I salvage "waste" building materials and build home furniture and crafts, such as this picture frame, out of it. One of the beauties of the craft is in saving perfectly good materials from the landfill where it would become the next generation's problem. On a walk today, I saw this scene(picture) at a new development in our neighborhood. The typical building process is so wasteful, it makes my heart heavy to think about. At large scale "cookie-cutter" development, there is no room for mindfulness of resources. Waste is just factored into the cost of business. Whats worse is that new construction uses such crappy materials that not much of it is even worth salvaging. Most of my salvage comes from remodels and rebuilds. In these cases they are removing good, sturdy older wood and replacing it with laminates(particle board), flimsy aluminum and plastics.
This craft is one of symbolic beauty more than anything, and it is very satisfying. It is tough to want to build ones livelihood from it since it would be necessary that our building practices stay the same, not to mention it is logistically tough. Financially it wouldn't necessarily be impossible if one found their niche among the population that could afford to purchase it. But again, this would also assume the status quo in building would remain, else you'd be out of a job.

On an airplane last year I saw a 10 minute news segment on Dubai where the interviewer was ogling at Sheikh Mohammed's splendid city in the middle of one of the driest places on earth. He let the man talk about the wonders and opportunities that he was bringing to his people who have lived as simple nomads on the land until 30 years ago. The interviewer tried to ask some hard questions, but nothing that would bring any disrespect, like maybe asking why the hell they have an indoor ski slope? of doesn't it bother you that you are living we'll beyond your financial and ecological means? The little challenge he did present was met with a furrowed brow plead to make us somehow feel that what he was doing was simply trying to survive and make a living for their people. I was left smelling the reek of that city, but without hard facts. It just simply didn't seem like a good thing to build artificial islands, and a city full of high end shopping malls, a municipal water supply entirely fed by desalination plants, all on speculation from a relatively small amount of the one resource they have; oil.

I was looking through my 'top pages' report on this site today, and a post about Arcosanti is by far the most visited page. It's pretty interesting because when you search 'arcosanti' on any of the major engines, it's no where near the first page(I actually stopped looking for it, so I don't know what pages it's on), so I'm not sure where 1300+ people have landed on that page from. Anyway, it prompted me to write some more about it. I have been in loose contact with a bunch of Alumni from Arcosanti who want to create a community website for alumni activities and groundswell. We are trying to get back on track with it in time for Paolo Soleri's 90th b-day celebration at Arcosanti this summer.

Check out the Arcosanti Alumni Network site progress and let us know what you think!

I have decided after much resistance that I would join the 200 million others on Facebook. It is a social experiment for me to see how the site works by becoming a complete Facebook junkie and then I am going to see if I can delete(not just deactivate) my entire account after 30 days. I outright do not agree with the fact that Facebook is a centralized network, a walled garden or the digital age. I do not trust my life's information to live on a country-sized website controlled by a handful of people. Now obviously we aren't in China or something and it's hard to argue that Mark and the gang are some kind of malevolent Orwellian dictatorship. But its the principle of it. I'm 30 now, and when I am 80 we are certainly only going to be communicating Facebook-style on the internet(in ways we can't even imagine right now). But I'll be damned if Facebook is going to hold 50 years worth of my life's data on it's servers. I think that would be dangerous.

This is a drawing based on one I did with a stick in the sand at the beach this weekend. My cousin, who was standing in the middle, made the playful comment that if I connected the line, she would fall through the Earth. I stopped short and set-up a perilous situation. I immediately thought that this chance drawing presented itself in a timely fashion, illustrating the present human condition on Earth. So I took it to the sketch book to further ponder the many meanings I saw in the sand.