I think we are a long way off needing to retool the clothing industry: Clothing is one of the few goods most westerners have way too much of, and in any case manufacture of clothing would be prioritised once the downslope really kicks in: Clothing is a necessary good to live in many climates therefore it will get made, albeit at perhaps a high price.

I used to live down the road from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford,UK. Some of you may be familiar with this place, a treasure trove of artefacts from all cultures and all periods of time. There is a large clothing section there which shows how inventive humankind has been in making garments through the years. The gorgeous fur gear made for Siberia by one tribe stands out in my memory, as does the seal intestine raincoat (Inuit?). I would be happy to wear either.

Anyhow, clothing will happen alright in even the bleakest future. We will obviously have less of it but vast amounts of fabric already exist and can be worked and remade into garments, certainly for the next 50 years or so, even if it means cutting up the cushion covers. Even a dummy like me can make effective low-tech fabric like felt given some sheep, shears and some time.

I am more worried about long-term retooling stuff like dental material supply and medical supply chains to be less fossil fuel dependant: I want antibiotics and pain-free dentistry for my great-grand children!

The Pitt Rivers also has a section of medical instruments from a wide range of low energy societies and civilizations: I would allow none of these near me; to say they are crude and ineffective is an understatement. The complex drug and instrument manufacture for modern medical care are going to need to be carried forward into a low energy future, but this is hardly touched upon at present.

surely you are kidding with this post. As an old man i will never purchase anymore clothes for myself. I wear mostly dimim(sp) overalls, jeans and cotton shirts. i plan to live a few more years, and have found the secret is to preserve them is to keep them out of washing machines and clothes dryers. Data that i have collected myself is that overalls washed and dried in these new modern energy intensive machines last 3-4 years. When i wear the same clothes into the shower and soap the dirty spots and allow to soak overnight in the bath water before i rinse and hang them out to dry the next day last a minimum of 10 years with a little patching. Next time you turn on your washer and dryer stand by and listen to the sound, which is similar to a turtle trying to climb out of a wash tub. no, i am convinced that automatic washers and dryers are the reason our clothes wear out so quickly. I have numerous shirts, shoes, and pants that are 40 or more years old. Stylish I ain't. Suggest others get use to it. You folks in the future, after I am gone, ought to get use to sack cloth and a little nudity. the latter I am sorry to say I will miss. but that is the way the cookie crumbles. Edward Bernays and his cohorts tricked us into believing style and super cleanliness would get us laid. It ain't so. Ladies can see past the stained clothes into your soul in a flash. My clothes are clean but a stain now and then is just a badge of some work that's been done.

Will peak oil translate into peak fashion? Is this what we can look forward to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CaMUfxVJVQ

(For a Canadian take on haute coulture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaAn4BgY5iI&feature=related)

Cheers,
Paul

Absolutely, we need to have plans for clothing. For one thing, we will need to be using cotton, flax, hemp, and wool for fabrics. Nylon, rayon, poyesters are all from oil. Fuggetaboutit!

Next, we need to consider how the mills will be powered. Water power was the way of the past... it may be the way of the future as well.

How about sanforizing? And, color dyes are today mostly petroleum products.

So. Land, along a stream with about 12' or so of drop. Equipment: automatic weaving machinery for making cloth. Spinning powered by water as well as cotton gins, and so forth.

A big future crop will be one that our founding father, George Washington, farmed. Hemp! It is used for clothing, for rope, and of course... for paper! It actually makes better paper than cotton or wood; I have heard it costs less as well. The reason it is illegal today? Mead Johnson, the paper giant. They had huge acres of softwood forest, and wanted to use it for paper, but hemp is better, grows faster, and is more versitile. Answer: create fear! Men smoke the leaves and it causes some sort of mellowing out. Ever since the native Americans discovered it, whenever that was, it has been instrumental in the 'peace pipe.' Ever wonder why that particular plant was used, rather than the ubiquitous tobacco plant? I think I can guess.

