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In search of sustainable cashmere goats in the Gobi desert (with film-maker Luc Jacquet)…

Richard makes a new friend…

The Times, 1 October 2019.

(Read this article on The Times website, with some stunning pictures, here.)

We were 80 miles outside Alashan City when the fear took hold. This was a terrible place: the Tengger desert, a dead world on the southern edge of the Gobi. For thousands of sunbaked miles there was nothing but sand, stones and dust. The emptiness made me shiver, like vertigo. What if the car broke down? I couldn’t even see vultures (said to be plentiful in Inner Mongolia) to pick our bones.

Apart from a couple of moulting dromedaries we had been the only visible road-users for an hour. The eyesores of modern Chinese civilisation – factories, building sites, half-dug mines – had long since petered out. Even the police surveillance had stopped. In this lifeless desolation, I missed it.

Then I started seeing goats.

Their whiteness caught my eye; they were brilliant flecks on distant sand dunes. I mistook them for gulls, briefly, but the sea was 800 miles away. Then the flecks began to cascade closer, quickly as liquid across the wrinkled sand, and I recognised the purposeful movements of a herd.

This was reassuring. Goats implied water, and a family of herders. They also implied Luc Jacquet. We were approaching the right place.

Jacquet, the French biologist turned film-maker who won an Oscar for his 2005 documentary March of the Penguins, had been camping in this land full of dust for weeks. He was here with a small crew to capture the lifestyle of the Capra hircus goat. Earlier in the year they had been doing the same in the independent nation of Mongolia (in impolite shorthand: Outer Mongolia). That had been in winter, when temperatures fall to minus 40C. The arid west of Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in the People’s Republic of China, offers a different harshness. Extreme desert temperatures, with burning days and freezing nights, are exacerbated by pollution, water scarcity, overgrazing and savage winds. The resulting dust clouds blow right across China and are one reason why the air in Beijing tends to be a poisonous chicken-soup colour.

The environment’s extremity is part of the attraction for Jacquet and for the goats. It prompts the latter to grow inner coats of the finest cashmere. And Jacquet? The world’s rough margins are where he thrives. For March of the Penguins he spent a year in Antarctica. Other projects have taken him to Siberia, the Yukon and the Andes. He lives in a remote farmhouse in the Jura mountains, but sometimes retreats to a cabin he owns in Greenland to get away from it all. Inner Mongolia’s western wilderness has an obvious attraction for such a man.

“It’s very impressive to stay alive in such a harsh landscape,” Jacquet says when we track him down to a yurt at his desert base camp. He isn’t just talking about goats. “I like the idea of co-evolution between goats and people. The herders here have been able to survive because they live at a very basic level, just as the goats do.”

Jacquet, a big, bearded, baggily dressed man, had been filming at a nearby farmstead, where he was trying to capture interactions between a herder and her goats in a primitive pen – with mud-and-straw walls and a roof of sun-bleached sticks – and on the surrounding sands. About 240 goats are based there, although all but a handful of kids and mothers were out in the desert. A typical Capra hircusspends most of each day roaming, over a territory of about 40 sq km, seeking scraps of desiccated vegetation. (Goats that search patiently enough can feed from up to 30 plants; a few days’ rain a year is all these need to sustain them.) Yet the herd always comes home in the evening to where the water is, and on this occasion it was expected back early. The winds were about to whip up another sandstorm.

“It’s a fascinating landscape,” Jacquet says. “When you first come it looks flat and boring, but it changes all the time. I love the way the goats move through it. But sandstorms are a problem. Two days ago there was a huge one blowing and the camera was covered in sand. The first assistant [director] was in tears. He was up all night cleaning it.”

By Jacquet’s standards, such hazards are trivial. His cameraman for March of the Penguins turned temporarily into a block of ice after falling into some Antarctic water. Every wild place has its dangers, but Jacquet thinks the risk is justified. “My work allows me to plunge into the universe that inspires me, and the extreme landscape helps me tell a story.”

