To attempt to buy “sustainable” clothing in 2022 is to face a carnival’s worth of smoke and mirrors — that is, if you’re buying new. Any consumer seeking to verify the various promises of “recycled fabric,” “climate-positive cotton,” or “non-toxic dyes” will find themselves stymied, because there’s perilous little in the way of enforceable standards for environmental responsibility in the fashion industry. And even if any of these claims are true, there is a momentous quantity of research required to find out if they actually matter.

The green credentials of used clothes, on the other hand, are much easier to verify. Sticking to the mantra “buy little new, plenty used, wear it a lot, and care for it well” is the most reliable way we have to reduce our fashion footprints. But the thing about textiles is that they tend to show their age over time. They rip, they stain, they stretch. If you want to preserve the life of anything old, you will have to mend it at some point. 

But modern mending doesn’t attempt to hide itself — to the contrary. Clothes are starting to wear their scars proudly, if you look for them. But for many people, taking a needle and thread to cloth has become something of a lost art. A survey by Colorado State University showed that 55 percent of participants had never mended their clothes, and only 20 percent felt confident in their mending skills.

I relate to that latter 20 percent. In theory, I am able to sew. I can thread a needle and take care of a detached button. But the prospect of executing something that requires a degree of real concentration or skill — say, a straight row of stitches or a hem repair — ignites within me a fiery frustration at the many mundanities of life. It’s akin to the feeling that comes when asked to attend a virtual birthday party. 

Meanwhile, my mother approaches a sewing project with the type of zeal that I imagine Lady Gaga must experience as she prepares to take a stage. That is because she is, like Ms. Germanotta, a 5-foot-1 master of her craft; my mother’s sewing skills are, to me, nothing short of awe-inspiring. I have watched her patch a pair of pants in the time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee. She has repaired the linings of the most finicky vintage coats and turned scraps of cashmere sweaters into throw blankets for each of her children. 

However, my admiration for her abilities has unfortunately enabled my own mending reticence. Despite the fact that I am an otherwise independent, self-sufficient woman in my 30s, if I ever sustain so much as a fingernail-sized rip in a pair of leggings, I immediately call Mom.

But in the last couple of years, I noticed a shift in her work. The mending projects stopped trying to conceal whatever damage had been sustained in the material. Her patches became brighter and louder — enhancing the garment they were restoring. A moth-eaten sweater was returned with a spray of jewel-tone darning triangles; the disintegrating rear of my denim cutoffs came back as a cheerful patchwork of old jean scraps.

I asked my mom how this shift happened, and it actually is almost entirely the result of my older sister Lena’s existence. When my parents had her, they were young and didn’t have a lot of money, and my mom would buy her baby clothes at thrift stores. Often the clothes would need to be mended — so she’d appliqué some cute patches in a decorative pattern. 

And many years later, the tables had turned somewhat, and my sister found herself with a drawer full of cashmere sweaters that had been eaten by moths. She brought them to my mother, not wanting to throw them away but not knowing what else to do with them. Mom cut them into pieces to sew into mittens, blankets, and scarves; and then started to use the scraps from those projects to patch other sweaters in the same decorative fashion as she’d used for Lena’s baby clothes.

“If you have something not quite perfect, you can make it interesting and functional at the same time,” she told me. “And if you’re going to do that, you might as well make it cute!”

The embracing of “not quite perfect” is more of a political statement for the Mending Bloc, a sewing cooperative in Portland, Oregon, that mends clothes for their community and distributes mending kits. The members, who use pseudonyms even among themselves, see the practice as a way to resist capitalism’s wide-reaching, damaging hand. If you are able to mend your clothes, you rely less on buying lots of new things from corporations that profit from selling them to you. With the growth of ever-cheaper clothing, more and more consumers have seen it as less effort to simply go out and replace a damaged garment than take the time to fix it.

“I just honestly think people are tired and overworked and simply don’t have a lot of time to learn a new skill, or develop a passion for it, let alone have the energy for it,” said mudpuppie, a pseudonym-using member of the Mending Bloc. They added that a person is unlikely to start sewing if they see it as another burden on an already onerous to-do list (ahem, guilty). It would have to be enjoyable, and “most people are too exhausted to discover if something like sewing brings them joy.” 

Rebecca Harrison, who started her Pittsburgh mending and tailoring business Old Flame Mending in 2019 with her friend Tia Tummillo, offered another reason for why sewing and patching have disappeared from many people’s skill sets over time: “I think that the connection with the objects and things you use every day isn’t as strong as it used to be.” This is, of course, another product of the cheap fashion industry: If the barriers to keeping the clothes you have intact are higher than buying new ones, well, why would you go to the trouble?

Naturally, it makes no financial sense to ditch long-wearing investments like down jackets or leather boots at the first sign of a scuff or pulled thread. But there are other reasons to save a garment from the trash heap: Everyone has that one perfect pair of jeans or their grandfather’s old flannel whose emotional value thwarts all economic logic. Harrison first started thinking about the business she has today when she worked for a tailoring shop that would reject all kinds of garments that they deemed “not worth fixing” because they simply couldn’t be perfectly restored to mint-looking condition. 

