Could a whole season — and a way of life — be melting before our very eyes?
A snowy winter in New York City brings with it a kind of magic. The air goes crisp, then bitter, and fragile snowflakes sift down in the early dark, silvering the trees and blanketing the sledding hills in the parks. After the first big snow, children and adults alike rush out to make snowmen, creations that delight passersby for the next two frigid months, until the snow finally thaws. When I took my older son, then a toddler, out for his first-ever sledding session, he squealed with awe at the crystalline world before him, shouting, “It looks like Frozen!”
Today he’s 5, and I doubt he remembers what sledding feels like. It’s been more than 650 days since Central Park, where snow is measured daily, got more than an inch of snowfall at one time; last winter, the park got just 2.3 inches in total, less than one-tenth the normal amount. In early December, Brooklyn saw a few anemic flurries, and my son told me excitedly that his friends had tried to build a snowman during recess. But there was nowhere near enough material to work with. They settled for “a pile of snowflakes.”
This sense of winter melting away before our eyes is not unique to New York: While blazing-hot summers and stormy autumns come with their own dangers, scientists say winter is actually the fastest-warming season. Snowfall is decreasing across the Northeast, the flakes slowly replaced by raindrops. The Great Lakes have experienced a 22 percent drop in maximum ice cover since 1973, and are frozen for a shorter percentage of the year. In December 2022, Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in Alaska, posted its warmest winter temperature ever at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 36 degrees above the frigid average for that time of year.
The effects are felt around the world, from the Southern Cone to the Arctic Circle. For some, the loss of cold is already an emergency, as winter warming exacts a devastating environmental and human toll. But for many, it’s a slow drip, something they notice in the small details of daily life.
These incremental changes alter the way we celebrate holidays, the way we get dressed to go outside, and even, on a deep level, the way we feel. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined the term “solastalgia,” or “the homesickness we feel while still at home,” to describe the disorientation some of us experience as the planet we once knew changes drastically around us.
“There’s this sort of existential offness,” said Heather Hansman, a Colorado-based ski journalist and author of the book Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow. “My body knows that this isn’t right.”
Winter is woven into the fabric of human life
Like worsening summer heat waves, winter warming is caused by companies and governments burning fossil fuels. The resulting emissions intensify the greenhouse effect, in which the earth’s atmosphere traps heat from the sun, making temperatures on the ground warmer. The greenhouse effect is strongest at the poles, and it’s also most pronounced during winter, said Kenneth Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist with the Minnesota State Climatology Office.
As a result, the frigid winters many people remember are slowly giving way to something warmer — and weirder. In Minnesota, “It’s not that it never gets cold, because it sure does,” Blumenfeld said. But “it doesn’t get cold as dependably, as frequently, or as severely as it used to.”
“I have some winter jackets that have been two years in the closet without any use,” Juan Antonio Rivera, a researcher at the Argentine Institute for Snow Research, Glaciology, and Environmental Sciences, said in an email. “Frosts in the winter mornings now are a rare thing to see.” (A winter heat wave earlier this year pushed the temperature to 86 degrees in Buenos Aires, where winter highs are usually in the 60s.)
Warmer temperatures around the world are bringing more rain and less snow. As I write this, for example, the Christmas trees for sale down the block are being soaked in a very un-Christmassy downpour. But even as overall snowfall declines, extreme snowstorms are increasing in some places, and there’s some evidence that climate change is leading to more intense cold snaps in places like Texas and California, where the infrastructure simply isn’t built for snow and ice.
Winter can be a bleak and unforgiving season, but it’s also one for which different cultures around the world have developed unique coping mechanisms — and even one many people have come to love. In northern Minnesota, where the season can stretch for six long, dark months, “it’s sort of built into how we live,” Blumenfeld said. Residents have made winter pastimes like ice-fishing, skating, and snowshoeing into thriving industries, with specialized gear and dedicated vacation destinations. “From the outside, it looks like it’s a celebration of winter, but it’s really just what people do.”
When social psychologist Kari Leibowitz conducted research in Tromso and Svalbard, Norway, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic circle, she found residents had what she calls a “positive wintertime mindset”: Rather than approaching the winter with dread, they tended to talk about what they were looking forward to, from sitting in front of a fire to skiing to watching the beautiful four-hour sunsets of the polar night. “The winter is a really special time in Tromso,” said Leibowitz, author of the forthcoming book How to Winter: Harnessing Your Mindset to Embrace All Seasons of Life.
