Today I Made a Pair of Pants

There are four primary pillars within the the framework of Deep Adaptation designed to help us navigate the complex realities of living through what might be civilizational collapse. These pillars take the form of four questions that I come back to again and again in my life.

Resilience: What do we most value that we want to keep, and how do we keep it?
Relinquishment: What do we need to let go of to keep things from getting worse?
Restoration: What can we/should we bring back to help us through this difficult time?
Reconciliation: With what and whom should we make peace given our mutual mortality?

When I started on this journey many years ago my focus was almost exclusively on relinquishment. First I gave up meat, then I endeavored to eliminate as much single use plastic from my life as I could, which then blossomed into finding ways to eliminate all forms of waste from my life, and so on. But more and more I find myself lingering on the questions of resilience and restoration, not just in my own life, but in terms of my local community.

In large part this has come out of a desire to reduce my carbon footprint by localizing my lifestyle, by which I mean finding local sources for all of my food, water, and all the other goods I need in day to day life. In some areas of the country finding a local source for something might be easy (I now live in a part of the country with abundant water and I have a well), but increasingly I have realized that nowhere in this country is it easy – or even possible – to localize our lives with everything or most things. Sometimes this is the result of simple climate realities – oranges require a long growing season that Maine simply doesn’t provide, as an example. (In the case of oranges, relinquishment is required for most of us.) But a lot of this has come about through policy choices and market drivers. In other words, a lot of this challenge has grown out of a reality we created ourselves through the laws we passed and the buying habits we fostered.

This has become apparent to me once again as I started looking into how I might localize my closet by creating a wardrobe that was grown, raised, milled, spun, dyed, woven, and sewn all within 100 – 200 miles of my house. A glance back to 1860 in North Carolina, as an example, shows about 68 textile mills in production, making mostly cotton yarn and textiles used heavily by the local community, with a smattering of wool thrown in for good measure. Today an effort to find and purchase locally grown and processed cotton, hemp, linen, or any other sort of plant-based thread or fabric is a futile endeavor. Wool grown and spun here is abundantly available, but primarily through small local spinners, and most retail outlets do not sell local wool.

The end result of this is that no matter how many folks might want to buy local clothing, today, in my local community, they won’t be able to. Like just about everywhere in the US, we have to settle for clothes made primarily of plastic by folks in places like Indonesia or Bangladesh that have minimal if any human health or environmental regulation, and that are then shipped across the ocean to our local retail outlet.

The silver lining in this is that there are a lot of creative and intelligent people working to address this problem. I stumbled upon a book called Fibershed about a community in California that has created a thriving local fiber economy out of a desire to create a 150 mile wardrobe, and there are a lot of others all around the world working to recreate industries that have all but vanished, to restore knowledge and tools that have almost been lost, to bring a fiber focused resiliency back into their communities. In my own local community an organization with these same goals is working hard to share this knowledge and build these same bridges. Farmers are actively looking for a market that would allow them to grow linen or hemp. Yards and roadways are bursting with invasive bamboo and kudzu that are currently a nuisance, but are also a unique opportunity for the creation of gorgeous fabrics. The few remaining cotton growers in the area would no doubt jump at the opportunity to sell to a local miller for a better price than they could get on the global market competing against countries like Bangladesh.

The problem is a lack of local milling, spinning, and weaving infrastructure. It’s pretty easy for a farmer to seed a field with flax, or for a homeowner to hack back a years growth of bamboo or kudzu, but the effort would be a waste of time without a miller to process it or a weaver to weave it, or a consumer ready to buy it. The solution to this problem seems easy – all it takes is a mill after all! But like most easy solutions the reality is much more complex. Different fibers have different milling techniques, small scale milling equipment is hard (and sometimes impossible) to come by, the skillset needed to mill, spin, dye and weave the fiber into fabric may not exist sufficient quantities or at all. This is by no means a complete list, the challenges are legion.

But it is possible, for someone with enough curiosity and the willingness to carve out the time and build relationships, to create locally grown textiles and garments. With a bit of weaving and sewing know-how wool clothing is well within reach even now. With some elbow grease and a sense of humor making small amounts of bamboo or kudzu fiber is absolutely doable, and getting just one or a few folks doing this can make all the difference in helping others awaken to the possibilities of a robust local fiber economy. Resilience and Restoration indeed.

Which brings us to the crux of this post. I caught the local food bug years ago, and now I’ve happily fallen to the local clothing bug as well. This is a project I want to jump into with both feet. I want to create a locally grown wardrobe of my own, to learn skills that had been handed down from generation to generation until the modern industrial age closed the door on them, I want to support my local farmers and maybe help build new markets for them, I want to do a small part to help build another layer of resiliency into my community and create opportunities for thriving small businesses that are healthy for the humans and the natural world we live in.

To that end I have spent the last several months learning how to sew – a skill I never learned as a child or teenager, and frankly, never imagined I would want to learn. (Oh how people change when they actively seek to grow, understand, and learn!) Many weeks of pricked fingers, cursing, and practice, have led me to a pair of pants that I created from a couple yards of plain old fabric. The fabric is not locally grown, the infrastructure to do that doesn’t yet exist in my corner of the world and I don’t yet posses the knowledge to do it small scale, but my first step has been taken. I now know, if somewhat rudimentarily, how to create garments. All I need to do now is find a way to make the fabric.

Easy, right?