In August of last year I flew twenty hours, drove another four hours, swapped to an off-road car to drive another six hours, then travelled by water on a peke peke for four hours: by then I had made it from my home in Australia to the Awajún community of the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest.
I was there because this community is both suffering due to the fashion industry and providing a solution to it at the same time. The Awajún people, as with so many Indigenous Amazonian communities, are fighting against deforestation. This is largely driven by the cattle industry, which through profitable leather production is tied to fashion. Mining for fossil fuels used in fashion’s supply chains and synthetic materials are also a problem.
As I sat, exhausted yet wide awake with total awe on the peke peke – a traditional canoe-like boat with a lawnmower-looking engine attached – I admired chirping birds, wandering butterflies and an endless diversity of wondrous plant life. A few times, for a stretch, I instead saw the light brown of chopped trees on dirt.
“We will not allow those cutting trees to come here”, said Rosalia Manuig Taan, a young Awajún woman, speaking to me via two translators (Awajún to Spanish, then Spanish to English).
Instead, Rosalia and other women defend their trees by working with them. The shiringa tree is a type of rubber tree that stands some forty metres tall. Moss and lichen growing on them, women like Rosalia carve very shallow lines into them, milky latex sap seeks out and is collected.
They turn this sap into a bio-leather, providing the fashion industry with an alternative to the animal-derived leather production that threatens their home, culture and very survival.
In large part because of this, the Peruvian Government has granted this particular community of Awajún people reserve-status, so their land is secured against deforestation while not so far away, miners have burned down homes as a threat if people do not move on. That is violent land grabbing.
Shiringa bio-leather is regeneratively collected: the tree that women like Rosalia, as well as elder woman Doris Pape Petsa extract sap from have been standing for around one hundred years, used by their community for generations. As Doris says, they do this surrounded by the forest’s guardian spirits.
Visiting this community, working with and befriending Rosalia and Doris was a privilege and resounding reminder of what the fashion industry can do at its worst or best.
We can choose to continue to prioritise profit over the life of our shared planet, the people who live with it, and our fellow animals. That’s what continuing to use animal-derived leather and plastic materials does. Or, we can choose to find a path of coexistence, to create a total ethics fashion system in which all life is placed ahead of profit, where this way of thinking helps creativity flourish. That is exactly what this community is doing, even with almost no industry support – yet.
I was in the Peruvian Amazon because my charity, Collective Fashion Justice, was making a film about this incredible process and community. We went alongside Caxacori Studio, a Lima-based material innovator working with the community to improve the durability and aesthetic qualities of the bio-leather, while maintaining its sustainability credentials as much as possible.
Guided by a conservation agreement between the two, everyone involved is paid a genuinely fair wage some 50% higher than that of the standard rate for latex sap collection for other uses in Peru.
SHIRINGA: Fashion Regenerating Amazonia is now available for international streaming on Waterbear Network, and our charity is now actively seeking brands and designers interested to trial the use of this material in place of current-generation materials.
My dearest hope – a hope shared by Doris, Rosalia, their community leader Jessica, and many others – is that this film can help significantly increase the use of shiringa bio-leather, staving off the use of harmful materials like animal-derived leather and wholly synthetic materials.
There is real potential for this material’s production to responsibly scale, as communities across Amazonia live alongside shiringa trees, have long used shiringa trees, and would benefit from the environmental and economic security gained by a fashion industry that wants to use this material. A material that is supple, soft, water resistant, flexible and full of life – not taken from life (a living animal, a living ecosystem).
I invite you to watch the film, hear the words of Rosalia and Doris, and imagine this fashion future alongside us.
At Collective Fashion Justice, we are all about creating a total ethics fashion system for people, our fellow animals and the planet. We work directly with the industry, at a government policy level and with fashion education institutions. We hope you will join forces with us towards this goal.
See it here: https://www.collectivefashionjustice.org/shiringa-film)