But as winters warm, many of the activities humans have developed to survive and thrive during the colder months are slowly vanishing. Skiing, for example, is becoming more difficult in Norway and around the world as rain replaces snow. Leibowitz said that she fears that climate change will leave Norway with the darkness of polar winter but none of its joys. “We won’t have snow to reflect the light. We won’t have ice to make beautiful patterns. And we won’t have all of the recreational activities that come with snow and ice.” One study estimates that, in a worst-case scenario, the majority of US ski resorts will be unable before the century’s end.
The decline of sports like skiing has real economic and social effects, experts say. When the weather isn’t cold, “people don’t book vacations, they don’t buy gear, they don’t think about winter,” Hansman said. In towns that rely on skiing and other outdoor tourism, the entire economy can suffer.
In mountain towns in the US, the loss of a source of connection, meaning — and jobs — can also have psychological effects. “A lot of cold places in the Mountain West have remarkably high suicide rates and poor mental health outcomes,” Hansman said. “If you don’t have that sense of purpose, if you don’t have that sense of community, if you’re not seeing your friends out and about, that can have a negative impact.”
The change to winter can also affect people’s sense of who they are. “In Svalbard in the winter, you can snowmobile across the fjord to go camping, you can go ice climbing,” Leibowitz said. “In Tromso, you can ski to work.”
“These activities are a part of the fabric and culture of these countries,” she said. Losing them is “really going to change people’s relationship with the places where they live.”
Experts sometimes use the terms climate grief and climate anxiety to capture the emotional impact of the current environmental crisis. In a 2005 paper, Albrecht described developing the term solastalgia to capture the pain expressed by residents of Australia’s Hunter Region as they saw their local landscape scarred by open-pit coal mining. He combined the word nostalgia, which originally referred to an actual illness caused by displacement from one’s home, with the concepts of solace and desolation.
Nostalgia for winter could help save it, some experts say
While the warming of winter still manifests in some parts of the world as a sneaking sense of something amiss, it has already reached crisis proportions across much of the Arctic and subarctic. In Alaska, for example, the disappearance of sea ice, habitat destruction, and disease caused by warming waters have made it difficult or impossible for indigenous hunters to catch marine mammals, a practice that has been their livelihood for thousands of years. “A relatively small temperature change in sea ice, and also in sea temperatures in the Arctic and subarctic, results in complete ecosystem collapse,” said Joan Naviyuk Kane, an Inupiaq poet and essayist who grew up in Alaska. For many of her friends and community members, “a subsistence lifestyle is no longer within reach.”
People who live and work in cold climates are finding ways to adapt to their new reality. In Alaska, some indigenous communities are learning reindeer herding from Sami practitioners, Kane said. When hunters can no longer rely on the sea, “some of these land-based practices actually may help us continue to survive into the future,” she said.
For Kane, sorrow isn’t a meaningful frame for thinking about the loss of people’s way of life. “Indigenous people can perform grief and perform our trauma endlessly if that’s what non-Indigenous people want,” she said. But “by doing so we’re taking away time and energy and resources to engage our anger and to meaningfully enact policy change in the Arctic.”
Some experts believe that nostalgia for a vanishing winter can be harnessed to fight climate change, reaching people who haven’t yet been personally affected by the crisis in more immediate ways. “For a lot of people, recreation or a family vacation or the places where they’re open to the environment” can provide a much more relatable, concrete example of the unfolding disaster than statistics about global temperature change, Hansman said. The group Protect Our Winters, for example, founded by pro snowboarder Jeremy Jones, brings together winter sports enthusiasts to reach out to voters and lobby lawmakers on climate issues. It is already making headway influencing legislation on renewable energy infrastructure and more.
Meanwhile, the long, chilly winters of yesteryear — and the way people responded to them — may still have something to teach us. Positive wintertime mindset is about adapting to your circumstances, both realistically and optimistically, Leibowitz said. That same can-do spirit can help us “think about what’s possible” when it comes to fighting climate change, she said.
“Our mindset can help empower us to see opportunities in difficult things,” and it can help us feel “inspired to work towards protecting winter,” Leibowitz said. “Changing our relationship with the darkness might inspire us to say, what else can I envision?”
The Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, explained.
Container ship captains who make the run between Europe and Asia are about to become reacquainted with the Cape of Good Hope, making a long swing around Africa in a route that has been largely obsolete since the opening of the Suez Canal more than 150 years ago.
