idée recyclée #1: Kardashians, geological time, and brown cotton

A bi-weekly roundup of sustainability storytelling

Photo by Sally Fox, Vogue

Welcome to idée recyclée! I’m excited to introduce a regular feature series to idée fixe to punctuate longer-form pieces. For my job and by simply following my own curiosity, I’m constantly encountering incredible pieces of sustainability storytelling. I’ve been thinking for a while about giving them both a home and a spotlight. To keep newsletter momentum going and chart my own lines of thinking, a roundup feels like the way to go. 

I’m a big fan of roundups myself—I love reading about and clicking through the things (the idées fixes if you will!) that others are ruminating on, inspired by, and consuming. Here on Substack, I’ve been inspired by Haley Nahman’s 15 things I consumed this week on Maybe Baby, Caitlyn’s media consumption on milk fed, and Kait Mumford’s Microcosm on Another Realm.

This series will be a bi-weekly roundup of ~5-10 interesting sustainability, climate, and environment pieces, including essays, books, creative writing, and journal articles. I plan to share pieces that are sharp and urgent, but decidedly not doom-and-gloom. I’ll also feature podcasts, news and headlines, and maybe even films and other forms of media as I come across them. Starting the week after next, you can expect a new idée recyclée every Tuesday morning! 

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1. Entomologist, biologist, and cotton breeder Sally Fox was featured in Vogue earlier this year. Before I read this piece, I had no idea there was brown cotton, but I was shocked to read that Fox bred seafoam green and pink cotton. Her colorful cotton is pest-resistant and organic. She’s worked tirelessly since she was in college to create a market for colorful cotton, crediting her life’s work to her early, “humble jobs” (“raising insects and doing the lab work to test biological insecticide”). It’s exciting to read the profile and learn about her life’s work—it’s all the more exciting to think about how her breeding and farming methods could be scaled and drive change in a pesticide- and dye-dependent industry.

2. In “Reading the Rocks,” published in Emergence Magazine, Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing, Saving Time) writes about what unfolds when she learns the “language” of her local topography. There’s a passage in the piece in which Odell reflects on a collection of boulders she sat on in her twenties, that she recognizes later as a specific geological formation. She writes: My mind folded in on itself trying to remember what it had been like not to think there was anything to see here. I suspect that on those earlier visits, I was just too inside my own head to care about the very thing I was next to and on top of. Even when I did find the canyon beautiful—and I did, which was the reason I kept going there—it seemed to speak to me of me, not of itself. The piece explores how we can access new ways of seeing the world around us by tuning in to an older time: geological time. With this new way of seeing, the natural world is more than something to project our feelings and thoughts upon; it is a body of time and identity beyond us.

3. When I walked to my neighborhood Chipotle on Sunday, I noticed something that looked almost like snow falling from the sky. I was startled when I realized it was ash. Paige Vega wrote about the conditions that created the New York City and New Jersey wildfires for Grist. As her title notes, it’s not normal for the East Coast to be on fire. Drought conditions in the Northeast reflect more unpredictable and warmer temperatures. Here in New York City, we might expect more periods of drought in the coming years—wet seasons and dry seasons are becoming all the more common. 

4. I really enjoy Hannah Bonner’s film criticism. In “Keeping up with the Klimate,” published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bonner explores degrowth, production, and the climate crisis via the Kardashians. She relates Kōhei Saitō’s book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto to Sara Sowell’s short film “Color Negative.” Her interview in The Creative Independent this month was also a phenomenal read. 

5. Each year, McKinsey & Company and Business of Fashion Insights release The State of Fashion Report. The State of Fashion 2025 suggests that sustainability has “fallen off the agenda” for the global fashion industry. Even as climate change poses an existential risk to fashion supply chains and regulation grows (adding pressure), the business case for sustainability appears “less obvious” to executives. In 2025, the primary concerns are consumer confidence and appetite to spend, inflation, and geopolitical instability. The broad strokes are that resale is low on the agenda, 60% of brands are behind on their sustainability targets, and consumers have proven reluctant to pay more for sustainable products. It’s 154 pages, but very much worth a skim.

6. British lifestyle and clothing brand TOAST just opened its first store in the US this summer. The brand celebrates craftspeople and makers of all kinds, and its magazine (TOAST Magazine), features rich writing on the environment. Mina Holland profiles filmmaker Michelle Sanders and composer Alice Boyd for TOAST in “Audiovisual Explorations of Changing Ecosystems.” Sanders and Boyd collaborate on audiovisual pieces, blending video footage and scores to explore how their mediums can communicate about the climate crisis. Their collaboration Arctic Ice: Under the Midnight Sun is available to watch on YouTube.