Of course transporting our newly sewn hemp shirts requires rail transport, so there is another fundamental to think about. Otherwise you would need local mills, local products for spinning, and local sewing. For every locale. Perhaps that will be necessary in a hundred or so years; it depends on how much we can salvage, and of course the numbers remaining.

I am encouraging my grandchildren in learning leatherwork. They would be able to produce tack for horses, mules, and oxen. Or they could become blacksmiths and forge plows, tills and discs for farmers. Woodwork would go well with all of this, wouldn't it.

Other considerations:

dairy - not the cows, that part is easy. I am talking about pasturizing, homogenizing, churning butter, and so forth. First of all, they require energy. The products need to be heated - will wood be sufficient? Churning is hard work by hand. I see a lot5 of industry alongside the rivers and streams, all competing with electrical generation facilities for space.

Altogether we are not prepared, and seemingly are not, as a people, interested. The grandkids listen better than their parents ever did, which does give me reason for hope. Interestingly, a granddaughter just came up and started brushing my hair! Learning a trade at age 3!

Craig

I wonder if EROEI is a bit like interest rates, in that a small change in the rate makes a huge difference to dampening or stimulating the economy?

The changes in the EROEI of the fuels we are currently using have been trending downwards for some time and perhaps even subtle unrecognized declines create a leveraged effect to dampen economic activity which goes unrecognised so that the drop in economic activity is attributed to other causes or appears mysterious.

Under these circumstances, society will likely fail to perceive the real root causes of decline and rather than rationally attempting to adjust in the ways Gail suggest, it is likely that that everything else except the actual cause will be blamed, there will be a lot of useless attempts to prop up BAU and the window of opportunity to power down gracefully will be lost.

We need to psychologically transition to the idea that we in the OECD countries are inevitably going to have less purchasing power, and understand the reasons why, before we will start taking the necessary steps to change the way we consume.

For people in the country may I suggest Deerskins into Buckskins by Matt Richards, ISBN 0-9658672-0-X

It's about brain tanning. Yup, you whack the skull open, take out the brains (they have lots of oils and can be saved for other tanning projects). It can be used with any animal. My area had a brain tannin seminar a few months ago using rabbits.

Now, for the boondocks: Deer were wiped out almost immediately during the depression so whack your deer now.

Todd

PS He used to have a site IIRC http://www.braintan.com I haven't looked at if for a long time and my URL might not be right.

In the near term, clothes do not seem to me to be a problem. However, long term thread and cloth production in or near the local community will become a high priority activity.

Many of the women in my community have excellent sewing skills. We have acquired shop maintenance manuals for our high tech sewing machines and we are stock piling some of the parts that seem most likely to need replacement.

There are two small (50-60 ewes) sheep farms less than a mile from my house. Several of the women in the community are skilled and well-equipped spinners and weavers. My nineteen-year-old granddaughter (my wagon train woman) teaches spinning and weaving at the local community college.

I believe work boots, both leather and rubber, and work gloves will be more difficult to produce locally. I wear out a pair of Carhart’s best waterproof, insulated gloves each winter and two pair of cowhide gloves each spring and summer.

Cowhide will be available locally, but I have not located a local tanner, cobbler, or skill leather worker. Those are skills on our community requirements list.

.
T

I for one really appreciate you thinking about such things Gail, for a long time I didn't pay much attention to TOD simply because no one talked much about the real world and what real people should do in preparation for when all those lines on the graph came to mean something, thank you.

Though we do grow and store much of our own food, and I worry about harvesting rainwater and repairing the windmill, have an ongoing battle to make this antique house tight and warm and on and on, I don't worry about clothing. I'm not sure why exactly, perhaps because it is so cheap even new. I wear sweatshirts when it's cold (I freelance from home and do 2-4 hours of chores a day too) my wife and daughter find them for $10 and they are really nice. Go to goodwill and great stuff is cheap!

