Rekindling Craftsmanship: Alex Langlands on Sustainable Practices and Ecological Balance

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Alex Langlands. You might be familiar with Alex due to his work on a variety of BBC series and TV shows, all focused on farming. Shows include Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, and Wartime Farm, among others. He's also the author of Craft, a book that talks about the history of crafts and craftsmanship, how that's evolved, and where it belongs in modern society. Check out his work and speaking tours here, and if you haven’t, tune into one of his many shows!

Andy:

Alex, thank you so much for joining to chat. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?

Alex Langlands:

So, I consider myself an archaeologist first and foremost, but I work as a lecturer now a senior lecturer at Swansea University, where I teach history, heritage, and archaeology. But people will know me most likely from a series of programs I made for BBC around historic farming and that sort of. Really in some ways, so many of my interests overlap there. Being outside, getting dirty, and, you know, getting hands-on with the past really is one of the things that I think best describes me.

Andy:

Yeah, that was one of the really interesting things about the BBC series that you did. For folks who aren't familiar, there's a—I don't know how many are there—like six of them just about somewhere around there.

And it's interesting to see how, how much we've lost in terms of knowledge and like we can. As you, as an archaeologist, I'm sure you can speak to the fact that you can go dig something up and be like, I think they used it this way, and then you go to use it, and you're like, that doesn't make any sense at all. Now that I'm trying to do it, trying to figure that out is an art in itself.

Alex Langlands:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean myself and Peter Ginn, who appeared in many of the programs with me. One of the first things I think we actually met each other on something that's called. It was called PrimTech, which was short for primitive technology weekend, and basically, a bunch of students from University College London would bus down to somewhere in the wonderful English countryside, and we'd spend the whole week just in what's called experimental archaeology. So we would do sort of charcoal burning, we would make wooden shingles for buildings, pottery, wood turning, traditional cooking, butchery work, you know, all of that kind of stuff, and it was great it was having a go.

It was kind of ice-breaking, but of course, one of the best ways to really engage with how materials work is very often to talk to craftspeople and indigenous groups who still use tools and equipment and those resources in that way. So it's been a thread in archaeology for quite a long time, certainly ethnographic studies as well.

They have their problems, obviously, but it's been a thread that one way in which we can understand the archaeological evidence is to experiment and have a go ourselves. And that's grown, and there are, you know, legitimate courses to postgraduate level on experimental archaeology.

So you know that in some ways the farm programs kind of came out of that, you know, because myself and I are the kinds of people, like you know, often with the farm's program, the director of the production would say to us, well, you know, what are we going to do next? What are we going to film next week? And we were like, well, we've got to get some seed in the ground, and there's an old seed drill in the barn, so we're going to pull it out and see what happens and, and that's often what we did.

But of course, there are people around, even if they've only pulled seed drills with tractors, uh, who can give you a little tip. You know, don't dare take that seed drill into the field now. It's too soggy, you just they'll clag up. It won't work. Okay, that's pretty logical.

A lot of it is what some people call living history. A lot of it's what I would call experimental archaeology, finding out about how things were done in the past by having a go yourself. I think that's really important to do.

Andy:

I think you brought up a unique point about how there are cultures that are still using some of the technologies that we're rediscovering, and however you want to talk about archaeology. So how does that unique perspective from the people that have that historical knowledge, how does that pair with us looking at it as an artifact, that generally we think of artifacts as these, like static things, and now you're integrating a living culture into that static item? Does that create a little bit more of a complicated conversation about that technology, whatever it might be, or does it help make it better?

Alex Langlands:

Yeah, no, I think so. I mean there's so another the risk of sort of boring your listeners to death. There's this kind of field of cognitive archaeology, and one of the movements in that is towards thinking about materiality and our minds, you know, and there's this very traditional view that our mind is just in our head, and the viewers can't see me, but I'm tapping my head.

Our mind is just in our head, and the viewers can't see me, but I'm tapping my head; your mind's just in there. Cognitive archaeologists, among other psychologists, argue that the mind isn't just in the head; the mind is in the body, the mind is in our hands, and the mind is in the objects we use on a day-to-day basis.

So our sense of self and who we are is constituted. Our mind is constituted through, uh, our physical actions, uh, our skill. You could say that's something I'm adding into it, a skill. The way we move and the way we respond to the physical environment and tools and materials are part of that. Now, for me, without wishing to get romantic about it, although I am about to, we obviously live in a world now where we press buttons, and that's just about it. You know, uh, even when we come to drying our laundry, we take it out of one machine, we put it in another machine and we press a button. So even going out and hanging laundry out on a line is not something we necessarily need to do anymore because there's a machine and a button that does it for us.

The conversation is about how to bring back that sense of the embodied mind or the mind being embodied and thorough.

So you know, I think, how do we complicate things, and I think that speaks a little bit too, you know, I think something I've seen get brought up more and more over the past probably couple of years, and I know there's kind of a lag from academia to kind of mainstream conversation is this idea of ancestral knowledge. And I think that kind of plays into this a little bit, where you're talking about this idea of memory that's not just in your brain, but also that memory that's cultural, that that gets passed down and evolves with cultures that continue to do these types of things.

You brought up a really good point about the fact that we don't have that. As an archeologist and somebody who spends so much time doing stuff hands-on and thinking about the future, I'm very interested in how archeologists will look at modern times, what we're calling now modern times, you know, from 1990 to, I don't know when.

