Like the food you eat, the clothes on your back come from somewhere.
If you wear cotton, that “somewhere” is ultimately a farm (with detours
at a textile mill, a clothes factory, etc).

Growing vast monocrops of cotton, it turns out, is a dirty business.
Globally, cotton occupies 2.4 percent of cropland — and burns through
16 percent of the insecticides used every year, the Environmental
Justice Foundation reports.

Indeed, conventional cotton production in the United States has long
required a veritable monsoon of poisons. Cotton can even give even
industrial corn a run for its money in terms of environmental impact.
According to the U.S.
Geological Survey, pesticide applications for cotton run “3 to 5
times greater per hectare than applications of pesticides to corn.”

To try and stem the chemical cascade, farmers in cotton country have
largely switched to seeds genetically modified to contain a pesticide
and to withstand Roundup, Monsanto’s broad-based herbicide. Today, upwards of 60 percent
of cotton grown in the U.S. contains those traits.

Trouble is, that “solution” to cotton’s chemical dependence is
already failing. In cotton country, Roundup-resistant “superweeds” are a
large
and growing problem, forcing farmers to employ a toxic
cocktail of herbicides to control weeds. And now, Monsanto recently
revealed, a strain of cotton bollworms has developed
resistance to the company’s widely planted pesticide-carrying cotton
strain. Who knows what new poison concoctions will be needed to
exterminate these “superbugs”?