The oldest strains of cotton tell a story of the people who cultivated it.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

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Sammy Oteng is a Kantamanto Market organizer in Accra Ghana. The market is a 28 acre site, historically created by the people of Ghana to repurpose and reuse materials. Since the onset of fast fashion, the marketplace has become a dumping ground for the waste of the Global North. In a country of 2 million, the marketplace is cycling orders of magnitude more individual garments than there are people. Beaches and open pits have become the homes for our overproduction.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

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Ground building legislation was passed in 2021 to protect the California garment worker community from the “piece rate”, otherwise known as life threatening wages. We’ll talk to the Executive Director of the Garment Worker Center, an organization that worked with the affected community to design and push the law into place.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

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And transcript here.

Plastic textiles are flowing and shedding into our soils, oceans and bodies. The reality of 60 percent of our clothing being plastic is that the lint that our textiles produce ends up where we least want it to be— and that includes our biosphere, oceans and soils. We're permeating our ecosystems with a material that microbes can't eat. Dr. Timnit Kefela researched the fate our plastic microfibers during her PhD candidacy at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School. She is very focused on the transfer of these materials into terrestrial ecosystems, noting that where the fibers end up is an environmental justice issue that needs to be addressed.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

Find show notes here.

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For thousands of years to the present, the Indonesian archipelago textile communities have been producing intricately complex textiles— woven with yarns dyed in morinda root, indigo and hundreds of other dye plant recipes. In this interview with William Ingram, co-founder of Threads of Life, we discuss the plants, processes and non-material dimensions that guide the creation of millenia-old textile recipes.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

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In this interview with Jay and Nikyle Begay and Zefren Anderson, we learn about the long arc of relationship between the Dine and the Churro Sheep. Beyond the narratives promulgated by colonization about when this relationship began, we dive into a landscape of relationships held together by mutual care and exchange between shepherds and sheep. The wool from Churro is long, colorful and exists as the foundation for multiple artistic and deeply functional lifeways that are discussed in this powerful exchange.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

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Four thousand meters above the sea, Andean mountain communities have been living with alpaca for thousands of years. Small flock shepherding is a long-held way of life, one that our guest, Mauricio Nunez, is working diligently to see flourish and sustain. He leads the Andean Pastoralist Livelihood Initiative, a multi-stakeholder project that lifts up the vision for life, family, and relationship that pastoralist communities (which produce fiber and food) are holding— and seek to continue well into the future.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

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In this interview with Roland Geyer, we discuss the history and the effects of the interplay of economic forces and environmentalism. We'll also touch on how sustainability has been defined in the last three decades coming out of the U.N. Earth Summit of 1992 in Rio, and what this means for our textile material culture, human labor and the climate today.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

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And transcript here.

One of the most ancient fibers, silk has been cultivated for 5,000 years. The silk moth produces a filament designed to protect the moth from heat, predators, wind and water. In turn, these properties generate enduring and high quality second skin garments. Brazil (by luck and fate of Japanese immigration) hosts the Vale da Seda (Valley of Silk), a landscape that has generated high quality, beautiful raw fibers for decades. We explore the Vale da Seda with agronomist Joao Berdu and evaluate the reasons why mainstream modern sustainability measurement frameworks have hit silk hard— making farming and raw fiber production a more vulnerable proposition for those who make mulberry tree farming and cocoon production their livelihood.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

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Interview with Jason Hickel; Economic Anthropologist and the author of the new book Less is More. We discuss the historic political, social, and ecological threads that led to the economic model we now exist within. Understanding the model is foundational to understanding the textile industry as it exists, and the reasons why the most sustaining textile farming and making cultures struggle to exist.

Weaving Voices is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. Learn more about Weaving Voices here.

Find show notes here.

And transcript here.