Well, in the digital age, I think—let's call it the digital age—there'll be a in the stratigraphic sequences.

There'll just be this thick band of plastic. Yeah, and hopefully, above that thick band of plastic will be archaeological and environmental evidence for restoration. I'm not quite convinced yet that enough people, and certainly in the Western world, have woken up to that need. But yeah, there'll be a thick band in the geological sequences millions of years from now of plastic. Do you know what we are doing with plastic? Come on, what's really happening with plastic is we're shortcutting in many ways.

And you know, if I bring up the example of the laundry basket. I could be accused of being a kind of whimsical romantic, but you can buy a plastic pressed laundry basket which is a byproduct of the petrochemical industry for about £2, £3. I mean, what are we talking about? $4 or $5, something like that, maybe not even that. And do you know what? What that thing will last you if you really look after it?

You'll look, it'll last you, but it won't last you as long as one that's made from split oak. Uh, now the issue is you're gonna have to pay the guy to make the basket out of split oak 60, 70, 80 dollars maybe. So you know, not everyone can afford that, obviously. So I don't want to be elitist here. But of course, the plastic one, once it's done with, what do you do with it? Chuck in a hole in the ground, I guess. The great thing about the oak one is if, you know, if a bit of it breaks, you can phone up the basket maker, and he can replace it.

And these things I'm talking about in particular. What I use for a laundry basket is what's called a swill basket. They're made in the north of England, a place called Cumbria, and there's a brilliant basket maker called Owen Jones. He features in Victorian Farm, uh, and he really is a kind of poster child for that kind of basket, and I bought one off of him recently, and it's a laundry basket. These things have a lifespan of 50, 60, 70 years. If you look after them and if they start to fall apart, do you know what? You can chuck it back in your garden. That's as bad as it gets, you know. So I think we kind of look at plastic at the moment in this very common sense way. But of course, it isn't common sense. And what are my romantic views about everyone having a split oak basket as a laundry? It is fast becoming common sense. It's not romantic, it's not radical, it's common sense.

Andy:

You know, for example, I tried to buy a coffee maker that didn't have plastic in it, and unless you get one of the ones that's like all glass with the little filter in the middle, there's no such thing as an all metal coffee pot, and that just seems insane to me, and I think I spent like a week looking online like every day and I was like there's got to be one, like even if it's $1,000, there's got to be one, and it doesn't exist.

Alex Langlands:

You know what you want, and it doesn't exist. That, if it's like a sort of artistic sensibility, but, when we made the farm programs, I mean, say for Victorian farm, for example, we turn up at the farm and the first thing you do is you periodize it, and periodizing is about saying, well, I wouldn't have had that, wouldn't have ever I remember the farm we use a victorian farm had this sort of broken down JCD parked right in the middle of the farmyard.

You know what farmers are like. It's better; the aesthetics don't come into it. You know, if you can just dump a JCD there, and you're still using it because there are some hydraulic pipes on it and some buttons and switches that you might at some point need.

So it's useful, but you had to move all of that out, and there's some oil drums we had to move those and bits of plastic and in some ways, it's an aesthetic sensibility and and and and. If you go on Instagram, that aesthetic sensibility is like, I want it to look bijou, I want to look cottagey, I want to look craft, but I think actually underpinning that is our environmental values, and I think one of the things that we've done or we've allowed society to do, is to see that as backward, looking as romantic, as sentimental. It's not.

You know, I've been a Green Party member now for over 15 years, and what underpins my desire to get plastic out of my house isn't because I want to turn the clock back, necessarily to some halcyon days when everything was perfectly okay. It's actually because I have an aversion to the economy that's produced this stuff.

Let's not just take plastic to task. There are certainly ways in which we can and should use plastic. If we're going to deliver the level of medical care that we have delivered across the globe in response to the pandemic, plastic has a role to play, so let's not turn plastic into the demon here. It's profiting from the reckless and irresponsible production of plastic items that could otherwise be produced using sustainable resources. That's where we need to be.

Andy:

Absolutely.

And I think a part of that attraction to; I don't want to say, the olden ways or, you know, this idea of what the landscape should look like in terms of a farm or whatever, is that I think, like a very deep, ancestral, like ape part of our brain like realizes what we're living in isn't natural for us.

I'm not saying we shouldn't live in houses or anything like that, but you know, there's definitely a part of our brain that realizes we're doing something very wrong with the way we live, where we're surrounded by petrochemicals and, that we, we aren't doing anything with our hands, and that's what, like, we are wired to do is work with our hands.

For example, the whole muscle-building movement, like the gym, its history came from the fact that you had a bunch of people that had been working with their hands all day, and then they got stuck in a factory and, as you know, industrialization took hold, and they had this energy and they felt like they weren't being fulfilled, and that was a big piece of it that at that time there was such a quick change that there was this desire to physically work and that meant literally just going in a building and lifting things up and putting them down.

Alex Langlands:

As simple as that sounds, yeah, I mean, I know, and like I don't know, that you necessarily need psychiatrists or medical practitioners or educationalists of you know. I'm not saying we're in the post-expert age because we kind of are in Britain, but I don't think it does take that kind of expertise to point out that many young people are just not being fulfilled by a button-pressing society, you know, and I recognize it in myself now as a kid I perform best at school at the in the times when I was getting up really early and going out and delivering newspapers and I was burning, cycling around delivering 30 newspapers, you know.