That’s where the visible mending comes in — the colorful scars, if you will. This is nothing new outside of Western culture — the Japanese embroidery boro and sashiko, or the Indian sari-repurposing method of kantha, go back hundreds of years. But as many countries industrialized, it became less necessary to preserve clothing in thoughtful and beautiful ways; garments became both simpler and cheaper to create via the innovation of manufacturing. By the time we rolled into this tortured century, the practice of decorative mending had largely moved more into the sphere of art than craft, such as the work of British textile artist Celia Pym. 

And then, at some point in the past decade, little patches of embroidery and appliqué began to pop up here and there in commercially sold clothing. In 2017, a sewist at the Eileen Fisher Renew warehouse in the industrial district of Seattle showed me some whimsical stitching she’d done to cover a small tear in a blouse. (The Renew arm of the Eileen Fisher brand takes back lightly worn clothing to wash, restore, and resell at a discounted price.) The material of the blouse was too delicate to be mended invisibly, she explained, so if the stitches are going to be obvious, why not make them interesting to look at? 

The same sort of embellishment can be seen in the work of smaller designers, too. Rona Chang has been sewing one-of-a-kind jackets out of old quilts and other textiles since 2018 under her independent brand Otto Finn. Because she works with older fabrics, many of her pieces are obviously — and intentionally so — patched or embroidered. “Part of my practice is to make the most out of something that is already in existence,” she said, “and to be able to just patch it up a little bit so we can keep using it, and it’ll be not the same as new but good as new. It prolongs the life of something.” 

Visible mending is an obvious (in more ways than one) balm for a planet overburdened by a shocking weight of exploitatively manufactured clothes, but it’s a little harder to unravel exactly what its resurgence signals for the fashion industry’s sustainable bona fides. Encouragingly, it’s almost the polar opposite of the artificially “distressed” trend that has surged in and out of fashion from the 1980s all the way up to today. The false wear and tear of pre-ripped jeans and paint-splattered T-shirts at several hundred dollars a pop is the sartorial equivalent of zombie makeup painted on an actress by a special effects team. But when someone puts in the effort to heal the authentic wounds of cloth, they’re demonstrating that they care enough about the lifespan of something man-made to make sure it doesn’t collapse in tatters off someone else’s body.

But just like carefully saving your food scraps to compost, biking through a bitter winter afternoon in lieu of driving, or making sure every light is turned out when you leave a room, taking the time to patch up a tiny hole brings to mind the familiar refrain: Why am I bothering to make an individual change when it’s really an entire industry that has to change its ways? And climate advocates say it is crucial that retailers and designers use these creative methods to keep textiles in circulation as long as possible. 

“Even the most sustainable designers are kind of running into this question of, ‘What is conscious consumption under capitalism?’” said Rebecca Harrison. “What does this mean to be putting new stuff out into the world, when there’s already so much here?”

Emissions aside, reviving the people’s art of the patch is a good way to do battle with consumerist culture. Pocket, another member of the Mending Bloc, suggests the main barrier to mending “is not a lack of interest or will, but financial limitations and knowledge or skill barriers.”

There’s certainly a generational element to how sewing has traditionally been taught; almost everyone I interviewed learned it, in some capacity, from their mother or grandmother. (My own mom certainly tried to teach me, to no avail.) But for those who missed that boat, or who never had the opportunity, there is a far less sentimental way to learn: the world of social media.

Harrison explains that “arts and craft in general has become more democratized with the rise of social media.” Especially over the past interminable years of the pandemic, you have millions of people trying to learn new skills at home and eager to show off the fruits of their labor. It’s a proven recipe for a movement. 

Multiple members of the Mending Bloc described how they’d honed their own sewing practice by watching YouTube and Instagram tutorials. But they also emphasized the idea that you shouldn’t have to be responsible for exhaustively maintaining your wardrobe entirely on your own.

“Maybe you’re great at mending clothing seams, but can’t figure out how to darn socks,” explained Rita, “and that’s OK, because if you have a community of makers and menders, there’s bound to be someone there who can help.”

As for me, I do not think I am unique when I tell you that there is a fantasy version of my life where I do all sorts of good-for-the-Earth, homestead-y things. I grow my own vegetables, I make preserves, I mend all my own clothes and even sew ones for myself out of vintage textiles — the kind of simple yet flattering linen smocks that you imagine really fulfilled people wearing. But I also know that I get too easily frustrated when new skills do not come naturally to me, and perhaps that’s the real lesson here: that the more climate-compatible versions of our lives require an element of patience. 

I consider every mender I interviewed for this story to be an expert, a person in possession of awe-inspiring prowess and dexterity. And yet, each one emphasized how they are constantly learning and trying out new methods and techniques to tackle particularly finicky projects. So in addition to wearing our imperfections with pride, perhaps what we really need to abandon is the expectation of an “easy fix” for any problem, be it as simple as a hole in a sweater’s elbow or as complex as the global clothing industry.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The most ‘sustainable’ garment is the one that shows its wear, proudly on Mar 2, 2022.

