Amid forest fires and watering bans, air-quality alerts and atmospheric rivers, we see a new culture arising among people who go hiking in the backcountry of the Pacific Northwest. How might this new folk seek to reconcile past Western land-management practices and contemporary conflicting cultural histories? What timely knowledge might such a society offer in the midst of planetary crisis? In landscapes of rapid change, alongside those who’ve known the land far longer than modernity allows, the goods dreamt up by these Anthropocene wanderers have evolved from speculative niches in academia to a burgeoning bazaar of Pollyanna technologies and nuanced neo-tribal narratives spanning a spectrum from savvy hope to existential despair. Perhaps they signal an emerging reconciliation between conflicting cultural histories of land use in the forested backcountry of the Cascades?
Anthropologists hold that every artifact possesses a cultural backstory legible in design—every stitch, every screw an archive of creativity and folk knowledge. Some of these narratives speak through vagaries of form—the mouth-sized spout on a canteen; the flared axe handle, smoothed and weighted for ergonomically-efficient destruction. Other stories are only revealed upon rigorous research, including the acquisition, restoration, and re-creation of objects long lost or never known by outsiders. In this way, every object in the Forest Fashion collection communicates a story of human creativity, resiliency, and adaptation.
Environmental Wayfinding System: Building off traditional “hobo” pictographs, the Environmental WayfindingSystem (EWS) is a reimagined folk communication system that serves as a graphic survival-code for people navigating environmental collapse in the Anthropocene. A living graphic language constantly evolving in response to ecological developments and human understanding, EWS is often informally shared among its users, and has been recorded across North America, ranging from the scorched mountains of the Pacific Northwest, to the desiccated fly-over flats of the Dust Bowl 2.0 region, to the swamped back alleys of American coastal cities, most notably Washington, D.C. Given the strength of the community’s practice of sharing ideas, it is not surprising to see EWS signs and symbols incorporated into handmade crafts, where they can communicate, teach, and disseminate the system’s broader message. Documented examples of EWS objects include camping equipment, quilts, furniture, hand tools, and even toys and clothing for children.Environmental Wayfinding System in the landscape. The three EWS symbols painted on a sugar maple in Petersham, MA communicate a forbidden landscape (top symbol) of ghost forests (middle) and the presence of deadly pathogens (bottom). The symbol for “Kool Aid” appears faintly in white paint on the hooded sap bucket, indicating that the pail offers some temporary relief to worn-out travelers with hard trails ahead.The EWS Map Case is a faithful reproduction of an iconic map case favored by long-distance through-hikers. As such, the waxed-canvas case is almost waterproof, and offers two see-through UV-resistant polymer windows for viewing maps, reports, conversion tables, and EWS charts. The map case also boasts an internal pocket for essential write-in-the-rain field books, and two felt hoops: one for a dry-erase marker and the other for an EWS grease pencil. The case features four steel D-rings for easily lashing the case to shoulder straps, backpacks, pack mules, or low-torque electric powered ATVs.This Mega Drought Dehydration Canteen Gauge belonged to a young scientist who studied snowpack modeling for flood forecasting, water resource management, and climate studies. The scientist was lost in an avalanche during the late winter 2021 field research season in the Cascades of southern Washington state. His hand-engraved canteen was found the following summer off the coast of Sendai in the Tohoku region of Northeast Japan. At the time of retrieval, the canteen contents still smelled of sour coffee.The Trapper Keeper: Annotated Contents, Features, and Benefits for a Backcountry Hike to a Wildfire Lookout Tower
Packed with a variety of field tech, survival gear, and choice creature comforts, the Trapper Keeper is essential to support long treks to remote destinations. The pictured pack is a modification of the traditional, government-issued, wood-frame design, with tactical pockets for bodily autonomy, a plywood frame for easy peel-and-burn kindling, a wet tube for bare-root saplings, and a reinforced cotton lining featuring a decoded Environmental Wayfinding System print.
David Buckley Borden is a Fuller Design Fellow at the University of Oregon. He created Forest Fashion with Rachel Benbrook, Asa DeWitt, Helen Popinchalk, Nancy Silvers, Madison Sanders, Blake Schouten, Ian Escher Vierck, and Sabine Winkler. The work was funded by the Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes, the Ford Family Foundation, and the OSU Foundation’s Andrews Fund.