One thing I'll mention is if you think you can just go out and buy a couple of yards and sew something you are wrong. My wife is a good seamstress but there just aren't any fabric stores left, Wally put them out of business and guess what, they are eliminating fabric from their stores now. The only fabric available here carries a big premium because sewing is a hobby now.

Many of these types of questions I think should be more along the lines of "Will I be able to afford clothing." As the economy trundles to a standstill, clothing stores will fall by the way just like the fabric stores did until Wally is the only game in town. Just because the Waltons are the richest people on earth doesn't mean they don't charge what the market will bear...

Or that's how I see it tonight anyway.

Gail,
I'm upstairs at the computer while my wife is downstairs knitting. As a girl she would sit under her mothers loom to untangle the shuttle (I think its called) as the women made fabric and chatted. And this was in Quebec in the sixties. I don't think clothing is a concern right now. The skills are still there.
There is a lot of talk about the fragility and complexity of our society. Other articles on TOD talk about the esoteric nature of our interpersonal connections and that deadly entropy that will come along and reduce everything to "de minimus" - some sort of caveman brute survival.

Yes we have had a great party for the past hundred years with fossil fuel, but humans have not grown for a hundred thousand years based on some accident. We are tough smart animals who will thrive with whatever we have to.

We are not at all that far removed from survival and thriving at a simpler level.
When push comes to shove, the food producing and house building and clothing making skills are still there.

All the academics like Nate can become community leaders and put thoughts into practice

As a previous comment noted there are Spinning and Weaving clubs in most areas, but they would have to be expanded very considerably.

Communications is another problem seldom mentioned.
While I have never been able to find any study on the effect of depletion
on telecommunications it seems highly unlikely that that telephone systems
except on a local area basis will continue. There would be enough people
with the technical knowledge to keep local systems operational.

However parts for large scale telecommunications systems are likely to
become increasingly scarce.
The internet can expect to be an early casualty.

Local radio amateurs could be expected to keep a restricted message
service operational for many years until they also had problems with
parts availability. Electric power from water or wind generators, and
solar cells would be critical.
It is possible to build batteries using glass jars as was done in the
early days of radio.

Still reinventing the past will not be impossible and will be easier
than when it was done the first time as we have all the old information
available in books and not on non functioning hard drives.

Our sheep supply us with much more wool than we currently use. One daughter has taken up spinning/carding, so we would have yarn/thread to either knit or sell.

It doesn't hurt to learn skills from 80 years ago; they can be a great hobby, and may prove valuable in a pinch. For example, I chopped a tree down by axe today, vs using a chainsaw. Made me appreciate what others before us did as a part of their everyday lives, which we may need to do ourselves someday...

It's too bad about Hemp being illegal to grow in the US. It's such a versatile plant for textiles.

My current wardrobe includes a pair of synthetic track pants purchased in 2002. Being fairly nondescript (navy blue, nothing flashy), they're neither in-style nor out-of-style... not that I care much. Yes, I know that they are made out of oil, but there are most certainly fossil fuel inputs to plant fibers such as cotton and hemp. This synthetic fabric doesn't look any older than the day it was purchased (in spite of hundreds of wash cycles), the color doesn't fade, they wash out well in cold water, and air dry without wrinkling. I can't say that about any of my hemp or cotton garments. I'd bet the farm that synthetic fiber clothing will be in demand for a *long* time even when it's 10X its current cost.

We have a 40" 8-treadle Harrisville loom for which I traded a number of fine topaz my wife and I found on our "digs" several summers ago. I have constructed a number of Inkle looms, sent them off as gifts hoping the kids will pick them up someday. There is a singer treadle machine here, though we use the newer bernina mostly. We have a Kromski spinning wheel replacing the frankenstein wheel I made a couple years ago and a great wheel. My wife actively spins and knits in her spare time, I construct the wooden tools as best I can (bobbins and spindles on the lathe). We collect wild bast fibres - and wild beast fibres! Other than a very hairy cat, no fibre animals, yet. Sizeable garden, though. On rented property.