This post was originally published on Grist.

Nearly seven years ago, when I was pregnant with my first kid, a couple of my close friends from graduate school generously offered to throw my husband and I a baby shower. As tends to happen when you are the first person in your 30-something friend group to have kids, it was a highly entertaining combination of Instagram-worthy baby decor and day drinking. 

On a warm Sunday in November, we crammed 40 adults, most bearing enormous pastel-wrapped boxes, into our 1044-square foot Bay Area bungalow, which had been decorated using a “wildland” nature theme. Bedecked in DIY construction paper animal ears, the group eventually gathered in hallowed baby shower tradition and made a giant circle. We all cooed as I tore into gift after gift to reveal dozens of brand new toys, blankets, books – and clothes, so many clothes. Dinosaur-print pajamas, fleecy winter zip-ups, itty-bitty baby bootlets with owl faces, swaddles, hats, sleep sacks, and a dozen white organic cotton onesies for guests to decorate. 

As precious as those memories are, it’s hard to imagine enjoying a similar event today. It’s not just the fact that crowded, indoor social gatherings (especially involving pregnant people) have largely been on hiatus for the past two years. There’s a new sense of slight irresponsibility associated with the idea of showering someone with dozens of brand new items of clothing that will only last for a few months, tops.

Even within the already carbon-intensive fashion industry, children’s clothing is notoriously wasteful. Part of that is because little kids do so much growing. In the first two years of life, an average child uses over 200 pieces of clothing, each of which only fits for about two or three months. That may sound like a lot, but tiny kids aren’t exactly cut out for a minimalist capsule wardrobe. Once my daughter was born, I was shocked by the sheer number of outfits she could go through in a single day thanks to an explosion of one bodily fluid or another. After the first dozen blowouts, I learned to keep a full set of extra clothes in my purse, car, and stroller.

Having a few extra pieces of clothing around may seem innocuous, but all our unwanted apparel can really add up once it makes its way to the waste bin. In 2018, the U.S. produced nearly 13 million tons of clothing and footwear waste, 70 percent of which ended up in landfills. There isn’t clear data on how much kids contribute to the textile pile up: Their apparel makes up around 12 percent of the market share, but their waste contribution may be even higher than that, since they cycle through them so quickly and are more likely than adults to stain or rip their outfits. 

For used outfits that remain in good condition, there is a thriving secondhand market for children’s clothing – sites like eBay and ThredUp, for example, are stalwart sources for buying and selling pre-loved kid gear. But for people like me who were contemplating having a second kid someday, the instinct is often to save resources and hold on to reusable baby items for a few years “just in case.” 

In 2019, I got pregnant again, and one of the first things my husband and I did was assess our accumulated trove of used baby items. Even after countless trips to Goodwill over the years and having passed many pristine outfits to parents with younger kids, the stack of blue plastic tubs with labels like “3-6 months – jackets only” went from floor to ceiling. “Do you want us to throw you a baby shower or sprinkle for #2,” my sister emailed me a few months before my due date. “God no,” I told her. “I don’t want anything new. We have too much stuff already.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but my newfound anti-clutter kick was fairly on trend. According to Tom Szaky, CEO of the New Jersey-based recycling company TerraCycle, anti-waste sentiment really started taking off around the end of 2017 and hasn’t let up since. “When it comes to waste, people are at a much, much higher level of concern today than five years ago,” he said. “It is one of those things that you can’t unsee.”

The COVID-19 pandemic added to our single-use shame, as many grocery stores and cafes temporarily stopped letting customers use their own reusable cups and bags. And the combination of economic instability and environmental anxiety helped fuel the meteoric rise of the “Buy Nothing” economy. A large number of people turned to social media to exchange excess goods free of charge. As Fortune Magazine Senior Editor Beth Kowit wrote of a Los Angeles-based Buy Nothing group, “Members gave and received the likes of toys and kids’ clothes, the bread and butter of most Buy Nothing groups.” 

Indeed, kid items are so ubiquitous on Buy Nothing Facebook groups that many neighborhoods have started family-specific subgroups. Posts on these forums often read like happier versions of the supposed Hemingway-penned six-word story: “Baby Shoes. Never Worn. Contactless Pickup.”

But even the most eco-minded adults may still want to make the occasional new fashion purchase for their littles – a choice that can feel intimidating given the current state of greenwashing. As Grist’s very own Umbra wrote way back in 2014: 

“The term eco-friendly, when applied to clothes, gets a little tricky. Most modern textiles exact some form of environmental tax. Regular cotton is grown using tons of pesticides, but organic cotton must often be shipped to us from faraway lands and soaks up lots of water. Human-made materials like nylon and polyester come from petroleum. Toxins also get involved in the spinning, dyeing, and overall production of many fabrics. Really, it’s a pity kids can’t stick to their birthday suits forever.”

