Artisans helped us build and understand the world

Artisans helped build the world and through them we came to understand the crucial connection between creativity, ingenuity, nature, time, quality and the subtle beauty of the craftsman’s skill.



 Henry Ford gave us
the car and we paid
with our
 understanding of
 craftsmanship.

 The elusive beauty that craftsmen/women brought to the world has been largely eroded by technology and the urgency of mass production driven by fallacious need for growth.
The commercial world’s need for a standardized “more” has ended creativity and seen the demise of quality, repairable products.
Factory made products shaped remote from the touch of the craftsman seem to have no affinity with nature and so leave the end-user with no sense that nature played a critical role in bringing to them whatever it is they have in their hands.
Henry Ford introduced the world to mass production about a century ago and it proved to be the opening gambit of what was to be the end of the era of the craftsman.
Ford may have made the motor vehicle accessible to all, but he really did humanity a disservice robbing it ultimately of a great asset – the uniqueness, ingenuity, patience, inventiveness and the understanding of nature and time afforded us by craftsman.
Interestingly, those skills and the qualities they bring are only years away from again being in demand when we begin to feel the pervasive impacts of climate change; a reality to be complicated beyond comprehension as the world exhausts its fossil fuels.
The craftsmen skills that sustained the world before we accessed the bountiful energy of fossil fuels will again be crucial as we work to recover from our oil-soaked way of life.
The world of tomorrow will need people who understand the crafts and skills that were common in the 19th century, and of course put those to use, but at the same time integrate modern technological skills when and where they can.
In the decades ahead we will need people who can make clothes, provide locally-sourced food, build houses, understand animal husbandry, build a workable infrastructure from the remnants of our fossil fuelled-festival, establish low entropy ways of living and maintain the human project of civilization.