Hey, I just had a convo that reminded me of a question I have.

I keep seeing people claim that cotton is bad for the environment because of how much water it consumes, and hemp and linen are to be preferred for that reason.

That's super eyebrow-raising because I know that cotton, famously, grows in arid places like Egypt, Spain, and Tamil Nadu, while both hemp and flax (from which we get linen) were staple crops in northern and central Europe, and as such are much, much more demanding of moisture.

Furthermore, unlike cotton, hemp and linen are what is known as mast fibers, and cannot be liberated from the stalks in which they grow without extensive processing, which uses a lot of water.

Does somebody have a study about this somewhere? Because, boy, is that a surprising claim if you know anything about textile production. I mean, it could be true, chemical engineers keep coming up with interesting new industrial processes, maybe modern cotton is way thirstier than I thought – everything I know on this topic is approximately 500 to a thousand years out of date.

Absent actual evidence, this sure sounds like a lot of people got exposed to some sort of anti-cotton propaganda and just kind of assumed that it didn't also apply, only more so, to other familiar botanical fibers.

(I don't know the first thing about bamboo fiber production, but given that it didn't exist prior 1600 CE, or to my knowledge prior 2000 CE when I largely checked out of textile geekery, I assume the only way to get textile fibers out of bamboo are with some horrendous chemical process, same as rayon, which is made from trees.)

Hey, I just had a convo that reminded me of a question I have.

I keep seeing people claim that cotton is bad for the environment because of how much water it consumes, and hemp and linen are to be preferred for that reason.

That's super eyebrow-raising because I know that cotton, famously, grows in arid places like Egypt, Spain, and Tamil Nadu, while both hemp and flax (from which we get linen) were staple crops in northern and central Europe, and as such are much, much more demanding of moisture.

Furthermore, unlike cotton, hemp and linen are what is known as mast fibers, and cannot be liberated from the stalks in which they grow without extensive processing, which uses a lot of water.

Does somebody have a study about this somewhere? Because, boy, is that a surprising claim if you know anything about textile production. I mean, it could be true, chemical engineers keep coming up with interesting new industrial processes, maybe modern cotton is way thirstier than I thought – everything I know on this topic is approximately 500 to a thousand years out of date.

Absent actual evidence, this sure sounds like a lot of people got exposed to some sort of anti-cotton propaganda and just kind of assumed that it didn't also apply, only more so, to other familiar botanical fibers.

(I don't know the first thing about bamboo fiber production, but given that it didn't exist prior 1600 CE, or to my knowledge prior 2000 CE when I largely checked out of textile geekery, I assume the only way to get textile fibers out of bamboo are with some horrendous chemical process, same as rayon, which is made from trees.)

@siderea Not presenting myself as any sort of expert, I know nothing of textiles or botany, but isn't Egypt's whole thing the annual flooding of the Nile? So that, although it's an arid region, you've got regions that are super-fertile with abundant river water?