Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 41

With 1.5 billion pairs produced each year, and 450 million sold annually in the United States alone, jeans may be the most widely produced item of apparel on the planet. They begin with cotton, which is made with water—about two inches per week during the growing season, or about a bathtub full for each pair of jeans. Often, this water is supplied by irrigation. Rivers are redirected and aquifers depleted for crops that ultimately keep us comfortable and cool. As consumers, we think of cotton, water, and soil as renewable natural resources. And they are renewable, as long as producers pay attention to the regeneration of soils and the recharge of aquifers, which, generally, they don’t.¹³

Because cotton is typically monocultural, it invites invasions of insects like mites, aphids, thrips, worms, and beetles. Consequently, cotton-growing demands pesticides—about 10 percent of all pesticides used on all crops in the world. Cotton-growing uses 10 percent of the world’s herbicides, too, not including the defoliants used just before harvest. About a pound of chemicals is used for five pounds of cotton, and because it takes a little more than two pounds of cotton to make a pair of jeans, we’re responsible for about half a pound of chemicals for each pair of jeans we own.¹⁴ Only traces of these chemicals stay in the fiber, of course; more than 90 percent of them wash into soil, streams, lakes, and aquifers. One current strategy for reducing the use of chemicals involves genetically modified cotton. Currently GMO cotton makes up about half of the U.S. crop, so in a process we might call “jeanetic engineering,” our demand for jeans has now affected the genes of cotton.¹⁵

The row cropping of cotton is hard on the soil, too. Plowing exposes loose soil to wind and water, leading to erosion. Tillage also speeds the breakdown of organic matter, while pesticides kill microorganisms that give soil its vitality. Irrigation waters the crop and helps it grow, but it also contributes to the salinization of the soil. Cotton may be a natural fabric, but its cultivation typically isn’t kind to nature.¹⁶

After the harvest, cotton is ginned to separate the fiber from the seeds, bound into five-hundred-pound bales, shipped to factories, spun into yarn, woven into cloth, and cut and sewn into jeans. Each step requires fossil fuels or nuclear power, and all of the fossil fuels contribute to global weirding. Once made, the denim is dyed. In the distant past, indigo dyes came from plants and snails found around the Mediterranean Sea. Around 1900, German chemists discovered a process for synthesizing indigo, so now the raw materials for the blue in our jeans are aniline, formaldehyde, and cyanide, all of which come from petroleum.¹⁷ Because some of us like our new jeans to look like they’ve been lived in, some denim is “distressed’ by washing it with cellulose enzymes or perlite—a silicon rock. The process consumes a lot of water (again), plus the power needed to dry the “stonewashed” fabrics.¹⁸

Dyed denim is then made into jeans at factories located in low-wage markets, usually in Latin America or Asia. Manufacturing is expensive, but we don’t pay for it: foreign workers do. Less than 10 percent of the retail price of jeans goes toward their production, and labor costs make up just 2 percent of that.¹⁹ Most workers get just pennies for jeans that might retail for hundreds of times more. Some argue that exploitation is the price of economic development, or that such wages are adequate in industrial China, but cheapness isn’t the only choice.²⁰

Zipping up their jeans, students aren’t thinking about sweatshops or the politics of free-trade zones. They’re not thinking about the largely female workforce, bused into factories from rural villages, and housed in company quarters. Shopping for clothes in America can be a form of “sweatshopping,” but there’s no suggestion of that in our malls, catalogs, or labels. Trying on jeans in the store, customers are implicitly asked to forget the water, soil, oil, chemicals, and human labor used in their fabrication. As all Americans look for new jeans, we’re asked to make environmental decisions—and ethical decisions—without any relevant information.²¹

Jeans are so common on campus that Joe and Jo College hardly ever think about them. But, like our other clothes, they help us think about our place in the global commons. If we want to think globally and act globally, jeans would be a good place to start.