Since mid-November, Houthi rebels in the Middle Eastern country of Yemen have been attacking shipping in the Red Sea, firing drones and missiles and, in some cases, boarding and seizing vessels. The Houthis, who are backed by Iran, say the attacks are in solidarity with their Palestinian allies in Hamas. In response, most of the world’s largest container-shipping companies — including Denmark’s Maersk, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, and China’s Cosco — have stopped shipments through the Red Sea. The oil company BP is doing so as well. An estimated 7 million barrels of oil normally travel through the sea per day.
It’s an unexpected consequence of the two-month-old Israel-Hamas war, which is rapidly escalating into a wider conflict with both regional and global ripple effects.
“The impact is no longer on one country,” Noam Raydan, a Middle East shipping analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Vox. “Now, it is global.”
These reroutes will add thousands of miles and days of travel time to their journey, costing companies millions of dollars in extra fuel and other costs. While there are still ships braving the Red Sea, the tracking site VesselFinder shows that many have their transponders set to broadcast that they are carrying armed guards on board.
US, French, and British ships in the region have been shooting down dozens of Houthi drones, but Western governments have come under pressure to do more to protect global shipping. On Tuesday, the US announced the formation of a 10-country naval task force to protect shipping in the region. Biden administration officials are also reportedly considering operations for direct military strikes against the Houthis.
But there appears to be no easy way out of the crisis, which shows how a confluence of geography, economics, technology, and geopolitics can allow a relatively small rebel group to cause a surprising amount of havoc on the global economy.
Who are the Houthis?
They call themselves Ansar Allah, but the Houthis are more frequently referred to by the name of their founder, Hussein al-Houthi. Members of a minority Shia Muslim sect in northern Yemen, they emerged as a rebel group fighting the government of Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in the 1990s. Saleh was ultimately overthrown amid Arab Spring–linked protests in 2012, and the Houthis took advantage of the ensuing power vacuum to seize the capital, Sanaa, in 2014. They still hold the capital today but are generally not recognized by the international community as Yemen’s legitimate government.
Since 2014, Yemen has endured a brutal civil war that pits the Houthis — who receive substantial funding and weaponry from Iran — against Yemen’s internationally recognized government and an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia (and supported by the United States). As of last year, the United Nations estimated that the nearly decade-old war has killed more than 377,000 people — most due to malnutrition, unsafe water, and poor medical services, all exacerbated by conflict — though the violence has died down since a UN-brokered ceasefire in 2022. Today, the Houthis control about one-third of Yemen’s territory and 70 percent of its population.
To the extent that the outside world has paid attention to the war, the focus has mainly been on the humanitarian crisis and America’s controversial backing of the Saudis. But as the recent events in the Red Sea demonstrate, the Houthis’ war in Yemen isn’t staying in Yemen.
Globalizing the conflict
The Houthis have never exactly been subtle about their geopolitical views. The group’s official slogan is “God is great, death to the US, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.” But until now, outsiders have mostly thought of them as a concern only in their native Yemen.
Fatima Abo Alasrar, a Yemeni political analyst at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, told Vox that policymakers outside Yemen have underestimated the Houthis’ international goals because “they’ve never tried to act as boldly” as they are now, but Houthi propaganda has always played up what they see as the Saudis’ too-friendly relations with Israel. They’ve told their fighters, whose ranks include a substantial number of child soldiers, that they are fighting a war against the US and Israel for control of Yemen. Now, Alasrar says, “they’re putting their money where their mouth is.”
Following the October 7 Hamas attacks and the Israeli military operation in Gaza that followed, Iran-backed armed groups throughout the region — which some refer to collectively as the Axis of Resistance and which also include Lebanon’s Hezbollah and various militias in Iraq and Syria — have all stepped up their attacks on Israel and on US military targets. (The government of Iran itself, by contrast, has made clear it doesn’t plan to intervene directly with its own forces.)
Of all these groups, the Houthis’ actions in the conflict have in some ways been the most audacious, if only because of their physical distance from the fighting. Since October, the Houthis have been regularly firing missiles and drones at Israel, which sits more than 1,000 miles from Yemen. The Houthis have previously attacked targets in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with missiles, but the launches against Israel — which have all been intercepted so far, either by Israeli missile defenses or US naval ships in the Red Sea — are by far their longest-range strikes.
On November 19, helicopter-borne Houthi rebels boarded and seized the Galaxy Leader, a cargo ship partially owned by an Israeli businessman. The ship is still being held off the coast of Yemen, its crew held hostage and allowed only “modest contact” with the outside world. Since then, there have been attacks of various degrees against at least 12 different commercial vessels, most of them with little or no direct connection to Israel.
