Wired Magazine had a recent Op-Ed from excellent Human Landscapes blogger and scientist Erle Ellis (he also directs the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology at the University of Maryland. The article -- "Stop Trying to Save the Planet" -- seems great from the outset, right in line with Humblefacture's ideals, particularly in passages like this one:

And it’s time for a “postnatural” environmentalism. Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren. Postnaturalism means loving and embracing our human nature, the nature we have created to feed ourselves, the nature we live in. What good is environmentalism if it makes you depressed about the future?

However, while this is a big step for the mainstream (is Wired mainstream now?) media to back away from the human vs. nature argument, the author stops short of a truly humble stance.

At issue is not only that we must act, but the nature of that action. While Ellis is probably correct that humans would never be totally wiped from all ecosystems, he is quick to point out that we have lost civilizations many times over because of climate over-use. So we need to focus more on saving society from ourselves -- we can always scrape by on the outskirts of more major food webs.

More importantly, the tone of the article, and the tone of many modern eco-ideologies is very much directed toward "we broke things with technology, but we can fix them with technology, and we don't need nature any more. Many times throughout the piece, he makes mention of nature being "dead", as in the first passage:

Nature is gone. It was gone before you were born, before your parents were born, before the pilgrims arrived, before the pyramids were built. You are living on a used planet.

This view -- that nature is something that humanity destroyed, and, more provocative, something which we don't really need, given our technological advances is the fundamental error of modern manufacture and modern making in general. To see what I mean, first look at this ending passage from the same piece:

Use renewable energy. Clean it up. Repair it. Get to work. There is plenty more mileage left in this spaceship Earth. Think about that while enjoying a trip to your local zoo or arboretum — the most biodiverse places that ever existed on Earth.

True, we have created incredibly powerful engines of both diversity -- in arboretums, aquariums, zoos, and conservatories -- and fecundity, in modern fossil nitrogen-enhanced agriculture. Neither boon comes for free, and in these cases, we pay them in carbon emissions, either in producing the ammonia to fertilize giant monocultures of corn, or to heat, cool, ship, fertilize, feed, and otherwise maintain the finely tuned, but completely unstable systems we call animal parks. This is the issue. "Use Renewable Energy" Ellis says, and would that we could, but our demand is too great, and we are doing little to reduce it, even as we struggle to meet even 1% of our total energy needs with renewables.

We should not consider nature beaten, or passed for into a new postnaturalism; Rather, what if we were to develop a transnaturalism, acknowledging our role in husbandry and regulation, but focusing on developing new stable systems of production-consumption like those we first witnessed in nature tens of thousands of years ago, before we first decided to burn the forests to produce more edge for deer, or more open land for farming. This more humble viewpoint will let us see that while we may have the reigns, nature has some great models for maintaining diversity, fecundity, and stability without excessive energy or regulation.

And that, dear reader, is no small feat.

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I gave a talk introducing Humblefacture to the world at last week's Ignite Seattle conference. You can see the video of the talk above, and link to the slides on slideshare here. The manifesto has since grown by at least one point, and a thorough exploration of the ins and outs of defining this movement is forthcoming, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we at Humblefacture would love to hear any feedback you might have.

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Fellow humility advocate Jamais Cascio at the Institute for the Future has written a great article on future economies of resilience. It got us thinking: what makes for resilient making? Resilience means sacrificing some efficiency in order to have reserves and flexibility so that when circumstances change, instead of collapse, a system can sustain itself long enough so that it can change. In modern manufacturing, we see signs of brittleness in factory riots due to economic downturns, and in indicators like the meteoric rise and crash of world cardboard box markets. Hopefully, humblefacturing and other open-source, small-scale manufacturing paradigms will be able to respond more quickly to changing economies, and transition to making other items, or even transition from growing materials to growing food. Whatever the solution, it seems like more makers, more spread out, with more flexibility has to be part of the answer.

