and bemoans the fact that “there’s nothing to wear,” the statement is obviously false, but it illustrates our assumptions about choice, variety, novelty, and materialistic entitlement. For many reasons, we have more clothes than we need, and each item has its own environmental impact. But that’s not in our consciousness, because we have little or no information about how clothes are fabricated—how textiles are constituted from plant fibers or chemicals, and made into the fashions we think we need.
Dressing for each other—and even for our communities of consumption—is perfectly normal, reflecting the human need for affiliation and solidarity. But it doesn’t always make sense on a finite planet, where this materialistic commemoration of our imagined communities has real effects on living, breathing communities of nature. As social beings, we need to celebrate our affiliations. As natural beings we need to maintain our affiliations with the more-than-human life of the planet, which begins by understanding how the Earth that sustains us becomes the clothing that defines us.
The Nature of Jeans
The average American consumer owns seven pairs of jeans, and college students practically live in them. The eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age group, which accounts for only 10 percent of our population, accounted for nearly 30 percent of spending on jeans in the year ending in October 2006—about $2.8 billion of the denim industry’s $8.6 billion annual income. Cotton and comfortable, “cool” and common, “down home” and upscale, jeans go with everything and they can go just about anywhere. They feel natural—and, in a way, they are—but they’re also cultural, and they reveal a lot about America’s culture of nature.9
In a television commercial for Cotton Incorporated, as a camera pans over stacks of jeans in a retail store to the beat of soft rock music, captions identify, humorously, different styles of jeans: “Low Rise Jeans. Boot Cut Jeans. Skinny Jeans. Not Feeling So Skinny Jeans. Walk The Dog Jeans. Make Him Pant Like A Dog Jeans. Turns Butts Into Booty Jeans.” For the 2007 “Back to College” season, Old Navy featured “New Denim/New You,” with three different fits (and functions) for women—the Diva, the Flirt, and the Sweetheart. “Steal the spotlight,” girls were advised, “in our show-stopping jeans.” As this suggests, one of the main functions of jeans is to attract attention—primarily to the bottom of a woman’s body. The Cotton Incorporated ad ends with an alleged truism, “You Can Never Have Enough Jeans.”10
Some college students express their affection for jeans on social media sites: “Blue Jeans Are Probably the Greatest Thing Ever”; “I’m just a blue Jeans and T-shirt type of girl”; “My name is _______ and I am a blue jean addict”; “I wear my blue jeans multiple times, and I’m proud of it!”—and “My jeans are worth more than your life!” There’s even a Facebook group called “I Use My Blue Jeans As A Napkin.”
The rise of designer jeans has only fanned the flames. Since the debut of the company Seven for All Mankind (“Sevens”) in 2000, many American women have decided that jeans capable of elongating the legs and lifting the butt are worth a lot of money. Blue Cult jeans marketed a line actually called “Butt Lifters.” For genuine jean lovers, money is no object. As one Berkeley student claimed in 2005, “I don’t care how much I spend on jeans, as long as they look good on me. ... I don’t mind spending three hundred dollars if they flatter my body.” Her favorite brand was True Religion, a profession of faith that has more to do with fashion and the marketplace than anything spiritual. To most male collegians, designer jeans are just pricey. But to a coed in the know—and women dress for each other as much as for men—they’re a mark of true distinction. True Religion’s logo, for example, is “Buddha” playing a guitar, and its distinctive designs include a signature horseshoe on the pockets and thick-threaded seams. Such signs and symbols are more than a highlight for the body; they’re conspicuous consumption spotlighting the size of our bank account, too.11
When students buy jeans, therefore, it’s clear that they’re also buying meanings. Some of those meanings are historical. Jeans are Western, working-class, rebellious, hippie, and hip-hop. They remind us of Levi Strauss and California miners, generations of rugged cowboys, James Dean and fifties rebels without a cause, and Robert Moses and sixties rebels with a cause. As a result, paradoxically, they’re both cultural and countercultural—pants for all reasons.12
The Impact of Jeans
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
