribution, are obscured from the consumer. Sure now, one doesn’t need to look hard to understand where and how items are produced, but such a glimpse only provides a vague sense of how things are truly manufactured. Resource wars rage, lands have become decimated, slave labor continues, and so on – yet the stuff we are engulfed in doesn’t resemble such a story. The genesis of objects has become estranged from the consumer – appearing disconnected and removed. The second issue is that people are making less things – manufacturing employment has declined. Where objects were once created by human hands, machinery has now been replaced. It is likely that this table is machine-made, not man-made. 

Loss of Craft and Alienation

According to Alexander Langland, this shift in production has led to a loss of knowledge – chiefly, we have lost the knowledge of craeft. Craeft, for Langland, embodies the “power, the force, the knowledge, and the wisdom behind making” - technological advancements have distanced us from the identity of Homo faber. As craftsmanship diminished, so did our kinesthetic sensibility, physical adeptness, and the capacity to critically think through material mediums. This loss of identity goes hand in hand with vogel’s argument of alienation – by becoming estranged from the built environment AND the act of making, we neglect the imperative to address the practices that shape our surroundings. 

Focused on remedying the loss of these fundamental connections, my CEP works to address issues of alienation by reclaiming the power of craft. I advocate for a return to the principles of craeft. Regaining the knowledge of craft requires us to return to this identity – essentially, seize the means of production. If the issue of alienation is one of material loss, then the solution to this problem is a return to material practices – craft.

Crafts do not ask much of us; all it requires is a commitment to molding, stitching, cutting, and shaping materials with our bodies. If done right, craft can serve as a reminder that humanity has always lived in a world of making – it defines us, fulfills a fundamental need, contributes to our well-being, and makes us better.  

Henry David Thoreau and Time

I wish to speak briefly about the themes of time and reality that emerge in Henry David Thoreau’s seminal work, Walden. In Walden, Thoreau underscores the significance of how we spend our time. Time, as we conventionally know it to be, is transitory – at once the present becomes the past, and what was once the future becomes our immediate reality. Consequently, our lives become elusive. Memories serve as echoes of the past, and indicators of time propel us toward the future – Thoreau believes we often spend our time in this mechanized state of forward, habituating our lives around routine interactions and temporal markers.  

Amidst the relentless passage of time, we often overlook the depth and the beauty of the present moment.  

Thoreau asks, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” - In many ways, Walden offers a critique of labor, albeit differently from Vogel/Marxist’s critique. Thoreau believed workers were living “lives of quiet desperation” (7) - our apprehension of time has become caged by the industrial hum of laborers slogging away – what was once guided by the natural cadence of the rising and setting sun, the crowing of a chanticleer, has now been encamped into regimented schedules of factories and offices. This understanding of time has become given – in Vogelian fashion, we have become alienated from our conception of time. Thoreau tries to steer his readers away from this problematic understanding of time. He wishes us to not view days as “days of the week,” nor, “minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock” (109) - rather, we wish for us to spend our days as “deliberately as Nature.”  

“If the engines whistle, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pain...Let us settle ourselves, an work and wedge our feet downward... till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality” (95). Thoreau challenges the reader to seize the immediacy of the present, wherein reality resides. His answer to the rhythms of economic life is to break loose from the cage of capitalism. For Thoreau, reaching the present moment takes place in the natural world, surrounded by natural things, through deliberate living. This advice is under the guise of transcendentalism. These sorts of things, it would appear, cannot take place in a conventional, “artificial” environment. 

Here, I will consider Thoreau’s ideas of time and reality in relation to my CEP. First, considering Vogel’s arguments against nature, and the empirical claim that nature has reached its end due to the ubiquitousness of human presence across Earth – Thoreau's ideas might be perceived as outdated. Access to nature also remains limited for many – both physically and mentally. With a majority of the world’s population now residing in urban areas, a spatial disparity is present, making it more accessible for some to reach natural landscapes than other. Additionally, participating in such trips often requires financial resources. On top of this, wilderness areas might be conceptually inaccessible for certain people or populations – Johnson and Bowker in “African American Wildland Memories” discuss how black Americans maintain an ambiguous relationship with wildlands as a response to the legacy of slavery. Another example includes the displacement and erasure of Indigenous people from their ancestral lands.  

To return to nature as the sole means of connecting with reality overlooks the experiences and barriers faced by marginalized communities. But I contend that there are alternative avenues, aside from transcendentalism through which individuals can engage with the reality of our world. I maintain Thoreau’s emphasis on the present moment – but I diverge in the medium – As I have argued, and will continue to advocate in the following section, is that craft serves this function. The practice of craft both grounds us in the present moment and connects us to reality through material engagement. It is important that we can realize the world we live in, which, as Vogel has argued, is one that we have built. This is our reality, yet we have become estranged from it.

Immersing oneself in the present moment through the activity of craft can lead us to a profound recognition of our reality. 

