Sandra Goldmark - Fixation

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Copyright 2020 Sandra Goldmark

The lyrics to Stars by Michael Friedman reproduced with permission from the authors estate.

Original illustrations by Antony Hare.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 650, 2000 M Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036.

This book was supported by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939049

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Keywords: repair, fix, reuse, circular economy, sustainability, consumption, design, climate change, stuff, material culture, waste, theatre, scenery, swap, community, maintenance, innovation

For my family

I turned in the manuscript for this book in the first days of March 2020. I received a copyedited version back from the publisher a few weeks later, in early April. During that month, the coronavirus had spread across the globe. Every day, I watched the little red dots indicating virus hot spots on world maps expand, especially the ballooning circle that hovered over New York City. By the end of the month, my husband and I had both been infected with COVID-19, and very thankfully recovered. But in the meantime, the world had turned upside down.

As I got my energy back and dug into reviewing the copyedits, I had to ask what this new landscape meant for this book, and for what I had come to see as my work in the world. Did it still make sense to advocate for a healthy relationship with our stuff? Do the urgent needs of millions of unemployed people mean that we must return to normal at all costs, even if the pre-virus normal was deeply flawed? How do we think about climate change and consumption in the context of the pandemic?

As many have observed, climate change and the coronavirus have much in common: disproportionate impacts on the most vulnerable, a brutal uncovering of social inequity and flaws in our social safety nets, and the capacity to disrupt the flows of people, resources, food, and, yes, stuff around the world. The difference is speed. Climate change has been moving slowly, in the background, for yearsand will continue to do so. Coronavirus came as a shock, thrusting all these questions, and more, abruptly into the foreground.

However, rather than seeing these crises as either-or, its possible to perceive them as part of one process, operating at vastly different time scales: a reckoning that asks us to reexamine normal. As we rebuild after coronavirus, its imperative that we rebuild sustainably and equitably. Its my hope that the simple steps offered in these pages will serve us as we move forward.

Pope Francis said of the coronavirus, But let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were. This is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it. The pages that follow are in large part a record of my learning to really see, or contemplate, the mundane objects all around me and to imagine a world where we dont simply use and misuse but begin to understand ourselves in relation to all that surrounds us. I hope that as we rebuild, we might, with what the pope calls simple creativity, reimagine our relationship with our stuff, with the planet, and with one another.

May 7, 2020

Stuff is broken.

Our massive global system of consumption is brokenand its breaking the planet. Our individual relationship with our own stuff is broken. And in each of our homes, some actual stuff is broken.

How do we fix it?

Maybe in your home you have a flickering lamp, a wobbly chair, a wimpy vacuum. Where do you go to get them fixed? Its a surprisingly difficult question, isnt it? Chances are your broken stuff languishes in your closet until some theoretical day when you can get around to dealing with it. Its frustrating, because you actually like your stuff. But its just too inconvenientand finally, you give up. And your broken lamp or chair or vacuum joins the 150 million tons of landfill we create every year in the United States. And your new lamp or vacuum contributes to global emissions, toxic working conditions, and even more wasteand the familiar, destructive cycle continues. It doesnt feel good.

This is the story of how I learned to feel good about having stuff. It took me more than seven years of repairing upwards of 2,500 broken objects to come up with a better, simpler way forward, both for individuals and for society. This is a story about finding easy steps toward a simpler, healthier, more sustainable relationship with our stuffstarting now.

You are reading these words because my toaster broke. And my desk lamp. And the strap on my backpack. And my vacuum. This small tsunami of broken stuff occurred in 2013, when I was home on maternity leave with my husband, Michael, our four-year-old son, Luke, and newborn Eric.

It was a wonderful time to be home, to be a mother, and to feel the joy of being with my children. But as parents of new babies know, those precious early months are also a time of incredible upheaval, occasional irrationality, and dismal, fractured sleep. At night, when the baby needed to be nursed (or bounced on that infernal yoga ball, or cried until we carried him up and down the hall, or woke just to kick me awake and then drift into slumber himself), I had trouble falling back to sleep. I would lie in my bed, sometimes for hours, thinking about things.