My wife and I are both geologists (!)

FWIW.....

Hi Gail,

I'm having a little difficulty with comments to your essay:

Approx population of:

NY Metro Area - 19 Million
LA Metro Area - 13 Million
Chicago Metro Area - 10 Million
Mumbai Metro Area - 18 Million
Mexico City Metro Area - 22 million

Comments about hydro power, sheep, mules, hemp, etc really don't seem very relevant for 6.8B growing to 9+ Billion in a few decades. Maybe these comments relate more to 200 yrs from now.

In the meantime, it might be more relevant to talk about the sharing of clothing with people we are trying to convince that family planning is a good idea. In our area, we have various organizations that share articles of clothing. Our local place is called "Family Sharing". Affluent US folks typically have a huge glut of unneeded clothing. Instead of bombing poor villages, maybe we could drop bundles of clothes as a way to get people around the world to have a more positive perception of the US and any messages about saving the planet.

On second thought, this is a dumb suggestion as there is no potential of this happening.

It's interesting this subject came up now - I am half-way through reading The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century by Paul Mantoux. This very interesting book has a detailed history of the transition of the wool and cotton cloth industry in England from ancient techniques to the factory system of the nineteenth century. Before 1733, the wool industry was carried out in individual's houses, with some people specializing in spinning (using the spinning wheel) and others in weaving, using a conventional loom. Cotton cloth was also being made, but the raw cotton had to be imported. English cotton cloth was inferior to cotton cloth from India, but to protect the manufacturers, importation of cotton cloth was outlawed. By the way, the "manufacturers" were really more like traders who out farmed the spinning and weaving to the individual operators in his community, often owning the looms in the worker's houses. The workers often also ran their own small-scale farm, with the result that the English textile "industry" was scattered in the countryside rather than in towns.

The first major improvement was the "fly shuttle" by John Kay in 1733. This allowed the shuttle to be quickly sent from on end of the loom to the other with one hand - substantially improving productivity. The first automatic spinning machine was developed by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt in 1738. This was powered by horses, water, or, in one case, a Newfoundland dog, so didn't need a large factory. James Hargreaves developed his "spinning jenny" in 1765, a spinning machine that could be run by hand power. In 1779, Samuel Crompton developed his "mule", an improved carding and spinning machine, which initially was small enough to be used in cottages.

It wasn't until Richard Arkwright patented his "water frame" for spinning in 1775 and Edmund Cartwright made his power loom in 1787 that the machinery was big and complex enough to deserve large factory buildings. They were mainly powered by water, but James Watt's steam engine started to be used to power the factories by the turn of the century. This marks the beginning of the use of fossil fuels in the textile industry.

The thing to take away from this history is that major improvements in textile production were made before the advent of large factories. The fly shuttle, the spinning jenny and Crompton's mule were being used in the thousands of farm houses and cottages that made up the English textile "industry" before the advent of steam and factories. If we had to wind back the clock due to fossil fuel depletion, we would not have to go back to the spinning wheel and ancient loom.

- John Atwood

I think the clothing issue is an important one. It is one of the Maslovian basics. I think this is where some reversalism is actually useful. Look at clothes of the 19th century.

There is a favouring of durability.
There is a favouring of quality.

People also dressed differently. You had an "outer shell". You had perhaps a few of them. Suit jackets, hats, vests, trousers for men, dresses, vests, gloves and coats for women.

Underneath, one wore a variety of underclothes which were also durable, but light and absorbent.

Shoes were built to last and to be repairable.

I see a similar thing happening with future clothing. It will be more expensive, and must therefore be more durable. It would make sense to go back to the shell system. Wear an outer shell for a few weeks, change under garments every few days.