 Attention, Ethics, and the Environment 

This section will focus on the act of attention – this faculty means different things for different scholars, and through this section it will present itself in different forms. But as an anchor for this exploration, I will refer to attention as a conscious experience in which the agent takes possession of an object with their mind, while simultaneously ignoring several other stimuli. Attention serves as a virtual faculty for human beings, as it directly affects the shape and quality of our lives. Who we are, the decisions we make, and our experience of the world are all predicated on our ability to direct our attention to the things we care about. The issue, however, is that we are always paying attention to something. This means we are also always actively ignoring other things too. When we direct our attention to our phones while walking down the street, we might miss the fact that we’re about to barge into a lamppost.  

How does the issue of attention fit into environmental philosophy? Well, attention is a term seldom explored in environmental philosophy. That said, regarding Vogel’s assertions on alienation, attention emerges as a significant factor. Our detachment from the built world stems from our failure to pay attention to it. Here, alienation might be concerned with both the material conditions and a failure to attend. I largely focus on Iris Murdoch’s framing of attention as a moral activity – what Murdoch provides for this discussion is a different type of alienation that is not antithetical to, or absent from, a Marxist account of alienation.  

Attention as a matter of quality is key. It is not an on or off switch, nor is it merely about noticing or not noticing. There is a world of variation in the quality of attention – we can notice the world in better and worse ways. When we fail to see reality, what we are seeing is a fantasy. What is needed to see clearly is a refinement of our attention. For it is the quality of our attention that works to overcome illusions which separate us from reality.  

Returning to Vogel’s argument, the crux of the matter lies in our failure to recognize the built world as a product of our own doing, and thus, we succumb to the illusion that it has simply come into existence independent of us. Vogel’s idea of alienation is concerned with the abstraction of the product from the maker. What I have argued in the first section is that the physical act of crafting provides an avenue to seize the means of production, effectively unalienating oneself from the built environment. But we are still alienated in a way which Murdoch helps us to see; namely, alienation is a type of fantasy we construct.   

We have physically and socially built our world, but, as Murdoch’s account shows us, recognizing reality is rather difficult because we have a natural inclination towards fantasy fabrication. Let’s use waste as an example. We don’t want to see the waste that is a product of our own doing, so we obscure it from our vision. We hide trash cans in cabinets or in opaque canisters, we wheel our bins of garbage to the street at night, so when we wake up in the morning it is magically gone – the garbage whisked away into some hidden landfill site, shipped in big shipping crates overseas, where we will not encounter it. The garbage – although abstracted from us physically – is still of our creation, and yet, we advert our attention away from it. The object of our creations is plunged into the murky shadows of reality.  

What is needed is not a “seizing of production,” but a reorientation of our vision. This reorientation, however, cannot transpire if we do not attend to the reality of our world – to see it for what it really is, a built environment. As I have argued, Thoreau’s methods for engaging with reality are inadequate for this challenge – and this is where craft emerges as an optimal practice.  

 The Craft of Attention & the Attention of Craft 

Craft, fundamentally, entails a practice of attention, and in its most recognizable form, aligns with what Dorothea Debus terms “full attention” - this type of attention occurs when the subject is solely focused on the object of their attention – they effectively “lose themselves” in this act – and the immersion in the object leads to a “heightened sense of reality, and an increased openness to the object she attends to, and by extension an increased openness to the world” (1179) 

This mirrors the experiences one might encounter when engaging with craft. Consider the pine needle basket that sparked this project. I embarked on a question project on the slopes of Blue Mountain in search of the perfect needles. They needed to be long yet not excessively so, and older, but not so old that they were plagued with decaying fungus and mildew. The prime locations for finding these needles were near recently fallen branches, or trees which retained snow underneath, in which the needles rested delicately on gleaning snow, ready to be plucked. 

Foraging for needles demanded utmost attention; I became engrossed in the pursuit, spending nearly three hours meticulously collecting and safely stashing each needle. I had lost myself. This state persisted throughout the basket-making process. Hours were spent wetting, stitching, and coiling needles to fashion an imperfect vessel with an imperfect lid.  In essence, I had immersed myself in the craft at hand. My attention was wholly anchored in the material reality of these pine needles, from inception to completion. However, the practice of craft had left its mark on me. Through full attention, I discovered aspects of myself that would have otherwise remained hidden. Crafting the pine needle basket not only revealed insights but also transformed my perception of the world. Now, every glance at a Ponderosa Pine prompts an assessment of the scattered needles below. My awareness and appreciation of this environment have been heightened through craft.  

A reorientation had taken place, leaving my vision of the built environment reshaped.  The adage “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” rings true in this context. Discarded items by the roadside spur contemplation for their potential utility. Smooth stones found during walks are repurposed into buttons. I discern value in our material landscape, juxtaposed with the prevailing devaluation. This is the reason why eco-crafts predominately focuses on using materials categorized as waste. The practice of craft, predicated on employing full attention, can open oneself up to reality, and reorient our attention towards the built environment. 

In my CEP writing, I delved further into a Murdochian approach on craft – but I won’t speak about that here. What matters, and what is the most important point that I am trying to make, is that by engaging with tangible materials, in an attentive manner, we not only shape our vision but cultivate different choices and attitudes towards the world we inhabit.

Craft is an activity which speaks to both stories of alienation – it is not just about creating objects but reimagining the objects around us. Engaging with craft brings us nearer to reality through the physical practice itself, and the lessons that are learned.