Bill Coperthwaite: Yurt Builder Extraordinaire

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PLOWBOY: Would all your team members be specialists?

COPERTHWAITE: No, no . . . the whole point is that anyone can contribute. A little kid on a trip abroad with his parents can notice different kinds of boats — for instance — and be curious enough to wonder why they're different, to take pictures, to talk to the boat-builders. Then when he mails in his results he can feel — and rightly — that his actions have helped preserve that knowledge.

PLOWBOY: Can you elaborate a little on how this kind of folk knowledge furthers the process of social design?

COPERTHWAITE: An awareness of traditional methods gives us more options from which to choose our own lifestyles . . . more ways to simplify life and become directly involved in meeting our own needs.

More specifically, the customs of small rural groups provide us with alternatives that we're not aware of because we're conditioned to think in terms of standardized methods. The use of locally available materials is a good example. The Finns, for instance, believe that lilac and the small mountain ash are two of the best woods in the world for making rake teeth. Because modern industry uses white oak for that purpose — to be sure of an adequate supply of material — we in this society don't realize that there are these other possibilities . . . when in reality we could make a rake out of that bush in the front yard that would be better than the commercial product, would cost nothing, and would involve us in its fashioning.

It's extremely important to gather this kind of information while it's still available. Since folk knowledge isn't considered essential by the mass culture, the old skills are dying out. The Canadian Eskimo who knows how to harpoon a seal through a hole in the ice or make a kayak in a certain way is disappearing . . . and in many cases we can't reconstruct what he knew.

Traditional knowledge is the product of thousands of generations of handing down from father to son, mother to daughter . . . and once that chain is broken we have to start all over again, which can be pretty much impossible. But if we can find and learn certain kinds of knowledge while they're still being transmitted, then we can become part of the chain and pass on what we know to other people throughout the world.

PLOWBOY: Besides learning from other civilizations yourself, you're involved in one project which is intended to reveal a way of life to the same group that originally evolved it. As many of the people who've bought yurt plans from your foundation know, that money helped finance a traveling museum of Eskimo culture which you took to remote villages in Alaska. When did you originate that idea?

COPERTHWAITE: I visited Alaska initially in 1967 because I wanted to see Eskimo craftsmanship at first hand and find out if the old ways are still practiced . . . and in the village Hooper Bay where I was staying, I did learn a good deal of traditional knowledge.

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