Opinion | Demand for Cashmere Has Environmental Consequences

A decade or additional previously, it wasn’t uncommon to pay quite a few hundred {{dollars}} for a cashmere sweater. Now, as the holiday season approaches, advertisements present cashmere sweaters at decrease than half that worth. An advert advertising and marketing marketing campaign on Instagram from the retailer Quince boasts, “This $50 cashmere sweater is properly well worth the hype!”

A cushty cashmere sweater at a discount worth would possibly appear to be a win for buyers. But it surely absolutely comes at a steep value to definitely considered one of our most fragile environmental methods — the grasslands of the Mongolian Plateau in Central Asia.

Every cashmere sweater begins with a goat. The fibers are woven from the snug downy undercoat of quite a few breeds. As of late, most cashmere fiber comes from the chilly, arid steppes of China and Mongolia — a pastureland of immense measurement and scale, about a million sq. miles, the place for tons of of years seminomadic herders have raised sheep, horses, yaks, camels and totally different livestock. Demand for cashmere has grown so much that goats have grow to be the dominant animal in plenty of herds.

As a scientist who visits and analysis the Mongolian Plateau, I’ve witnessed the toll that rising herds of cashmere goats have had on the environment. Goats are much more damaging than totally different livestock to grassland ecosystems, like these of the Central Asian steppe. Whereas sheep nibble the tops of grasses nonetheless depart the underside and roots intact, goats eat vegetation all the way in which right down to the roots to allow them to’t regrow, degrading habitat and inflicting soil erosion. These grasslands are notably robust to revive as quickly because the vegetation is eradicated and soils are damaged; in primarily essentially the most intently impaired areas, grasses are displaced by shrubs and sand.