Some of these attacks have demonstrated startling technical capabilities, including what may be the first-ever combat use of an antiship ballistic missile by any military. These missiles, which travel at much higher altitudes and greater speeds than cruise missiles, could dramatically extend the range at which militaries can strike enemy ships and render many existing defenses obsolete. The models used by the Houthis appear to be somewhat less sophisticated than those tested by countries like China and rely on drones for spotting.
A critical chokepoint
About 12 percent of global trade and 10 percent of the maritime oil trade passes through the Red Sea, a body of water defined by two chokepoints: to the north, Egypt’s Suez Canal, and to the south the Bab al-Mandab, or “Gate of Tears,” a strait between Yemen and Djibouti on the east coast of Africa that is about 20 miles wide at its narrowest point and where making of the attacks are taking place.
“This is a chokepoint on the most densely used trade route on the planet,” said Sal Mercogliano, a former merchant mariner and shipping historian. “Any disruption is going to impact the entire supply chain.”
The route has been cut off before, most recently in 2021 when the container ship Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking traffic for a week. The current disruption, though, has the potential to last much longer, with much more serious consequences.
Some countries may feel the impact directly, such as the cash-strapped government of Egypt, which earns more than $9 billion a year from Suez Canal transit fees. But given the complex web of global trade woven by maritime shipping, other nations will experience knock-on effects.
Rachel Ziemba, an energy and economics analyst at the Center for a New American Security, pointed out that the disruption comes at a time when many European economies have been forced to increase their reliance on shipborne oil and natural gas, much of it from the Middle East, in an effort to wean themselves off Russian pipelines. Russia, meanwhile, has increased its own oil exports to India, China, and other markets in Asia — and much of that oil travels by ship through the Red Sea as well. “If anything, when it comes to shipping, there’s been more reliance on shipping rather than less,” said Ziemba.
Oil prices have been falling for the last two months, due largely to slackening demand in major consumers like China, but it did rise more than $1 a barrel on Tuesday. European natural gas prices also jumped 7 percent after news broke that BP was suspending its Red Sea shipments of liquefied natural gas.
The crisis couldn’t come at a worse time for the global shipping industry, which is in a slump as global industrial output flatlines and post-pandemic consumer demand normalizes. The issue for shippers is not just the risk to their vessels, cargo, and crews, but also the cost of insuring against that risk. The war risk premiums charged by insurance companies for shipping in the Red Sea have already jumped from around 0.07 percent of a ship’s value in early December to around 0.5 percent now. Considering that oil tankers can be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, these premiums could make Red Sea shipping prohibitively expensive if they rise further.
The Bab al-Mandab is also not the only global shipping chokepoint under stress. The Panama Canal is currently operating at reduced capacity due to low water levels caused by a historic drought, which limits the number of ships that can pass through. Analysts are also concerned that the turmoil in the Middle East could affect the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Arabian Sea between Iran and the UAE. Given its importance as a route for oil shipments, that could have a much more significant impact on energy prices.
“It really only highlights the importance of having different supply chains, of having the ability to redirect,” Ziemba said. But the costs of developing these alternatives are starting to add up.
Firing back
Global shippers have been leading the calls for global governments to do something about the Houthis. In a striking recent editorial, Lloyd’s List, the leading journal of the shipping industry, drew explicit comparisons to the use of the British Navy to protect shipping during the 19th century, writing, “Let gunboat diplomacy be confined to the past. But there are legitimate uses of gunboats in the 21st century; the continued flow of world trade is one of them.”
On Monday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational naval mission meant to protect shipping in the area. But it’s still unclear how large this task force will be or how it will operate. “I don’t think you’ll see World War II–style convoys escorting ships,” said Mercogliano. The scale of shipping involved makes such escorts implausible. “You’re more likely to see naval vessels basically putting themselves between Yemen and the main shipping channel and acting like gatekeepers.”
The coalition, which includes a number of European countries as well as Bahrain and the Seychelles — a small island nation of just 100,000 people — also has some notable absences. Missing is China, which has a military base in nearby Djibouti and is heavily reliant on importing Middle Eastern oil and exporting consumer goods to Europe via ship. Beijing has been playing a more active role in the region’s politics lately, including brokering a historic diplomatic deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year, while Hong Kong-flagged container ships have been among those attacked. Yet while the US and Chinese navies have collaborated in the region before, including in efforts to combat Somali piracy a decade ago, geopolitical tensions between the two nations are much higher now. Far from Beijing joining the multinational task force, the Pentagon has accused Chinese naval vessels of ignoring a distress call from an Israeli-owned tanker that came under attack in late November.
