One of the constant difficulties with talking about nature is deciding whether man is part of it or not. People constantly talk about liking nature, or working with nature, or conserving nature, as if it were a separate thing like clay or copper that one could consider objectively, and might interact with or not according to taste and profession. And when people choose to watch a nature film instead of a Nordic detective series, they are exactly choosing to reflect on some aspect of nature when they otherwise would not do so.

But if we instead appreciate that nature is all-encompassing: that the environment begins at the end of my nose and continues to the end of the universe (as some wag of an ecologist had it in the 1960s), then we have no choice but to interact with it, for good or ill. And if we observe that, like other animals, we eat other organisms – animals, plants and fungi, and occasionally bacteria and algae too – then we are clearly part of the global ecosystem. Further, the insects that bite us, the worms, flukes, parasitic amoebae and bacteria that cause us disease, and the bacteria that break down our bodies after death show that we play many roles in that ecosystem, not simply that of consumer or top predator.

In short, man is in many ways a part of nature, and one could say that the main problem with the natural vs artificial distinction is the idea that anything is outside nature. Bees make honeycombs; potter and mason wasps make houses of mud; chimpanzees and crows make tools; man makes spears and hand-axes and wheels and computers and nuclear weapons: it’s all part of nature.

From that point of view, everything we make is natural, and any judgement on a thing must be on grounds of taste (aesthetics) or efficiency (how well does it do its job, at what cost). It isn’t possible to do anything that isn’t part of nature, part of the world, but things can be done well and attractively, or not. The question of what ‘cost’ means is a large one, but one cost on a planet of fixed size is the use of non-renewable materials. We may, for example, use as much paper as we like, as long as we plant as many trees as we cut down, and the processing does not poison the rest of the ecosystem. Similarly, we may use as much glass as we like, as long as we recycle it after use, preferably efficiently (by washing it out and refilling it, rather than smashing it up and re-melting it, though melting and reusing is better than nothing).

Ceramics, on the other hand, are more problematic. Like glass, they are made from quarried materials; but once fired, they can generally not be re-melted, so they are hard to recycle. We should have very good reasons to use such materials; and we should find ways to recycle them.

Rooves across much of the south of Europe are traditionally made of moulded terracotta, an Italian word that descriptively means ‘cooked earth’, ‘fired earth’. The traditional variety comes in many colours and varying shapes. The colours range through whitish buff; pale or deep ochre; reddish brown; brownish purple, and combinations and intergradations of these basic tones. The shapes vary from quite sharply cambered to rather flat, specially at the broader end; and both size and weight vary rather considerably. The effect on a roof – still better, on a whole town of such rooves – is of diversity of colour and line, with overall harmony of tone and style. The speckled and dithered appearance of such a roof is reminiscent of the ‘abrash’ that makes a traditional, hand-made, vegetable-dyed Turkish carpet such a lovely and valuable thing. Nothing is exactly uniform or mechanical; but the whole is a skilfully-crafted work of art, strong, colourful and useful, and to many people’s eyes much finer than anything that can be made in a factory in imitation of it.

Modern clay roof-tiles are made in identical moulds, filled by machine with a fixed amount of evenly-mixed and coloured clay, and fired for an identical period in an oven of exactly-controlled temperature. All the resulting tiles are the same orangey-red, and you might expect them to be stronger and more durable than traditional tiles, in compensation for their deficiency in colour and abrash.

But they’re not. The new tiles are many times more vulnerable to frost damage than traditional terracotta. Why this should be is a matter of speculation: perhaps the factory uses any clay it can get, with no regard to frost resistance; perhaps indeed it uses the cheapest clay on the market, who knows. Or perhaps it tests a sample of its tiles for a short period – say, 5 years – and is happy to sell its products certified as having passed such a test, knowing they are of that specific quality. The traditional tiles carried no such certificate: their badge of quality was that the maker, like his father before him, was known and trusted to produce strong, durable tiles that could last a lifetime, and they did. Perhaps ‘harmony with nature’ means having a long-term, personal business relationship with your roof supplier.

The tiles shown in this photo have worn thin as frost has successively split flakes from their surfaces. Once the initial surface has flaked off, water penetrates more easily, and frost breaks more and more of the tile until it shatters in wind, rain and especially hail. To be sure, a severe (50-year) hailstorm can smash strong new tiles, but it will do far more damage to an already weakened roof.

On the recycling front, I found the split and broken tiles ideal for filling in holes in a track. It’s quite a humble form of reuse, but reuse it certainly is.

The rest of a traditional house, too, was made of local materials – stone, lime rather than cement (perfect for allowing lizards and solitary bees to nest in the walls), timber from the forest. When anything needed replacing, further materials were close to hand, and the old materials hardly needed recycling: they simply returned whence they came.

Maybe modern construction has something to learn from traditional methods. And maybe true sustainability is rather harder than glib talk of ‘sustainable development’ would suggest.