Coming to Terms

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Every now and then a ray of light breaks through the gloom of news related to climate change. It often has to do with community members taking matters into their own hands by developing initiatives to mitigate its impact. When doing the same thing that has always been done does not work any more, we look around for alternatives. Sometimes the answers to growing problems are nothing new, they just have not been seen before in the current light. There is one anachronistic area of activity that has seen a resurgence of late, possibly related to the growing awareness of our earth’s distress.

The Stone Trust’s 2024 journal, “Hearting”, recently published my essay, Coming to Terms in Today’s World. It makes the case that stone, and the laying of it dry, is worth taking a look at for its reusability and low-energy methodology in mitigating the effects of climate change. Here it is:

Without intending to, the archaic practice of dry stone walling has become topical. Three terms currently circulating in the design/build field are DfD, circular economy and embodied energy. All refer to the growing awareness that the materials and methods used in construction can have an environmental impact both before and after their implementation. Stone as a building material and walling as a building method are beacons for mindfully navigating the landscape of our present time.

At the same time that it has given us greater comforts, the modern built environment has increasingly given us concern for our well being. As its immediate and long-term impacts are recognized, alternative methods of construction gain traction. Design for deconstruction and disassembly, or DfD, proponents champion strategies that include the potential for a new construction to be easily taken apart so that its elements can be re-used for a future fabrication. It’s not exactly planned obsolescence, it’s just facing the fact that objects lose their function, usefulness or fashion over time. And when they do, the components that went into making them should become available and valuable assets rather than problems in need of disposal. 

As it stands with most of the objects that we surround ourselves with, at the end of their usefulness they are discarded, destroyed and buried. Many of earth’s resources considered inexhaustible in the 19th and 20th centuries have proven to be anything but. In the 21st century, natural resources continue to be depleted and exhausted at an even faster pace. Take sand for example, the world’s most-used solid substance, at 50 billion tons extracted every year, the rate is not sustainable. Once it goes into concrete, or glass, or the microchips in “smart” devices it’s gone for good and never coming back.

Reincarnation after death is an idea that’s been around as long as humans have held a hope for their futures, both as individuals and as societies. If we can believe in something that has only come true in myths and legends, maybe it’s time to make the concept of eternal life real in our material world. By moving toward a circular economy, one in which end products are repurposed after use and by-products are reintroduced into other production processes, we begin to allow the living earth to heal itself from the injuries inflicted by humankind.

Employing minimally processed, locally sourced, natural materials in a way that leaves them ever-ready for reconfiguration is the definition of dry stone walling. Every object constructed in this manner is a hand-made reflection of its local geologic setting. Existing dry stone structures are storehouses and inventories. Stone walls, themselves, are not the answer to the pressing questions we need to face on a global scale but they do serve to illustrate that long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships with the natural world are possible. 

The catalog of effort to produce a piece of construction is known as embodied energy. It refers to the invisible wake of expelled energy that a built structure leaves behind. The energy spent can be calculated and presented in a number of ways depending on the reason to quantify it. Every step in a process contains the residue of other processes. Embodied energy can be measured by the impact it has had on the earth, a species, a people or person. The deeper we peer into the background of anything manufactured the more complicated the picture gets until the congregate impact becomes difficult to comprehend. A natural stone going into a wall could be said to have an embodied energy of “zero” despite having gone through tremendous changes from its birth as an ingredient of earth’s solid mantle to becoming an object loosely lying on its surface. There are very few landscape constructions that contain as low an embodied energy as a dry stone wall that’s been assembled by hand. 

Being aware of the embodied energy that’s present in the products of manufacture that we surround ourselves with can help us make choices in our material life that are less damaging to the environment. Choosing minimally processed, locally produced raw materials is a good place to start when deciding what food to cook for dinner, or what components to include in a backyard landscaping project. The modern world has developed to a point where it’s near impossible for an individual to go about their day without causing some deleterious impact on the environment. That leaves us with constant choices to make; each potentially less, or more, in sympathy with the wellbeing of the planet.

The act of walling includes periodic shifting and lifting of stone. One thing that’s constant in a waller’s day is choice-making. The assessment and sequential choosing of stone is an ongoing mental exercise. If there’s anyone qualified to make respectful, solid choices for living in harmony with Earth, it’s a dry stone waller.