Quilting Sustainability

I have a whole entry typed up in Word, but reading it over again, I don't think it's particularly relevant.  Part of me feels like I should connect to COVID and our imposed segregation and quarantine.  The spacial injustice angle is pretty obvious (though completely valid), so let's try something else.  This is going to be a bit meandering and probably all over the damn place, so just hang with me.

Maybe we should take COVID as a learning tool for Jeremy Till's definition of sustainability, that is, doing things differently.  It's like how quilts and patchwork blankets are made and were probably invented. 

I need a blanket but I only have these 25 ties, so let's cut them apart and arrange them as one big blanket instead.  (This one was made by my niece.)

This is possibly a note to the rabid environmentalist definition which is what has been pounded into our heads for years: that is, doing more with less.  You have less fabric, stitch it all together and make one big useful thing out of it.  But Till asks something that's actually harder to do from the outset.  You have a bunch of fabric pieces, and need a blanket?  Stitch them together and BOOM: blanket.

"If, as argued above, scarcity asks us to do things differently rather than to do the same thing with less, then the discourse of sustainability is shifted from measuring and technically refining the object to understanding the object within a wider and more complex set of dynamics."

This may be tied back to the idea of A Duck--or rather the rejection of Ducks.  And I think people have been trying to do this... I mean, that's the point behind shipping container homes, isn't it?

I mean, they're still called shipping container houses.  It isn't just called a house, even though that's what it is.  We have to be very specifically clear that it's a house made out of shipping containers rather than whatever "traditional" house building materials are.  I think the only other thing we over clarify like this is a "log cabin": it's a cabin made out of logs.  Or "office building": it's a generally tall glass rectangle that continues to stand by sucking the souls and life out of its occupants.