We all live in a yellow submarine

This week I have chosen to tackle option A and argue that the garment industry is in fact guilty of contributing greatly to the depletion of our natural resources.  There is no denying that the human population is exploding and will continue to do something about it.  This is the root of all of the problems we are facing today and thus, because there are more people, more clothes are needed.  More clothes means more cotton needed, so the more land we clear and use for crops.  One of the major problems with this is outlined in the ESMA article "Approximately 60% of the ecosystem service evaluated in this assessment are being degraded or used unsustainably."  As stated in the FS article "the use of pesticides cab cause..soil degradation and biodiversity loss."  If we can not maintain healthy soil, especially with heavy pesticide use, we will no longer have good soil upon which to grow new cotton for new clothes.  In addition to the soil degradation, which in the Walsh article represented the largest environmental cost in growing cotton, water use is a major issue. 

Water, although not much of a problem here in a the United States, is very much a problem in the developing countries in which the cotton is grown and the clothes are produced.  In the FS article it is said that "Cotton is a thirsty crop.  A problem made worse by poor agricultural practices, in some cases over 10 tonnes of water are used to grow enough cotton to make 1 pair of jeans - or 6 pints of water per cotton bud!"  This water comes from wells, which comes from an aquifer.  This same water is used for drinking for the local people.  As the water is used beyond its replenishing capacity deeper wells must be drilled, causing many people's wells to run dry.  "In central Asia, inefficient water use in cotton production has all but eradicated the Aral Sea." 

One issue that is a bit more difficult to control is human consumption of the clothing.  As our society continues to exploit our desire for consumerism, the demand for more clothes grows.  In the FF reading, "Over the last two decades clothing has become increasingly affordable to everyone.  Retailers and brands have capitalized on this affordability by moving away from a 'summer' and 'winter' season to fresh collections throughout the year."  In the Walsh article they did justify additional cost to offset externalized costs within the products themselves, but not to set "green taxes" which they felt would be detrimental.  Although cost is not all of it: the trend to release clothes more frequently is a hard cycle to break.  Many designers could not stand being "behind the curve."  This is not just a problem for the garment industry, it is all industries.  So this becomes a human mindset problem, which will take as long of a time to correct as it took to set in the first place, potentially even longer.  This is certainly a heated topic in who is actually responsible.  I think that both the consumer and the industry are equally at fault.  With the current sustainability movement, I believe more and more people are becoming aware of the consequences of our actions.  The movement of the general public is like an old steam train, it take a lot of energy to get the wheels turning, but when they do begin to turn, momentum is gained exponentially.  It is best to note that like the Beatle's song "We all live in a yellow submarine", like that submarine our earth is contained, and we are all in this together.

The pin drop heard round the world

Earthquakes!  Tornadoes!  Tsunamis!  Diseases!  Famines! 

Every night you sit down and watch the world news there is no escape from hearing more and more about terrible things going on in the world.  Is it really that bad out there?  Have things gotten out of control?  Have we really screwed up this world that these things are happening?  I don't think so.

Let us go back in time to the 1500's.  Easter Island was at it's peak with about 7000 inhabitants.  By the time anyone ever found this place, it was 200 years later and the society had diminished to a few hundred.  It took settlers over 200 years to find these people, but now we can see everything going on around the world at a moments notice via satellite.  The advent of the internet in the 1980's only helped narrow the access time to next to nothing by allowing all information to be accessible almost instantly.  Now think, that society existed for 100 years before anyone discovered them, how many different disasters have we missed as well?  We did not have hundreds of weather stations or instruments of any kind of real accuracy.  We didn't have the variety of measurements either.

In the last 40 to 50 years, we have been able to take measurements with an increasing amount of accuracy.  This leads to a much better understanding of current trends, but does nothing with providing any details as to what happens in the past.  There is an old adage that says "if a tree falls in the woods, and no one heard it, did actually happen?"  I think that holds well in this situation, that there are many many more people now than there ever was in the past.  More people to see, record, tell their friends about, any kind of thing is now being witnessed and recorded.  The USGS website, in relation to whether or not there are more earthquakes now, "A partial explanation may lie in the fact that in the last twenty years, we have definitely had an increase in the number of earthquakes we have been able to locate each year. This is because of the tremendous increase in the number of seismograph stations in the world and the many improvements in global communications. In 1931, there were about 350 stations operating in the world; today, there are more than 8,000 stations..."  This relates directly to many of the recorded graphs in the Millennium Assessment that they either go back only about 60 years or so, or the technology upon with those recording were recorded from were very inaccurate or poor, as well as limited in number. 

So as with many things, there really isn't anything new under the sun.