Fibershed is a real eye opener!
If you want your clothes to be good for the environment, then you need to consider their entire lifecycle.
Where are the crops grown? Who processes them?How do they get transported? Where will they be sold? And so on.
The convenience of fast fashion quickly unravels under scrutiny.
That’s what Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess with Courtney White sets out to do and it presents a “farm-to-closet” vision for a better world.
It’s Hard To Know What We Don’t See
Almost all of us don’t want to cause major harms to the world through the things we wear.
The trouble is that we have no visibility of the impact that clothing has prior to it arriving on the shelf. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we can’t see what we need to know.
As creatures with no natural fur, we’re very much dependent on clothes, but how can we marry that with our desired to do better?
Rebecca took a hard look at the world during a project based on locally grown, processed and made clothes and discovered that the giant, damaging, unaccountable supply chains that deliver our clothes are not necessary, they’ve come into being because of a lack of insight from consumers.
See The Future
She offers as an alternative vision in which natural fibers are locally grown, sourced and processed using natural dyes and as part of a bigger scalable and restorative agricultural system.
The book is not just a fascinating resource for consumers, it’s a roadmap for farmers and manufacturers everywhere.
If you want to make the world a better place, read this book.
You can find Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess online.
For more great reads check out all our Whole People Book Reviews here. Or if you’re more of a visual person we highly recommend these 5 TED Talks on Sustainable Fashion You Must See.