The story he wants to tell here is stark: luxury fashion in its present form is unsustainable. The cashmere-producing goats of China and Mongolia show why. At one time a handful of western brands – Loro Piana, Brunello Cucinelli, Pringle – imported small quantities of cashmere to supply an elite market. In recent decades, however, wider affluence and demand for “affordable” fashion have caused explosive growth; the market is worth £4 billion a year. Established purveyors of luxury have found themselves competing with (relatively) cheap-and-cheerful brands offering low-quality cashmere on tiny margins that make sense only in huge volumes. Result: more goats.

Mongolia’s goat population almost doubled between 1993 and 2009, and the story has been much the same on the Chinese side of the border (90 per cent of the world’s cashmere comes from these two nations). The land could not support so much grazing. Vegetation became sparser still. The desert grew. The cashmere goats became less well nourished. The quality of their wool declined; the herders earned less from it.

Yet consumers had developed a taste for £50 cashmere sweaters, not only in the West, but in the growing market of China. A vicious circle took hold. Poorly paid herders expanded their flocks to meet demand. In a region scarred by the headlong exploitation of natural resources (coal, gas, aggregates, rare earth metals) the cashmere boom was jeopardising their ability to produce cashmere. Hence the government’s receptiveness to a series of initiatives from the Italian luxury brand Loro Piana.

Loro Piana has been sourcing cashmere from Inner and Outer Mongolia since the 1960s, and buying it directly from individual farmers since the 1980s. Drawn to the Alashan region by the high-quality cashmere of its pure-white goats, it became even more closely involved when, in the mid-1990s, it persuaded some herders to harvest the almost mystically soft fibre known as “baby cashmere” – combed from Capra hircus kids that are less than a year old. This was a slow process; each kid produces about 30g and it was a decade before Loro Piana sold its first baby cashmere garment. But its emphasis on long-term development impressed the herders and the Chinese authorities.

In 2009 the company launched an initiative: the Loro Piana Method. It is a system of selective breeding, developed with the Jilin Agricultural University in China, the University of Camerino in Italy, and the ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) – that prioritises quality and sustainability. Herders are encouraged to breed only from goats that produce the very finest cashmere. (You can test this objectively, by measuring the fineness of the fibre. If a human hair is about 75 microns and ordinary wool 25, the best cashmere from an adult Capra hircus goat might be about 15, with baby cashmere perhaps as fine as 13.5. That’s very soft indeed.) Over time, the yield of the herd improves, so numbers can be kept down and land pressure is eased. Eventually, grazing recovers. Better-nourished goats produce better cashmere, Loro Piana makes and sells ever more luxurious garments, the herders earn more and there is no incentive to enlarge the herd. Instead of a race to the bottom, there is a patient, virtuous upward spiral.

Is it working? For a visiting journalist, it’s hard to reach confident conclusions – partly because Chinese officialdom goes out of its way to make visiting journalists feel unwelcome, but mainly because the quantities and areas involved are so huge. Inner Mongolia is five times the size of the UK, and the families Loro Piana deals with – with their 100 or so herds, comprising 24,000 goats – are scattered over an area the size of Wales.

I visited the farmsteads of three of these families; each visit involved many hours of driving. The main thing I learnt is that Mongolian traditions of hospitality are alive and well (key features: lashings of boiled whole sheep, vigorous singing and a strong, colourless drink that tastes suspiciously like goat brandy). The herders live more comfortably than their parents did; their bungalows are made of breeze-blocks, not mud, and have solar panels. However, they still guard their flocks on camels and remain desperately dependent on a fragile environment. If the land dies their livelihoods and traditions die with it.

The local authorities, which had previously tackled the desertification crisis by paying families to give up herding and move to the city, are pleased enough with the project to have renewed the collaboration. As for Loro Piana, it is delighted with the results. The quality of its cashmere from Alashan herders using this method improved by an average of 1 micron in the first five years. The yield has improved too, enabling the company to reduce significantly the gross volume of wool it harvests. I can vouch for the fact that the cleaned, separated, de-haired fibres that emerge from the production line in the factory that Loro Piana uses in Alashan are as light as foam and soft beyond the powers of human description.