Consumers’ desire for sustainable clothing is trending up worldwide, and the baby clothing market is no exception. In March 2020, for example, Gerber Childrenswear LLC launched a new “elevated” line of baby basics called Gerber Modern Moments. All of the items are made with organic cotton in an apparent bid to increase their eco-friendly appeal. But it also takes green to go green: A pair of Gerber Modern Moments sage green and black rompers will set you back about $20 – almost twice the price of the non-organic equivalent.

But if you’re willing to be optimistic (in 2022 no less!), there are a slew of new companies with somewhat novel waste-reduction models for child apparel. Many of these ventures focus on resale, repair, and recycling options rather than your standard greenwashing campaigns. 

In April of last year, for example, the popular kid clothing brand Carters partnered with TerraCycle to launch a free, national textile recycling program, called Kidcycle. People can sign up for an account, fill a box with any brand of kid or baby clothing that they can’t donate or give away, download a free shipping label, and drop the package off at any UPS location. The materials are then recycled, often ending up as insulation.

The New Jersey-based company Borobabi (pronounced “borrow baby”) claims to be America’s first circular retailer. Customers can rent or buy baby clothes made from natural materials, selecting from new or pre-owned items. For families who choose to buy an outfit, they can return it to the company when they’re done in exchange for store credit. The pre-owned items are either composted or cleaned and put back into circulation, depending on their condition. “On average, we can do four to five turns of the clothes,” said Emily Ryger, the company’s chief of communications. Borobabi was recently certified by the nonprofit B Lab as having met high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.

In the past two years, Ryger says the company has seen demand grow exponentially. “The market’s desire is for worthwhile options in the face of climate change,” she said.

Szaky, himself a father of three kids, also sees a lot of promise in looped models for baby clothing — ones that allow an item to be returned in good condition and used again. One key reason is that clothes for very young children have the fastest consumption cycle. That quick turnover is attractive to companies that are willing to clean and resell pre-owned items instead of making new ones. 

“Reuse can be a win-win for companies and consumers,” Szaky said. “Of course the very best thing is to buy less, but you also have to consider the sentimental factor, especially around baby clothes. Some people like to buy them and others find it difficult to let them go. I think the biggest miss we have in the sustainability space is hoping for a behavior change or talking about behavior change when really people don’t want to.”

Here’s the thing about parents of young children: We want a better future for our kids, we really do. And many of us are very, very aware of the horrors that await future generations if we don’t curb our emissions and consumption habits ASAP. But the truth is, we are also so effing tired. Like physically, mentally, and spiritually tired. That can make the siren song of consumerism hard to resist, even when it comes to something as innocuous as curbing the wastefulness associated with what our kids wear.

Hopefully parents in the near future won’t have to agonize as much between climate and convenience. But the good news is, I don’t think it’s necessary to hold ourselves to some unrealistic purity test in order to do better. And every time I successfully make a bag of my kids’ old stuff disappear into the arms of a grateful new family, or stuff my son into my daughter’s old hand-me-down leggings, I fully plan to celebrate the victory.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to dress your growing kid, less wastefully on Mar 2, 2022.

This post was originally published on Grist.

As a bright-eyed twentysomething, Hannah Neumann wanted to make the world a better place. She looked around at her options and, given that it was 2011, landed on starting a blog. It began as a place to share sustainable lifestyle tips for consumers who, she felt, had both responsibility and power to change the world through what they bought and did in their homes. She offered advice on how to compost, reviews of Fair Trade chocolate, and recycling guides for her hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota. 

Before long, she had attracted a growing audience — her following swelled to around 20,000 on Instagram at its peak, which was significant for a sustainability blogger at that time — and with that following came attention from brands, especially fashion companies, that wanted to pay her to promote their wares. Since they made commitments to treat their workers well and do right by the earth, she happily obliged.

Neumann developed a protocol for asking brands about their impact, requesting that they fill out a form answering what she considered a set of basic questions about their sourcing and labor practices. But the more she did so, the more dissatisfied she became — often companies that claimed to have ethical production as a core value couldn’t give clear answers about whether or not they were paying producers a living wage or about the provenance of their raw materials. 

The lack of transparency started to eat at her, but the checks kept coming in. “All content creators are going to say, ‘I only work with brands I really believe in.’ But if you’re getting paid hundreds of dollars to write a post, there’s quite a large incentive to say nice things, even if you discover something about the company that isn’t great,” she says. “Because at the end of the day, you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.”

Neumann didn’t know it then, but she was one of a small handful of people forging a path that’s now more of a six-lane highway: that of the “sustainability influencer.” While she was most active on Blogspot, her successors thrive on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, where they promote hiking gear made from recycled plastic bottles, organic maternity dresses, and secondhand Y2K-inspired looks. This relatively new cadre is susceptible to the same market forces that Neumann encountered — despite good intentions, influencers’ financial dependency on brands can result in them amplifying skewed ideas about how to right fashion’s environmental wrongs. And experts say that influencers’ paid recommendations often run counter to the most basic sustainability rule of all: we can’t shop our way to a better world.

