Our friends at Moowan publish beautiful stories about finely made objects in the wider world. The story about the Japanese craft of sudare screens is particularly evocative.
It includes beautiful images, video, history and poetry that helps us appreciate these bamboo screens. Of note is their usefulness in filtering out the heat while allowing enough light to pass through for everyday life.
As the world becomes hotter, the default option is to turn up the air-conditioning. But this only increases carbon emissions and thus accelerates the cycle of global warming. This is a time when we might look to traditional crafts which offered offline means of staying cool, such as the paper fan and these Japanese blinds.
This doesn’t mean other reforms are unnecessary, such as the reduction of carbon emissions generally. But we do need to break out of our technological cocoons to engage more directly with the world around us.
