[lisarea]

Thank you, godfry. I did not know that. Angora makes me sneeze, so I'm not generally a fan myself. (I actually unravelled an angora sweater a while ago to make a scarf out of it. I could only do it a little at a time because I'd be sneezing and my eyes would tear until I couldn't see what I was doing, and it took me a disturbingly long time to get around to asking myself "Why?" I mean, it's not like I could wear it when I was done or anything.)

Anyway, on the overall vanity/exploitation thing, I think it's really a matter of understanding that different people have different priorities. Everyone picks their battles. Is it vain to exploit an oyster or a cow or a goat or a rabbit or a musk ox or a human being so you can feel pretty or impress others? Yeah, probably. Is it lazy to fail to thoroughly research every consumer good you purchase and weigh the significance of its impact on the environment to ensure that it has caused the least amount of damage possible? Yeah, probably that too. Everyone has an impact on the world around them, though. And it's fairly safe to assume that anyone who's arguing about it on the internet is living in an industrialized society, and is pretty unlikely to be intimately familiar with the means of production employed for things they use. It's also fairly safe to assume that anyone who would bother to argue about it on the internet has some personal priorities for themselves, and that they are, in some way, doing what they can to minimize their impact, do the right thing when and where they can.

It's simplistic to argue, then, that there's one way to determine whether someone is irresponsible and insufferably vain. Do they eat meat? Do they wear pearls or furs or leather or gemstones? Virtually any metal or gemstone is likely to be a product of the exploitation of human miners somewhere, so the 'blood diamonds' argument is overly simplistic too. There are plenty of blood sapphires and blood rubies out there, too. And there are even alternatives in the diamond industry as well. There are Canadian diamonds, and even manufactured diamonds coming into the market as well.

Any food product you eat, animal based or not, is likely produced in some manner as to kill or injure someone or something somewhere along its production chain. Fluffy woodland creatures are mangled by the threshers that harvest oats and wheat. Rice paddies, in many places, particularly within the US, are created artificially, by flooding large areas of land, thus displacing native wildlife, increasing methane and subsequently increasing global warming, increasing mosquito populations and subsequently propagating things like West Nile virus, decimating bird populations.

Anything you use is fairly likely to be hurting something, somewhere. Is your cotton harvested ethically? Are your clothes made in sweatshops? Are your petroleum based leather substitutes sending great big billows of carcinogenics out into schoolyards, nature preserves, and waterways? Are you contributing to the depletion of the atmosphere and limited fuel supplies by ordering things over the internet and having them delivered discretely, rather than using the more efficient methods of transport afforded by the distribution methods employed by big box store chains like WalMart?

Yeah, probably.

Can you avoid having some detrimental effect on other lives? No. Probably not. Again, particularly if you live in an industrialized society, you don't know where your consumer products come from. You don't control that. And even if you do manage to live completely off the grid (which, if you are arguing about it on the internet, you don't), you still have a footprint. Maybe you have farting livestock sending methane up into the atmosphere, maybe you're destroying native flora and fauna with your vegetable garden. Maybe you're just taking up too much space to justify the decreased demand for products in the production chain (actually, very probably that). Like the means of production or not, centralized manufacturing and production methods are probably, in the long run, more economical than maintaining a society full of completely self-sufficient households.

Is it vain to wear jewelry or furs or whatever? Yeah, probably, if you want to be all pejorative and judgemental about it. It's also vain to replace your jeans with holes in them, vain to get new glasses frames. It's vain to wash your hair and your body with detergents every day. It's vain to wear any kind of makeup, perfumes, hair products, or other cosmetics. It's all killing something, somewhere.

Maybe the damage you're causing is somewhat less obvious, slightly less direct, than being able to say "This product is made directly from an animal," but there's something just a little self-indulgent and almost a little corporate about absolving yourself of responsibility just because you've managed to distance yourself from the cruelty done in your name.

We all have some negative impact. We are all responsible for some cruelty, some injury, some death. It's unavoidable. And we all (or at least most of us) try to do something to minimize, mitigate, or atone for that. But just because you may have chosen one route doesn't mean that everyone has to choose that route as well. We all have different priorities, and we all have to pick our battles. So just because someone hasn't picked the same battle you have doesn't mean that they're not fighting something else that needs fought.

Sorry for the tangent. Sometimes, buttons I didn't even know I had get pushed.