Corporate spending on influencer marketing expanded by a whopping 42 percent in 2021 and is estimated to hit $15 billion in 2022. Combine that with reports that fashion executives consider sustainability one of their “biggest opportunities for growth,” and it’s not hard to see why the category has proliferated.

“Influencers are seen as credible sources, almost like friends, but marketers are not,” says Sevil Yesiloglu, senior lecturer in advertising and digital communications at the University of the Arts London and co-editor of the book Influencer Marketing. “So, marketers are going, ‘OK, I need to find those people who are seen as credible, who are not perceived as selling things.’” Marketers’ underlying assumption, of course, is that influencers must in fact be quite good at selling things, regardless of perception, or they’re not worth the cost.

Like their mainstream counterparts, sustainability influencers’ power comes from gaining followers’ trust, Yesiloglu says. But the key difference is that sustainability influencers don’t just have to convince their followers that they’re cool; they have to convince them that they’re sincere and knowledgeable guides on the topic of living sustainably. 

For the most conscientious of sustainability-focused content creators, that means spending ample time trying to learn about a given issue or product before they share about it online. But whereas other information-sharing professions often come with accountability structures built in for catching and correcting misinformation — like scientists submitting their research for peer review, or newspaper journalists submitting to editors and fact-checkers before publishing an article — content creation rarely does. 

That can mean that claims that sustainability scientists and other subject-matter experts might question, like the idea that making clothing from recycled water bottles is an unequivocally good thing or the oft-repeated but unsubstantiated claim that fashion is the second most polluting industry in the world, can spread unchecked online. Influencers don’t necessarily deserve more of the blame for misinformation than traditional fashion magazines — a lack of rigorous inquisition of sustainability claims remains a persistent issue in fashion media at large, with many well-respected publications beholden to advertiser interests. 

But the problem persists on social media, where the emerging influencer economy has very little regulatory oversight. That is especially problematic when it comes to potential greenwashing, says Yesiloglu. As a result, maintaining credibility is based largely on vibes, for lack of anything more concrete. Groups like the Ethical Influencers network, founded by UK-based sustainability-focused influencer Besma Whayeb, try to get around that by encouraging influencers to “do plenty of research” and “listen to your gut” about brands before agreeing to paid partnerships, and offering courses on how to properly label ads in a “clear and trustworthy way.” Even still, says Whayeb, it would be impossible for everyone in the network to say, “‘We’ve never participated in greenwashing.’”

These issues are partly a function of how social media works. “What influencers do is regurgitate and reshare information. So at some point, messages can get diluted and attention can be pulled away from people or places where it’s really important,” says Neumann. “We can’t equate consumption-focused content creation with activism or journalism.”

Neumann eventually became so uncomfortable with the tension inherent in sustainability influencing that she decided to change course — she still wanted to be a part of fixing the fashion industry, but she was no longer convinced content creation was the best way to do it. Instead, she moved to the Philippines to head up a small garment factory focused on low-waste production and living wages, where she lives and works today.

Still, for every Neumann type who’s walked away from influencing — and she notes there are many formerly well-known figures from her peer group who have done so — there seem to be a dozen new content creators that have risen up to take their place. 

Researchers most closely tracking the environmental impact of the fashion industry argue that the kinds of actions sustainability influencers tend to recommend, like eschewing virgin polyester leggings for recycled ones or even thrifting over buying new, will never be enough to bring the fashion industry within planetary boundaries if overall consumption doesn’t decrease.

“If they say something about the use of ‘sustainable fibers,’ I start seeing red,” says Ingun Grimstad Klepp, a professor of clothing and sustainability at Consumption Research Norway at Oslo Metropolitan University. “Because the differences between the [impact of] different garments are very, very small compared to the quantity you buy.”

Klepp points out that for all the ways the sustainability conversation has become mainstream, a shift which influencers like Neumann may have contributed to, average utilization of individual garments is still falling — in other words, we all have more clothes than ever before, but we’re wearing them less. That pattern alone ought to indicate that current strategies aren’t working.

Kate Fletcher, a research professor of sustainability, design and fashion at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion in London, agrees.

“It seems logical to endorse one brand over the other, but that will always be fundamentally limited by the original ideas and principles of capitalism,” she says. “Despite our best efforts over the last 30 years of trying to tweak that system, things are getting worse, not better, simply because the cumulative scale of the sector outpaces any benefits derived from our greener strategies.”

The only solution, Fletcher thinks, is a fundamental paradigm shift away from the growth model that undergirds the influencer economy and fashion itself. Fletcher’s book Earth Logic, co-authored with Mathilda Tham, tries to offer solutions to fashion’s ecological problems through the application of systems thinking, a discipline that approaches complicated problems holistically rather than fragmenting them into smaller parts. 

The conclusions they come to are stark: The fashion sector will have to shrink; no ifs, ands, or buts. 

Paralleling their colleagues in the degrowth movement, Fletcher and Tham argue that even circularity, fashion’s favorite buzzword of the moment, will not be enough to halt fashion’s contributions to climate change and ecosystem destruction if the scale of the industry itself isn’t reduced.

