Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Pexels/Canva.

Hey hey hey, we’ve done it, Homo sapiens! In 2025, as of today, we have extracted an entire year’s worth of what our planet can replenish. The rest of the “resources” we take to suit our annual need and greed now enters deficit mode.

Our concept of fashion is one major culprit.

Watch this recent video about fast fashion and ultra-fast fashion. (If you don’t know the difference now, you’ll know by the conclusion of the video.) The video suggests that social media algorithms target shoppers in places where people buy 12 new clothing items a year and do we really need this? Most of it (85%) is simply thrown away, and thereby added to the massive greenhouse gas flow generated through textile waste.

Excess from the fashion industry travels (on fuel-powered journeys) from the US and the EU to out-of-our-sight dumping grounds such as Chile’s Acatama Desert, the driest place on Earth, where textile pollution degrades the soil, and where locals have no choice but to breathe the stinking fumes of burning clothes.

And our planet’s other living beings are sabotaged by the whole industry that dries up water sources and pollutes waterways.

Upon learning these distressing facts from various sources, I’ve recently decided not to buy any new clothes, ever again. If I need something, there’s plenty of used clothing available near me. There are sharing and swapping opportunities. And there’s the nearby tienda which sells handmade shorts and shirts from real people the owners know. I might make exceptions for advocacy t-shirts on a case-by-case basis. But I’ve had concerns about cotton goods for years due to the massive pesticide use. The main point here is no more new clothes from the usual (store) sources. Actually, the main point here is limiting my impact on this living world. This shouldn’t be difficult for me. I’m old enough for my current wardrobe to sustain me for the rest of my life, easily.

Checking In: How’s Environmental Law Working Out for the Planet?

It isn’t. It’s too busy being bent to the will of capitalists, who themselves are bent on undoing the precious formation of an irreplaceable living world that experienced hundreds of millions of years of evolution before shopping for modern conveniences and fast fashion became this focal point of our lives.

And they’re still out there drilling for oil and gas, breaking mountains for coal, destroying sacred places. Even the ocean floor is becoming a vast mine to those who seek metals and minerals to run all things electric.

We seem to think it’s hunky dory that 8.2 billion Homo sapiens would rely on the Earth’s resources to reach a standard of living that’s well beyond our due. Some scientists call this overshoot. And we compound the expansion of human impact through our purpose-breeding of other living beings. For, along with textiles, there’s the food system. We must shift our energies and our subsidies from animal agribusiness to life-affirming agriculture. In other words, aspire to growing food — not feed. It’s a matter of simplicity as well as a matter of respect for living beings. Yes. The idea of animal liberation asks us to control ourselves to the point of respecting other living communities’ habitats and their collective evolution. To stop making a mockery of ours.

Whether we, the ultimate crafters of social hierarchies, will admit this, we can never alienate ourselves from the nature we destroy. So, what are we doing to reconcile ourselves to it?

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