CONNOR HOFFMAN
Staff Writer
Today at 4 p.m., Fredonia will be hosting author Adam Rome in the Kelly Family Auditorium in the Science Center. This event is hosted by Fredonia’s Sustainability Committee. The speech is called, “Fashion Forward? The Environmental History of Style from Beaver Hats to iPhones.”
Rome is a professor at the University of Delaware and is the Unidel Helen Gouldner Chair for the Environment. Rome is the author of the books “The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism” and “The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation.”
According to the Fredonia website, the purpose of the sustainability committee is “to integrate sustainability into all aspects of campus life by: educating students, faculty, staff, and the community about environmental, social, and economic issues; promoting environmental awareness and responsibility in personal and institutional choices and inspiring innovative environmental solutions, behavioral changes, and ethical stewardship of the natural world.”
David Kinkela, a history professor who studies environmental history and a member of the sustainability committee, provided some insight into what Rome would be talking about.
“Adam Rome is a fairly well known environmental historian, so historians have looked at sort of the relationship between people and nature over time. [He] has written some really influential books. One sort of on suburbanization and its environmental impact and the other on the history of earth day,” said Kinkela “He’s working on this new project and part of that is sort of thinking about large scale stories about how people have thought about particular items, and one of the things he’s looking at is fashion and sort of the large evolution of fashion and it’s use of natural products over time.”
One thing that Kinkela mentioned was that Rome was his only choice for this talk. He said that Rome “is a smart guy and would bring a really interesting perspective to this conversation. We often don’t think about the stuff we put on our backs as sort of an environmental issue.”
Rome described some of the things that he would be mentioning at his speech.
“It’s two-fold. I’m going to argue that fashion in all of its manifestation not just clothing, but everything from the styling of cars to the iPhone is environmentally destructive. That the constant changing of fashion is environmentally destructive more than we realize. But, I’m also going to argue that, especially in the clothing industry, there are already people seriously trying to imagine what a sustainable fashion would be,” said Rome.
He also said that he has been interested in the environment since he was about 10. He mentioned how the first Earth Day happened before he was 10; coming of age during such a prominent movement really inspired him.
Rome would further explain just how most people don’t think of fashion as an environmental issue.
“I don’t think most people think of fashion as being a problem, something that is unsustainable. And I’m going to give lots of example[s]; some of them go back hundreds of year[s]. The fashion for hats made out of beaver nearly wiped out beaver from the whole of North America, and Europe too,” Rome explained.
“So I don’t think people will have thought about all of the different ways in which constantly changing styles which encourage us to throw out things that we could still use but we are embarrassed to use because they’re unstylish [and] they’re unfashionable,” she continued. “I think most people won’t have thought about how wasteful that is and what we could do to correct it,” said Rome.
Rome added how he would mention some people at the end of his speech who are currently trying to reduce the impact of fashion on the environment.
“A lot of the people that I’ll talk about at the end of my talk that are trying to make a sustainable fashion. They love clothes and they appreciate all of the things that fashion provides, but they’re trying to think about how you can reduce the environmental impact of fashion and changing,”said Rome.
“Every time you buy something, that’s today[’s] fashion but won’t be tomorrow’s. What’s going to happen with the thing that you have that’s no longer in fashion. Are you going to just throw it in the trash? What’s going to happen?” said Rome.