For consumers in the West such niceties mean nothing. They still see cashmere garments costing thousands and cashmere garments costing £50. Most buy what they can afford. Few get so far as comparing the feel of different cashmeres; fewer still consider that brands that cost an arm and a leg (yes, Loro Piana, I am looking at you) may have the redeeming feature that, environmentally, they do not cost the Earth.

That’s why Loro Piana decided to commission Luc Jacquet. Think of it as an exercise in ultra-soft power, an attempt to change the world through goat-based storytelling. It’s a commercial project, obviously, but for Jacquet it is also “an exceptional opportunity”, allowing him to explore another environment at the limits of survivability.

“Consumer society has reached saturation,” he says. “It’s the duty of my generation to deal with this. We have to be sustainable. We cannot leave young people without hope.” Like many of his generation (he is 51) Jacquet has teenage children who stoke his concern for his planet’s future. Unlike most, he believes that he, personally, can make a difference. “If I can do something, it is maybe to awaken people.”

This project excites him because he has been able to follow the chain of the cashmere story, from scraps of vegetation in the sand, to snow-white newborn kids at a farmstead, to the precious finished fibre. He hopes that his film will remind us of “the connection between the clothes we buy and the environments and people they come from”. Explaining a garment or a fabric in terms of its life cycle restores its link to the natural world, and this, he believes, is the key to responsible consumption.

“I don’t understand fashion, but I appreciate things that are well made. I produce my own vegetables; make my own bread and sausages. I like a nice cloth, a good knife: things with a story. That’s true for food, for clothes, for everything.”

Loro Piana has commissioned a trilogy. Subsequent parts will tell the stories of two other “noble fibres”: vicuña, from the endangered Andes camelids of that name, and the ultra-fine black merino wool from New Zealand and Tasmania that Loro Piana calls the “Gift of Kings”. In each case Jacquet hopes to communicate how the garments we buy have a past, a future and an effect on the planet. Ideally, if his finished work matches his dreams, that message will reach a much wider audience than Loro Piana’s elite clientele, and collective appetite for less reckless forms of consumption will grow.

If anyone can achieve such a bold ambition, Jacquet can. He moved millions with his elucidation of the emperor penguin’s breeding habits. Might he not also have it in him to make the world think about where its luxury wools come from?

After just a few days in the desert, watching Jacquet on set and visiting places where he had been filming, I found it hard to rid my mind of the images he had assembled: a herd hurrying home across the dunes; a frail kid drinking from a bottle; a herder tenderly combing out cashmere from a perplexed but pliant goat. When Jacquet has finished working his storyteller’s magic on such imagery, who knows what impact it might have?

On the long journey back to civilisation, images from a different kind of wilderness clouded my optimism. We drove past smoking power stations, vast construction sites and factories swathed in toxic fumes. Shocking at first, the desolation stretched on for hours, until it was merely numbing. Eventually a paparazzi-flash of security cameras welcomed us to Yinchuan, where we boarded a plane. By evening we were back in the familiar embrace of the Beijing smog.

It was sobering to think that we were sharing this fouled air with perhaps 50 billionaires, nearly 1,700 ultra-high-net-worth individuals, half a million consumers classified as “affluent” and millions more hungry for upward mobility. Seventy years after Mao Zedong proclaimed the triumph of communism from atop Tiananmen gate, there is no mistaking the capital’s prevailing ideology: consumerism. Chinese shoppers account for about a third of the world’s spending on luxury products. Perhaps it helps them to forget the environmental desolation that has accompanied their nation’s economic “miracle”.

Those eager shoppers spend £370 billion a year on clothes alone and, if the evidence of Beijing’s boutiques is anything to go by, much of that goes on cashmere. Soon they will be spending more on the fabric than Europeans. What’s harder to find, in China as in Europe, is evidence that anyone is considering the cost of their fashion enthusiasms in anything but financial terms. We have a keen eye for bargains, but avert our eyes from the fact that, as Jacquet put it, “we cannot pay the bill”.

Somehow, he needs to persuade a few more people to start seeing goats.

See this article in its original context here.