Hands and Mind--Making Stuff and Making Connections in a Consumer Society

Several things in this photo, taken at the Healthy Children, Healthy Planet event at Riverside Elementary School a couple weeks ago, exemplify aspects missing from our suburban lives. Tedious manual labor and tightly confined animals, some might say. But what I see is the chance for kids to interact with animals beyond dogs and cats. There's also the patient making of things--that steady application of attention that we've out-sourced to machines, and sweatshops in the Philippines. And then there are clear connections made, between grass, sheep, wool-making and the clothes we wear.

If we had to pay the real cost of fossil fuels, we'd use our remarkable adaptive capacities to find ways to use them less, and might in the process rediscover some long lost satisfactions. Some of this is already happening. Paris got in the news recently for its use of miniature sheep to mow lawns. Hens are becoming more popular as backyard "pets with benefits", offering daily demonstrations of how the random bounty of a yard--grubs, insects and earthworms--can be transformed into eggs.

The patient making of things is a bit harder to "in-source", given people's harried lives. But one approach is to recruit what I call the "second self"--the part of you that does work automatically while leaving the mind free to focus on other things. Hand-washing dishes, hanging clothes up to dry--these means of disengaging from the use of climate-changing fuels can be tedious, mind-numbing tasks or they might slow one down long enough to actually listen to some music, have a conversation or catch the news on the radio. If, while doing the mundane task of washing dishes, I suddenly have some idea or insight worth writing down, I wonder if it would have occurred on its own, or if it is the product of both hands and mind. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest that each informs the other, given that hand and mind have evolved together, and largely define what it means to be human. Doing more varied tasks with the hands could jog the mind into more varied thoughts.

The ongoing expansion of convenience relegates hands increasingly to the role of consuming rather than making. Sound recognition may even bypass the remaining manual function of thumbing texts and typing on a keyboard. Similarly, once productive yards now do little more than flatter the house and consume time and chemicals. That's part of the challenge of sustainability, to figure out how a yard and hands can regain some of their productive roles.