Photographs by Peter Forbes
Chelsea Green Publishing: 2003
Hardcover $35.00
Good design is part of Maine life. Think of all those old Cape-style houses, oriented so the winter sun warms their parlors; the clean lines of boats, bows angled to cut through rough water with maximum efficiency. Even the homely lobster trap is a triumph of form and function.
Bill Coperthwaite sees life as a design problem, where the definition of design goes beyond physical surroundings to encompass philosophy. Bad design, he says, penalizes us all. Chairs, for example, are produced in the way that is easiest and cheapest for machines to make. The result is that “we end up surrounded by furniture designed to fit the needs of machines.”
Well, that woke me up, because my desk chair is none too comfortable. That kind of non-awareness, I realized, about our lives and surroundings lets us accept any number of injurious situations cited: water pollution, wars, violence, an educational system that stifles curiosity. It also encourages ignorance of the very large world around us, a world that is more and more arriving on our doorsteps and demanding loudly that we pay attention.
Coperthwaite, a Maine native and Bowdoin graduate with a doctorate from Harvard, has spent a lifetime studying other cultures, and in this thoughtful memoir he offers ideas about how we can incorporate into our thinking and our lives the wisdom of others – making an axe, collecting rain, weaving on a small loom – using qualities of self-reliance, proportionality and awareness. He has walked his talk by preserving a stretch of coastline way down east – living off the electric grid, utilizing primarily handmade tools, traveling by non-motorized boat. Others may find other routes; he asks only that we be aware, keep a sense of proportion, don’t use more than we need.
OK. So this may seem just a bit esoteric. How does it affect “real” life?
No need to give up your TV; just be aware of how your choices to use resources – time, minerals, transportation costs, and so on – may also affect other people in your life, other countries, the planet. If, he says, we could imagine our society as an extension of our selves, we would be more careful not to cause harm. Cooperation, rather than competition, is one road, and in a harsh climate like Maine’s, cooperation – among neighbors, friends, work associates – is a valued trait. The object, here, is a society “in which everyone wins.” It is an effort exemplified by Harborside homesteader Scott Nearing, who wrote, “Do the best that you can in the place that you are, and be kind.”
The book, which is beautifully produced (and publishing is a process that is anything but “simple”), offers numerous sidebars with anecdotes, instructions, accounts of encounters in far corners of the world, all of which seem particularly relevant to our ever-smaller world. And there are numerous marginal quotes from such as Thoreau, Gandhi and Emily Dickinson that offer small jewels of awareness and inspiration.
One quote from Hillel, who wrote in 100 B.C., seems particularly appropriate: “That which is harmful to you, do not do to another. That is the whole law. The rest is mere commentary.”
Ironically, the stretch of land that Coperthwaite has sought to protect along Dickinson’s Reach is now under threat of development as a golf course, which can be one of the most toxic and environmentally degrading forms of “development.”