So the best part of like 15, 20 pounds worth of paper on my back around my hometown, coming home, having my breakfast, then walking three miles to school. So by the time I got to school, all that nervous energy, anxiety, that can become anxiety, you know, that was gone. I just kind of burnt that off. You take that off, and I think the problem with our education system at the moment is kids get out of bed, get in a car, get in a classroom, and they're kind of waking up around about 10 o'clock; they're already in and then that energy that comes out of a lot of young people has to be boxed into a desk and sums and maths and writing and you know that's not right, it's not working and it's not working for a lot of society.

It doesn't work for a lot of society. So yeah, that needs to burn that energy off physically. And, of course, we are. You know we are made to pick. You know our hands are made to pick. We don't have 10 or 8 fingers and two thumbs to press buttons. I mean, you know mobile phones have been designed around our hands. Our hands haven't been designed around mobile phones. We have been designed around picking and food. A bit of hunting in there. We should probably talk about gatherer-hunters rather than hunter-gatherers. But you know, that's what we've been designed around.

And there's a certain fulfillment. Anyone who's who has the opportunity. This is the thing if you have the opportunity to garden and grow your own food. This is the society we live in now. It's like I've only just started after a four, five-year hiatus.

I've only just started growing stuff again because I haven't had the time in my life, and a lot of people don't have the time or the space. You know, time is money. It's a privilege to have a vegetable garden now. It's a cultural choice. I don't, you know, don't get me wrong, it's a cultural course. You can make the time. Believe me, you can make it.

The time when you've got the space is another question. You have maybe gotten on a waiting list for a council or a municipal plot somewhere. And in some parts of the British Isles, you've got to be a borderline multi-millionaire to buy a plot of land, a small plot of land, to grow something in. So you know it. That's not easy in itself, but anyone who does that will tell you how much satisfaction you get out of it.

I've just started this year and decided to commit to growing some stuff again because, you know, a big warning to anyone who wants to take up growing vegetables: digging your plot over is less than one percent of the job. You have to factor in four or five hours for a small plot a week. Write that into your calendar, because if you don't it'll get, get you down. And it's only this year I've been able to sort of say, okay, I'm going to commit to this. I'm not. I've been too ambitious like I've got kids. Now you see this: I'm raising two little children.

I was kind of on my hands and knees, just digging out some weeds to prepare a bed and putting some rye in.

I just wanted. I want to see how it grows. I'm making baskets with basket-making materials, but I also want to see how rye grows where I am. I'm quite high up a hill, and so that's stuff going on in my head, and actually, I was just there, and the smell of the soil and this, the smell of me in the soil, was just like god, this, I like this, I enjoy this. Why aren't I doing more of this?

And it is very, very gratifying, and we need to create the opportunities for doing that. It's not good enough just to say to everyone you should be growing your own food. Society should be creating the space for people to grow their own food. It's not everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone can do it in society. They've not got the physical skills or the interests, and that is absolutely fine. But creating opportunities for people to grow is good for their own diet, their own mental well-being, and, ultimately, for the planet.

Andy:

I think I'm a little bit of an oddball, and I think a lot of people envision an improvement of the world being that, yes, we've got automation, but automation should give us the freedom to do more things on our own, which is like. I don't disagree with that premise, but my perspective is that we need to, instead of having more free time, we need to be more invested in our ecology and our food systems, and that should be what we're doing with that excess time, not lounging around. We're still really not even made for that. But being outside and in nature and getting dirt under your fingernails is, you know, exponentially better for you than sitting inside and being able to watch TV for an extra four hours a day.

Alex Langlands:

Yeah, I mean absolutely. It's going to take a seismic shift in values and attitudes. I hope it doesn't come about because of some massive catastrophic climate incident, but as you say, I think we have rights in society.

Everyone has rights, but everyone has responsibilities, and increasingly, we need to write into people's responsibilities the planet and taking care of the planet and you know, like you say, if, because of automation, we get a day off, okay, we really shouldn't be driving down to the airfield, popping in our plane and having a zing around because we can, or getting on a jet ski and making a lot of infernal noise. Jet skis, goodness me, they should be banned tomorrow if you want my opinion.

I'm sure the jet skiers are listening, thinking that's not fair. But you know we're going to. We've just really got to put under the microscope exactly how that free time is used. Free time should be free time to deliver a healthier planet for everyone, not free time to burn more and to consume more. And that's one of the issues we have when trying to imagine a world.

When I was an archeologist, I was poor. All I ever wanted was time. You know, I didn't like it; I just wanted time. But we live in a world where you have to consume in your free time. You have to go out and do something. What should we do? Let's go out and consume.

Doing nothing is an option.

Andy:

So this is a little off-topic, but here in the United States, one of the things that's really grown in the last few years is foraging, and it's a great hobby for people to have. I'm not trying to dissuade people from foraging. However, the practice is how do I identify foods that I can eat and not, and how do I integrate myself into the ecology so that there are more foods for everyone? And a lot of these, these things that are being foraged are getting essentially wiped out because you've got a bunch of people going into an ecology and they don't understand.

