Sustainability Manifesto
“At some point over the last four hundred million years, some plant has tried every strategy with a remote chance of working. We’re just beginning to realise how varied a thing working might be. Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes. To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous and what you cut down…
A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware”
Richard Powers ‘The Overstory’ pp566-7
Handspring is a small design-led organisation in the heart of Sheffield run by me – Scot Fletcher. It is my attempt to run a creative, practical and skilled timber craft-based enterprise following the principles and ethics of sustainability.
I have been involved with sustainability for my whole adult life and I have approached it from a number of directions including: eco building renovations, green maps, local food, academia (architecture), eco-design research, teaching and making art installations. However long before that I was involved with wood. My grandfather was a carpenter and standing in his woodshed from early on always gave me goosebumps, and I grew up with an attic workshop room in our little terrace house. An axe, saw and chisel where natural extensions of my hands. So now designing and making creative sustainable timber structures connects my present, through my past and into my family tree.
Learning about and from nature, and celebrating and supporting a deeper connection with nature has become increasingly important to me over the years. Maybe this has been as a way to continue to feel positive and hopeful in our troubled and destructive times.
Most of the indigenous cultures from around the world have long developed a deeper relationship with nature, both animals and plants - they recognise humans as the younger relatives of the older wiser plants - they have been around for so much longer and have learnt how to grow and give so much to all around them supporting all other life without poisoning their roots or polluting their leaves. A reciprocal relationship, that the rest of us could do with learning. See for instance the incredible writing and work of Robin Wall Kimmerer
I am very lucky -- if you believe in luck -- to have a workshop in the middle of South Yorkshire’s largest ancient woodland. A woodland that is currently gently expanding and merging into the local hinterland, due to the brilliant work of Sheffield City Council Rangers. I am lucky too because I get to cycle on tracks through this majestic forest every working day, washed clean and green by nature, leaving the sound of the city momentarily behind. I get to do this on a beautiful wooden gravel bike, made from Welsh ash by Twmpa Cycles
In the Handspring workshop, whilst the indoor spaces are old and knackered, our open sided barn faces south and is an amazing place to spend the day. The site is constantly serenaded by bird song, and during the nesting season we find delicate, intricate and messy nests everywhere: in the workshop, the dust extraction unit, dotted through the woodpiles and even in the tractor. Woodpeckers providing the bass beat, and lately three Buzzards have been circling overhead. The new council visitor centre that sits next to our workshop has a large pond, full of aquatic life and beehives and often before we pick up a piece of timber we say hello to a honey bee, dragon fly or giant horntail and gently shake them off! The bees have swarmed a couple of times - what an amazing and momentarily terrifying experience that is. The sky darkens with spinning insects, and then they congregate around the new escaping queen, coalescing into a dense football of vibrating insect life, before heading off to find a new home.
I carry my fascination and wonder of nature home and have re-wilded my small urban garden, which is now full of wildflowers, bees, newts, dragon flies, frogs, sparrows, blue tits, blackbirds and bats whilst also growing fruit and vegetables. This is by way of introduction to the main story:
Trees
“For over a million years, oaks have taken root in Britains soil, their story etched into the fabric of the land. As ice ages came and went, they withdrew and returned, reclaiming ground alongside animals and eventually, humans. Yet today, these rooted beings stand at a threshold. What once seemed eternal now leans toward fragility, its fate entwined with our capacity to care. As we gather in its shade, we are called to become part of its story, to ensure it is not only remembered, but continued.”
Marshmallow Lazer Feast - virtual oak tree exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Having a workshop in the middle of a forest might seem like an ideal location for a timber-based business. However very little timber, and none of it usable for making significant structures comes out of these ancient woods these days. It certainly used to, back when ancient woodlands where at the heart of the regions industrial revolution, and they were once busy noisy places full of human activity; coppicing and pollarding for charcoal and tool handles, foraging for food, collecting firewood, and animal grazing.
For a long time the lack of usable very local timber was a source of some frustration for me and other makers. The woods are now managed as a public amenity and wildlife reserve, but not as places that support our livelihoods. However, as human understanding of the important and complex natural processes taking place in forests has blossomed over the last few years so has my awareness of my own ignorance and a humbling gratitude for the celebration of the forest for itself has grown.
