How can we mitigate the social and environmental impacts of a trillion dollar industry?

Health, ethics and environment interact on a global scale in the fashion industry. Mass-production of fast-fashion garments and toxic beauty products has long been the accepted practice within the arcane affairs of the fashion supply chain. Who is driving meaningful change towards social and environmental responsibility? Join us for a talk by Kate Black, author of Magnifeco: Your Head-to-Toe Guide to Ethical Fashion and Non-Toxic Beauty, followed by a response and questions from Kelly Drennan, founding executive at Fashion Takes Action.

Kate Black is the founder and editor-in-chief of Magnifeco.com(@magnifeco), the digital source for eco-fashion and sustainable living and EcoSessions®, a global platform bringing together designers, industry and consumers to discuss change. Agraduate of the University of Toronto, Kate has lived and worked in many fashion centers of the world and written over 1,000 articles about designers and ethical fashion from her decidedly global perspective. Her book, Magnifeco: Your Head-to-Toe Guide to Ethical Fashion and Non-toxic Beauty, was published in September.

Kelly Drennan (@ecofashionista) is a social entrepreneur devoted to making change within the fashion industry– known for its negative social and environmental impacts including labour, energy, waste, water, and the use of toxic chemicals. Kelly brings her many years of experience as founding executive director of Fashion Takes Action, a non-profit organization that brings social and environmental awareness to the fashion industry.  

What happened at Copenhagen, what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly – what now? Those who expected decisive agreements and large-scale governmental action from the recent Copenhagen negotiations are disappointed. However, now the emphasis falls on other strategies and technological opportunities we face to coordinate environmental movement, raise the standards of evidence and facilitate diverse responses to environmental challenges. How can distributed sensing and public publishing of data reveal this evidence, support local organizations and actions? How does Pachube – a kind of Facebook/YouTube for data – change the game? How can social networking be used in collective sense-making and lifestyle experiments to localize responsibility for environmental health? Is it the big opportunities – or not?

About the Speaker: 
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. Jeremijenko is a recipient of the 2008-2009 Van Alen Institute-New York Prize Fellowship in Sustainable Cities and the Social Sciences, and was recently named one of the 40 most influential designers by I.D. Magazine. She is an artist not-in-residence at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto. Jeremijenko directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic [http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/] at NYU. Her work is described as experimental design, hence xDesign, as it explores opportunities presented by new technologies for non-violent social change. Her research centers on structures of participation in the production of knowledge and information, and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information and emerging technologies — mostly through public experiments. In this vein, her work spans a range of media from statistical indices (such as the Despondency Index, which linked the Dow Jones to the suicide rate at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge) to biological substrates (such as the installations of cloned trees in pairs in various urban micro-climates) to robotics (such as the development of feral robotic dog packs to investigate environmental hazards). Jeremjenko’s permanent installation on the roof of Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea Model Urban Development (MUD) provides infrastructure and facilities for high-density bird cohabitation in an environmental experiment in interaction with the New York City bird population.

This xLECTURE will survey through a series of public experiments the state-of-the-art in socio-ecological systems designed for improving human and environmental health, and argue why these methodologies raise standards of evidence and exploit the opportunities that new technologies provide for social and environmental change.