Agraria_Journal_WINTER_2022

24 AGRARIA JOURNAL 2022 Bachman: But even if there is some interest, how does it actually translate to the physical world? Burgess: That takes real commitment and capital investments and real movement of wealth and resources. And that’s where people get held up. But it needs to show up in material culture because that’s where you get the flywheel effect where people support that thing that’s material, which then supports the expression of the values in the real sense. Like worker land trusts and collectively owned milling. All of this could be happening and then just continually feeding on itself. But not when money is going into fast fashion and lowest-common-denominator labor situations all over the world, from Ethiopia to Myanmar. We just aren’t given opportunities to invest in those systems yet in the way that I would like to see. Bachman: Right. Whereas, for example, local food has really infiltrated the mainstream so that you can go to your favorite restaurant and they’ll have a menu of local items. But it’s not the same when it comes to fiber at this point. Burgess: That’s right. It’s there, you just have to figure out what you want to support and then do some deep dive searching. In our region we’ve really unearthed that. People can buy a California wool hoodie that’s blended with San Joaquin Valley cotton. They can purchase organic cotton from the Southwest, grown in a chili and wheat rotation and milled beautifully. They can support classical breeding projects for cotton which are not genetically engineered. There are definitely places out there to uplift, but it needs to grow. Bachman: Absolutely. I think a lot of people feel like if they go to the thrift store, that feels good because it’s recycling clothing that is already out there. But is that enough? Burgess: Thrift stores are the right way to go because we’ve been overproducing textiles. But if we want to change the system, slow the big machine down and start having that machine produce in a decentralized way in our communities and utilize materials that are right now under-utilized, that requires an investment. And so if we have the ability . . . to find a farm yarn or knit our own, or find those artisans who are actually making it from farm to finished goods, invest in them. Support them so that they can get the revenue they need to reinvest in their business and do more stewardship on their land. One thing I worry about with thrift is that eventually it’s becoming so saturated with the castoff clothing, the quality is just plummeting. Bachman: And they’re benefiting off of that whole overproduction system too. Burgess: And only about 10 percent of the clothing on average stays in the country of consumption. A lot of it is baled and sent to places like Accra, Ghana, where they have the biggest dumping site in the world for fast fashion, or the Atacama Desert in Chile. In Ghana they had a reuse market that just got hit just like a baseball bat by fast fashion. . . . They can utilize, at best, 40 percent of the bales that they receive and the rest ends up on the beach in a burn pile or in a dump site. So even in the place where they’re so focused on reuse, they can’t keep their head above water on it. It’s just too much. Bachman: I’d like to talk about the issue of scale and finding the right scale for the different parts of the industry. What can be done locally, and what has to be developed regionally? Burgess: First is the willingness of all of us to support our communities in this endeavor. Right now the industry just pummels you with things you don’t need at very low prices. They pay white collar people more to market to you than they are paying people to cut and sew your textile. We have to wake up to the inequity of the fast fashion system and say, “No more.” If we were to say no to that inequity, what would localization look like if we were reinvesting? It would mean a regional scope. It might be New England as a whole looking at some kinds of infrastructure such as the low-margin, high- volume infrastructure for washing a protein fiber. We are looking at a scour, which is a wool washing station that might PAIGE GREEN Rebecca Burgess