Another missing country: Saudi Arabia, which is all the more surprising given that the country has been fighting the Houthis for years. But Saudi leaders, who recently have been taking steps to disentangle themselves from the bloody and costly Yemen conflict and have hosted several rounds of peace talks with the Houthis, have reportedly urged the US to show restraint in responding to the shipping attacks.
Alasrar suggests Saudi leaders are likely still resentful over what they see as a lackluster response by Washington to Houthi and Iranian attacks on Saudi and Emirati oil facilities in recent years. “At this point, the Saudis are probably more interested in being a spectator because the Houthis are addressing Israel and the United States more directly,” she said. The Saudis are “not interested in escalating because it hasn’t gotten them anywhere.”
In addition to the new task force, the US has moved the Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group to waters near Yemen to support a possible further US response to the attacks. Politico recently reported that Biden administration officials have been weighing options to strike back against Houthi targets in Yemen itself.
There is some precedent. In 2016, under President Obama, the US launched Tomahawk missiles at three Houthi radar sites in response to a previous round of Houthi attacks on US Navy ships in the region. The US has also launched hundreds of drone strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Yemen over the past two decades. But it would represent something of a reversal for the Biden administration, which announced a halt to US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen as one of its first foreign policy actions back in 2021 and has been scaling back the US drone war as well.
The Houthis, for their part, say they are undeterred by the new task force, with a spokesperson telling the Washington Post, “Our war is a moral war, and therefore, no matter how many alliances America mobilizes, our military operations will not stop.”
However the situation resolves, it could have lasting repercussions far beyond the Red Sea. The global economy remains as reliant on shipping as ever — it accounts for around 80 percent of global trade. And between the disruption of grain shipping through the Black Sea as a result of Russia’s naval blockade of Ukraine and the Houthis’ operations in the Red Sea, recent years have given ample demonstration of how armed conflict can disrupt that trade.
More disruptions may loom. Last year, in response to a visit to Taiwan by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China’s navy conducted live-fire drills around the island, effectively blockading international shipping lanes for several days. There are growing fears that China could enact a longer blockade, either in the lead-up to a full-scale war on Taiwan or instead of one.
Mercogliano says recent events have upended assumptions about the balance of naval power. “We saw what the Ukrainians could do to the Russian Black Sea fleet without an advanced navy,” he said, referring to Moscow’s decision to mostly withdraw the fleet from its traditional base in Crimea after a slew of attacks by Ukrainian aerial and maritime drones. “Now we’re seeing what the Houthis can do without any navy at all. Now, imagine what a Taiwan scenario would look like.”
The Houthis will likely struggle to respond to a true US-led response, but their audacity — and their strategy — could also be offering a preview of greater disruptions to come.
Wool’s cozy image masks a polluting, violent reality.
We’ve been banging this drum at Future Perfect for a long time: Animal agriculture is terrible not just for animals, but also for the planet. And despite the meat industry’s ferocious greenwashing efforts, that message is finally, if haltingly, breaking into mainstream climate discourse.
But there’s one big domain of livestock production that is often seen as exempt from the hard trade-offs of farming animals for human consumption: animals raised for clothing, like the more than 1.2 billion sheep farmed for wool, or the tens of millions of cows whose skin is processed into leather. Both species, as ruminants, emit massive volumes of methane (the potent greenhouse gas that is responsible for about a quarter of global warming) and take up vast land areas that could otherwise host native, carbon-sequestering ecosystems.
According to one analysis of wool production in Australia, by far the world’s top exporter, the wool required to make one knit sweater is responsible for 27 times more greenhouse gases than a comparable Australian cotton sweater, and requires 247 times more land. Sheep farming threatens native species around the world, from koalas in Australia to sage grouse in the US. Domesticated sheep in the American West have, as my colleague Paige Vega has reported, been implicated in mass die-offs of their wild cousins, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, through the spread of the lethal pathogen Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae.
Ruminant farming’s hunger for land has made it a prime engine for colonial expansion around the world; we see this in Brazil, for example, where cattle ranching is driving illegal seizures of Indigenous land. Sheep brought by colonists to Australia “immediately trampled and destroyed all of the native yams and edible vegetables that Aboriginal people had. The land that Aboriginal people never ceded was taken for pastoral practices,” said Emma Hakansson, the Australia-based founding director of Collective Fashion Justice, which advocates for what she calls a “total ethics” fashion system: one that’s fair to people, animals, and the planet. “Animal-derived materials in particular are a focus for us because it’s in those supply chains that all three of those groups are consistently harmed.”