I don't think corsets and similar nonsense are in the cards. But cheaply made polyester crap from China / Malaysia / etc will disappear, and people will want things that last.

Do yourself a favour - pick up a copy of the Saturday evening post from the 1890s. Look at the advertisements in back. The clothing focuses on quality of construction and elegance. The other ads are often for "safety bicycles".

This will also change how we eat. People will be much more careful with their food, as stains will be hard to get out, and if you spill on your suit, you will need to wear it for a week or two... People will get reacquainted with dainty things like cloth napkins.

This will also change our expression of wealth. Nice clothing will be seen as a point of wealth, more so than today.

Clothing is important. I would suggest the real problem will be with shoes...

HW

Young people are having a lot of trouble finding jobs now here in Japan.

I saw a program on TV about some young women who had decided to work for a traditional kimono sewer (an older woman who had kept her tiny company going for many years in a small town removed from big costly city). The younger women had decided not to go to college but instead to learn the traditional kimono sewing techniques and work for the tiny kimono company. I believe there are no machines used (or if there are it`s minimal).I think they probably have tiny incomes but stable incomes. There are always people who are going to order a new kimono here. The older woman was a very exacting boss!

I know of one man who runs his own leather craft business. He may not have a huge income but he can manage. His wallets cost less than comparable quality at the department stores....so it`s an easy choice to buy from him. The department store has all the overhead---huge costs. He lives in his shop. Tiny costs.

From what I have seen here if you have a good skill and if you can have a low cost structure (small shop where you live in the back, or a small town location, no big loans, if you can teach your craft on the side earning money from these lessons) then you can have a chance to earn enough to eat. No riches obviously. But now becoming rich seems so passe anyway. It`s better to be busy and making something useful.

1. Should we even be thinking about a new method for producing clothing?

Yes and the most intersting parts might be logistics such as locating thread and fabric manufacturing closer to the raw materials and sewing and coloring closer to the customers.

2. Is there a better approach for handling the clothing problem that I have left out?
3. What approach would make most sense to you?
4. In your selected approach, what would be needed in terms of land? Equipment? Training in new skills?

These kind of very complex needs and opportunities with millions of final customers, thousands of sellers and a vast number of combinations of sites and methods is best solved with a free market solution where everybody has the legal opportunity to try their solution.

5. How would such a big undertaking be funded?

By customers buying clothes, competitors with the wrong kind of overhead going out of business in creative destruction and thus making their physical resources available for something else and people investing their time, physical capital and retirement savings.

6. Extra Credit: How would handle one of the other issues besides clothing, listed at the beginning?

Paper a free market, pens a free market, fences a free market, containes a free market and for hoses a free market. This needs to be supported by government and other institutions that uphold contracts, saves people going bankrupt from starving so they can try again, maintains basic infrastructure and gather and store knowledge that is made public. A rich society can also fund research into understand what people are doing, how the world works and how to make things in a better way.

People should be free to try everything but making wooden wind powered machines to process local hemp seems quite nutty.

Why build pre industrial revolution machines when we have steel, ball bearings and electrical motors? These kinds of machines are also working very well in primtive and poor countries and return on investment, energy return on energy investment and longevity of the machines are exellent.
There is more then a hundred year of pre electronics machines technology avialble and it is very likely that we can continue to augement the basic stuff with electronics and computer systems.

And you dont need to do all the steps in the process right away. Start with processing fibers to simple products and work up from that or start to sew and then work backwards into the supply chain as far as it makes sense. Or set up a fabric plant at a logistics crossroad between boat shipping and rail at a location with plenty of electricity and water

4. We might set up some factories powered by solar PV, and enlist some farmers nearby to grow crops that could be used to make the cloth, using electric vehicles (golf carts, or something fancier, if available) for transportation and for work in the fields.

