Katie Bretch
DCL
After writing the post Low-tech Tips: Plant Vines, I was contacted by Katie Bretch, who is nuts about vines. She describes them as an "Oldway"
"That is, it is a pre-industrial human technology common across multiple cultures around the world. As such, it has been devalued and forgotten, while less efficient and effective modern technologies are brought forward to supplant it. As oldways are too common to be captured as intellectual property, and too simple to be the basis for consulting gigs, nobody profits from the propagation of oldways except the new user, who regains the value of a useful, beautiful, appropriate and environmentally beneficial technology."
I asked her where she heard the term OLDWAY, did she invent it?
"The term "oldway" is not original to me by any means, but I can't remember where I picked it up. I have always understood it to mean pre-industrial technology handed down as a folkway. Flint knapping is one. Much cooking obviously comes to us that way and it is part of the rationale for not allowing recipes to be copyrighted."
But back to vines, which we have noted, are such a simple way of cooling a house. Katie writes:
"On vines, especially the Parthenocissus varieties, I have been struck by how undemanding they are for the value they return. I look at the engineered living roofs and walls, with all their expense and high maintenance, and then I look at a simple wall or trellis with a beautiful growth of Parthenocissus that doesn't even need watering once established. Cost/benefit ratios? No contest!"
All of our Low Tech Tips could be called Oldways- things people have done for hundreds of years that just work, simply and without fuss, or as Katie put it so well, "a useful, beautiful, appropriate and environmentally beneficial technology."
