Humans have long built in, on, and with the footprints of their forebearers. During the 1990s, sustainability advocates in the United States rebranded the process of dismantling structures with an eye to recovering reusable components as “deconstruction.” Committed deconstruction enthusiasts salvage as much as possible, while the more practical focus on materials with expansive market potential.

Deconstruction proponents in the late industrial American Midwest extol the reuse, aesthetic, and heritage values of old-growth boards, beams, and joists. For them, the pine, maple, and oak that once swathed the Great Lakes region did not disappear with nineteenth-century timber booms and busts. Those trees still stand as what they call “the forest behind the walls” or the “bones of ancient forests.” “Detroit is a standing forest that’s been abandoned, with all the roofs coming off,” remarked one Chicago-based architect in 2015, “so harvest [it] before it rots.”

In the years following the subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, government agencies and private philanthropic organizations in the Midwest began supporting deconstruction as an alternative to demolishing abandoned residential structures in neighborhoods decimated by foreclosures—and more broadly by a history of racialized segregation, redlining, and disinvestment. Proponents sought to save reusable building materials from landfills, thus sparing the natural resources and CO2 expended on producing new ones. They hoped also to generate novel employment opportunities. Phrases like “triple bottom line thinking” and “the circular economy” saturated public and private conversations about deconstruction.

Training programs expanded to prepare people with “barriers to employment” for jobs in deconstruction and affiliated building, demolition, and warehouse trades. In local parlance, “barriers” often implies a criminal record. Importantly, deconstruction’s circular economy is neither seamless nor harmless. “There’s endless supply,” a reclaimed wood broker in Chicago insisted in 2015, “it’s the getting that’s hard. It’s easier if you have a lot of tools, a truck, you’re strong, and you have people to help you, and if you’re willing to get dirty and breathe some crap into your lungs.”

A team of biologists and computational scientists seeking a picture of “the composition of the world” at a moment of accelerating ecological change recently estimated that in the year 2020, human-made objects outstripped biological mass.¹ For the first time, our planet contains more things made by humans—more concrete, more aggregate, more bricks, more asphalt, more glass, more plastic, and more paper—than the entire mass of plants, bacteria, fungi, archaea, protists, and animals. Most of those I spoke with about deconstruction do not think that humans have yet reached the point where we would need to mine what we’ve already made and cast off, just to fulfill our basic needs. Yet more than a few insist that such a time will soon come. Late industrial life’s anthropogenic mass is plentiful; its getting is fraught. Living and working with this strange abundance demands considerable work—and it will be ongoing.

1. Emily Elhacham, Liad Ben-Uri, Jonathan Grozovski, Yinon M. Bar-On, and Ron Milo, “Global Human-Made Mass Exceeds All Living Biomas,” Nature 588 (2020): 441–444. ↩︎