“There is a deity in nature that we all understand. When you walk into a forest - great or small - you enter it in one state and emerge from it calmer. You have that cathedral feeling and you’re never the same again. You come out of there and you know something big has happened to you. We now know that the alpha - and beta pinene's produced by the forest actually do uplift your mood and affect your brain through your immune system. That pinene released by the trees into the air is absorbed into your body. It tightens you as a unit and makes you reverent towards what you’re seeing. Simply walking into a forest is a holiday for your mind and soul, allowing your imagination and creativity to bloom.”
Diana Beresford Kroeger “The Global Forest” p185
The Japanese practice of Forest Bathing is taping into this, and recent research into the sounds of the forest have further amplified their beneficial calming effects on humans.
We, in our educated urbanisation, now understand through our science what indigenous cultures from around the world have long known: Trees communicate with one another above and below ground, exchanging information, food, medicine, coordinate flowering, fruiting and masting and have early warning systems in place for predator attacks, sometimes for instance calling in wasps to act as guards. When they are sick they can drop limbs to turn into food with which to nourish themselves and before a natural death they will transfer nutrients and other resources back down through their roots and fungal networks to their leafy friends and neighbours.
“The chemistry going on in trees is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes,. Alkaloids, phenols, corkey suberins. They’ve learnt to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven’t even identified.”
Richard Powers ‘The Overstory’ pp565
All this is on top of trees being the home, shelter and food for huge numbers and variety of life. In 2019 a team of researchers led by Dr. Ruth Mitchell (the James Hutton Institute) published ‘OakEcol: A database of Oak associated Biodiversity within the UK,’ cataloguing 2300 species - birds, fungi, invertebrates, lichens, and more, reliant on native UK oaks Quercus Petraea - Sessile oak and Quercus Robur -English Oak.
This study highlights oaks as keystone species, deeply intertwined with the ecosystems they sustain. However, the species exploration within ‘Of the Oak’ barely touches the vast network these ancient trees support. Each oak is a metropolis - a pillar of biodiversity whose influence extends far beyond its own body. All the way to the sea: There is an old Japanese saying “If you want to catch a fish, plant a tree”. As leaves decompose on the forest floor, they release fulvic acid which is capable of bonding with the iron in the soil. Flushed from the forest into rivers and carried to the ocean, an iron-poor environment, this oxygenated iron boosts the growth of phytoplankton, creating a marine buffet, which is the base of the aquatic food chain.
An oak, left to itself can live for over a thousand years, growing for 500 and slowly dying for 500 more. And it is in this later stage of its life that a great number of the species that life with it thrive. Without mature oaks more than half of its biodiversity never even gets started. [see for instance Oaklore] And while it is growing it also can give rise to fresh virgin forest all around it.
Trees of course also absorb carbon dioxide, storing it in their cells and mostly sending it down into the ground through their fugal networks. They release oxygen and through transpiration pump massive amounts of water vapour into the atmosphere, creating the local, national and global climate they [and us] need to survive.
If you think about the River Amazon and all the water that flows down that mighty river every day. The trees of that still immense, but rapidly shrinking, and increasing under threat, forest pump more water into the atmosphere every day through transpiration than what goes down the river.
All with just a little sunlight.
“Trees have perfected the photo-reception of sunlight. This is what makes them the most special species on the planet. Trees receive quanta of sunlight and transform this energy into thermodynamic reactions. All of science cannot replicate the astounding feat of ingenuity found in a single leaf.”
“..The natural system of electron capture that the tree uses to grow may well have extraordinary ramifications for the human family that is running out of energy. A recent development in physics called the Bose-Einstein equation has demonstrated the plasticity of light energy that can move into different states and produce energy as various laser lights. Such a system might well be copied from the pattern of chemistry that exists in trees. This blending of the cutting edge of physics and polymers might well power the planet.”
Diana Beresford Kroeger “To Speak For The Trees’ p89
Then there are the fruits, nuts, resins, sap, timber and many other uses that humans have found for them.
