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POST INDUSTRIAL WOOL

POST INDUSTRIAL WOOL

August 18, 2022
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Image courtesy of Gaia Baracetti

By Gaia Baracetti


When people hear the end of the story, they think they already know how it began. Tired of city life, back to the land, call of the mountains... but it was none of that. I had just responded to the circumstances and contingencies of our ever-changing world.

I had decided to move to the Alps in order to do some research for a novel I was writing, and ended up in a small village in the North East of Italy. I had been there for a few months when I first saw the burning of the hay.

In rural areas mowing and keeping the meadows "clean" is considered a civic duty; but it's become an empty ritual since the cows that used to eat the hay are now gone. So, beautiful mountain grass is cut and thrown off the cliffs, left to rot or burned.

And wool, once a true source of wealth, is now legally classified as "special waste" and is actually a headache for shepherds, who cannot sell it but still have to pay someone to shear the sheep and then to dispose of the wool - or do so illegally. The things that make wool so valuable, such as its durability or flame-retarding properties, also make it difficult to get rid of.

I wanted to do something, however small, against all this wastage. The things is - not all sheep produce high quality wool.


Image courtesy of Gaia Baracetti

For animal lovers, choosing a breed is an exciting endeavour. Through millennia, nature and man have worked together, lovingly and ruthlessly, to produce perfectly adapted, perfectly useful animals and plants that both tell a very long story and are a never ending work-in-progress. Modern breeds are often selected to maximise production at the expense of everything else, and only do a lot of one thing. Our ancestors were wiser than that.

I choose sheep from a Veneto landrace that is what we would call a triplice attitudine: they can be eaten, yes, but also milked, and they produce a butter-coloured, lovely fine wool. They are well-adapted to their native ecosystem, docile, and pretty, too, with their unusual reddish faces and legs.

I bought my first Brogna sheep from a shepherdess from Veneto. Village neighbours gave me all the hay I wanted, mostly for free, and offered beautiful pastures to graze my animals on - even as many were skeptical about a city girl suddenly raising livestock.

But soon they saw how seriously I took the whole thing. It's a great responsibility, and a freely chosen loss of freedom that binds you to time and place like almost nothing else will. It surprised me how actually liberating this was, and how much I liked sheep - they are good-natured, trusting, generous and joyful.

The Italian shepherds who do manage to turn their wool into usable fibre typically have it processed in one of the few remaining factories that do that. But I am a bit of a Luddite and I was always gonna do everything myself.

I shear, wash, card and spin by hand. I have no patience for machines; I enjoy the meditative experience of doing repetitive, flowing tasks on my own schedule; it's better for the environment as it only uses renewable human energy, and I believe that things done by hand are almost always of superior quality. I think it's because machines assume matter to be homogeneous, but it isn't. Only a human eye, brain and hand can accommodate for the natural variations of matter without flattening and breaking it.

I am not the world's greatest artisan, but my (our) wool is beautiful. The problem is how to make a living from it.

When I take part in markets or Medieval Fairs as a spinner, I am quite the attraction. We're so removed from not only the land, but the making of almost anything, that most people actually have no idea - but want to know! - how exactly you go from sheep to sweater. I am happy to demonstrate.


Image courtesy of Gaia Baracetti

But that's not how it's really done anymore. All governments subsidise industrial production while taxing labour, thus making it less competitive. Given this, wool spun by hand in a rich country and sold at an honest price becomes unaffordable to most.

I eventually had to leave the village because I couldn't get the reliable help I needed, and because wolves are coming back. The government has chosen to protect them no matter what, their numbers have soared, and many Alpine shepherds have no choice but to give up.

I moved back to my hometown of Udine, but managed to keep my sheep with me. This summer, in the village, hay will burn again.

I am holding out as much as I can, hoping to last until humanity finally understand that the industrialisation of everything was never going to be sustainable.


Image courtesy of Gaia Baracetti

People ask me how long I've been keeping sheep. The thing is, I don't know - when you do this, time becomes cyclical more than linear. I am so behind progress I am actually ahead - waiting, in good company, for others to turn the corner and find that the future isn't quite like the past, but not all that different, either.
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