Fixing Our Broken Relationship with ‘Stuff’: A Q&A With Sandra Goldmark – State of the Planet

Sandra Goldmark is a triple-, or possibly quadruple-threat, but not in the conventional song and dance way. She is director of Campus Sustainability at Barnard College, and also a theater professor, set designer, and repair shop proprietor. Oh, and an author; Goldmarks book Fixation: How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet is a short but substantive and enjoyable dive into the relationship between humans and stuff, based on her own sustainability journey and passion for repair.

I first met Goldmark in 2014 at the Columbia Greenmarket, which I was managing at the time. She and her husband Michael, both seasoned theater professionals accustomed to fixing things at work, periodically brought their pop-up repair shop to the farmers market at 114th and Broadway, staying for three or four weeks at a time. They would spread the word that they were there for a week and then the next week theyd collect a stream of broken items from the community. A couple of weeks later, theyd bring them back fixed.

Goldmarks experience with the repair shop made a lasting impression on her. She discovered that its not just less wasteful to repair things; it also makes people feel good. Most of the people she interacted with at the shop werent getting items repaired because they wanted to be eco-friendly; they were doing it because of their attachment to the item. They didnt want to replace itthey wanted that particular thing to work again.

In Fixation, Goldmark outlines how stuff is a really essential part of who we are as humans; we couldnt survive without it, and it also gives us pleasure. She delves deep into our very troubled relationship to stuff and our insatiable appetite for it, and the consequences these have had for our planet. You can read an excerpt here.

I caught up with her to ask her some questions on our podcast, Pod of the Planet, and you can read a condensed version of our conversation below. Weve also put together a list of recommendations of shops and organizations that can help you on your journey to a more sustainable lifestyle at the end of the interview.

Sandra (sitting center) and her Fixit pop-up colleagues at a New York City Greenmarket.

You started as a set designer and professor for the Barnard College theater department. How did you come to your current position as director of Campus Sustainability?

As a set designer for many years, my job was to work with stuff to create meaning on stage with space and the objects in it. Another big part of the job of a set designer, unfortunately, is creating a lot of waste. Almost every design that you make goes, sooner or later, into the Dumpster.

My work in theater led me down this path of thinking about questions of consumption, of waste, and their roles in climate change, and eventually of circularity as a solution. Somewhere over the past 10 to 12 years, I got really fired up about that and I came up with circular economy solutions for our theater practices. I started the repair shops, which were a kind of like a real-world example of the same thing.

All of that ultimately fed back into this work of thinking about climate action on campus. Having worked across these disciplines for so many years, it made me feel very strongly that its good to have people working on these things from all different departments and perspectives. That has really fed into my work at Barnard. Were looking at climate action from as many angles as we can, with as many people in the room as we can.

Can you talk a little more about the repair shop? Do you have a favorite repair from your time in the repair shop, or one that is particularly memorable?

My husband and I and our colleagues started running these little short-term repair shops all over New York City, and we called ourselves Fixit. People would bring us all kinds of broken items. We accepted everything from lamps and appliances and furniture to toys and textiles and ceramics. As you mentioned, there were a lot of really specific objects. Twenty-five hundred of them, to be exact, that came through our shops.

It was an experiment into this question of whether people would pay for these services. How much would they pay? How could we tinker and disrupt the traditional business model of repair to make it sustainable and viable in New York, a very expensive city?

The Fixit workshop.

We ran these short-term shops for seven years. We did more than a dozen shops and dozens of educational events. It was funny because on the one hand, there did come to be a pattern, a repetitiousness of another lamp, another broken blender. But in another funny way, every little object was unique and told a story.

I really loved the paint touchups. Within set design, I really quite love scenic painting, so I love touching up things like ceramics or wood stains or jewelry. I remember one item, it was a yellow kids stool with a painting of a tiger on the top. We fixed the leg, but then the paint was all chipped, so I touched up the top.

Those jobs were really satisfying. First of all, its very soothing for me. Its a hard job that for me is easy, which is always fun. Theres something really satisfying about like the kind of invisibility of the mend when youre done. Some people in the repair world love visible mending, which can be very cool and very beautiful, but I think my theater illusionist heart really loves it when you hold up the bowl and the crack is completely camouflaged.

In your book you discuss a broad range of topics from sustainable agriculture, to set design, to furniture production, to waste cycles, to world religions. Can you talk a bit about the common threads running through the book? What ties it all together?

I guess the obvious common thread is stuff or consumption, whichever term you prefer. The reason I have so many threads is I really felt like after all these years in the repair shop, we needed to look at stuff as the incredibly complex and rich topic that it is. You can talk about it from a climate change perspective and talk about all the damage that were doing, and that is in the book. But I felt like in order to talk about solutions or a way out, you have to understand the problem from all the different perspectives. You have to really see and understand stuff, and what its doing in our lives. Because if you look around, its everywhere. Like right now, wherever you are, whoever you are, I guarantee you youre surrounded by objects made by humans.

Stuff, the things we make that are the products of our hands, is so central to who we are as a species, to who we are as individuals. And its also really central to the climate change problem because it is so monumental.

What Im trying to do in the book is acknowledge the vastness and the complexity of this topic on the personal level, on a business level, on a scientific climate change level, on a policy level. Appreciate the problemI shouldnt call it a problemappreciate this category of our humanity.

We cant really move ahead and try to get past our clogged planet if we dont understand that we need stuff and it is fundamentally a part of who we are as humans. That understanding of or respect for our stuff and the role it plays in our lives is something that I dont see talked about a lot.

