Laudator Temporis Acti

Alexander Langlands, Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (2017; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), pp. 340-341:

I get angry over the lack of basketry in our lives. Up against its closest competitors — cardboard and plastic — it emerges the outstanding winner. By their nature, the raw materials for basket making must come from self-sustaining sources, the year-on-year regrowth from coppiced stools of hazel, willow, alder or any other species that sends up sucker shoots from a harvested stool. And yet these materials are mechanically thrashed out of the hedges in our landscapes, or clipped and trimmed from the shrubs in our gardens, deposited in the green-waste bin and carted off to the local recycling centre. Do we, therefore, really need quite so much deforestation-produced cardboard or quite as many plastic crates, the latter a casual by-product of the petrochemicals industry? Both, like baskets, don't last for ever. But when a basket's working life is over, it can be left to rot, to be given back to the earth and to be replaced at no cost to the environment. We just need to give someone the time to make it for us. We need to embrace the cyclic economy. We make for profit and not for use. We are enslaved to growth economics.

My older sister is an expert basket-maker. Her creations are both useful and beautiful, and I'm lucky to own some of them.