About one minute in to Mr. Ziermann’s story, he explains how his intent to pursue a life of timber logging in Oregon was waylaid by the “rules and regulations” (he did not sound happy about these) to protect the spotted owl in the American northwest. I recommend taking five minutes with the video here, and a moment more below if you want my two cents on it.

A Fraught Search for Succession in Craftsmanship

Video by Andrew Plotsky

George Ziermann has been making handmade boots for over 40 years.

As he reaches old age, Ziermann is searching for a protégé to take over his business. To his surprise, few young Americans share his enthusiasm for boot making.  “I spent my own money, my own time, to get this [business] together,” he says in this short film,George’s Boots, by Andrew Plotsky. “It would be really nice to pass that on to somebody….[but] it’s hard to find anyone with work ethic anymore.”

Author: Daniel Lombroso

The beginning of his story, which seems incidental to Mr. Ziermann’s main objective in the video, somehow sticks with me and makes me wonder about more than keeping a dying craft alive–which I am also interested in. I checked to be sure I remember correctly. He is talking about a period beginning when I was 15 years old, when the first efforts were made to protect the old growth forests where those spotted owls were endangered–I was almost certainly unaware.

But within a few years, which is likely when Mr. Ziermann “saw the writing on the wall,” I was in my first year of adulthood, just months after declaring myself an undergraduate literature major on my 18th birthday, resolutely not interested in business or business issues. The next small step to spotted owl protection was taken.

Coincidentally, that was also just months after I voted in my first presidential election. By that point I was interested in conservation, and appreciated the simple notion of protecting old growth forests–an issue I was most certainly aware of because by then I was an avid news junkie. The man I voted for had lost, and the one who won went on to use the spotted owl as a symbol of how regulations were hurting American workers.

1981 was also the year I decided to abandon my undergraduate education, to apprentice my way to future fortune. Fortune was not about wealth, in my 18 year old imagination. It was about some deeper source of satisfaction.  Having apprenticed as a blacksmith and as a leatherworker, I appreciate this video mainly because of the focus on a man whose craft is one I can relate to; he is one of the last of his kind and it means something to me. He wants to hand on the knowledge. He loves his craft. He does not dwell on the spotted owl, which inadvertently put him on the path to cobbling. But somehow it struck me as an important bit of his history. In the realm of the law of unintended consequences.

The year of my marriage, 30 years ago this year, was the year things started getting interesting with regard to the spotted owl; the most significant efforts were made that year to protect those forests. Just as the spotted owl had put Mr. Ziermann on his new path, it seems to have done something like that for me as well. Within a couple of years, once I had started graduate school, the “spotted owl controversy” was all over the national news in the USA. Conservationists and environmentalists were pitted against the common working man by ideologues, funded by an ilk of “business interests” who were just getting started on a long term project to undermine conservation and environmental regulation.

(Although those interests seem to be winning, it is not yet time to concede defeat.)

Mr. Ziermann’s recollections remind me of my good fortune for having decided not to stick to either of my apprenticed crafts, returning instead to complete both my undergraduate and graduate education. That allowed me to find my own project, in the form of entrepreneurial conservation, which is meant as a countervailing force against the project of the anti-spotted owl folks.

I hope Mr. Ziermann finds his successor, and I also hope he takes the opportunity from time to time to visit those old growth forests again, and those spotted owls. They have survived as a species, and have adjusted to the new realities of those forests, just as the rest of us have adjusted to our new realities.