Interesting German Carpenters Group on Facebook

[ernest dubois]

Ok, this is all quite broad and conventional and maybe brings us to a certain point. There was the matter of the destruction of two World Wars and acute housing shortages that small scale rebuilding efforts couldn't really address in terms of quality and quantity. When I head over there into Germany, where they were never overly exposed to the Anglo-Saxon model of economy and so have not gotten the pommeling most other Western economies tied to the US one have gotten, they seem busy reversing a lot of the hasty rebuilding of the type characterized by convenience and mass production. It's amazing what got stuccoed over and hidden behind hardboard and asbestos sheeting, preserved to a degree in other words, thanks in large part to the integrity of the original builders.
The folly of pretending an economy, let alone the physical infrastructure of a community, could be built or maintained in the abstract by designers, engineers, ITers, accountants, consultants... no matter how good their PR, is starting to dawn on us as the few trained to actually work are retiring/passing on and nobody is there to take their places. (On a personal level, for me to find a decent blacksmith since the death of Jan van der Veen here in the village, has been a disaster).
From the corners of the internet it begins to be clear that under the surface of all that there are interested and engaged people taking the challenge to dig up the old knowledge or invent new ways and the task seems to be to make sure it is these that get acknowledgement and the credit and most important the job, instead of the timmerman Jan or Bota Bouwer from the building company in town.
I don't know if taking a page from the latest management guide out of the Wharton school and tweaking it to your own program is that sustainable either. Making a go of it outside the model is a conceptual problem not one of marketing. I believe one thing that helps is a degree of wide-scale coordination of individual efforts to strike tiny blows and François Calame out of the France ministry has made a good start of it with some books, coordinated projects and one good website you can look up about European Carpenters and more.