This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

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.”

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.

Several times this year, after suffering through lectures by various influencers extolling animal fibers, I thought back to a widely discussed piece by data scientist Hannah Ritchie on the naturalistic fallacies that pervade popular understanding of what’s good for the planet.

“Sheep that are not regularly shorn, as they’ve now evolved to be, suffer from having their heavy coat dragging them down,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who recently wrote a book on what we owe nonhuman animals, told the Boston Review in defense of wool earlier this year.

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