Weeding is good for your brain and polyester isn't a great look.

Rachel Cernansky covers sustainability for Vogue Business and is one of my favorite writers on sustainability, particularly in the fashion industry. Before her writing, I hadn't thought much about these issues but her beat has recently become an incredibly hot topic the more we find out what kind of damage our fashion tastes are doing to the world.

Before Vogue Business, she spent about a decade freelancing on health, science and the environment for Nature, Science, National Geographic, The New York Times and elsewhere. She tells me that she's a New Yorker at heart but lives in Colorado with her family. In her words: "I've been to six continents and I'm holding out hope that the seventh remains frozen."

Here is my talk with her:

My mother taught me how to mom, how to live by my values and how to express my exasperation in Yiddish.?

My father taught me to question everything, all the time no matter what it is — sometimes a skill, sometimes the world’s most annoying habit.

I used to think that I could change the world. (I'm still trying?)

My path has taken me on some very surprising turns. I'm enormously grateful for them.?

The forest obsesses me. I mean - trees talk to each other through an underground world of microscopic organisms(!), forests regulate the water cycle, they host a richness of biodiversity we have only begun to understand — and they feed, clothe and heal us, too.?

New York City is the greatest place on Earth, except for its stressful and increasingly inequitable faults.??

I got into gardening because I love veggies and because, I realized once I started, I had long been all work and no hobbies. Weeding is good for my brain (I find it meditative); the dirt is good for my soul.?

You’re never going to beat me in name-that-tune, or in name-that-vegetable.

You’re not ready to live with an extra 2°C. (No one is.)

The furthest I’ve gone off the grid was a hut in Kenya that I lived in for a year, on a small island in Lake Victoria.?

Who knew that the world would be literally burning and we would still have people, politicians in particular, denying climate change.?

Pleather is a false solution for the problems with leather. It doesn’t mean there are no Earth-friendly alternatives to animal leather, see below!

Denim is a can of worms, as far as environmental impact goes. Read labels, ask questions.

Vegan leather has mega potential — if the industries that use leather give it a chance, and if the startups behind them stay true to their plastic-free, chemical-free, zero-waste roots.

Polyester is plastic in the form of clothing. We’re wearing plastic.?

Shein comes up on my beat a lot these days.?

The Maori, like other Indigenous peoples around the world, know how to coexist with nature — how to benefit from and protect it at the same time.?

Hear Me Out: I am a science journalist who writes about the fashion industry. In my past life, I wrote about soil science, biodiversity, reforestation strategies, international aid and the rise of (and need for) community-led development, environmental health and the exposome (google it), the glory of Indigenous fruits and vegetables in Africa and more.?

What I love about reporting on sustainability in fashion is that the topic is so vast and covers so many issues — I find myself writing about many of the same issues as before, just now in the context of a multibillion-dollar global industry that touches virtually every person on the planet. From how cotton is grown to the chemicals used in garment manufacturing to garment waste and brands' philanthropic projects overseas, there are few issues that do not manifest in fashion in some way, somewhere.

I try to cover sustainability according to the true meaning of the word: meeting the needs of the present without compromising future generations’ ability to do the same. I also try to cover solutions — effective, holistic, actual solutions — whenever possible. The world, and the fashion industry in particular, are not sustainable today, but they could be.

You can follow me here on LinkedIn and on X.

Check out some of my other pieces here including: The Rise of Africa's Super Vegetables in Nature, It Takes Consultation to Help a Village in The New York Times or What toxins have you been exposed to? Your baby teeth may hold the answer in The Washington Post.