Our northern California skies have been grey and heavy from the thousands of wildfires burning since the third week in June. There wasn't any breeze for days and the air itself felt dead. My friend’s husband called it “nuclear winter”. Another said it felt like the end of the world.
On television we watch horrific news about flooding in the Midwest while we pay more and more for a tank of gas. Every night the evening news shows us people turning to smaller cars and even bicycles, cutting back on travel and luxuries, while car dealerships and automobile manufacturers are in financial trouble.
Are we finally going to realize that the earth’s resources are finite and that we cannot continue to consume a hugely disproportionate share without hurting ourselves as well as others? Or will we look for a temporary fix and then go blithely on, ignoring the disastrous consequences for the world’s poor as well as for our own children?
I certainly wasn’t focused on the consequences of my buying decisions when I bought the cotton yesterday. Pleased with my hemp ponchette, I wanted to try other vegetable fibers. I already had some Euroflax sport weight linen but when I stopped by my LYS to show my new ponchette I came out with some Classic Elite Provence, a mercerized cotton in a lovely blue.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know cotton production requires large amounts of petroleum based products for herbicides and defoliants. I certainly knew environmental standards are not always either sufficient or enforced and these toxic chemicals are allowed to run over workers and into the water supply. I didn’t know much about mercerization but I looked it up after I got home and learned it requires large amounts of sodium hydroxide, another very toxic chemical. And what about those dyes?
Three years ago I knit a baby blanket for granddaughter. It was a simple garter stitch square in Pakucho organic cotton, knit on the diagonal with an eyelet border. The naturally pigmented cotton is grown and harvested in Peru using pre-Columbian, 100% organic, farming techniques. Three years later, the blanket I made has provided many hours of both comfort and play for Clara. She takes it to bed for nap time and night time and during play puts her stuffed animals to sleep under it. Her mother washes it in the washer and dries it in the drier. The blanket is softer, cuddlier and just as pretty now as when it was new.
No, I wasn’t thinking when I bought that cotton.
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2 comments:
Now I want to see a picture of the organic cotton baby blanket.
Thanks for stopping by my blog, Catherine, and for the lovely compliments on my knitting. I've been exploring your blog this morning; you're a very thoughtful and interesting writer. I'll be stopping by more often.
We went through a fire storm in this area 5 years ago, so I understand exactly what you mean about the "nuclear winter" feel to the air. Even now, we've been having nightly lightning shows and there are a lot of nervous firefighters around, with everything being as dry as it is. Our thoughts are with California.
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