Like if everyone says I'm only going to take a third, well, if you know, for example, fiddleheads, if there are 10 fiddleheads, someone takes a third of those. There are several; someone takes a third of those. There are seven fiddleheads, someone takes a third of those, down to five fiddleheads, someone takes a third down to like two or three fiddleheads, and you know that's not sustainable. I think that you know how we create the conditions where there are more fiddleheads, and that should be just as important as actually. You know, being like, I want to eat foods that come from nature.

You know, whatever the microbiology that's involved with that and all those good things that are good for us, but we're very consumptive in that relationship with our environments.

Alex Langlands:

That is what I mean. I was, at one point, toying with writing a book called Hedgerow Craft. I get it would have dropped. It would have bombed in the States. It's not to say it wouldn't have bombed here, but it would have bombed in the States because you don't have any hedgerows.

Andy:

Yeah, and I would love that book because I am very interested in hedgerows, and there's nobody here who does them. So I think I can go to Canada to learn. There's one place that has a class, and it's about 12 hours away.

Alex Langlands:

That's like probably the only thing within 3,000 miles. Yeah, because I think the only hedgerow is a sort of New England way. I've been reliably informed that there was a kind of attempt many years ago to plant out hedgerows.

Of course, the British and European landscapes, since the Bronze Age, have had these living boundaries, what we would call hedges, which take management all the time, and I'm very keen. I really love the crafts that come out of the hedgerow. The tricky situation you're in is if, if you, if I, were to land a bestseller, for example, and everyone got themselves a little hedging hook and went out and cut some stuff from the hedgerow to make something, what would happen is our landscape would be denuded of hedgerow. So you're exactly exactly what we need. You know, it is what we're consuming. We're consuming all the time, you know, and my wanting to write a commercial book about hedgerow crafts would be actually promoting a form of consumption in a way. And what we need is that kind of restorative restoration, and that means it's. It's very interesting.

I've done some work on commonality and the commons and what the concept of common access is and how it's managed and who has rights and all this kind of stuff, and there's, there's a, there's very, very strong historiography of that in the sort of English landscape that I know about and aware about, and it's exactly that If there's a resource in a landscape that can be used to make something at some point you're going to have to carve it up and decide who can make from it.

So you know, there are all those ethical questions, I think, around byproducts is the way in which we should be maximizing, you know, because farmers actually don't have the time to hedge traditionally all the hedgerows in British landscape and, to their credit, they're engaged in programs here where they maybe will they flay hedges now.

So you have a machine that goes along, and it's brutal.

It just flays the whole hedge, and it leaves it scarred, and it's raw, and actually, you get these big open wounds on the plants, which then can attract infestations and cankers and all that kind of stuff. It's not ideal, and of course, they've probably got a barbed wire fence on either side of it, so they don't really care about the hedge's functioning entity. Increasingly you can be involved in schemes where you maybe fly it once every three years, once every two years, so that you're encouraging growth, and also these are kind of corridors, wildlife corridors, nesting seasons as well and all that kind of stuff. But actually, if you upskilled enough community members to hedge who have the skill, a lot of clearers, all they want to do with the stuff they cut out of the hedge is burn it for brash, and you know that's.

The byproduct could be used Anywhere. There's a byproduct, it can be used and that's maybe what we need to just think. That's what we should be thinking about now. That's what we should be thinking about now. You know, for any time a municipal authority is out cutting something, flying something, chopping it back, which is the kind of petrochemical boomer generation, do you know? If it's growing, cut it. Cut it back.

Andy:

Try to keep it static so it doesn't change size.

Alex Langlands:

I get it, I kind of get the, I get that aesthetic. You know, if you were born and brought up in a city and you move to the country, you don't know what natural grass looks like, you just want a lawn, you want a carpet, and it's actually. It's taken me a while to look at my lawn now, which someone would say is messy, but aesthetically, now my lawn is beautiful because it is allowed to just grow, and I will scythe.

The viewers, obviously the listeners, can't see me, but I'm looking out my window. You know, down the bottom now is a big scythe. That was the first scythe I've done in three years, and then about halfway up the garden, I don't think I've scythed that for two or three years as well, and that's got a little bit more grass in it. Now what I did with the lawn out the front of the house here is I've done a tight mow now more regularly, and that is imitating a tight graze because grasslands were grazed, and that type the imitation of the tight graze obviously encourages different species and in fact what we've had is thrushes and blackbirds coming for worms on that patch. Now, because it's been very tightly grazed, it's more like a grassland where you get birds coming in and feeding. So I've tried, I've tried to sort of mix it up really in my garden but a lawn to me now like there's nothing more beautiful than watching long grasses in the wind, you know.

And now I look at lawns, and they are abhorrent, you know. They, to me, are cut for the sake of neatness and tidiness, like there's a cognitive dissonance going on in the mind of someone who's doing that.

Andy:

They are not engaging with the planet, absolutely, and I also have a messy yard. Just before we started recording, I went out and checked on some of the whips that I had planted a year ago. I was just kicking over the dandelion heads that were, all you know, throwing seed, and I saw my neighbor pull out, and I was like, ah, they're probably so mad at me right now.

Alex Langlands:

I have that. I've got a neighbor who has a pristine lawn, a lovely neighbor. They really are, and they have a pristine lawn, and I understand, like you know. To be honest, it's like we don't have the time to manage. You know, we've got a big garden, believe it or not. Now, new builds in the UK. You don't want a big garden A because developers want to get as many houses on the plot as possible. But actually, people don't want big gardens. They want room enough to sit out on the patio in the sun, have a barbecue, drink some white wine and that's it, you know.

