The Return of the Lorax

“At the far end of town, where the griggle grass grows, and the wind smells snow and sour when it blows, and no birds ever sing except for old crows, is the street of the lifted Lorax.” This is the opening line of Dr. Seuss’s book The Lorax. Dr. Seuss goes on to tell a tale of a society overrun by society and without a Truffula Tree in sight. Dr. Seuss’s story is not a happy one, but a fable with an obvious environmental message. Dr. Seuss painted a sad picture of the future, but in the end, the Once-ler gives the little boy the very last Truffula Tree seed for him to plant and take care of, potentially regrowing the forest and resulting in the Lorax’s return. This is where I will pick up.  I would like to think of myself as a positive realist. I am not naïve, but unlike a pessimist, I have hope for the future—I do not believe that we are doomed to failure. In order for me to envision a sustainable future I know that I will have to think in terms of “best case scenario.” I think that some key characteristics that will define my vision have been stressed in some of my previous blog posts, they will include: complete transparency, replacing synthetics and organics with sustainable materials, and replenished resources. Habitual beliefs (aka lies) that I will have to overcome might include doubting the possibility of my vision occurring and doubting that the solutions I picture would actually work. In order to believe my vision I will have to believe that anything is possible and if you dream it you can achieve it. In order to communicate my vision clearly I want to paint a picture of a world so colorful and promising that it seems fantastical. Taking after Dr. Seuss, but with a happy story to share, I plan to tell a story. I don’t want to just discuss the future, I want to show it to the reader. A mental mode that will be required to create my future is that if you believe it you can achieve it. I think this is the bottom line, if our future is going to change we are going to have to see what we want it to look like and then make it look like that.

From the readings this week I picked up some new tips and information to spur me on to visioneer. In Thinking Ahead, Tom Lombardo introduced psychotherapy to me. He explained what it is (opening the mind to future possibilities and raising one’s perceived self-efficacy in realizing positive possibilities) and the discussed the goals: helping people to see that there are alternatives to negative future scenarios by involving clients to set new goals, articulate plans, and monitor follow-through on these plans. Lombardo writes that “one thing is certain: the future is the only reality that we can actually do anything about…the future is a vast arena of possibilities—and the only arena of existence over which we have any practical influence or control.”

In Limiting Consumption, Alan Durning writes that it is not possible for the entire population of the world to live by the American lifestyle. We are a wasteful people, especially for being some of the most educated people in the world. Durning goes on to acknowledge that the goal of creating a sustainable culture (a culture of permanence) is a challenge that will last several generations. So flash forward several generations (to the return of the Lorax), and that is where my vision will be. “Living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to a true materialism that does not just care about things but cares for them.”

Visioneering probably provided the most direction for what visioneering is. Joon Kim and Taikan Oki write that visioneering for problem solving in social-ecological systems (SES) requires the integration of three processes: vehement envisioning of the world works and how we want it to be, systematic analysis conforming to the vision, and implementation appropriate the vision. They also offer definitions of sustainability that reflect a paradigm shift like: use of environment of resources to meet needs of present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, process that is farseeing enough, flexible enough and wide enough, and the possibility that human and other life will flourish on Earth forever. I learned that my goal is to visioneer (engineer a clear vision) as opposed to simply visioning (imagining).

Stranger Danger

As a child growing up in the nineties a common lesson taught annually was to steer clear of unknown strangers. Phrases like “Stranger danger” and the repeated yelling of “You’re not my mom” were common tactics to ultimately help us avoid abduction. The trick of the stranger was to tempt children with something appealing to get their attention; similarly, companies bait consumers into buying their product with false advertising. Unfortunately, it is sometimes easier to catch a kidnapper than it is to catch a greenwasher.

In Eco-promising: communicating the environmental credentials of your products and services, they define eco-promising as “the practice of making claims about the environmental attributes of products.” In The Greenwash Guide the negative of this is referred to as greenwashing, which is defined as “an environmental claim, which is unsubstantiated (a fib) or irrelevant (a distractions). Found in advertising, PR or on packaging, and made about people, organizations and products.” Just like the man creeping around the corner in a large black minivan, greenwash isn’t just a nuisance it’s dangerous.

