–Sophie Benson

Pollution and the degradation of nature aren’t the end goals of fashion production, but they are a side effect. And when a brand prioritizes high profit, high volume, and quick trends, the likelihood that they will occur increases. It taints almost everything we buy as consumers but currently no brand or executive is held accountable. That might be about to change.
Making environmental destruction illegal
Though it seems unbelievable, threatening the very future of humanity via the mass damage and destruction of nature is not illegal, but Stop Ecocide International (SEI) wants to change that. Founded in 2017 by Jojo Mehta and the late Polly Higgins, the objective is simple: make “ecocide”—a term first coined in 1970 to mean the deliberate destruction of nature—an international crime. The process of getting there is somewhat more complicated, but significant progress has been made. The EU criminalized environmental damage ‘comparable to ecocide’ at the start of last year, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa formally proposed an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to include ecocide in September, and domestic bills to criminalize ecocide are now being proposed and progressing across the world. Jojo Mehta expects ecocide to become an international crime before 2030 – and it’s about time.
“There’s a huge quantity of environmental laws and regulations in place around the world but it’s becoming ever clearer that they are not adequate to slow the levels of destruction we’re seeing globally,” says Mehta, who is also the executive director of SEI.
“When we look at the fact that 70% of wildlife has declined in the last 50 years and several planetary boundaries have already been crossed, clearly something isn’t working.”
Companies, including fashion brands, are increasingly used to working under certain environmental restrictions or regulations. They might be that a harmful chemical can only be used at a certain concentration or that air pollutants can only be released up to certain levels. However, this leads to companies pushing the limits of what’s allowed, or even steamrolling right past them knowing that the amount of profit made will be worth incurring a fine for breaching the rules.
The legal definition of ecocide, however, is not bound to specific numbers. In fact, it may even seem a bit vague on the surface, says Mehta, but that’s intentional as it means harms won’t escape scrutiny just because they miss a single, arbitrary threshold. It also allows for reflection on factors such as intention and context, which are key in criminal law.
An independent expert panel convened by SEI’s charitable foundation defined ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by these acts.”
The broad scope means that the purposeful destruction of an important Indigenous site—the impact of which may be highly concentrated—could be deemed to be as serious as, say, clearing tens of thousands of hectares of the Amazon. It’s not just about targeting the sources of huge disasters but the myriad acts that unleash severe damage across different contexts.
Fashion and Ecocide
In fashion, severe damage can stem from an array of seemingly small decisions that are made in the process of designing and making a garment. “When you make a decision in your studio to choose, say, conventional cotton [grown with the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers] the act of making that decision will lead to killing millions of birds and insects and worms, because that cotton will be grown in toxic conditions,” says Carole Collet, professor in Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins UAL. “Whatever we do is interconnected.”
Collet takes a ‘living systems’ approach to design which is centred on how nature works and undertaken with an understanding that we as humans are a part of nature. The normal design process starts with the product and all the cascading impacts of creating it are secondary. A living systems design process, meanwhile, begins with an ecosystem and how the designer can benefit it, and the product emerges from there.
“I’m interested in trying to go beyond the ‘sustainable’ way of thinking—i.e. limiting our impact—and looking at how what I can do as a designer, as a researcher, can help restore nature, to reverse what the damage we’ve done in the past 50 years,” she says.
One Dress: PLANET
Fashion can be either a mechanism for ecocide or a defense against it, and though it defies the industry norm, Collett isn’t alone in taking the latter path. Pioneering London-based brand TAMMAM was founded upon the principle of being ecological, both practically and thematically. The brand converted to a bespoke model over ten years ago to avoid overproduction; making clothing to order according to customers’ specifications. It considers its tight selection of fabrics carefully too, working with artisans and craft cooperatives on beneficial production processes such as weaving on handlooms.

After discovering the concept of Ecocide at a conference and meeting Head of Global Networks, Sue Miller, brand founder Lucy Tammam set out to create a project to further the message of SEI’s campaign. The result is One Dress: PLANET. While many fashion awareness campaigns involve selling lots of themed garments and accessories, contributing to overproduction, Tammam wanted to sell emotion. The concept? Collaborative Couture. Tammam would only make one dress, and customers would have the opportunity to buy an embroidery, based on flowers from different endangered ecosystems, that would be attached to the dress.
“You’ve not bought something you don’t need. You’ve bought into something that belongs to a lot of people,” the founder says. “And when the One Dress comes to town, or you see it being worn by someone fabulous, you can think “I own a part of that”. It becomes an emotion and makes fashion a much more interesting thing to invest in.” At the time of writing, there are still select embroideries available to a lucky few who wish to support the project.
Raising the floor
Signatories of SEI’s business and finance open letter who endorse the ecocide law include apparel and footwear brands Patagonia, Vivobarefoot, and House of Hackney. However, Mehta says that many big players, particularly those that rely on fossil fuel-based synthetics, are keeping quiet. Hardly a surprise when those doing the most environmental damage are currently the most successful.
“We exist in the wrong economy. It’s centered on GDP growth, and continuing the exploitative, extractive approach to natural resources,” says Colett. With that mismatch between reality and global priorities in mind, an ecocide law is a must to level the playing field and raise those lagging behind up to the same level as those pushing for progress.
Crucially, the law seeks to draw a line between decision-making and harm. “So, the idea is not to be criminalizing workers on the ground in Global South countries who are effectively doing what they’ve been ordered to do by a company in the wealthy North,” says Mehta. It will be those at the helm of fashion brands who are held accountable instead, but it’s not about just throwing them in prison. Although Mehta has no doubt that could well be the fate for one or two people, it’s more about the cultural shift that criminalization engenders.
Ecocide will transform from being a bit of a PR headache, to becoming morally abhorrent
“There’s a genuine recoil from wanting to be categorised as a criminal,” says Mehta. And that’s the key. In creating such a hard boundary, you transform the very nature of decision making in the fashion industry. The temptation to push the limits of what’s culturally and legally acceptable to chase better prices or quicker delivery times will soon come with serious consequences, and the spectre of those consequences could create a much healthier fashion future.
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