Whereas when I clapped my eyes on this place, which we got five years ago like I didn't even go now, I said to the agent, we'll take it. I hadn't even been in the house, I just saw it in a big garden, it had an amazing view of the bay, and it had a workshop at the back. So I was like, we'll take it. My wife, like, do you want to have a look inside first?

Andy:

Yeah, that's similar to my story. We found our house. It's got about two hectares, and that's pretty uncommon around here, but it butts against a highway, and there's a strip of land between us and the highway as well. That's about another 10 hectares. It's a long, thin strip, but I looked at it, and it was the square footage we needed. And I looked in the backyard, and I was like, nobody's back here, and it's just a mix of woods and grasslands. I'm like, this is perfect. And my wife hadn't even seen it, and I put an offer on it, and she's like, can I see it first?

Alex Langlands:

As long as it had a house, yeah, we'll make it work, yeah it's good, and of course, you know I work at university now, so we've been incredibly busy, and I've got young kids as well. So, my days of jumping into the costume of an 1880s farmer and spending a year immersed in the world of farming aren't over. They will come back very definitely. But I had to sort of, in some ways, grow up a bit. It's great to sort of let the garden go because the species have been absolutely amazing. But I that that's where I do feel for people. At the end of the day, we don't have the time. We have a creative society that doesn't have the time to look after its landscape.

Andy:

Yeah, and there are other elements.

Alex Langlands:

We need to improve access and meaningful access to landscapes, not just park here, get out, and go on a walk. But meaningful access is about parking here, getting out, having an induction, building a dry stone wall, maintaining these hedgerows, digging these ditches, putting up some fence posts, you know. Sow some, sow some seed here, dig out some invasive species there, you know.

We need to create those frameworks for public engagement and volunteering because I think people do want to do it. We have something called the national trust over here. I think you have a national trust over there, which owns a lot of properties. They have a big, huge volunteer workforce, and there's a program of engagement and that, you know. These are the positives that I think are coming out of the turn if you like, the natural turn.

Here in the UK, it's a bit different. I mean, in the States you can walk for days and not see anyone. In the UK, this is a very crowded little island. Sometimes I don't think people realize how crowded this little island is. Not quite as crowded as Holland, but I moved to Wales partly because that's where my wife's from, but a big part of me was like, you know, I, I am on the doorstep here of national parks, country parks, coastlines, mountains, it's joyous out here, but where I lived in the southeast of England, I'm not joking country parks over weekend, there's no parking space.

Andy:

Sure, yeah, I mean, we've got a couple of parks around here, and, like I said, it's a little rural, but it's not super rural. I'm a half hour outside of Boston, and you go to the hiking trails, and there are about 40 SUVs shoved into the little parking lot, some of them on the road. It's all these massive SUVs and they're all doing the same thing, like walking their dogs, and that's about it. They're not going off the trails; they don't really understand the ecology that they're looking at.

To tie that back into what we're talking about, this restorative understanding of our relationship with the landscape, much like the UK, much of this part of the country was clear cut multiple times. One of the damaging effects that I think is not talked about enough is that the forest here has no successional transitions because all of the old growth is gone.

So the nuts from the trees that take a long time to travel, there's no way for them to be here. You know, the hickories and the walnuts and all these other things that would, you know, be the next step in our forests from taking hold. So you walk in the forest and there are these massive pines and black cherries and the occasional oak, and then below them, like you know, 20-30 feet tall, are the next round of pines. There's no change in the evolution of the forest. And, yeah, you know, people can walk around and say, oh, this is so serene, and blah, blah, blah. But you're missing this very important part of our natural succession in the ecology.

Alex Langlands:

I've literally just come out of a meeting we were talking about exactly the same thing. Here in Swansea during the 19th, well, late 18th, and 19th centuries, huge amounts of copper were smelted. And when you smelt copper, you're driving off arsenic and sulfur, and what was happening is it's coming out of chimneys and just being blown over the hills, so it just killed. I mean, some of the photographs, aerial photographs from the 1920s, are just like the surface of the moon. Uh, and what they then did in the '60s and '70s was to try and restore the hillsides. They planted a lot of pine. We also planted a lot of pine as well in this country because pit for things like pit props, and there was a tax offsetting you could do if you planted a forest, so you just use bungalow pine.

So these community groups are taking the pine down and looking for that, as you say, the residual seed, the residual indigenous woods, to come through. But of course, the challenge you have is exactly that, that what comes through is the pine and we've got, we've broken, it's broken, it's broken and and the and. The other thing is, as you say, a lot of people, like in the south of England, will look out the window at the beautiful chalk downland, and they'll see sweeping hills. It's green, that's good enough, and I lived in that part of the world for long enough to realize that and I was quite seduced by it when I first went down there. Oh, it's lovely, the chalk downlands, rolling hills, ancient landscapes, and Stonehenge. You know all of this, and actually, I lived there for 10 years, and I think it was in February before I left, I realized how much of a rat-infested desert it was.

You know, and the soil, the hills have been so denuded, and you've got monocrop. It's wheat, barley, and rapeseed just as far as the eye can see.