From Eco-promising I found that Eco-promising has been around since 1977, and without a strict way to regulate the promises companies are making it has been allowed to run wild and expand. Eco-promising’s system was created to combine two innovations: life-cycle analysis to trace product environmental performance and third party assurance. In 1998, three types of labels were characterized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Type I: declarations that meet criteria set by third parties, and are based on life-cycle impacts. These are award-type labels. They require the product to meet independently set criteria.

Type II: manufacturers’ or retailers’ own declarations or ‘green claims.’ There are no pre-defined criteria, nor is there verification by independent bodies.

Type III: quantified information about products based on life-cycle impacts on specific aspects such as energy output.

Eco-promising, although it still has kinks that need to be worked out, is still an important step in making our companies more environmentally sustainable and consumers more aware.  According to Eco-promising, some of the benefits of eco-promising include enhancing company reputations and increasing sales; on the other side, the obstacles mentioned include the problem of confused consumers and greenwashing.

Thankfully, a pattern has begun to develop making it easier to identify signs of greenwashing. In The Greenwash Guide they list 10 greenwashing giveaways:

1.     Fluffy language

a.     Words with no clear meaning. For example, “eco-friendly.”

2.     Green products v dirty company

3.     Suggestive pictures

4.     Irrelevant claims

a.     Emphasizing one green attribute that the company is proud of in order to distract from every other aspect that is un-green

5.     Best in class

6.     Just not credible

a.     For example: ecofriendly cigarettes? Making a dangerous product “green” doesn’t make it safe.

7.     Gobbledygook

8.     Imaginary friends

a.     They may have a label from a third party endorsement…except the whole thing is made up.

9.     No Proof

10. Out-right lying

Looking at brands featured on ecofashionworld.com it is easy to see that not every brand is as reliable as they say they are.  For example, the brand Thieves promotes itself on using sustainable fabrics, the proof for their statement is when they list the fabrics like hemp blends, organic linens, beeswaxed organic cottons, and peace silk to show that they are aware of the materials they are using.

The brand Nature 89 advertises using 100% unblended organic cotton and eco-friendly, water-based dyes. From previous readings we have learned that 100% unblended organic cotton may not be the most impressive form of cotton to use. We have also learned to approach garments that advertise themselves as “eco-friendly” and don’t go into the details that make their garments, or in this case dye, eco-friendly. The plus side to this brand is that they are part of the 1% movement.

The brand English Retreads brags that they are one hundred percent vegan though they don’t go into any detail on how they are achieving that.

These are examples that there are brands out there that are following through with their eco-promises and that there are brands out there that know how to use the right words. As a consumer it is important to remember not to believe everything you read or hear. The more you know the more of an educated purchase decision you will be able to make. Do not be fooled by everything that is thrown your way to entice you into buying companies products or you could just find yourself a victim to greenwash.   

Cotton: The Fabric Of Our Lives

A SHORT STORY

Growing up in Texas with the last name Cotten, I got used to the routine questions… Do you live on a farm? Do you harvest cotton? Did you get your last name because your family used to harvest cotton?  And every time I answered with a polite “No.” In fact, I had never even been on a farm until I came to Oklahoma for school. Last year for Christmas my dad had shirts printed up for our family that were a spin off of the Cotton Inc logo.  Instead of the boll of cotton there was a Christmas tree and instead of spelling cotton with an o we spelled it like our last name: Cott-E-n. My friends back at school got a huge kick out of this shirt and began running through those routine questions I thought I had left behind. When I was through answering “No” to every question they threw my way one of them said, “Well we need to fix this!” Before I knew it we were in a car and on our way to her farm in Tuttle, OK. She was more than thrilled to show me the ropes of cotton farming and couldn’t resist the occasional cotton/Cotten puns. Had I known then what I know now I would have loved the opportunity to learn first hand the process that their family uses on their farm to harvest their cotton, what they know about where their cotton goes and what continues to happen to it during it’s production, and what changes they have implemented (if any) to make their farm more sustainable. I think that experiencing cotton farming first hand definitely made the article, The Sustainability of Cotton, more interesting. After all, “knowledge of what happens in the filed is the basis for recommendations.”

