As I prepare to join the gals at Botanical Colors for Feedback Friday this week, I’ve been thinking about the state of things and wanted to process a bit before jumping into speaking about dyeing textiles and making beautiful, expensive objects in a world that is in such suffering and tumult.

The novel coronavirus has changed and continues to change everything - down to our DNA. My husband says the virus is here to prepare us for space travel (how to exist for long periods of time in confined spaces). There’s a book by Lisa Margonelli called “Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology” and an article in the June issue of NOĒMA by Tobias Rees “From the Anthropocene to the Microbiocene” that address the notion of microbes as higher intelligence, guiding things more than we’d like to think. Since changing my diet a year and a half ago to address health issues, I have experienced the power of repopulating my body’s microbiota with bacteria and viruses (yes, viruses) that aid my immune system and make my body and brain function better. It’s a 10 to 1 ratio of microbes to human cells - let that sink in for a moment. So microbes must affect the dye process, too. Actually there is a company in the Netherlands that is producing microbial dyes for textiles - a bacterial dye factory where the microbes are dyeing the textile as they grow. It’s called Living Colour.

If we really consider what the novel coronavirus has been able to do, six months ago could we have imagined a world wide shut down? No air travel? Remote work? Remote learning? Our government coming up with money - lots of it - to help businesses pay employees during the pause (imperfectly, yes) and the brilliant $600 a week pandemic unemployment: a taste of what $15 an hour minimum wage would be like? For those who earn less than that, it’s been eye opening. Larry Summers - remember him? The ‘women can’t do science like men can’ guy is saying we need to create a new global paradigm. Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank who pushed the punitive and not very helpful austerity measures, now questions everything he’s preached for years, shaken to the core by the coronavirus. To me, it really does feel like what Charles Eisenstein calls “a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold on normality.” What’s normal? How has our normal worked for most of the planet’s population? Imagine a transcendence of compulsion (conspicuous consumption) into slowing down and choosing another way to live. Has the Great Pause actually given us pause?

The designer and futurist, Li Edelkoort did a podcast in late March for Business of Fashion where she talked about the virus as the “amazing grace for the planet” and that it might be the reason we survive as a species. She talked about artisan handicraft folklore culture/small batch production as having a bright future in the new reset economy. This is encouraging to me, of course. It’s not a new idea, creating a global economy of intensely local small businesses. We’ve seen this idea in action with many of the artists featured on Feedback Friday on Botanical Colors. Recordings of the talks are on their website. Aboubakar Fofana has been very vocal about this. Two years ago he did a series of posts on Instagram during Fashion Revolution Week about fast fashion and the destructive western fantasy of ever expanding markets. The exploitation of the developing world has been devastating. He and I had an exchange about the idea of returning to local production and the big companies that talk about “ethical sourcing” in developing countries who would do more good turning their attention to their - our - own communities at home in the US. So it’s encouraging when mainstream economists like Larry Summers and Mario Draghi say we need a completely new strategy, and economists like Tim Jackson, who wrote “Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet” and Mariana Mazzucato who co-edited “Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth” are getting attention that, I hope, will mean a tilting of the playing field to prosperity as a shared endeavor by all.

Working with natural dyestuffs is a metaphor for acceptance of the fragility of life. Curiosity, slowing down, trusting in a process where results can vary wildly, getting comfortable with uncertainty, being willing to adapt and using imperfection to innovate are useful in all aspects of life. A couple of years ago I learned about a business woman named Zita Cobb, 8th generation Newfoundlander and founder of the Fogo Island Inn. She brought a radical idea back to her home after making a fortune on the mainland. She saw first hand how modernity has been hard on small places. She wanted to revive a place, her home, that was dying as a result of the massive fishing industry. Her idea was a luxury hotel owned and operated by the people of the island. The people built it, furnished it, run it and a happy byproduct is a business of making furniture and goods for export. She definitely read Tim Jackson. Her focus on the specific comes right off the pages. He says, “Avoiding and solving unemployment have less to do with expanding markets and more to do with building an economy of care, craft and culture.” The Fogo Island Inn demonstrates the power of workforce development at home and of an entrepreneurial spirit with a moral compass.

We are experiencing a reckoning. I don’t think I am overstating this. We can feel what’s at stake. We are literally only as healthy as our neighbors. We need healthcare for all. Globally we need a new economic strategy. As Americans, we need to effectively address systemic racism, sexism and our caste system. This moment is unique and it’s time for big change. We will have to feel the fear and leap anyway. Are we up for it?