And everyone goes, oh, look at these lovely, wonderful yellow fields, bright yellow fields of rapeseed. That's not, that's not lovely, that's terrible. And it takes a long time, I think, for those aesthetics I think I talk about in craft, I think about, I talk about Kant, the philosophy of aesthetics. You know, the pure aesthetics, pure beauty, and dependent beauty, and I think we have these things called what are called areas of outstanding natural beauty here in the UK, which are protected, designated areas. They always make me chuckle because, actually, they're not natural; they come from the Anthropocene, and they come about because of human activity.

The rolling chalk downlands and grass downlands are there because they've been grey since the bronze age, okay, so they're not wild; they're because managed herds of grey were there, okay. You know, I was in the Cantabrian mountains three years ago. That's an outstanding landscape, northern Spain. So if they're not natural and they're not outstanding, okay, they're areas of beauty, well, beauty is a subjective concept, okay. And if you've got dependent and pure beauty, well, if I think dependent beauty is really the way we should be thinking about it.

They're not actually that beautiful because they're not functioning as beautiful places. They're just being exploited, really, through industrial farming. So what you're actually left with, once you've taken the natural, the beauty, out of the equation, is an area. It's just an area, it's fiction, and the English landscape is in some ways the rural middle of the English landscape fiction, and it's fiction that's perpetuated still to this day in we have a series called Countryfile. It's all about a wonderful country. You watch that program in January. The color grading on the actual program has been ramped up so high it's almost like luminous green, it's like intoxicating green.

I remember talking to someone who actually worked on it, who presented on it, and I won't name it, and he said we're not allowed to show barbed wire. So we live in England, where a good number of people have made a lot of money out of perpetuating this myth of this green and pleasant land, and of course, that's starting to be eroded on historical, social, and ecological grounds. It needs proper eroding.

It's actually not green and pleasant. It's over-exploited, it's sick, and it's poorly. We know we need to act pretty quickly to repair it, and one of the best ways to repair it is to put people back in it, people with understanding. So they're not like, you know, if you want a wildlife habitat, you have to keep dogs out of it. You can't have dogs and wildlife because you run a dog once or twice through a habitat off the lead. Dog's having a lovely time, everyone's having a lovely time burning some of that energy off your puppy, great.

But you run a dog through a wildlife reserve two or three times. Certain species will go. They'll just go. That's how they're bred. They're bred to go, and dogs are bred to do one thing. So, how can you engage with landscapes in a more responsible way and actually get hands-on? That's an educational program. It's a cultural program as well. It's about values.

Andy:

I could talk about ecology all day, but I did want to talk to you about your book, and you brought it up, so now I can transition to it despite my interests pulling me the other way. Um so, craft—is it craft or craved? How is it pronounced?

Alex Langlands:

Actually, it’s craft, which is probably the traditional way of saying it. I often say craft just to differentiate it from craft. If we're talking about this knowledge, this wisdom that we do appear to have, we don't appear to have a modern word in English that relates to the old English way, the way that word was used in the late ninth and early 10th centuries.

Yeah, when it's used as a gloss to describe power, knowledge, wisdom, even virtue as well, and you know, that's what's interesting to me is, what is that thing that we've lost?

Andy:

Yeah, I wanted to ask. I believe you wrote it after the BBC series was pretty much wrapped up. I'm assuming that experience heavily impacted how that book was written and, I guess, where the ideas came from.

Alex Langlands:

Yeah, it did. I think, a number of like moments when I'm doing something and I think, ah, this is the smart bit about this, this is why this is clever. There could be anything really, even like making a hurdle, okay, splitting the wood, getting them. So how do you split the wood? Well, the theory is this that's nothing smart in the theory, it's a point of practice. It's the way you hold your body, the way you move, that then, once you get that flow, that you think, oh, that's the smart bit, that's why you twist it over, that's why you do that.

And when you come to make a hurdle, panel, split wood, you're making a fence post, basically out of split hazel. There are a couple of little tweaks that you do with the wands. These are the ones that bind it together and basically stop it from falling apart the moment you pick it up. There's this and then that, that those the skill, the intelligence of the skill, the intelligence of how something is made and those little tricks that you do to make something.

And there's the intelligence of the way it's resourced because if you don't manage the coppice wood to produce the wood to make the hurdle, then you're going to run out of hurdles. So it's the intelligence of how that's managed and not over-exploited. And then there's the intelligence of how the hurdle is used to pen sheep onto a patch of ground to concentrate their dung so that you organically produce yields or try and improve your yields.

So the intelligence, the craft in the making of a hurdle, actually manifests itself in both the way it's resourced, the way it's made, the way it's used, and in the way it's disposed of. You know it runs out of use. You know hazel hurdles will last maybe two or three years, three or four years maybe if you can look after them. Um, what do you do with it then? Well, it's fine; you can just burn it. You could use it to light your stove. It has another function. And then finally it's ash, and then that ash goes out onto your garden plot, and guess what? That provides potassium for your food. So the intelligence behind the whole process is what I was really interested in.

Andy:

It's a really thoughtful, introspective approach to craft and doing things for the sake of doing them throughout all those components of the process. You know, as we've been talking, it really speaks to the fact that this is what we're wired to do and how we can integrate ourselves into the landscape in a way that we can improve the landscape with human interaction, as opposed to this idea that the thing to save the ecology is for humans to stop being in it, which I think has been an understandable reaction to the damages that we have done in the last 80 years, specifically speaking, or you could even say since industrialism.