Or water powered. In 1825 Antoine Brutus Menier built a chocolate factory. It was completely powered by the river beneath it:

The above texts make no reference to the method of powering the mill but I saw it on ARTE (in German, just babelfish it!):

A true work of art!

The centers of production in those days were the river valleys were water drove anvils, looms and - chocolate factories!

J. Dähn

FTV, someone sent me the link.

I work in apparel production. My specialty is *sustainable* manufacturing models.

Only a few of these suggestions are workable in this industry. I don't even know where to start. Whoever mentioned Maslov, you get a gold star.

Generally, apparel is the first industry started in any developing economy. Because of this, there is a lot of existing technology that is implemented in places off the power grid. Operating machines with solar power? Ho hum, we've been doing it for years. I have a friend with a plant in Nicargua that is totally energy independent.

Treadle machines are great but save great grandma's treadle to build an agitator or something. You're better off buying a *new* treadle -yeah, they still make them- the technology and efficiency is much better. The Amish do a lot of contract sewing work in the US, much of it on treadles. Treadles have a lot of advantages over the obvious (for the purposes of this discussion). I'd worry more about machining (needles, parts, hook assemblies etc), the means rather than the direct application.

Re: Textile production, they don't call textile producers "mills" for nothing, the days from when textiles were produced with water mills is not so distant. Textiles continue to be produced on manual looms etc. The only energy intensive portion of fabric production is dyeing and again, that's done with boiling a bit of water.

Beyond skills, shoes aren't much of a challenge either. You can still take classes on how to make them. Not that I'd want to.

Several years ago when visiting Estonia I came across an interesting small scale business model that ties into this discussion.

At the breakdown of the Soviet Union a lot of people became unemployed. A machinist and his wife, a clothing designer, both lost their jobs. With their savings and some small amount of outside financial help he bought a half dozen small scale pre 1900s industrial machinery for scrap value and repaired them. They relocated to an island that grew sheep but no longer had a market for the wool. His one man operation could take the raw wool and turn it into yarn. His wife designed sweaters. The yarn was supplied to local knitters and they knit the finished items on piecework to be sold at the factory and by mail order.

The farmers now had a local market ... many local knitters had an income. All value added through the good designs that sell very well. The machines are electrically driven but easily could be converted to other prime sources of energy.

You visit a working museum that is profitable. They also have a small cafe plus a retail outlet. Here is their web site showing the machines and their product line.

http://hiiuvill.ee/?lang=en

We can always do like the other animals. Go naked.

People on this site don't seem to understand the numbers or the technology. I don't know why I bother...but here goes.

I reason that we will never see a return to the 19th century approach. Here is my logical progression:

There will never be a shortage of electricity. I know from the numbers that it is purely politics and our greedy desires for sub-10 cents/kWh that we are not 100% renewable energy by 2020. There's simply too much coal in the world before we get there, and even if there weren't, we would get there. So, we will never have an electricity crisis. Thus our machines will run indefinitely. We need 10,000$ oil before steel for our machines become too expensive - we are endowed with unlimited steel on this planet. (We have so much hematite that we could grow at something like 3% a year and still have 50 years of easily-accessible hematite left. By that time, we'll have conquered energy and be mining way deeper into the Earth's crust.) Thus we can make new machines using our existing machines. We can mine using electricity. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle is growing the cotton. We are currently using processes that employ natural gas as the endothermic agent and replacing this with wind power is absolutely perfect, since we effectively create a lowpass filter for wind's intermittency. Plus, last time I checked, we need not use many agricultural steroids to grow cotton. In fact I believe in South America they are not even using agricultural inputs for the most part.

Before clothes go, the following will have to go first: cars, housing, plastic goods, excessive good, lawns, ...

And by the time those have been sacrificed, we will have cleaned up and gone entirely photovoltaic. And I consider this view pessimistic.

Seriously Gail, do some backup research on the processes involved before you post such a naive article.

If we are not going to worry about fossil fuel use emitting CO2 and causing global warming, then we hardly need to worry about clothing. We will be shedding our clothing long before the oversupply we now have runs out.