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We humans have it pretty good. Blessed by evolution's wheel of fortune with binocular vision, seriously honkin' brains, and opposable thumbs, we've turned ourselves into the uncontested tool leaders of the animal world. Those tools enhance our capabilities more than any claws, fur, or antennae could. We move faster, fly higher, change the courses of rivers and even affect the temperature of the atmosphere. All this can give a mammal a pretty big head -- big enough to think that without us to save it, nature is somehow in danger.

This attitude is a very recent development; your great-great-grandmother probably still regarded nature as an unpredictable force which caused high infant mortality, famine (even in industrialized countries, as during the Irish potato famine or dust bowl) and was full of untamed wild spaces. Nature was master, and we were lucky if we made it to next year.

Little by little, we have convinced ourselves that the converse is true; There but for the grace of Us goes Nature. Books like Silent Spring and public service campaigns like Smokey Bear laid the foundation of the "humans as stewards of nature" idea. More recent discoveries like the CFC-produced ozone hole and CO2 emission-induced climate change seem to solidify our position as poor guardians (even destroyers) of nature.

The truth is, nature is a pretty resilient system. Even as humans have gone to impressive lengths to throw ecosystems out of whack -- importing pigs from Spain to everywhere, for example -- these food webs still continue to function, albeit with slightly reduced biodiversity. Nature reconfigures things. That is the reason for biodiversity in the first place. Suburbia might seem like a bad thing for the ecosystems it displaces, and it does cause serious biodiversity loss, but some species like opossum, raccoon, squirrel, and robin just do better in the suburbs. We should be worried about the interesting opportunities we are missing by losing species diversity in plants and animals, but we shouldn't worry about losing nature. Nature will survive.

Humans, on the other hand, are another story. Our tools have allowed us to work our way out of some serious spots, but the reality is that we are still reliant on natural food, material, and energy webs to sustain us -- if our goal of reducing fossil fuel use is to be realized, we will become vastly more reliant on these natural energy sources. We need to make sure that the next reduction in biodiversity doesn't include removing us. In order to preserve our place in nature, and the free and irreplaceable support that this position gives us, we must again re-imagine our relationship.

Instead of imagining ourselves as entities who need to tread lightly to keep from hurting nature, we must see that our success is intimately related to the success of natural systems. We need to stop trying not to hurt things, and start trying to make the natural pillars that support us more sturdy.

Even the "greenest" manufacturing hasn't fully embraced this idea. Take the example of biodegradable Natureworks PLA plastic; Maybe it biodegrades, but it's still based on a monoculture of synthetic-fertilizer-supported GM corn. That natural support pillar is just as weak as fossil fuel -- one day, the right mosaic virus mutant comes along, and boom. No more corn crop. No more plastic.

Though manufacturing may not have understood the interconnectedness of maker-nature webs, food producers have been thinking like this for at least the last 20 years. The Slow Food movement grew up as a rebelion against "Fast Life", but it quickly became a force for building and maintaining artificial food webs populated with human eaters, human farmers, and hosts of plant and animal food participants. The slow food model is to make ever human in the web -- grocer, shopper, farmer, chef -- a "co-producer" of food. In this way, no-one is any more responsible for the quality of the food than anyone else. This may seem a simple concept, but it is quite subtle in its effectiveness. For example, a shopper, when described as a consumer, is immediately placed in a frame of reference of working to consume -- trying to get the most stuff for the least money. Since an easy way to get more food is to buy lower quality food, markets fill with lower quality items.



Re-defining the shopper as a co-producer completely re-frames the situation. Now, since the shopper is producing the food they are buying, the optimal solution involves producing the "best" food possible. Since "best" in this case is usually assumed to mean high quality, fresh, or tasty, the shopper is encouraged to spend as much money as they can to buy fresher, tastier food. Think about it -- in your mind, does the "best" food ever mean the cheapest?

