Whatever Happend to Do It Yourself

Boat plans from Popular Mechanics Magazine

Whenever I am giving a kayak building demonstration somewhere in a public space, some guy in his sixties or seventies will come up and say, "Yeah, I remember building one of these in the Boy Scouts."  The point worth mentioning here is that it is never a forty or thirty year old or even a fifty year old that comes up and says, "Yeah, I remember building one of these in the Boy Scouts."  My statistical sample isnt very large, but it seems to me that sometime in the post-WWII era, people built stuff and then they stopped.

So what happened? 
I have some theories. 
One of the factors that encouraged the do it yourself movement was prosperity and the high cost of wages.  Since most things consumed in the US were made in the US rather than imported, manufactured goods were relatively expensive because of the cost of labor.  So if you made something yourself, you could save on the cost of labor. Also, since manufacturing was still a big part of the US economy, the skills to make things were still valued and encouraged.  Schools were still expected to turn out graduates that could enter a job market where manual skills were valued. 

Folding kayak built from Popular Mechanics plans

And there were magazines like Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated to cater to do-it-yourselfers with plans and instructions. It seems like the golden age of  home made projects.
The other factor working against home made boats is the invention of roto-molded boats. This process eliminates most of the human labor from the making of a boat.  Kayaks and canoes can be made in a mold.  A little clean-up and some trim is all that needs to be added to make a finished boat.  The cost of these boats is so low compared to making your own that the effort hardly seems justified from a cost perspective.
Still, various plywood boat kit manufacturers seem to be making a living turning out kits for home builders. But a kit is not the same thing as making something off a set of plans out of a magazine.  I suspect that kits are popular because the general level of confidence to make something by hand has declined considerably since the middle of the twentieth century. 

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Fire Good Fire Bad and Whatever Happened to Pyrodiversity

I recently bought a book called California Indians and Their Environment. California Indians unlike most of the other Indians in what is now the US had never developed any agricultural technologies.  Instead, California Indians made their living exclusively off plants growing wild in their environment.  However, Indians managed their environment by burning practices that encouraged their food and medicinal plants to thrive.
Enter the Europeans.
Fire, an environmental management tool for the Indians was a threat to property for the Europeans.  The use of fires intentionally set  by the Indians, what are now called prescribed fires was outlawed by the Europeans. I imagine that the dwellings of Indians were subject to fire damage just like the dwellings of the Europeans but given  that the Indians set fires to manage the vegetation in their territory did not build dwellings where they would get burned down.  In addition, Indian dwelling may have been more temporary or movable and therefore more disposable or more easily relocated if a prescribed burn was called for.

I have never seen the reasons for antipathy to fire spelled out anywhere in text, but the idea that fire is bad seems almost self evident probably at least in part because of a massive public relations campaign by the department of Agriculture.  The appeals were mostly emotional and aimed at a population that probably had very little contact with forests on a day to day basis. The reasons for preventing forest fires are primarily economical and have little to do with ecological concerns.  Fire is a natural phenomenon and ecosystems have adapted to fire and in many cases depend on fire to keep the ecosystem in balance.  Not so in National Forests managed by the Department of Agriculture.  National forests produce lumber.  The lumber is sold to lumber companies and the Department of Agriculture collects money when the trees are cut down.  Trees that go up in smoke dont produce any revenue and whether by training or by natural disposition, most people, myself included dont like the look of burned over forest. 
The National Park people on the other hand dont sell any lumber and so they can afford to let forest fires burn.  No revenues are lost as a consequence.  Perhaps park attendance goes down during a forest fire but quickly picks up again afterward.  National parks even do prescribed burns since some trees like the giant Sequoias dont reproduce unless the ground is burned over.
But back to the Department of Agriculture anti fire campaign.  While the motivation to prevent forest fires was primarily financial, the advertising campaign instead focused on the fact that forest fires could potentially kill cute baby deer and bears, and so Smokey the Bear was created.

OK, so fire wastes resources, not to mention displacing or possibly orphaning young deer.

Heres the orphaned deer theme again.  no mention of wasted resources this time.

And again, this time, who knows, might be Smokeys nephew thats getting bandaged up there.  Smokey wants to know WHY?

This time, no orphaned animals, but the implication is clearly that those two cubs would be in a heap of trouble if there were to be a fire.  Smokey meanwhile is taking a break from shoveling dirt on top of camp fires to read a fan letter.  In the background, city dwellers recreate on a lake in the woods at a forest service campground in an environment of statuesque ponderosas unmarred by fire.

And for the children, a reminder that theres lots of critters that would be indisposed by forest fires, the advertising campaign bleeding out into the culture at large via childrens books.

And finally, WWII poster.  Needs an update there with Putin and Osama.

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Chagudax

It used to be that the only way to get your memoir published was to be a famous person or an interesting writer or to have such an interesting life that someone else wanted to write your memoir for you, as told to style. The truth is that a lot of people have had interesting lives and it is too bad that more of them dont write memoirs, but then, what would we do with billions of memoirs.  Where would we store them all?  And if you think about it, a lot of the memoirs would be more or less similar or at least that is what people think.  And so, hardly anyone writes memoirs at least in statistically significant numbers and instead of there being a vast and repetitive glut of memoirs, theres a vast array of lives that have never been documented in print.
So it seems that Andrew Gronholdt had the sense that his life lived mostly in the Aleutians during a time when traditional Aleut culture was rapidly being overcome by the mainstream American culture might be worth putting down in writing.  Apparently, Gronholdt worked at his memoirs but but died without getting them published.  According to the book, Gronholdts daugher, Sharon Gronholdt and her friend, Mike Livingston decided to edit Andrews writings, lay out the book, add photos, many of them taken by Andrew and publish the book themselves though Blurb, a print on demand publisher.
So there it is.  Mike Livingston sent me a copy.  I have leafed through it, looked at the pictures and started reading it.
The title and the cover picture both made me think that the book was primarily about bent wood hat making.  But it isnt.  Its about Andrew Gronholdts life just off the Alaska Peninsula in the north Pacific in the Shumagin Islands, the place where Vitus Bering discovered Alaska and sea otters and set off the chain reaction that led to the colonization of Alaska by the Russians.
The Russians sold Alaska to the Americans who then began to work on Americanizing the native population.  By the time that Andrew Gronholdt was born, the Americanization was just about complete and much or even most of the Aleut culture was disappearing.  Andrew Gronholdt, however, must have had a sense that the culture needed preserving or in the case of wooden hat making, reviving from the death it had suffered a few decades earlier.
The book is lavishly illustrated with photos as well as some of Andrew Gronholdts sketches and working designs for various Aleut inventions, not only the hats but also bailing pumps, fox traps and other things that Andrew was interested in.
The book at a price of $109 a copy is probably not within everyones budget, but if you are interested in Aleut or Alaskan history at the beginning of the twentieth century, you may want to talk your library into getting a copy. Or if you do have the $109 you can get a copy at Blurb.
By the way if you think your own life or the life of someone you know is worth documenting, co-editor Mike Livingston encourages readers to just do it and put together a book and publish it through Blurb or one of the other self-publishing houses.  We probably dont need everyone to write a memoir but a few more might give the humans of the future a bigger window into the past.

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