To Fletcher, that means also moving away from one of the defenses that sustainability influencers frequently employ: The money they make selling “green” products is justified, they say, because it helps fund their other environmental work. But she thinks the logic of this oft-repeated sentiment can obscure the urgent shift that needs to take place if the fashion industry is ever going to become compatible with a livable planet.

“I find it a very cynical argument,” Fletcher says. “We’ve known for a long time that ‘green’ products do little to change behavior, if anything at all. It seems impossible to say that you can just keep promoting better alternatives, but stick with the growth-focused ideology that underpins it all, because that’s not going to change anything.” 

In an era where the odds are stacked in favor of those who uphold the status quo, that means that influencers and followers alike might have to start holding themselves to a higher standard.

For the casual Instagram scroller, that may mean asking more questions of influencers and their content. These might include: What does this person stand to gain by sharing this information or product recommendation? Is there a subject matter expert who doesn’t have a financial stake in this who I can cross-check these claims with? Did this influencer get their information from a primary source, like a scientific study, or from a secondary source, like a blog post they found online? And the most important reflection of all: Does following their account make me want to buy more stuff I don’t need? 

On the deepest level, it will almost certainly mean making the mental shift from consumer to citizen. That starts with an acknowledgement that better shopping will never be adequate to fix the fashion industry. The system needs to transform in a fundamental way that will only be achievable through political action and regulation. 

The good news is that there’s a growing coalition of people trying to do just that. After nearly three decades of trying to fix the fashion industry through better buying, some advocates have started to see changing policy as more effective, and are creating ways for citizens to be a part of bringing about that shift. A recent example came in the form of SB62, a California law meant to protect garment workers from wage theft, which went into effect on January 1. Passing the bill took years of organizing by garment workers, activist groups, and concerned citizens — many of whom got connected to the movement by hearing about it on Instagram. Proponents of the New York Fashion Act, a bill introduced earlier this year, hope to follow a similar pathway to ensuring better regulation of the industry’s environmental impact.

It’s this shift that gives clues as to what hypothetical “Earth Logic influencers,” as Fletcher calls them, might look like in the future. From her perspective, such “influencers” would need to pioneer new business models that don’t require them to help brands sell clothing to stay financially afloat. But some of the other things sustainability-focused content creators bring to the table, like the ability to “elucidate or give visual form to other ways of living and doing things,” will continue to be useful in shrinking the footprint of the fashion industry to a size well within planetary boundaries, she says.

Politicians, scientists, business executives, and climate activists have spent decades engaged in a deadlock over the societal consequences of making and selling less stuff. The choices that the fashion industry finds itself facing are simply one component of a greater economic conundrum, which Fletcher recognizes “has complicated implications, especially in the short term.” But something simply has to give.

“At the end of the day,” she says, “perhaps the only thing we’ve got is our integrity.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The great conundrum of the sustainability influencer on Mar 2, 2022.

This post was originally published on Grist.

This article is part of the Ask Umbra 2021 Holiday Makeover.

We are nearing the two-year mark for a pandemic that has (at the very least) completely upended our lives in many, many ways. Daily schedules collapsed and were rebuilt, values and priorities shifted, personal relationships transformed. And yet, for some reason, the majority of us are not yet willing to look squarely at the holidays and think: Perhaps a Black Friday sale does not add meaning to my life.

The consulting firm Deloitte reports that 73 percent of retail executives expect higher spending this holiday season as compared to last, bringing the per-shopper average right back up to its 2019 fighting weight of almost $1,500. But as we know, many of those purchases will sooner or later (often sooner) end up in some dusty closet, donation pile, or trash bin. When you consider the amount of resources — water, land, carbon emissions — and underpaid, exploited human labor that go into goods that are often simply landfill-bound, it is hard not to be horrified.

And for what? In many cases, holiday buying habits are driven by a need to meet imagined expectations, an attempt to bring happiness to loved ones. While giving and receiving gifts can impart delight and even temporary joy, overbuying for the sake of obligation can also cause emotional and financial distress.

American consumerism is a year-round thing, but things really go into overdrive in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. When you get into the question of whether these habits are more grounded in religion or tradition, you risk getting stuck in a real quagmire. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that winter gift-giving, be it for Christmas or Hanukkah or Diwali, is a form of religious expression. But that doesn’t mean that we have a spiritual mandate to make a pilgrimage to Target. And you don’t have to take my word for it — in the Western world you don’t get much more influential in religious authority than the Pope, and the Supreme Pontiff has some firm thoughts on the matter.

In the Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ 2015 essay on our moral obligations with regard to climate change, he wrote: “The pace of consumption, waste, and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which even now periodically occur in different areas of the world.” (Let’s put aside the irony of this coming from the Catholic Church, an institution rather historically notorious for corruption and hoarding of wealth. When the Pope is right, he’s right.)

And yet, taking the “consume” out of Christmas is far easier said than done. We’re up against some powerful forces, including many billions of dollars in corporate advertising and a strong American cultural compulsion to shower our loved ones with gifts.

