December - nature’s reliable cycles
Written for and originally published by Homes & Gardens
This time of year always has a cyclical feel. Unless you are a person highly attuned to natural rhythms, time throughout the other seasons moves fast enough that we occasionally forget the rotation we’re in until it catches us; the blossom in Spring or the first leaves falling can draw us sharply back in synchronisation. So as 2020 careers towards 2021 we feel the circle completing and starting again, and although this is a human-made structure, we are resonating with the non-human world as it begins to recommence growth (in the Northern hemisphere, anyway).
Nature’s reliable cycles are fundamental to its function. Aside from seasonal change, closed loops exist in how nature gives and recycles nutrients, carbon, water and - relevant to humans - materials. Wood, my beloved and dearest material, is a wonderfully simple example of this; the trees grow by absorbing carbon, turning it into woody material, then they fall or are felled and that carbon is released through decay, becoming both soil and atmospheric carbon again. All of the matter during this growth and death is not just dealt with, it is the foundations of other interconnected life elsewhere, like fungi or microorganisms, mammals, insects and birds. It’s such a humblingly sophisticated process, we are privileged to be able to use the woody biomass as a material for our homes.
Contrast that system with how we humans extract and process fossil, mineral or even biomass materials and we look like total amateurs, or worse, destructive fools. It still astonishes me that after more than a century of using manmade polymers we still do not have systems in place to correctly recycle them. ‘Not yet recycled’ is still unapologetically written on much of our packaging in the year two thousand and twenty. If we can extract and refine minerals and polymers, then it’s entirely possible to reform those materials without any further extraction. The post-use systems haven’t been created properly yet, which I find unacceptable. We must move from a linear take-make-waste system to a circular one; a friend of mine adds refuse as the starting word of the well-known phrase reduce-reuse-recycle. And he’s right. The developed world drives the over-consumption of resources, and Christmas sees our peak consumption, so we must restrain by refusing as a first action, opting for recycling last.
Top of my Christmas list this year is a recent book which optimistically tackles this subject - Wasted by Katie Treggiden. She profiles designers who are fixing our broken material systems by making waste their primary resource - much as the natural world does.
I always believe mother nature holds answers for how we can better live, centre to her operation are cycles which have no waste. No matter how sophisticated or modern we think we are, we won’t have reach modernity until we have developed wasteless circular systems, closing loops and acting like we are a part of this planet again. I believe this modernity is in reach, so as we recommence our annual cycle we must make circularity our determined priority.