Yet animal-based textiles benefit from a natural, planet-friendly image. It’s still common to see media and the industry itself misleadingly report that animal-based fabrics are just a byproduct of meat production that would otherwise be thrown in the trash and that it’s better for the environment to use them — a claim that obfuscates the economy of animal production.
“Wool and leather are not byproducts of meat production, they’re co-products: producers support their livestock operations by selling meat as well as wool and hides, all of which keeps them afloat,” Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, told me in an email.
Wool in particular evokes biblical scenes of sheep farming that are especially conspicuous during the Christmas season. It’s “a mass-market commodity that operates stealthily under many layers of mythology, from legends of the golden fleece to bucolic images of sheep peacefully grazing in open pasture,” as a 2021 report by the Center for the Biological Diversity and Collective Fashion Justice put it. “But wool is not a fiber simply provided by nature — it is a scaled product of modern industrial, chemical, ecological and genetic intervention that’s a significant contributor to the climate crisis, land degradation, water use, pollution and biodiversity loss.”
Although wool shearing is widely misperceived as merely a benign “haircut” for sheep, the modern sheep industry, like all industries that mass produce animals, is egregiously violent. Sheep are subjected to painful mutilations like tail docking and mulesing, a procedure in which skin from their hindquarters is cut off to prevent flystrike, a parasitic infection the animals are prone to because of how they’ve been bred.
Some brands and certification programs have banned mulesing in their supply chains, but that practice just skims the surface of the industry’s cruelty. Many appalling undercover videos of wool production have emerged over the years, showing sheep beaten and wounded by clippers as workers restrain them and shear off their hair as quickly as possible. Eventually, they’re sent to slaughter.
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Zuzana Mit / We Animals Media
The lesser of two evils?
Wary of climate regulation, wool producers are embracing the same greenwashing diversions as the meat industry — they are, after all, the same industry. Misleading “regenerative wool” claims — a phrase that “lacks any standard definitions or accountability,” as a 2023 report by the Center for Biodiversity and Collective Fashion Justice put it — have proliferated at progressive-coded fashion brands like Allbirds, Everlane, and Reformation.
Many (though by no means all) of the alternatives to wool on the market are made of fossil fuel-based synthetic materials like polyester, acrylic, and nylon. These materials have their own terrible externalities, contributing to carbon emissions and microplastic pollution, the effects of which we’re only beginning to comprehend. Fabrics like wool contribute to this problem, too, when they’re coated in dyes that release microplastics, and wool generates significant chemical pollution through scouring — the highly polluting, detergent-intensive process used to remove the grease from sheep’s hair.
While there’s an increasing variety of novel, low-resource, plant-based alternatives (Hakansson points to Tencel, a silky smooth fabric made of wood pulp, hemp, and recycled materials), the fashion industry largely lacks the incentive to invest in these at scale. Until better options become more widely accessible, consumers who decide to buy new clothes for the winter are often choosing between animal fibers or synthetic ones.
“Both cause harm. Deforestation, wild habitat loss, emissions, overgrazing, and erosion for wool, and fossil fuel extraction and microplastic pollution for polyester,” Hayek pointed out. “The most climate-compatible system of making materials such as clothing fibers involves moving away from both fossil fuels and over-abundant animal production.”
But we live in a world of trade-offs, and the planetary impacts of wool and synthetics have to be considered in comparison to one another, not in a vacuum. On that score, wool consistently ranks worse than synthetics.
“We know from data across the wool industry, the leather industry, the fur industry, that synthetic alternatives almost always have a significantly lower climate impact,” Hakansson said (though her organization still rightly campaigns to end the fashion industry’s dependence on fossil-based synthetics).
To name just one example, a 2021 study using data from the Swiss sustainability assessment nonprofit Ecoinvent found that wool had far higher greenhouse gas emissions than alternatives for the same amount of fabric, including nearly nine times more than polyester. This, combined with the dreadful animal welfare consequences of wool farming, makes the choice between a wool coat and a long-lasting synthetic one very clear. The same is true of leather, which has truly atrocious environmental impacts versus its synthetic alternatives (and there are now far better leather alternatives, made from plants like cactus, apple, and pineapple).
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Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media