I think thats why in my earlier answer, I was shying away from calling stuff a problem. Because while there are a lot of problems with stuff, I think that, just like food, if it becomes stigmatized then were missing part of the equation, which is that it can be a blessing and a source of joy. And its certainly essential to our survival.

Most Americans today are probably dealing with a problem of excess as opposed to a problem of scarcity, because thats where we are. Again, just like food, even at lower socioeconomic levels in this country, theres sometimes more of a problem of an excess of cheap stuff calories as opposed to actual scarcity of calories.

We love food, we love stuff, which is totally natural. But we have built a system that can satisfy every appetite to the nth degree in a heartbeat. The problem were facing today is due to our technological capacity to fulfill our appetites. The appetites themselves are totally normal and sensible and frankly, quite lovely.

How do we build a system that isnt over-satisfying our very natural appetites? Historically and still in certain traditional cultures, it was and is easier to live in balance. But those traditional habits surrounding stuff are being decimated as the U.S. exports its patterns of consumption worldwide, just like traditional languages, just like traditional diets. The traditional ways of living with the physical world are also being diminished by globalization.

When I worked at the Greenmarket, my friends and coworkers at the market and I used to talk about how working at the farmers market is a lifestyle. We were referring not only to the physical necessities of the job, but also to using reusable containers, composting, and reducing waste wherever possible.

Your book hits on a lot of similar aspects to that lifestyle in terms of waste reduction and making it work with what youve got. Can you talk about your personal lifestyle or guiding philosophy a little bit and how youve arrived where you are now?

Its a lifestyle, but theres another layer to it that has to do with habit, and physicalizing or internalizing certain behaviors. For instance, I dont think every time I throw something in the compost now. I just started composting at some point and now it feels weird to not do it. When New York canceled compost at the start of COVID, it was disgusting to me to put my food scraps right in the regular trash. It was so funny how disruptive that change was, and it was not because Im an environmentalist and trying to combat climate change, it was just because it was a break in my habit and it was this physical action that had started to feel really normal and healthy.

I think theres a huge part of the book that is about embracing that and saying theres a way to just begin. Like all habits, you do have to start somewhere, but then it can just become a thing that you do. Im trying to help people see that the steps to deal with stuff more sustainably are not complicated and like food, you can get there over time.

I learned a lot on the food movement in terms of the lifestyle question. The farmers market is a good analogy because the food movement is more advanced than what I call the stuff movement. Its more firmly established in the zeitgeist, or the collective consciousness, that what you eat and how you eat impacts the planet, impacts your health, impacts communities around the world.

I tried to consciously build on that and say, Hey, stuff is just like food, and just like you can have a healthy food way of living, you can have the healthy stuff way of living. Its not a fad diet. Its not a restrictive, horrible thing that youre going to have to change every few days.

Fixing some jewelry.

And so I (on purpose) borrowed from Michael Pollan, the food writer, because I love his work. I wanted to consciously build on his concepts and show people how its similar. Michael Pollan said for food, Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. So in Fixation I lay out these five steps for stuff: Have good stuff (not too much), mostly reclaimed. Care for it. Pass it on. Theres all kinds of details within it, but thats really all you have to remember.

How can we enlighten people so they see the importance of their individual choices within larger systems? In your book you say that not taking individual actions denies each of us a place in the world. If our actions are part of the problem, then they must be part of the solution. Whats your advice for people wanting to make a difference and be a part of the solution?

Im glad you brought this up, because its such an important question. I think in that section of the book that youre quoting, I was reacting what sometimes I see in the kind of climate action movement: this little fight between people saying individual actions dont matter versus individual actions do matter. Or the even more reductive version is to say its all the corporations fault.

Or sometimes Ill hear things like, Well, we dont need to change individual actions, what we need is systemic changeas if theres a dichotomy, or as if the two are not related. That whole thing just leaves me totally cold, because to me its all related. They are all separate levels of detail on the problem. I could zoom way out and talk about a systemic problem. I can zoom way in and talk about an individuals actions. If Im only looking at one, Im missing a part of the picture.

There are a lot of policies and business practices that would make it a lot easier for people to live these low-waste, sustainable lifestyles. Thats really what we need, because we need it to become the default. We need it to become easy. We cant wait around for people to heroically choose to repair their item instead of buying a new oneit does need to become part of the system.

Sandra and the team speaking with a customer at one of the Fixit pop-ups.

But taking individual action is part of getting there. Thats where you build at the community level. You go to the farmers market, you go to the community board, you go to the schools, and thats where you actually get a culture shift. Businesses also have a huge role to play, especially in this particular arena of stuff and consumption. They have to really change their core business models, which is a big ask, but I actually think its doable and believable.

A good example of how individual action and activism matter is the bag ban in New York City. We have this plastic bag policy in New York, which was passed in March. That policy, which is going to have so much impact, was built on a lot of individual actions and a lot of activism and community organizing. It will be supported and scaled and facilitated by businesses figuring out how to make it work from their perspectives. It shows all the spheres of individual, business, and policy.

This is why I get distressed when I hear people saying, Dont talk to individuals. Why not? Why would I only talk to one segment of society?

And of course, individuals make up all segments of society.

Exactly. Who do you think is writing the policies?

Wondering where to get started with healthier consumption habits? Goldmark has provided some recommendations for where to look for secondhand items, get things repaired, and find new homes for unwanted items. Some of these are specific to New York City, but there should be similar options elsewhere around the country. In no particular order:

Happy shopping, and wishing you a sustainable new year!

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Fixing Our Broken Relationship with 'Stuff': A Q&A With Sandra Goldmark - State of the Planet