So how do we actually do it? Well, we start with the foundation, and work our way up.

The idea of consumerism as a form of contemporary religion — “America’s religion,” if you will — is not particularly new. The theory goes that we assert identity through which possessions we buy, define ourselves by affinity to various brands, and make our life’s purpose about having a lucrative enough career to buy what we want. The mall is our church, the credit card our rosary, et cetera.

In the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s 200-page essay, “Escape from Evil,” his final work published posthumously, he explains that the inclination to accumulate possessions comes from an innate desire for security. In ancient societies, the ability to give plenty of gifts both as expressions of generosity and goodwill to community members and as offerings to the gods established the gift-giver in a position of power and respect.

“The origin of human drivenness,” he wrote, “is religious because man experiences creatureliness; the amassing of a surplus, then, goes to the very heart of human motivation, the urge to stand out as a hero, to transcend the limitations of the human condition and achieve victory over impotence and finitude.”

So there, you have a sort of psycho-evolutionary motive, wherein “I shop, therefore I am” takes on a whole new significance.

But if shopping is supposed to be a strategy to triumph over the threat of sad, solitary existence, it’s not a very effective one. Study after survey after story confirms that buying great heaping mounds of stuff does not actually improve our existence in the long term. Economists are developing new ways of measuring what makes a society satisfied with life, because wealth and the ability to purchase possessions (beyond the trappings of a certain level of needs-meeting comfort) are no longer considered particularly meaningful metrics of it.

Materialistic values have been tied to depression, anxiety, and insecurity. We’re even willing to spend money on methods to get us to stop buying so much stuff! Japanese decluttering scion Marie Kondo, for example, built an entire wildly profitable enterprise off of the ways in which the great oppressive weight of our belongings make us actively unhappy — an enterprise, it should be noted, that now includes a store where you can buy more stuff.

When you live in a consumerist society, it is not particularly easy to avoid consumption when you are simply trying to enjoy yourself. Even the most basic features of many interpersonal relationships are to some extent dependent on it. If you want to ask someone on a date, you’ll probably go to a restaurant or a bar or a movie theater; if you’re a teenager who wants a place to go to with your friends, you’ll go hang out at some sort of commercial center; if you want to show someone you care for them, you buy them presents at Christmas. If you don’t do any of these, you will be operating outside the norm, and risking rejection of your peers.

A litany of philosophers and sociologists and psychologists have argued that this hamster-wheel model of self-satisfaction is an (albeit poor) substitute for personal fulfillment and happiness. The Swedish sociologist Magnus Böstrom writes, “consumer culture is often said to be built on the experience of satisfaction as transitory. It fosters a sense that demands are insatiable.” And the psychologist John Schumaker warned at length about the “insanity” that that culture propagates, coming to the conclusion that it “results in an emotional void that is experienced as failure because of the persistence of emptiness that mocks all attempts at satisfaction.”

In other words, giving up consumerism means taking up the hard question of, what truly makes us happy? Before we can find that answer, we have to do a fair bit of deprogramming. Which takes us to another specter of Yuletide torment: Capitalism. 

In the bone-biting chill of Scottish November, Reverend Billy, the leading “preacher” of the Church of Stop Shopping, brought his congregational choir to have their voices heard at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. The group is not actually a religious one. Rather, they are an anti-consumerist performance troupe whose singing and dancing routines urge their audience to consider changing their heavily polluting ways. By, for example, stopping shopping — or at least doing it way less.

But circling the Scottish Event Campus, the venue for COP26, the choir members found they just couldn’t get an audience with the actual delegates. The conference itself was housed in “these big buildings that all have different shapes — it’s just kind of a postmodern hell, that architecture,” Reverend Billy — government name William Talen — told me over the phone after the fact. There were highways and waterways and other forms of confounding infrastructural blockades that all conspired to form a sort of labyrinth around the conference center, and the group, at several points, found themselves stymied.

“Postmodern hell” is a familiar setting for the Church of Stop Shopping. Reverend Billy has spent the past two decades leading the group in protesting environmental sins in a wide variety of venues: Times Square, multiple outposts of Starbucks and Walmart, the Mall of America, and, more recently, the JP Morgan Chase Bank headquarters in New York.

The structures that protect and nurture the urge to shop are mighty fortresses indeed. Zygmunt Bauman, a famous Polish sociologist, wrote that one reason we’re so trapped in a consumerist cycle is because leisure — the ostensible goal of wealth — has become both commodified and profitable, making it “the turn of the consumers, rather than producers, to be exploited.” In other words, your boredom or malaise is someone else’s opportunity for profit.

The entire purpose of a capitalist system is to build and accumulate assets (aka capital), and the American experiment has definitely succeeded in that regard. Today, we have many very profitable corporations and wealthy individuals with a vested interest in maintaining our cultural obsession with buying and owning more and more stuff.

But to be able to participate in said stuff-owning, you have to have money. If you don’t have enough money to buy all the things you want, you are actively encouraged by companies and financial institutions to take out lines of credit and go into interest-accumulating debt. The psychological, physical, and economic impacts of significant debt — particularly on low-income families — are well-documented, and they are profoundly negative: heart attacks, chronic pain, homelessness, to name a few.