I understand it, but it does erase the human aspect that humans have impacted and improved the ecology across the planet for 12,000 years. This is a blip in humanity's history, and it doesn't mean that we are the virus or whatever terminology people might use, but that we have to really think about our place and our craft, as you say, as something that's a unique way to be involved with the environment that we live within.

Alex Langlands:

Yeah. I think one of the problems I have with rewilding in inverted commas is the re-element. What are you going back to? Are you going back to 1400 AD? You're going back to about 1400 BC. Now what?

If you want to restore a landscape, put a bloody big fence up and stop people getting into it is, you know, is the sort of emergency measure and, and let it just breathe, uh, a little bit and have a break from human beings, but the long you know, we're not going to feed the world, by doing that. Like you, I think I don't agree necessarily that we need designated wild places and that other places aren't designated, because I think the danger there is you get inequalities across the planet.

You know, we really have to be very careful in the UK at the moment because, you know we, if we decide, well, actually, no, we shouldn't be producing food here, we should turn it back, we should think about the pollinators, we should think about x, y, you know, restoration and rewilding. We're gonna have to grow that food somewhere, and if it's not in our backyard, it's going to be in Brazil's backyard. So we actually really need to think very, very intelligently about how we actually grow food. We restore the habitat. That's what we're going to do. We're going to grow food; we're going to restore the habitat, we're going to make it financially sustainable, because you know otherwise, that has to be a goal, has to be part of it. And then the fourth thing maybe, just maybe, if we can, a little bit of profit for those that work really hard to do that.

That's the one way around. No one's interested unless there's profit in it. And you know there's a big lobby across the world that just wants the profit, and that's. You know there's. There's a great line, isn't there amongst the diggers? A common treasury for all is what it should be. The landscape shouldn't be an opportunity for people to make a profit. For people to make a profit, maybe somewhere down the line, if we've successfully fed X number of people, improved the environment, and the whole system's financially wiped its own face. Yeah, if there's profit at the end of that, great. Well done. But at the moment, we are in a situation where profit is driving what happens, and of course, that idea is a relatively recent concept in the story of the human world that landscapes for profit.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think you know, at least the last couple of years we've seen a lot of talk about things like carbon credits. While I think it's well-meaning, it's still very profit-focused, and I don't know if we are capable of fully accounting for the externalities of our economic models. And you know, I think it's, you know, it's like a Band-Aid on a stomach wound, like you know it's not going to really do much, except it might look good at first.

Alex Langlands:

Yeah, I mean, if you introduce carbon credits or carbon taxes, you're working with the existing system. This is going really to mean that if you can burn stuff, you can afford to burn stuff. You can burn stuff, yeah, and the danger is we live in an aspirational world; there's no doubt about it. People want. The danger is is we live in an aspirational world, there's no doubt about it. People want to show up. We want new stuff; we want to be seen to have new stuff because we want to seem to be wealthy and powerful. You know, we have that kind of aspirations, and that's very toxic, and you know, we need to change that. We need to change, and that's very difficult.

You know, if someone goes into a second-hand store and buys an item of clothing from a second-hand store, there's a certain stigma attached to that. You know what's happening is hopefully, the values will change. Is that? You know, actually, that someone going into a second-hand store and buying something second-hand is more virtuous and more desirable than someone who has to buy something and feels they need to buy something new? Yeah, it's very hard to communicate, you know. I, we. We try and tell all our family members, Christmas this year, can it be second-hand?

Andy:

know, and that is that is anathema to some people.

Alex Langlands:

Oh, I can't buy secondhand. I'm not buying secondhand, and we've got to get into that space where we have a different set of values than excessive consumption.

Andy:

Consumption for the sake of consumption.

Alex Langlands:

Yes, it is demonized, and that is where it becomes a little bit hard because you know it's about values. It's about values, and yeah, spending lots of money and being really flashy, uh, is not cool, it's really not cool. But smoking, you know, there's a time when smoking was cool. We were watching Greece the other day. Bit of a tangent, you know. I grew up watching that with my sisters, and they're amazing. I love it, but Christ, the amount of smoking in it.

I don't think we've got time for fashions to change. No, I think this has to be driven actually by values and by responsible values, and I think both the US and the UK.

The UK is currently still in this situation. I don't mind saying it. We've had leaderships that are not intellectually equipped enough to deliver that on those values, you know, they're just not, and it's a step backward, really, because this is the point at which we should be doubling up, not cooling off on, and the language that's come out of your past incumbent and our present incumbent is woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenge. And you know, I think that's that is a big problem at the moment is around values, and we've got to believe in it and our leaders have got to believe in it. Come together and push the agenda forward because if we don't, the legacy for our children, children's children, and the planet is going to be pretty horrific.

Andy:

It's scary stuff when we start thinking about heading towards this cliff, and we all know it's there. But it doesn't seem like anyone wants to be the one who says, okay, well, I'm willing to make a change, and a real change, not driving a Tesla, but something that actually makes a difference. ” And that means freedom of time doesn’t mean freedom to consume.

Alex Langlands:

We need to introduce more of those weekends, more of those. Look, you know. You know I don't want to come across as some kind of purist; I've got a car out there. It's an old banger 20, 20 years old. Religiously, every year I try and keep it on the road, but I fashioned a world for myself where I can walk to work. Okay. Now the fact is, my wife can't. She's got to drive, you know so, and we're looking at electric cars. Can we make the leap can we? It is about slowly, all of us migrating, perhaps a bit quicker than if I was saying this 10 years ago. Yeah, maybe not so slow, but migrating our values towards something that is going to be more respectable to our descendants.

