Rebecca Burgess and Craig Wilkinson on Fibershed and indigo

The soil to soil connection in the production, use and regeneration of natural fibres is one that Rebecca Burgess has been making for more than a decade through the Fibershed movement originating from California in the United States.
The movement is shining light on ways of transforming fibre and dye systems from the ground up and engaging everyone involved in the complex process of bringing clothes into the world for people to wear.
It is a vision for place-based textile sovereignty which aims to include, rather than exclude, all the people, plants, animals, and cultural practices within a fibershed. It begins with the source of raw materials and includes transparency and connectivity in the way it is converted into clothing, from soil to skin and back to the soil.
In Rebecca’s Northern California fibershed, based at San Geronimo, natural plant dyes and fibers such as flax, wool, cotton, hemp and indigo are being grown using practices that are both traditional and modern. She says many of these cropping and livestock systems are showing benefits that are ameliorating the causes of climate change, increasing resilience to drought and rebuilding local economies.
Through her learning journeys and experiences in place-based fiber and dye communities, Rebecca believes what is no lack of motivation among people for grassroots textile systems. What is needed is the will and courage to appropriately resource and financially invest in them so they can function to farm, ranch, mill, sew, repair and cycle materials into new clothes and eventually into compost.
Rebecca’s book Fibershed: growing a movement of farmers, fashion activists, and makers for a new textile economy is an invitation to engage will all parts of the growing, creating, wearing and caring processes of our clothing.
She believes implementing a deeper understanding of the earth’s biogeochemical and physical properties and cycles is a critical step to generating new textile businesses that can help reduce the legacy load of carbon from our atmosphere.
I visited the Fibershed Learning Center on a Natural Dye Market Day during my recent Churchill Fellowship and chatted with Rebecca Burgess and indigo farmer Greg Wilkinson.
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