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of the study discussed in The Sustainability of Cotton was to compare the three major farming systems in terms of their impact on the environment. Cotton crops are known for bringing in considerably more income than other crops. In the article, Karst Kooistra and Aad Termorshuizen admit that even though cotton likely has the most impact on a global scale, the available data was limited for analysis (red flag number one that cotton is not going to be an easy material to make sustainable).  

In this article, Kooistra and Termorshuizen compare the three most common cotton cultivation systems: conventional, organic, and integrated pest management (IPM). However, all three of these systems engage in applications that are unsustainable for the environment which only shows that, at least right now, the cultivation of cotton cannot be 100% sustainable (red flag number two).

The breakdown of cotton cultivation is as follows:

·      80% conventional

·      20% IPM

·      .4% organic

The conventional farming used in developed countries often approaches the standards of an IPM system because highly toxic pesticides have been banned. In an optimal system, the IPM system scores well based on their efficiency of fertilizer use, their effective use of low-persistence and narrow-range pesticides, and in their high yields. Organic farming stands out with high scores when it comes to wide rotations and the lack of pesticide use all together. The conventional and organic farming systems are not as different as expected either. The Sustainability of Cotton offers the comparison that “transforming a conventional system that has unsustainable water use to an organic system with the same degree of unsustainable water use has limited advantages.”

It is no surprise that “cotton is considered to be quite a difficult crop to grow.” Cotton is dependent on water, sensitive to low temperatures, and helpless against insect attacks. In order to ensure that the cotton crops will grow and be harvested farmers have to fight each of these difficulties, and while each of the battles can be fought and won, the process required to bring cotton to its full term comes at a cost (red flag number 3).

NEED FOR TRANSPARENCY

As I acknowledged earlier in this post and in previous posts, transparency is crucial to sustainability. Organic farming is the only certified type of production, IPM is only certified occasionally, and conventional farming never is. Certified production makes it possible for both retailers and consumers to keep tabs on the entire production process, which in turn allows for inferences on the environmental impact to be made. Since cotton is such an important crop, it only makes sense that in order to obtain the quantitative field data on the environmental impact that more fieldwork is needed. The areas The Sustainability of Cotton focuses on in order to compare are: water use, land use, biodiversity, human and environmental toxicity, eutrophication, acidification, global warming, erosion, and salinization. I will try to briefly focus on water use and human and environmental toxicity (pesticides).

WATER USE

The Sustainability of Cotton suggests that one way water use can be reduced is to introduce more sustainable irrigation techniques. Professor Steven Raine provides hope with his study on irrigationfutures.org. In his article he explains:

The Future Irrigation: Practice and Technology program is focused on providing the leadership and capacity to capture, develop and promote new irrigation practices, technologies and management systems to ensure the social, economic and environmental sustainability of the urban, peri-urban and rural irrigation sectors.

Raine goes on to discuss new insights that The Future Irrigation program is putting into practice. One of the projects his team is implementing is Improving the Precision of Irrigation. The purpose of this project is to develop frameworks in order to assess the importance of both the crop variation and the irrigation systems that should be adapted in order to deliver the most efficient use of water.

PESTICIDES

      The most important factors to consider when determining the effectiveness on crop growth and the impact on the environment that fertilizer has, according to The Sustainability of Cotton, are:

·      rainfall patterns

·      types and levels of the fertilizer used

·      timing of the application of the fertilizer

The negative consequences that pesticides could potentially cause for human health are becoming even more widely recognized despite the fact that statistics are still rare. One statistic pointed out in this article is that it has been estimated that globally 40,000 lives are lost annually due to the application of pesticide.

SILVER LINING

The President and CEO of Cotton Inc has published a message to the Cotton Inc website stating that “the cotton industry envisions a future where environmentally sustainable production and manufacturing will thrive along with the businesses that depend on cotton as a source of income.

Dr. Ed Barnes with the Agricultural Research branch at Cotton Inc explains one effort that they are taking. He explains that they have switched 70% of their crops to conservation pillaging. With this system, Cotton Inc is simply planting the new crops without pilling the ground from the previous crop. By doing this he explains that this protects the soil, allows the ground to absorb more rain, limits erosion, and helps to trap the carbon from the atmosphere so that it cannot contribute to greenhouse gas.