By involving all levels of food handler in the co-production loop, each person has the capability to alter the system to make it more conducive to "better" food. This pursuit of better, rather than cheaper, leads to healthier animals and plants, more sustainable growing methods, and a stronger tie to the natural systems that give us food.

So, just as slow food co-producers work hard to identify and reinforce the ties that connect us with the natural world, truly sustainable manufacturing must do the same. What we find in doing this is that the best way to stay safe is to work hard to be relied on. Michael Pollan talks about this extensively in The Botany of Desire. An apple started off as a sour, tiny fruit many tens of thousands of years ago. But through a co-evolutionary process with our human ancestors, it developed into something so well liked by humans that it will likely never go extinct. In fact, it has even managed to hitch a ride in freezing temperatures for the next 10,000 years just in case of extinction -- something that few, if any, non-food wild plants have managed.

But, if inter-dependence is something to strive for, we need to change our "top of the food chain" attitude. Someone who wants to become useful to others must acknowledge that they are currently useless. This requires humility. When we become humble, we see how improving the situations of others will benefit us.

Humble manufacturing would see that the strongest material is one which strengthens the networks that already support its consumers. Humble manufacturing would work harder to create the right methods of making than it would to make the right objects. Humble manufacturing would sacrifice power for resilience.

Without a more humble conception of making, we are only making ourselves less likely to survive each successive iteration of nature's re-organization. We make ourselves more powerful without making ourselves more safe..

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What is the difference between a sweater and a pile of yarn? Nothing is added to the yarn to make a sweater; the yarn weighs the same before knitting as after. Yet the sweater is obviously different than the pile. The energy of knitting might seem to be the difference, but we could make make just as many random knits in the yarn -- expending the same energy -- and end up with a knotty pile of yarn. A knotty pile is definitely different than a regular pile, but it's also significantly different than a sweater. So, if it's not added matter, and it's not added energy, what's left? Answer: Information.

The difference between a sweater and a knotty pile is that in one case the knits are applied in an orderly pattern. A pattern is a repeatable method for applying information to matter. Using another sewing example, think about the pattern used to make a dress. It is information, printed on paper, but it can be applied to cloths of different colors or patterns to produce multiple finished dresses. These dresses are functionally identical, even though their colors or textile patterns may be different. The reason they function the same is because their patterns -- the information that organizes their matter -- are identical.

So, in garments at least, the matter and energy that go into an object are not so important as the information applied along with them. This should not come as too big a surprise: throwing eggs, flour, sugar, and water in a bowl to make a cake will never match the results of following a recipe. Methods, techniques, tricks, hacks, recipes, and other storage media for the information of making have been a part of being human since the first tool was made for the second time.

What should come as a surprise is that these three components are not given equal consideration by the manufacturing industry.

Energy is easy to quantify. It is the heat used to melt, treat, dry, cure, cut, burn, or bake objects. It can also be the mechanical energy that runs the machines that knit a sweater, cut a wafer, or stamp a fender. In many processes, adding more energy makes them more precise and accurate (cutting metal at higher speeds, for example) or results in a higher performance product (in making ceramics, or metal alloys, for example).

Matter also easily understood by industry. Matter is the raw iron and plastic, or the processed wire and sheet that feed a manufacturing process. Both the form and composition of the matter influence the final properties of the made object. Purity (in metals), impurities (in semiconductors), crystal structure (in everything), and nanostructure (in semiconductors) and metastructures (in fabrics) all affect the final product.

Information is a third component of every object, but it is introduced during the making, and it is not as easy to measure; Information does not weigh anything, or pass trough an electrical meter on the way into the product. Often, information is introduced in multiple ways, at multiple stages during production, and is not easily extractable in a final product. A drop forged wrench has at least four different informational domains encoded during making, and bearing on its ultimate utility.


The formulation of the steel used is the first domain. Metal crystal grain size, orientation, and deformation from forging are the second domain.


