Issue 36 – David Attenborough
“People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.” – Sir David Attenborough
This issue is about sustainability, but we could have quite easily called it the ‘how can we do things better?’ issue. Not as zippy, eh. The reason we’ve done a ‘sustainability’ issue is because recently, the ‘S’ word keeps popping up. And rightly so. We’re lucky to meet a lot of people in this line of work and surprisingly, a lot of them actually care about doing things better, dropping the ‘S’ bomb left, right and centre. Mainly on the left though. (Am I right?)
That’s not to say this is the ‘how can we do things perfectly?’ issue, because it’s not. The issues surrounding sustainability aren’t going to be solved by just going out and buying an organic cotton t-shirt. These are gigantic issues that will ultimately be solved (or not solved) in financial and political arenas. That’s not to detach from them, it’s just to say they’re issues of monumental scale. Things like Brexit (which isolate, rather than unite) will obviously not help, but we digress.
We, as in us, everyone, can do things better and this issue is about how. This issue is about materials, sharing knowledge, thinking differently about the way we shop and investing in quality. It’s not about ‘40 things you need to buy this week’ (and forget about next week), it’s not about buy one get one free and it’s not about buying things on a whim that you wouldn’t bother repairing if they broke.
This issue features people like Arthur Potts Dawson – who was talking about sustainability in food a decade before it become cool – and Mae-ling Lokko whose passion for mushroom-based sustainable building materials is infectious. We’ve considered cradle-to-cradle architecture, jackets that are worth repairing and recycled cordial in bartending. It has been one of the most rewarding and enlightening issues to put together and we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone involved. Keep fighting the good fight and follow us on Instagram.