CONCLUSION

I appreciate the efforts the cotton industry is implementing, however the red flags I pointed out earlier are still of great concern. I think that cotton is in too high of a demand for its sustainability to dictate whether or not it is sold. I also don’t think that a 100% sustainable solution will happen because like I just said, it doesn’t have to happen in order to keep cotton on the market. Lastly, the sustainability of cotton does not stop at the farm. The next step of sustainability goes beyond the cultivation process, “if cotton production and processing are to be sustainable in a more holistic sense that goes beyond environmental indicators, then social and trade aspects need to be addressed.” As much as I do believe in the improvement that is taking place in the cotton industry I still feel that, despite our best efforts, cotton will not be joining the list of sustainable materials.

Ultimately, Sustainability

“Natural” has become synonymous with healthy, safe, environmentally friendly, green, and sustainable leaving the “synthetic” to be associated with words like fake and harmful. To the unsuspecting consumer those connotations make sense. However, if you do just a little bit of research it is not hard to realize that “natural” is not always better and “synthetic” isn’t always bad. In fact, with the progression of technology, the goal of textile producers has started to point towards the combination of the two ideas in order to create sustainable synthetic materials.

Charline Ducas explains that natural fibers are more appealing because they are more comfortable and therefore often make up the garments we wear closest to our skin. Unfortunately those natural fibers like cotton are not as environmentally friendly as they would seam. Ducas discusses six ways to make garments more sustainable and not one of them was to remove synthetic materials.

Reducing, recycling, upcyling was the first suggestion Ducas discusses. Under this headline she explains that we need to focus on zero waste design and designing for disassembly and recyclability. These solutions focus on reducing the environmental footprint of the waste we put back into the environment. In Material Diversity, Fletcher discusses an entirely new class of synthetic fibers known as Poly(lactic acid), PLA, or biopolymer. This fiber is compostable in industrial composting facilities. Agproducts.unl.edu notes that PLA is an attractive option because it can break down under the “composting system while maintaining its integrity under normal use.” Another benefit listed by agproducts.unl.edu is that PLA is created from renewable resources such as corn. PLA is an alternative to the use of petroleum and while it is not a flawless solution yet, it is a start.

Doing more from less is Ducas’ third suggestion. Under this headline Ducas discusses the Huntsman Research and Technology group responsible for Avitera, revolutionary textile dyeing products created to save water. “Huntsman takes a lot of pride in being able to improve how the world works with chemicals while being responsible to the environment in which we live.” It is because of the Huntsman research that Avitera has been proven to reduce the water used in dyeing cotton by 50%, saved process time by 50%, and performed the dyeing process with 70% less energy. The example the Huntsman group has set shows that it is possible to use fewer materials and still accomplish the task expected.

Ducas’ other suggestions include renewables, re-exploring naturals, going water-less, thinking of new ways. She acknowledges that not all solutions are available but the industry is working on the technology to make them available.

“Materials are our starting point for change.” It is our job to figure out how to use them to their full potential and preserve them so that we can use them in years to come. In Material Diversity, Fletcher spotlights the Sustainable Cotton Project. In California they have found “that biological integrated pest management (IPM) techniques have potential to reduce chemical use by more than that achieved by organic cultivation practices.” The goal of the Sustainable cotton project is to “lessen the toll that the soil-to-shirt cotton production process takes on the earth’s air, water, and soil, and the health of people in cotton growing areas.” People don’t realize that it isn’t just about the creation of a fiber or material or garment but that once the garment is made it becomes about the laundering of the clothes and then the discarding of the garments at the end of their life cycle. In order to make garments sustainable we need to reduce their environmental footprint at each step throughout the process. It does not matter if material is environmentally friendly to create if there is not a sustainable way to dispose of the product at the end. As a consumer it is important to think of these things when we are shopping for the next article of clothing we want to add to our closet. It is our duty to consider how it was made, how we have to care for it, and what is going to happen to it when are through with it.

Ultimately, my research on this issue has brought me to the conclusion that the terms “synthetic” and “natural” are misleading. “Natural” refers to the organic agriculture movement, “synthetic” refers to fibers created from natural materials but through chemical/man-made processes and “sustainable” stems from the environmental movement. While “natural” sounds more appealing than “synthetic,” neither of those options offers everything that the label of being “sustainable” does. Consumers need to realize that the battle is not between synthetic and natural but between sustainable and unsustainable materials.