music: Sigur Ros- Agaetis Byjun
I’m doing laundry now, which is probably way overdue, and as I’m moving my clothes from the washer to the drier I notice that the clothes really aren’t all that wet. Rather, they aren’t as wet as I remember clothes being after a wash cycle. They are damp, there is evidence of water being involved at some point here, but they really should be more wet than they are. Then i realize that all of the clothes I’m moving from washer to dryer are made of plastic. Capeliene, polypro, nylon/lycra blend, duofold, bergelene…and the only clothes left out of the wash cycle are my gore-tex jacket and my windstopper fleece jacket. Granted these are my travel clothes, the small handful of garments I’ve been wearing ever since I rolled out of Boston on July 1, and when I consider all the clothes I own the picture changes. But still.
No-correction-my socks are a blend of wool and synthetic (40% wool i think), and my bandana is made from 100% cotton. So there’s that.
But still.
What happened to plants? Or animals even? Scientists working in high security research bunkers have managed to turn used milk cartons and tennis ball fuzz into such a wonderful facsimilie of plant fiber and animal hide that we’ve forsaken plants and animals altogether. Now our outdoorsiness manifests itself in brightly colored plastic clothes. We think of fleece in terms of the newest North Face or Patagonia garment, but often fail to remember that fleece originally referred to sheep hair. My ‘fleece’ jacket doesn’t have that barnyard smell to it (I take that for granted), and it is very light, packable, and due to some space-age laminate completely windproof. But here’s the kicker: I wear my jacket around town and people look at it and probably think “wow, that guy is really outdoorsy, really into being in nature.” Only when i cover myself in plastic, apparently.
I wonder what the environmental impact is of all the waste chemicals pouring out of the Gore labs…
Perhaps we’ve gotten too far ahead of ourselves as a culture when something so clearly synthetic, so clearly made by chemicals in a factory becomes the symbol for outdoorsiness or an affinity for nature. Maybe it’s just really good marketing by the gear companies. But it shouldn’t be so. Wool and leather, still quite acceptable materials from which to make clothes, should really be the marks of the nature-lover. Cotton is still a wonderous material, despite being a poor insulator once it gets wet, and there’s all sorts of alternatives like silk, hemp, or beech. These are all truly natural fibers, and would be better symbols of the nature-lover than the dryer full of plastic in the next room.
(Something similar could be said for food, but I’m not going to get into that right now.)
Posted by davidtaus at September 6, 2006 02:40 PM | TrackBack