I've been more-or-less a laissez-faire free-trade libertarian (aka: a lazy consumer). OTOH, I've been interested, even advocating, the whole 'buy local' for food. If food, then why not other products? And is it moral to deliberately direct my dollars towards local producers and away from the poorest of workers? Moral choices in buying blue jeans: Life has gotten too complex when you start down that road.

http://allusaclothing.com/

I think an important suggestion is NOT to buy fashionable stuff but rather things that are timeless and sturdy. And perhaps to acquire a taste for these "old fashioned" things (in Germany, currently there is a so-called "retro" movement among young people who begin to appreciate the "ugly" stuff of the 60s and 70s).
In fact in my family we almost always keep our things until they become defunct, so we have quite a few things that are decades old - a few even from my grandmother.
This is completely different from my other grandparent's attitude, who liked to have a full modernization of their furniture every few years. Altough we could also afford an "update" we don't like this wasteful attitude.

Fortunately more and more people are thinking like us, and there is a growing market for "sturdy" things, e.g offered by Manufactum. Although some of these things are rather for professional users (or rich freaks) and too expensive for "normal" users I think this is a step in the right direction.

Gail, where did you get the ten year figure? I have many T-shirts that I have been wearing for over twenty years, and denim jeans will last even longer, especially with patching.

And are you familiar with just how many tons of used clothes a year get shipped to developing countries? I don't know the figure but I lived in Nicaragua for a year and it seemed to me that the entire country was clothed in throw-aways from the United States. People who knew no English would be wearing T-shirts from some Midwest high school's marching band (the school must have ordered too many), or with slogans that didn't go over too well in the US when somebody tried to sell them. I'll never forget the old man in the next village who had on a T-shirt that said, "I Come Quick" in huge letters. I doubt he even knew the literal translation, much less the bad joke. In Managua there were stores that had huge grab bins of clothing that had been shipped in from the US and other countries up north. It cost pennies a pound. I think the world is pretty much awash in clothing (no pun intended).

The more important aspect of this is drycleaning. We now make clothing out of synthetic fibers that require cleaning with toxic petroleum solvents (or worse... chemicals like Perchloroethylene that are highly carcinogenic). Peak oil or not, we should not be wearing clothing that cannot be washed with regular old water and detergent.

Most of my clothing comes from Tilley Endurables... still manufactured in Canada. Expensive in the upfront cost --- not that dissimilar to the upfront costs of wind or solar. Last forever and do not need dry cleaning. You gets what you pay for... no free lunches.

This site has reached a new low. Gail has deleted my comment about her lukewarm attitude to global warming, as is clear in her "some folks think it is a problem" comment.

I very much doubt that I'm still going to be around much more than 25-35 years or so. Thus, just focusing on that shorter-term time frame, and assuming that we are looking at economic decline and harder times, at least:

-First priority: Buy clothes (and shoes) that last. We're probably going to have less money to spend on clothes in the future. There may be less available, and what there is available might be more expensive. Thus, it makes good sense to stock up on durable clothing while you can. Forget about "fashion"; today's fashion will be tomorrow's rags, and not even very good rags at that.

-Second priority: Be able to maintain your clothes. First that means taking care of them properly: hanging clothes up (except things like sweaters that should be folded; keeping woolens in a cedar chest or closet; keeping shoes polished and on shoe trees; and laundering clothes in a manner that is least hard on the fibers (see other posts above).

You also need to be able to repair clothes. This means having a good sewing machine in your household, and someone who knows how to use it at least for mending. You can do some repairs just by hand (and some are better done or are only possible by hand), but being able to use a sewing machine sure helps. I'd recommend shopping for an older mechanical Singer in good condition, rather than buying the newer electronic models. The old machines were built to last, and you are not really going to need most of the bells and whistles that the new machines do.

