‘Regenerative’ is word that is cropping up more lately. Yes, despite our lives becoming more tech-filled by the day, it seems there’s a band of people who hanker after the ‘stuff’ in their lives to be made of more natural materials; less corporate, branded and remote. Is this you too? I’ve thought much about regenerative farming. I’ve written about this in my first book (Eat Like Your Ancestors), and about regenerative fashion in a blog post. But, I believe we can think ‘regenerative’ in a broader way, bringing the wider world of regenerative goods into the story.
I’m a compulsive crafter, who’s main love is textile crafts; always happy handling fibres, yarn and fabric. But even so, I’m becoming aware of many kinds of goods which we can produce while still allowing wildlife, soils, air and water room to constantly renew. And, our local economies to revive.
We’re adaptable, resourceful people. We have a rich history of tapping into the diverse material world all around us, to produce the substance on which our lives depend. No computer chips needed.
We clothe ourselves and carry stuff around. Then too, we store it in jars, cases, baskets and bags, and walk on flooring, wearing shoes and boots. We decorate ourselves with jewellery, or our houses with paintings and ornaments. Though we might not think of jewellery and paintings as being ‘essential’, they make us happy, and are part of our identity. We could say then, as they’re an important part of our lives, they really are essential.
Traditional but Evergreen
We only have to look back to the past to see how much we’ve made from our diverse, natural material world. If you’re not used to delving into history, where can that realisation come from? Maybe from raiding an old leather suitcase, a pure linen table cloth (or bed linen) from a dusty attic. You might catch sight of a photo in a magazine article. Someone is lifting the remnants of an ancient artefact out of the sodden mud of a prehistoric farmstead, under excavation. It’s a useful wickerwork basket, or fragments of cloth. Crafters of today might even spot recognisable methods used in their construction.
As I work in archaeology myself, I see daily the diversity of useful fabric of life that can come from natural resources; whether that be plant, animal or mineral. And, that harvesting of living materials can still allow their renewal, with wildlife living alongside. Plant fibres like flax and hemp, wool, leather, wood, wattle, and withies, live on. They can be found in the next generation of field crops, animals, trees and marsh. I focus, here on organic materials, as they have capacity for renewal.
Regenerative Goods and Rewilding
Words in use change, and as one word or term becomes hackneyed, another replaces it. We’re hearing the words ‘regenerative’ and ‘rewilding’ more, as they naturally go together, so for now I’ll use these words.
But, when it comes to rewilding, not everyone thinks alike. ‘Rewilders’ exist on a spectrum. At one end of the scale, they may see rewilded land as remote landscapes into which we’ve reintroduced wolves, beavers and other wild animals and few of us live. The land is left to be, as George Monbiot in his well-known book Feral, suggests, ‘free-willed’, where we resist the urge to control nature and allow it to find its own way. It sounds idylic, and maybe in the remotest margins of the British Isles this could make sense.
But, we’re a densely populated island, and there’s a limit to which we can leave land completely free-willed when we depend on it for food, materials and living space. It’s that lived in and worked in landscape that I’m most familiar with. I’ve lived in these places, not the remote landscapes of this country. I’ve seen seen it dug up – revealing a life lived over thousands of years. People long buried, their houses and all the flotsam and jetsom of their lives lie beneath our feet. Yet, nature lived with them too. They shared land, and maybe we forget that, as we live in increasingly artifical spaces.
Wildlands in 2035?
In 2035, in the furthest reaches of the British Isles, we’ve introduced wolves and beavers. They’ve settled in, only disturbed by eco-tourists observing from far. It’s a landscape rich in wildlife, but very few people. Many farmhouses lie derelict, but some are now nature conservation bases with holiday accommodation attached.
Sometimes researchers move amongst the animals, pushing carefully through long grass to record their behaviour and habits. But, mostly, they watch from afar. Large areas of the British Isles are now like this. In Snowdonia and the Cairngorms we find not a cow or sheep in sight. The movement to completely rewild remote parts of the British Isles has grown. We, the people, live mainly in cities on the lowlands. Increasingly we live in mega cities, crammed in and surrounded by intensively-farmed land. Food processing plants, factories and mega distribution centres have expanded. All are empty apart from a robotic fork lift truck and a driverless lorry waiting outside to deliver our goods.
We can visit the wildlands, but only by booking. We can no longer call our dogs and wander on a whim – it’s now an expedition. The economy of this wild land centres around the work of conservationists, researchers, alongside eco-tourist guides and their customers.
Small-scale, natural economy
I’ve made up this vision of life in 2035. Some may think it’s extreme and unlikely – the ‘wildlands’ scenario being one that a select few, realistically, would call for. As regards the landscape in which ‘we the people’ live though; well, we’re pretty far into the scenario I painted.
