Embracing intentional uncertainties together - By Eugenia Morpurgo
The reality we currently live in is predominantly made of materials based on oil, from our houses to what we wear. Synthetic materials account for 67% of the global fibre market 1 and for 41% of the European insulation materials used.
For the production of materials made from plants or animals, we rely on a very limited number of species. These are farmed and bred in industrial settings through monocultural extractive practices. For example, in the textile industry, 78,6% of globally used plant-based textiles derive from the cotton plant, which is predominantly farmed as an individual crop using only one genetic variety (Gossypium hirsutum). 2
Production systems rely on certainties: the system demands standardised seeds to grow monocultures and standardized technologies to process standardized resources, resulting in an increasingly standardized material culture.
Simultaneously, we're promised regenerative material futures by an ever-growing offer of circular alternatives made from agricultural waste 3. But these materials, even in case they are made from a wider range of species, are conceivable only because intensive farming for food production produces an incredible amount of unintended biomass. The industry primarily considers this as waste, secondly as a problem, and ultimately as a resource for novel productive systems that benefit from the certainty of intensive practices without counteracting their negative impact. These mainstream material cultures are bringing our planet beyond its safe operational space 4, generating such a loss of biodiversity, that what we are witnessing, is called the “the sixth mass extinction”(Ceballos et al., 2015)5-6.
While bio-based materials stand at the center of the extinction crisis, they also represent a possible response to it. It is fundamental to critically understand and then address the power structures and cultural models from which they derive and which they enact to make them instrumental against this loss. The radical simplification of the ecological and cultural landscapes we inhabit has been violently enforced by colonial and capitalistic productive infrastructures 7. In contrast, traditional and indigenous cosmologies allow us to imagine and create material cultures. Here humans are part of interdependent ecological networks, fostering a constantly evolving relationship between biological and cultural diversity 8.
As Vandana Shiva stated in Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Traditional Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth: “There are two paradigms of biodiversity conservation. The first is held by communities whose survival and sustenance is linked to local biodiversity utilisation and conservation. The second is held by global commercial interests whose profits are linked to the utilisation of global biodiversity for the production of inputs into large scale homogeneous, uniformly centralised and global production systems.” (2020) 9
As designers, architects, fashion designers, and material enthusiasts, it is therefore our responsibility to build material cultures and their productive infrastructures in such a way that they contribute to the efforts of biodiversity conservation. To do so, we need to allow productive landscapes to be complex ecological systems, embracing the instabilities that come from working with complexity and diversity; also for material design. Imagining and enacting production processes which shift the existing paradigm and are intentionally uncertain in order to favour thriving complex ecosystems. While currently agriculture and forestry is responsible for 97% of biodiversity loss 10, we see that bio-based materials can, and should, become instrumental for its conservation, at all its levels: the genetic diversity 11, the variety of species 12 and the range of ecosystems 13. But to do so, the shift should be paradigmatic, questioning the essence of the relationship between technology and ecology.
In the European context, from which I’m practicing and writing, rethinking local biomaterial infrastructures requires critically learning from the past 14. For centuries we have externalised the risks, the actual costs, the labour, the devastating polluting impact of industrial production. To address this, many contemporary initiatives are attempting to reshore entire supply chains, biomaterials included. Nevertheless all these efforts risk becoming meaningless, or even counterproductive, if they don’t take ownership of the violent socio-ecological relations of both our past, our present and of our potential futures. In less than four generations, we have lost a great deal of knowledge and diversity; therefore, we must rediscover and reinterpret tools, processes, landscapes, and their connections 15. Positioning ourselves in between these timeframes - past, present, futures - allows us to see how innovation around biomaterials results from cumulative and collective knowledge. Our efforts are only another step in ever evolving material cultures. When we acknowledge that, the need to fight the false capitalistic myth of dependency from patented and centralised innovations becomes more clear.
Mutualistic and cooperative thinking become key tools to address this complexity: we need to share and face the uncertainties together. We need to redistribute and celebrate ecological and cultural abundance in order to protect us from the temptation of falling back into a reductionist view of the world. Common based and open source practices become instrumental in facilitating the transition, from seed sharing to the development of open source farming tools 16, to material recipes and processing machinery plans shared under creative commons licensing 17. However, we must realize that we are projecting these new visions for local bio-based cultures and economies onto the same landscapes and the same inhabitants, which, as we already know from the planetary perspective, are limited. So the different disciplines and their supply chains, from what we eat to what we wear, will have to negotiate what we can and should produce in common.
