New Wine in Old Bottles: Structures of Feeling for a New Way to See New Wood Products

Acknowledging an undeniable need for innovation, this paper offers a qualitative assessment for recognition and policy advocacy for superior innovations-for new wood products and processes offering more benefits and fewer drawbacks than other innovations. The paper highlights the irrationality of using the limited natural and human-made goods of the world to produce and consume inferior innovations, especially when they fail to mitigate or, in fact, contribute to worsening climate change. Raymond Williams' structures of feeling are used to disclose evaluative commitments associated with the new characteristic of industrialized and indigenous civilizations toward illuminating potential pathways for halting an otherwise seemingly unstoppable engine of climate change from pushing all of life on Earth over its precipice. Discussing how the new is always implicated in the old, decision-making and design methods applicable over the whole of the value chain are proposed for generating new innovations and processes that are genuinely able to change the current world trajectory of our species. Future research is also discussed.

Automated summary

This paper acknowledges the need for innovation and advocates for superior innovations in the wood industry that offer more benefits and fewer drawbacks. It highlights the irrationality of continuing to produce and consume inferior innovations that worsen climate change. The paper suggests using evaluative commitments associated with industrialized and indigenous civilizations to find pathways for addressing climate change and proposes decision-making and design methods for generating new innovations that can change our current trajectory.