Final machined shape and surface finish are the third domain. Finally surface composition or differential metallic composition -- as from case hardening, or plating -- is the final domain.

All of these domains are created by controlling the addition of matter or energy, and the removal of any one of them would seriously (and adversely) affect the performance of the final object. Additionally, the order in which these domains are encoded is important -- a metal cannot be alloyed after it is case, and a hardened workpiece is much more difficult to cut to a reliable shape.

So, in this example, the function of the tool depends, not so much on the matter itself, or the quantity of energy used in making it, but on how usefully and effectively that energy is used to encode information into the matter. And yet, we still think of this process as one primarily of gross processes (melting and forging) and energy (heat to melt metal, force to drive hammers). We think that a blacksmith is different than a hacker -- why is this the case?

Let us consider two blacksmiths to illustrate the point: One, a modern swordsmith,working with modern tools and technologies and the other, a swordsmith working in Hyderabad, India more than 2000 years ago. Both of them are making the same material -- what has become known as Damascus steel (more specifically Wootz steel). This metal has a highly ordered crystalline structure of alternating bands of very hard carbide (a ceramic) particles within a relatively softer (and more flexible) tempered martensite (an alloy of steel) matrix. While the final product is the same, the methods by which the two arrive at that product are very different.

The modern blacksmith subscribes to a method outlined in this patent by Daniel Miller. Basically, a metal bar with the appropriate blend of alloying elements present in it is alternately heated by burning natural gas and cooled by a cryogenic liquid in an inert atmosphere in order to grow grains of carbide within the bar of steel. After the carbide is grown, the steel is worked with hammers and grinding to form the final shape.

The blacksmith of antiquity also hammers and grinds his blade, but the method by which he obtains the carbide-enhanced steel is radically different. John Verhoeven and Alfred Pendray only recently reconstructed this method in the late 1990s. Because precise control of temperature, furnace atmosphere, or purchased steel composition was not available in pre-common-era India, the information in the final Wootz ingot was encoded through the selection of already information-laden admixtures. For example, in addition to iron and charcoal (for carbon), the alloying crucible was filed with leaves from specific trees, wood chips, and residues from river beds (salts). Each of these elements contributed some of their information to the mixture within the crucible as it was fired over wood for hours. When cooled, the mixture was now separated into one ingot of Wootz, and one thick layer of slag -- the matter of the additions, less its information.

Both smiths created comparable artifacts. From the viewpoint of industry, however, the modern method is superior for a number of reasons: It scales up easily, it requires only simple inputs, and it is highly predictable. The older method does not scale to mass production (crucibles alloying is a non-continuous, expensive process), requires complex ingredients (specific leaves, salts, etc), and is less obviously predictable (what scientific model is there for the interaction of molten metal and leaves).

However, looked at from the point of view of a programmer, these options appear in a different light. While the modern method is predictable, it is a brute force effort; Getting high quality natural gas, liquid nitrogen or helium (the cryo-liquid), and high purity initial alloy is a high energy, high precision effort, much like trying to design a better piece of software simply by adding more features, or more workers coding on it. In contrast, the ancient method is what a programmer might call an elegant hack; A highly ordered final product created using clever choices of raw components and a minimum quantity and quality of energy (a wood furnace for crying out loud).

Why should these viewpoints be so different? Because industry persists in thinking that matter and energy are the primary building blocks of things. Programmers have long realized the benefits that come from working in an information-heavy medium. The recognition of elegance as a desirable quality fundamentally changes the way that things are designed, and what things are possible. Humblefacure must embrace a three component view of the construction of things. Without the idea of information as a component, there can be no elegance in a design. Without the idea of elegance, there is little reason to work toward things like energy efficient manufacture, culturally appropriate manufacturing methods, or cradle-to-cradle design. Development of information-centered manufacturing processes is central to all the aims of these, and the best chance for maintaining our current level of technological output while transitioning to a humbler mode of making.

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