“Their fruits and nuts hold first-class protein filled with the essential amino acids for body building for true health. They have the three essential fats necessary for nerve functioning, brain building, and maturation….All of the natural foods of the global forest are complex molecules, bonded and bound together. They are slowly plied apart in the process of digestion. Their sugars are gentle on the pancreas. They enable the hormone insulin to work more slowly and carefully on its target sites in the body. These forest foods shield the body from diabetes. They have a cardiotonic function and they revitalize the brain.”
Diana Beresford Kroeger “To Speak For The Trees’ p96
I realise I have much more to say about trees, and hopefully always will. Whenever we install something near to mature trees - in a park for instance, I am always humbled and often embarrassed by our efforts and the resources involved to make something which always seems insignificant next to the majesty of a mature broadleaf, or towering evergreen. The coastal redwoods in Northern California have reached heights of one hundred and twenty metres, and widths of Eight metres. 120m is seriously tall, with a generous three metre floor to floor height that would be a 40 story building. Apart from in big cities you don’t see many buildings that tall, imagine trees standing as tall or taller next to high-rises. Now imagine the amount of human endeavour and materials that it takes to construct something like that; design, engineering, construction, steel, concrete, glass. All only enabled by our addiction to fossil fuels. Imagine just getting a litre of water from the ground to the top of that building! walk it up the stairs! take the elevator or pump it through the pipes. The redwoods grow that tall from a genetic blueprint in a tiny seed no bigger than a pin head. They do it all just on sunlight and rainfall, every day pumping thousands of litres of water up through their vascular network just using static pressure and sunlight. And whilst growing so big they make a multitude of connections with their surroundings, giving food, shelter, energy and medicine to their neighbours, and can easily live for a1000 years or many more.
Indeed some of the oldest living things on the planet are trees:- Six to ten thousand years old bristlecone pines, and they are also some of the largest organisms: a quaking aspen clonal colony know as Pando in Utah which covers over a 100 acres.
Sustainability in action at Handspring
I am plainly a user of timber. I make a whole host of products and structures from this remarkable material and so I try to be very careful about what, from where and how much wood I use, and to make things that are useful, beautiful and durable.
In practical terms I have honed my business approach, cutting away the non-renewable or dubious heritage materials. I have turned away from business growth, preferring to stay small, light and hands on and say no to involvement in excessive commercial development schemes. I add in nature as much as possible into every design and have developed some local more eco-system style relationships. These can be summarised as follows:
- Using renewable materials, UK FSC sourced Oak and mostly Douglas Fir account for about 95% of all materials used, mostly freshly sawn so with very low embodied energy.
- Minimising or eliminating the use of highly pollutiing concrete and other non-renewables such as plastics and using steel carefully for connections were timber to timber joints are less resilient such as to keep the wood off the ground and away from the damp zone and so increasing the structures durability and longevity.
- Reusing materials as much as possible and recycling what we can’t reuse. Waste wood become firewood for home and workshop, shavings for local chickens, pigs and horses, with eggs and manure coming back in return.
- Using local labour, skills and suppliers. Connections with the community help nurture and support us.
- Supporting and encouraging skill development and education through live projects, apprenticeships and school/university student work placements
- Cycling to work and to collect materials where possible and using public transport to attend meetings further afield. Encouraging and supporting Handspring workers to also cycle.
- Engaging with and supporting community projects.
- Adding in nature to as many as our projects as possible, by using wildflower greenroofs, planting trees and incorporating bug/bat/hedgehog houses.
- Being absorbed mentally and physically by the craft of making and the connection between brain and hand, fresh air and physicality.
- Supporting through donations and time; local, national and European nature-based organisations, planting trees and getting involved with rewilding schemes.
Scot Fletcher PhD, MSc, BEng
Director
Handspring Design
Books that have recently awed, humbled, educated and amazed me on my journey:
‘Wilding’ by Isabella Tree
‘English Pastoral’ by James Rebanks
‘The Missing Lynx’ by Ross Barnett
‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben
‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake
‘Braiding Seagrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
‘Gathering Moss’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
‘Finding the Mother Tree’ by Suzanne Simard
‘The Overstory’ by Richard Powers
‘Wildwood’ by Roger Deakin
‘Oaklore’ by Jules Acton
‘To Speak For The Trees’ Diana Beresford Kroeger
‘The Global Forest’ Diana Beresford Kroeger