While there’s no doubt that the choices of individuals help perpetuate an unsustainable cycle of consumption, it would be as profoundly off-mark to criticize those with limited means for our consumerist nightmare as it is to criticize them for the climate crisis. The impact of what the bottom 10 percent consumes so massively pales in comparison to that of the top 10 percent, as an analysis by the Financial Times recently found. (That differential is greater in the United States than in any other country.) But our lifestyle options are not limited to “impoverished and struggling” and “in possession of a personal jet.” There are ample examples of middle-class and even wealthy families who have enough money to be comfortable but still feel trapped in an ever-more-stressful cycle of debt and spending.

“What I argue is that the United States is like a backpacker, but a backpacker who has this enormous pack, overloaded, falling backward, angry, straps are cutting into us, like an overturned turtle that can’t right itself, and we’re mad as hell,” says the documentarian John de Graaf, who has researched consumerist culture for decades. “And we are blaming everything — immigrants, women, taxes, government, minorities — for this misery that we feel, instead of looking at the crazy priorities that get us there.”

But what would an alternative to those crazy (work-obsessed, wealth-obsessed, environmentally apathetic at best) priorities look like? Perhaps a level of social infrastructure that allows people to actually enjoy their lives. Say, a four-day work week, government-ordained paid time off, or subsidized child care. Quality over quantity, so to speak.

To that end, there is a contingent of escapist Americans who like to point to Scandinavian countries and say: See, they’ve got it figured out. They have year-long paid parental leave, they can nestle their babies in a government-provided box of free onesies. Surely their priorities are in the right place.

“That’s bullshit,” says the sociologist Magnus Böstrom. Despite the fact that many Nordic countries have comparatively extensive welfare benefits, “the income gap is drastically widening in Sweden, and there’s all sorts of mass consumerist behavior. There is no real policy and politics and culture in Sweden to downsize.”

But Böstrom has been researching — in Sweden — why and how people do decide to downsize, and what happens when they do. The “why” is usually driven by a dissatisfaction with life combined with distress about the ecological impacts of consumption, the “how” usually entails working less to have more free time, and the “what happens” is, surprise, a greater satisfaction with life.

“I think too few people ask these questions: What do I do with my life? What is well-being, actually? Is it just to continue as usual and follow the norms — is this a meaningful life?” he says. “So that has similarities, of course, with religious thoughts — that they reflect on their existence.”

Philosophy is well and good, but let’s bring this holiday conversation back to the ghost of consumerism present — and by that I mean the presents themselves. This time of year is associated with peak capitulation to our American-capitalist grooming, but it’s also an opportunity to reconnect with our values and reinvent traditions for a new generation.

April Dickinson, who documents her dogged attempts at a minimal-buying, zero-waste lifestyle on Instagram, explained that her bicultural upbringing helped inform her current approach to holiday giving. On her Chinese mother’s side, there were no objects bestowed on many celebratory occasions, just money and delicious food. On her white American father’s side, big piles of gifts at Christmas were the norm. As she and her brother grew older, they realized that, in either case, the memories of how they spent the time with family were far more vivid than their recollections of what they had actually received. Later, Dickinson saw the same long-term indifference toward physical presents play out with her own young children.

“Kids really love and are excited about a toy for like two minutes, and then they’re kind of over it,” she said. “Seeing that happen in real time, in front of my eyes, I was like: ‘We need to adjust why we’re doing this.’”

Dickinson found that pushing back against the great weight of materialism worked best as a process of slow reduction for her family: gradually smaller and tighter wishlists, and open communication with relatives about what really matters to her. But for others making the attempt, she emphasized the importance of not being too harsh on yourself. “We only have so much capacity to always be upholding something, and swimming upstream is very, very exhausting. So, give yourself some grace, and just commit to what you’re able to commit to.”

Part of that commitment problem is that a non-consumerist Christmas — to say nothing of a non-consumerist America! — is still so hard to imagine. Even writing this essay, I myself struggled to imagine what a life with less stuff would look like on a society-wide level. I found myself coming back to the words of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who wrote in her novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, that the white architects of this country and its institutions “have really structured the fucked-up-ed-ness in a seemingly impenetrable way.” That certainly resonates when you try to do something as ostensibly simple as eschew or even reduce gifts at the holidays.

But if there’s a silver lining to our buying habit’s sticking power, it’s that it actually speaks to our primal desire and potential for change. In an analysis of the very idea of the religious trappings of materialism, Finnish theologian Mikko Kuhrenlati wrote that the “absolute act of dreaming can be interpreted as the engine of consumerism,” a kind of beautiful bit of optimism. We are shopping to achieve some imagined better life or version of ourselves that will be achievable with this car or that lipstick.

What comes next, I suppose, is pushing that imagining of a good life beyond coveting what we can see in a store window or Instagram ad. Is this season not known for miracles?

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to save Christmas from consumerism on Nov 22, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.