Finding Our Way Home

It is Spring Equinox here on Bundjalung Country, also known as Byron Bay, Australia, and a spell of misty rain has engulfed my little patch of wild mountain that I call home. On these 41 acres of which I am now steward, only one acre is ancient rainforest. The rest was cleared for timber and cattle in under 100 years. In the blink of an eye, an entire ecosystem that had developed over millions of years – the land where the first songbirds evolved – was almost entirely eradicated, and with it a 60,000-year relationship between humans and forests was broken.

In three weeks my grandmother will turn 103. We will celebrate her here, among the small but lush patches of rainforest that remain. In her honor we will plant native trees, some now almost extinct, in the hope of bringing back that ancient forest – even knowing it will take thousands of years, if not more, to be restored to its original glory.

My deepest prayer is that a future generation will enjoy this forest, giving thanks to the ancestors who brought it back from the brink of extinction, and that the destruction and devastation of the last few hundred years will be just that – a faded, distant memory. Stories of the trees we cut down, the plastics and chemicals we poured into the rivers in the name of modernity, progress – even fashion – will be told as cautionary tales to future generations, so they never forget the ancient covenant our ancestors lived by: “Do unto those downstream what you would have your upstream neighbours do unto you.”

At first glance, this future memory – of humans living in harmonious relationship with the natural world – looks much like our past. I see my grandmother as a young girl by the fire, spinning wool shorn from her animals, which she will then knit into a cardigan and socks. A loom sits under a tree, the beautiful textile in its warp nearing completion. In an outdoor kitchen, young men and women dip skeins of wool into boiling pots of seeds, leaves, and flowers crushed with mortar and pestle. The rivers run clean because the golden rule is followed. Not for profit, or progress, and especially not for fashion, do we conceive of contaminating our waters with chemical dyes and plastics. Biodiversity flourishes; bees and butterflies hover around the wildflowers, buzzing happily, having survived the dark days of industrial fashion, when tons of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides were used to grow cotton for the mass production of disposable clothing, worn a few times, then thrown away.

For thousands of years we lived this way. Rivers so clean you could drink from them. Forests so dense a squirrel could cross continents without ever touching the ground. Within a few generations, these ecosystems – and the knowledge of how to live among them – were lost. But now we are reclaiming both, and fashion is leading the way.

Innovations in fashion are leading us back to our ancient past. In places like Peru, my country of birth, we are returning to ancient ways of growing cotton, combined with new ways of spinning, weaving, and dyeing – coming back into the covenants we once lived by. Born of the earth, these clothes can once again return to the earth, biodegrading without plastics, becoming soil once more, ready to nourish new life.

This circularity is our birthright. We don’t have to accept a world in which mountains of discarded synthetic clothes pollute our beautiful landscapes, where even the most remote parts of the planet are tainted with microplastics. The alternative is so much more beautiful, and it is not so far away.


When I visited regenerative cotton fields in Peru with PAKA earlier this year, I was blown away by how close we are to making this dream a reality. I saw rainforest trees, food, and medicine grown side by side with cotton – no sprays or chemicals in sight. Biodiversity returning, communities clawing their way back from the brink, moving towards a future that looks a lot like their past.

And all around me I feel the tide of consciousness turning – we know intuitively that the way we’ve been living is making us unwell. The clothes, the chemicals, the plundered resources – covenants broken – sick soil, sick water, sick people. And inversely, when clothes are made with respect for animals, rivers, communities, and forests, we see life flourish again.

PAKA showed me that young, scrappy fashion startups can be leaders in this field – not beholden to corporate overlords whose only goal is more profit, whatever the cost. I saw what can happen when a company with soul and purpose puts its effort towards changing the playing field, challenging the big guys to step up and do the same. My community of tree-hugging, nature-loving optimists loves PAKA for this, and we celebrate every time they inch closer to their goal of 90% natural fibres. Of course it would be them, and not the big guys, leading the charge, pioneering the way for the rest of the industry to follow.

Kris, PAKA’s founder, has not met my grandmother yet. But I know she would be proud of his commitment to seeing her home in the Andes restored to its former glory: biodiversity intact, rivers clean, alpaqueros paid generously for their wool, alpacas treated with gratitude and respect.

So in three weeks, when we gather in the rain-soaked forest to plant trees for her 103rd year, I will be wrapped in alpaca, spun and woven in the Andes, as she once was. Every forest that has ever been restored began with someone on their knees in the dirt, planting a seedling for a future they would never see. Every garment made in keeping with the old covenant is a seed of that same kind. The future is natural. It always was. We are simply finding our way home.