Practices working in the commoning-way, as pioneer plants do, are bravely exploring uncertain territories and laying the ground for novel ecosystems to thrive. Even if only this small community of pioneers intentionally embraces uncertainties as a choice, the devastating impacts of the changing climate are making this shift inescapable for everyone. Temperatures are rising, droughts are coming accompanied by heavy rains and flooding, the stability and certainties promised by industrial farming are becoming less real by the day. We need local cooperative productions rooted in convivial conservation practices openly sharing knowledge through global networks of solidarity, to mitigate planetary collapse, but also to build a reality that is rooted in and celebrate bio-cultural abundance.
1 Adapted from Textile Exchange (2024), Materials Market Report, September 2024.
2 Gossypium hirsutum seeds. Steve Hurst, hosted by the USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database
3 Ellen MacArthur Foundation Circular economy system diagram (February 2019).
4 Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Richardson, K., Steen, W., Lucht, W., Bendtsen, J., Cornell, S. E., Donges, J. F., Drüke, M., Fetzer, I., Bala, G., von Bloh, W., Feulner, G., Fiedler, S., Gerten, D., Gleeson, T., Hofmann, M., Huiskamp, W., Kummu, M., Mohan, C., Nogués-Bravo, D., ... Rockström, J. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), eadh2458.
5 Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P.R., Barnosky, A.D., García, A., Pringle, R.M. and Palmer, T.M. (2015) “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction”, Science Advances, 1, p. e1400253.
6 Species Extinctions Accelerating Globally. Planetary Health Check 2024,(2024) Caesar et al.
7 Illustration of corn monoculture and its potential uses beyond food production, by Eugenia Morpurgo.
8 Illustration of the potential biodiversity found in the first 10 years of a Milpa system, where beyond corn more than 90 species can be found. Milpa is a traditional agricultural practice from mesoamerica, which moves beyond the economism and instrumentalization of nature and human relationships that characterizes neoliberal and late capitalism. “ The making of milpa is the central, most sacred act, one which binds together the family, the community, the universe…[it] forms the core institution of Indian society in Mesoamerica and its religious and social importance often appear to exceed its nutritional and economic importance” Ford, A., and Nigh. R., (2016) Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands, Routledge. Illustration by Eugenia Morpurgo.
9 Shiva, V., (2020) Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Traditional Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth, Synergetic Press, Santa Fe.
11 Acadian Brown Cotton project, from Acadia Fibershed in Southern Louisiana, USA, has been rescuing a variety of cotton naturally colored, which had almost gone extinct. This genetic variety has been discarded in favour of the industrial use of the Gossypium hirsutum white one. Now Acadian Brown Cotton, working in a network of more than 12 farmers, has been preserving more than 400 seeds, allowing to weave again with this heirloom variety. Photo by https://www.acadianbrowncotton.com/
12 British studio Material Culture, in collaboration with the companies Cecene e Earthly, have been developing heat pressed panels made with a variety of bark trees uncommonly used for this purpose: sequoia, pine and silver birch. The project has been developed for The Woodland Goods exhibition at V&A South Kensington. https://materialcultures.org/woodland-goods/
13 Dutch designer Iris Veentjer, with her project RietGoed has been exploring the potential use of cattail for fiber production. Cattail is a central species of wetland ecosystems. With this project Veentjer has been developing the whole processes, from fiber extraction to yarn spinning, with the aid of open source technologies such as the Hilo e-spinner. Finding an economical use for the cattail could become an incentive for wetland conservation.
14 French designer Nicolas Verschaeve takes direct inspiration from rural crafts whe developing objects with underutilised wood. Finding an economical use for irregular timber could become an incentive for complex forest conservation.
15 The British project Fantasy Fiber Mill, is using open source technologies to redesign a local processing chain for fiber production in the UK. While they focus on the development of the technology they also experiment with farming flax in a polycultural setting, with rows of flax between rows of food.
16 The platform Farm Hack is the online meeting place for farmers all over the world who want to reappropriate their own tools and use open source tech to do so. https://farmhack.org/welcome In France l’Atelier Paysan has been bringing the same approach to communities all over the country.
17 Since 2009 Timelab, under the framework of the Knotfactory project, has been sharing, on their wiki, materials recipes for transforming Japanese Knotweed into a variety of materials. The recipes have been evolving through the years, failures as much as success can be found in the documentation, allowing for the changing community to continue developing new recipes. Also in this case open source technologies have been fundamental, like the module to transform a standard press into an heat press.