Andy:

In this mindset of thoughtful consumption, I got to ask one of my favorite parts of the book about your skep hives because they're non-existent here in the United States. But it's something I'm super curious about as a beekeeper, and I'm just totally frustrated with traditional beekeeping. So I just really enjoyed reading about your thought process, and it kind of reminded me of, like, the Tibetan monks who create the mandalas and then they let them wash away. And that seems like the same process with the skeps, where you're like you're making something that you know and acknowledge that is very short-lived, even though it's a very long, thoughtful labor of love. So, for folks who aren't familiar with skeps, and I know we're running a little bit out of time, can you talk quickly about them and a little bit about that process?

Alex Langlands:

Yeah, skep is, in essence, it's a basket; it's a straw basket, and it's one of the things that I make quite a lot of as a thing on YouTube at the moment. I did back in lockdown, the first lockdown, called Shed Crafter, and I basically show how to make a basket in my shed, a skep basket, and the great thing about skeps really is they have a kind of social and economic situation. You might. You've got a lot of straw because you live in an agricultural world, and there's straw aplenty when we used to grow long straw varieties. And you've got winter months where you haven't got an iPad or a tablet or a TV to keep you occupied, just chat in the fire, maybe a bit of song, I don't know.

You've got time and raw materials, so you can make these baskets, which are cheap and easy to make. If you try to make one now, it'll take you ages, okay, because you also have to strip down bramble to use for binding them and everything.

Anyway, we don't like skeps now because one of the problems is you can't get to the bees inside the skeps. So, in the 19th century, they developed frame hives where you could take each frame out and you could inspect them. You could inspect your bees and you can manage your bees. Now that comes from a very scientific way of understanding the world. Where you see a problem, you treat it, you intervene, and increasingly, we use chemicals to intervene now so that we can knock back the burden of both insects that get in there and prey on the bees, but also funguses as well that prey on the bees.

So I kind of understand all of that, especially if you're making a profit out of bees, and that's what a lot of the lobbies beekeeping lobbies want to see. They don't want to see people using skeps because the risks are that in your skep, you're going to build up of these pests and mites, and the bees then carry them and spread them around.

The other thing with the skep, I should say, is if to get to the honey, you have to destroy the brood, you have to dig the whole brood out of the basket, and that's seen as a bad thing. Well, it is a bad thing, but if you know, the queen in that skep is four or five years old. She's not going to have another laying year. So you can target that skep, you can take the wax and the honey out of that, you can burn the skep because you can just sit by the fire and make another one because you've got all the materials. So there is a social and historical context within which they're made.

The thing about skep beekeeping for me was that it allowed the bees to do their own thing, putting the well-being of the bees within the bees ’ hands and also making sure that the skeps were burnt. You know, that's one thing. If you, if you do, leave something to get infected, the thing with skep keeping is you want the swarm, you want her to leave, you to swarm, you want the queen to swarm, you want that to happen, you don't want to suppress that, whereas when you're frame hiving, you don't want the queen to swarm because it splits the colony and you get less honey. So you're thinking you're looking after yourself and not the bees. Skeps allow you to look after the bees, and if you get a bit of honey out of it at the end of the day, all is well and good.

And the great thing I found about the skeps when you're encouraging swarming, you're encouraging her, the queen, to breed, you're accelerating the process by which actually natural selection works okay. The other thing with skeps is because they're straw, they're insulated, and bees die off in the winter, which means when it starts to get warm in the spring, more bees are there, ready to get going. So they get going quicker than your box hives which often have a just. They just keep that chill, you know, extra week, two weeks into the spring and also the chill, and they catch moisture as well. These big, you know, if you've got cedar wood hives, they catch moisture, so you get more die-off. So they've really worked.

But what you have to bear in mind is that it's a different way of beekeeping, and I don't want to upset beekeepers who have traditional hives. You have a problem with skeps because in some nations, they are actually banned. I just want people to understand that it's a different knowledge and a different wisdom.

Andy:

It's a super cool process, and it's villainized very heavily in the beekeeping community. So reading it was just. I felt like my brain exploded, and I was like, this is a totally different perspective than I've ever heard on skeps, and I really appreciated it.

So I know we're wrapping up. Let me ask if there's anything you want to plug in, if you know where people can get your book, and if you have anything else coming up for people to check out.

Alex Langlands:

You can buy the book online, anywhere. From the publisher is always best. There are certain nefarious global enterprises that aren't necessarily doing the planet any good. You could buy from them or you could buy from the publisher. You could check out Shed Crafter on YouTube. It's entirely free. It's two and a half hours of how to make a basket, broken down into 12-minute episodes. How to make a basket from scratch. I did it in my shed. It's my little lockdown project. I did it for fun. That's me. Have a look at that. And if you go out and end up making a basket and using that as a laundry basket instead of a plastic basket, if just 10 people do that, I've brought some good into this world.

Andy:

I'm going to check that out. I've got a bunch of little oaks that need to come down, so maybe I can put them to work. That's good stuff, Alex. Thanks so much.

Alex Langlands:

It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks ever so much for having me on.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #41 of the Poor Proles Almanac.