excerpt
Repair
Revolution HOW FIXERS ARE TRANSFORMING OUR THROWAWAY CULTURE by John Wackman and Elizabeth Knight The world’s first Repair Cafe was organized by Dutch journalist Martine Postma in Amsterdam in 2009. The idea crossed the Atlantic in 2012, and New Paltz became the fourth community in the US to open a Repair Cafe in 2013. TV producer and writer John Wackman was the founder of that effort. In Repair Revolution (New World Library), published in late October, Wackman teams up with Elizabeth Knight, an author and sustainability activist based in Warwick. The book is part repair how-to, part roadmap for how to build a grassroots organization, and part manifesto. It outlines a strategy for building resilient communities through a mindset of thrift, shared intelligence, and zero waste.
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Above and following pages: Scenes from Repair Cafes across the country. There are now more than 40 active cafes across the Hudson Valley—in libraries, town halls, churches, community centers, and co-working spaces— where skilled volunteers fix and mend beloved-butbroken items for their neighbors, for free.
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sed to be, every town had its repair shops. Everyone knew where to go when they needed something fixed. That know-how was often close at hand, practiced by parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, or a local “fix-it man.” We can call this a remnant of the Great Depression, of course, but its roots stretch back to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard and the tradition of Yankee thrift. How has our society changed? The immediate answer, almost always, is that we no longer get things repaired because ours has become a throwaway culture. The economic explanation for this is that since World War II, the world has embraced the materials economy, that is to say, a wasteful, rather than regenerative, use of precious resources. As the axiom coined by Twitter cofounder Evan Williams puts it, “convenience decides everything.” The argument can’t be made that this is sustainable. But if there is a Repair Cafe or Fixit Clinic or Tool Library in your town, you have a different answer. The place to get something fixed is at the library or a church or your town hall or
community center. The concept couldn’t be simpler: Whatever you call it, wherever it is held, a community repair event invites you to bring a beloved but broken item to be repaired for free, by an expert who is also your neighbor. There’s one catch. This is not a drop-off service. You bring your item and stay with it during the repair process. You sit down and describe what it’s not doing that it’s supposed to be doing, when it stopped working, and where you think the defect might be. This is not a monetary transaction—it’s an interpersonal transaction. The consumer economy is powerful. The growing repair culture is a countervailing force: community initiatives that are creative, socially vibrant platforms for building awareness about the larger challenges facing our planet. There is something about the act of repairing that motivates and satisfies deeply felt parts of our nature. We can trace this insight back to Aristotle: one of the greatest sources of human enjoyment is being able to enact one’s knowledge, to share what you know. The act of repairing involves “troubleshooting,” which to many people is an irresistible proposition.