What prompts me to come up with this vision? It’s partly that I see much written about rewilding, with many mentions of ‘nature-based economy’ that seem vague to me. These references seem focused on tourism, school trips and planting trees (which are fine, in their own right). Some mention cultural heritage and traditional skills. This speaks to me more, but I see little elaboration on what this could mean.
How else might we rewild across our landscape? How can we find a happy middle ground between extreme rewilding and everyday people crammed into a land of mega-cities manned by drones?
A Land Sharing Future
Perhaps we could imagine a transect across a landscape? What comes to mind, for me, is a journey across the landscape in which I live. We look through portals into the past, to see what is still viable today, and into our future.
The Journey
I’m thinking through another book – another journey, along roads well-travelled. We move west to east from the borderlands between England and Wales, across the West Midlands and into south-east England. Maybe we end up in London, or on the coast? It depends on when, and the reason for the journey. For, this is a journey in time as well as across country.
Goods in the Ground
The residues of our daily processing, and creation of vital goods lie buried on route. We find organic resources used to make yarn, cloth, baskets, charcoal for furnaces, gloves, shoes, buttons and combs.
I’m on an old droving route running from the Welsh borders, eastwards. I pass by a pub called the Hop Pole Inn in Leominster, a Herefordshire border town. Compressed into boggy ground, hidden underneath the building, were the remains of retting (rotting) flax in wet pools close to where two rivers meet. There too was the waste from tanning and possibly horn working. The produce would probably have left town as flax yarn, leather hides and horn. Mingling with these remains were signs of life in surrounding flax fields and marsh. Find out more in Regenerative Fashion, Wildlife and Fibres.
Follow me along a diversion north into the Wyre Forest. Dig into earth platforms and sample old charcoal, left behind in the forest from making charcoal centuries ago. Listen to oral histories from people who remember how the forest was used for green wood working, basketry, fueling furnaces and even dyeing.
Drop back down on to the route, and through towns and the City of Worcester. Here leather hides are turned into gloves and shoes, animal bone into buttons and knife handles, woollen yarn into cloth, and more.
Symbiosis
The remains of animals and plants that lived in productive landscapes, through which we travel, mingle with the buried debris. That life grazed, pecked, flew or grew in fields, in forests, in villages and in towns. And, they still can do again today.
A symbiotic relationship existed between farmers, their animals, crops, and the soil; amongst foresters and the trees. All these people produced raw materials for themselves and other crafters. In towns and cities, in backyards of people running small businesses (using those resources), nature thrived. It can still thrive and does so, on a more localised scale.
Into the Daylight of Today
Today, flax growing for the British and Irish textile industry has gone, but with some work it may come back. South West England Fiber Shed, an affiliate of a growing American organisation (Fibershed), is working to bring back regional cloth production. They’re sourcing their materials regionally from regenerative farms; producing homegrown fibres. Change is happening.
What about your shoes? Alice Robinson and Sara Grady of British Pasture Leather are supplying leather from cows raised on pastures of regenerative farms, so maybe the leather in your shoes could come from the farm down the road?
Drop into a charcoal vendor in the Wyre Forest or Forest of Dean, with me, to pick up a new bag of charcoal today. It’ll come in handy for summer barbequeing. Maybe that day we’ll find a basket making workshop to join? The industry of the forest lives on.
But It’s Expensive!
You’re not likely to find these goods, or raw materials, at High Street prices. But, how many goods do you really need to buy or make in a year? Quantity isn’t everything. The benefit isn’t just in the number of regenerative goods you can make or buy. Neither is it in the degree to which they contribute to the GDP of our home countries.
It’s the land, soil, trees, pasture, crops, and animals well cared for that matter too. For, they were all part of the cycle before those goods came into being.
It’s also the mindset we foster, and the skills we learn from practising one craft skill, or from buying or caring for one item. It could be that if many people bought one item (like a pair of shoes made from British Pasture Leather), combined, we would make a big difference.
You may be contributing to farm diversification, which isn’t a new or unnatural concept. Food production should be valued, but farmsteaders always have combined farming with other production. Take an Asda supermarket in the centre of Worcester, where I live, where some typical evidence lay under the ground. Before the supermarket was built, archaeologists found the remains of 15th century tile kilns. From documents in archives, they found that the owner of at least one was a farmer from the outskirts of the city. Presumably, he ran the kiln at quieter times of the the year. It was, afterall, a natural way of life before we specialised to the degree we do today. We were the original ‘jack-of-all-trades’.
Regional Production
Regenerative goods need not be all about hand-produced artisan goods, or goods only made from renewable materials. There can be sliding scale of hand-crafted to industrial production: from hand-woven cloth, to cloth produced by machine from local wool, in a family-owned mill in the same region. Take Fibershed – they aim to decentralise, produce Soil to Skin goods, and disrupt fast-fashion industry. There’s an aim to aspire to!
The header image is by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
