I’m fascinated by the natural world, in particular varieties of bugs, butterflies and the habits they live in.
In 2017, I came to the UK to continue my studies in Footwear Design one of my first observations was that there are fewer insects compared to my country of Hungary.
I had this strange feeling that something is going on, I became ridiculously excited when I noticed an ant!
I had a big collection of small nature books called “diver books” focused on various things like plants and insects, bugs, butterflies. According to recent studies, “the world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.
The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century” (Carrington, 2019).
Insects are mainly threatened by the vast amount of pesticides (Rachel Carson - Silent Spring), diseases, climate change and environmental disasters just like the burn of the Amazon rainforest which may house as many as 2.5 million species of insects and over 90% of the animal species in the Amazon are insects. And only a tiny fraction of this number have been described by scientists.
Over the summer, I had the chance to visit Iceland and its only tannery which is focused on producing fish leather in an environmentally friendly way. Leather made out of fish skin is not as common, yet historically, the skin is a by-product of the fishing industry, the world’s fish harvest was around 150 million in 2017 which means compared to the cattle industry the farmed fish industry is bigger by 63 billions of animals. Out of “one thousand kilos of raw fish, forty kilos is the discarded skin” (Hoogvliet, 2017, p. 27) which mean thousands of tons of fish skin waste which could be potentially turned into leather. (Even though cowhide is a by-product as well, the rising demand for meat is the reason for 80% of the deforestation in the Amazon countries)
The Footwear collection aimed to “reinvent” a biodegradable material by using waste by experimenting and making my own fish leather. I believe the change for the Footwear industry; what we take from nature could return to nature