As for shoe repair, if your town still has someone who does shoe repair, you have a treasure; patronize them frequently, encourage your friends to do so, and help keep him in business. This is a good reason for buying and wearing leather shoes that CAN be repaired. They may cost a little more, but view that premium as an insurance policy you are paying for to assure that there is someone in your town who can still do shoe repair when you need them. (Of course, you can always learn to do your own shoe repairs. If you are handy enough to do that, more power to you.)

-Third priority: Make your own. Right now, as some have noted, the comparative prices of raw materials and finished goods do not make this as much of a money-saving proposition as it used to be. However, that may change in the future. A lot of clothesmaking is pretty difficult and requires a pretty high skill level, so this isn't for everybody. Using the experience of yesteryear as a guide, the clothing that would most typically be made at home was children's clothing (which did not usually need quite so fussy tailoring), and some women's clothing, especially skirts and dresses (which again can be a bit less tricky). If you are at all serious about making any of your own clothes, then you really do need to invest in a very good sewing machine. (People have talked elsewhere on this thread about treadle sewing machines. If that is what you like, fine. However, I am going to assume during the time period in question that electricity is going to be available, at least often enough to allow some sewing to get done. No electricity at all and most of us are not going to be around, regardless of what type of sewing machine we have and how it is powered.)

People also used to do a lot of knitting for sweaters and such, which can sometimes be just a bit more forgiving when it comes to getting things to fit.

I just don't see most of us really needing to produce our own fibers and to spin and weave them into cloth during the time window I am addressing. If things get that bad, I'm probably not going to be around anyway.

Greetings from Czechia.

I´ve been reading TOD for years and 2 years ago I started up a Czech-language clone of the Energy Bulletin but I haven´t been active at TOD yet because of my poor English and for having lots of other worries anyway. However, this topic is something I hope I am able to comment usefully because I´ve been a long-term (> 30 years) paper industry insider.

Peak paper? :-) This comment is a trial to explain (not only) Gail the Actuary that there is no reason for fear of peak paper even in the conditions of successive deindustrialisation of our society.

So, you should have no trouble trying to make your own paper using "kitchen-grade" devices. Try yourselves: Take a kitchen blender, tear to pieces a couple of pages from your yesterday newspaper and mix it with ten or twenty times as much water. Pour the mixture (paper stuff) on anything similar to a close-meshed screen or sieve and shake it until water flows away through the sieve. Try to make the stuff layer as thin as possible. Then take a piece of thick fabric (felt is the best), put it on the layer of the wet stuff and press it as strong as you can - e. g. you can use a rolling pin. The wet paper sheet should get stuck to the felt. Carefully remove it from the felt and let it dry overnight - if possible hang it on your clothesline. Next morning you will see your first hand-made paper sheet.

Well, yes, I do not solve here sizing and glazing paper necessary for ink writing and lots of other issues. On the other hand, for getting pulp in handicraft scale you can use more suitable materials than waste paper - before inventing industrial mechanical groundwood and/or chemical wood-pulp production there had been rags used for making pulp. Simple rags-treating machines (stampers) driven by water wheels can be built very quickly anywhere at the water stream using various junk and scraps and wood.

(To be more exact, the first who invented chemical way of paper production from wood were wasps: Carefully check a wasps´ nest - an empty one, please, if possible... But we humans do not produce necessary biochemicals so this is not the suitable way of papermaking for us...)

The most important: Basic raw materials - not only wood but also bamboo, reeds, hemp, cotton linters, straw and many other annual plants or their parts applicable to stuffmaking - are everywhere around us and are 100% renewable. For example in the Netherlands they boiled pulp suitable for boxboard production from straw in very simple boilers using slaked lime yet in the 1950s.

My opinion is that a paper making craft older than our Western civilisation (probably you know paper was invented in China 4 or 5 thousand years ago...) surely will survive any stage of a western civilisation collapse.

regards,
hank