There is a mountain of unworn clothes in the driest desert on earth, large enough to be photographed from space. It grows by 39,000 tons a year and almost none of it will ever rot. The Atacama, in northern Chile, is a place where it may not rain for a decade. On its edge is a duty-free port called Iquique. Every year about 59,000 tons of clothing arrives there from Europe, America and Asia. It is last season's stock that never sold, and the bags people leave at charity shops. Dealers pick through it for anything they can resell across South America. Two thirds of it is worthless. Nobody will pay to ship it back out, so lorries drive it into the desert at night and tip it. The local landfill refuses to take it. The reason given is that the clothing does not biodegrade and is full of chemicals. Most of it is polyester, which is plastic, and in a place with no rain and no soil life it will lie there for centuries. Some of it is set alight, and the smoke drifts over a town of 100,000 people. In 2025 a Chilean court ruled that the dumps had done serious damage to the land. For most of history this could not have happened. Clothes were wool, linen and leather. They were worn out, handed down and patched, and at the very end a rag merchant paid for the scraps. In Yorkshire, from 1813, old woollens were shredded and spun into new cloth. Anything left went on the fields, where wool breaks down in months and feeds the grass. Nobody ever had to find a desert for worn-out wool. We invented a fabric that cannot die, and then we started making it to be thrown away.

In 2006 the commanding general of the US Marines in Iraq banned his men from wearing the most popular sports shirts in America, because of what the burns surgeons were finding. It was 50 degrees in Anbar province. The issued cotton T-shirt was soaked through in minutes, so Marines had been buying their own. Tight, light, sweat-wicking tops in polyester, the kind every gym in the country is full of. They were cooler and they dried fast. Nearly everybody had them on under the body armour. Then the roadside bombs started. A bomb under a vehicle produces a flash of fire lasting a second or two. Cotton scorches in that time. Polyester melts. The Navy doctors at the field hospitals described the result. The shirt turned to liquid and set again on the man's chest and back. A burn that should have been survivable became a far worse one, because there was now a layer of plastic fused across it that had to be cut away. In April 2006 the order went out from Camp Fallujah. No synthetic athletic clothing outside the wire. It named the brands. The Marines then went looking for something that wicked sweat, dried fast, did not stink after a week and would not melt. What they found had been grazing in New Zealand the whole time. Fine merino wool is now standard issue next to the skin for troops who expect fire. That is twice in 25 years, in two different services, that plastic clothing has been tested on young men by an explosion. Both times the answer came off a sheep.

To do what a cow does with grass, you would need a 200-litre fermentation tank, a licence and a microbiologist. To do what a cow does with straw, you would need a pulp mill. To do what a cow does with cobalt, you would need a B12 plant in China and a container ship. To do what a cow does with beet pulp, you would need an incinerator, because that is where it goes without one. To do what a cow does with soybean meal, you would need a landfill. To do what a cow does with a 40-degree hillside, you would need a tractor that does not exist. To do what a cow does with rain, you would need a reservoir, a pump and a bill. To do what a cow does with seed oil, you would need a hydrogenation plant, and it would make margarine. To do what a cow does with sunlight, you would need a solar farm that grows steak. To do what a cow does with its own waste, you would need a fertiliser factory running on gas. To do what a cow does in a year, you would need all of the above and a calf. Every job on that list is one the cow does standing up, for nothing, and does again next spring. They have filed it under low-tech. It is the only technology on the list that works.

1891: A chemist in St Petersburg synthesises a new compound, bisphenol A. Nobody can think of a use for it. 1936: Edward Charles Dodds, a London biochemist hunting for a synthetic oestrogen, gives it to rats with their ovaries removed. It works. BPA is a sex hormone. 1938: Dodds finds a stronger one, DES, and BPA is dropped as a drug. DES is the one that passes the interview. It goes on to be prescribed to pregnant women for 30 years, until it is pulled for causing cancer in their daughters. 1957: The chemical industry discovers the reject makes a marvellous hard, clear plastic. Full production. Over the following decades: baby bottles, water cooler jugs, the lining of nearly every tin on the shelf, and the receipt the shop hands you with them. 2004: The CDC tests the urine of 2,517 Americans. BPA in 93%, with the highest levels in the children. 2008: Canada declares it toxic and takes it out of baby bottles. The industry prints "BPA free" on everything and swaps in bisphenol S. Same family, same oestrogen trick. 2023: The European Food Safety Authority redoes the sums and cuts the tolerable daily dose by 20,000 times. It adds that every age group in Europe is already over it. 2025: The EU bans it from anything that touches food. A compound too feeble to be sold as a medicine was approved as crockery for infants. It was a hormone 21 years before it was a bottle, and the paper saying so sat in Nature the whole time.

Every fibre a human being wore before 1935 came off an animal or out of a field. Wool, linen, silk, leather, cotton, fur, hemp. Ten thousand years of it and nothing else. Nylon arrived in 1935, from a DuPont laboratory, made out of coal and air. Polyester followed in 1941, out of oil. The fleece jacket arrived in 1979, spun from the same plastic as a fizzy drink bottle. Polyester is now more than half of every fibre made on earth. Every wash sends a few hundred thousand fragments of it down the drain. In 2020 they found plastic in the human placenta. In 2022 they found it in blood. In 2024 they found it in the testicles of every man they tested. In 2025 they weighed it in the brain and found the equivalent of a plastic spoon. Meanwhile, in 2023, a Swaledale fleece off a Yorkshire hill fetched 5p a kilo. Shearing her cost the farmer close to £2. He paid to have her wool taken away. This year is the best wool year in a decade, and a fleece will just about cover the man who took it off. The only fibre on earth that grows back every summer, insulates when wet, refuses to burn and rots quietly in a field when you are finished with it, is worth less than the labour of removing it. The one they found in your blood is £200 a jacket. The sheep has not been informed.

Medicine's record on the man who turned out to be right is the record of what it did to him first. Semmelweis, 1847: doctors should wash their hands between the mortuary and the maternity ward. Ridiculed, sacked, died in an asylum in 1865. Accepted twenty years after his death. Alice Stewart, 1956: an x-ray of a pregnant woman gives the child cancer. Ignored by every radiologist in the country. Accepted twenty-five years later. Kilmer McCully, 1969: homocysteine damages arteries, and cholesterol is not the whole story. Eased out of Harvard. Accepted thirty years later. John Yudkin, 1972: sugar, not fat, is the killer. Career buried by the fat men, conferences closed to him, died out of print. Accepted forty years later. Stanley Prusiner, 1982: a protein with no genes can be infectious. Laughed at in the corridors. Nobel Prize, 1997. Barry Marshall, 1984: stomach ulcers are an infection. Drank the bacteria to prove it because nobody would run the trial. Nobel Prize, 2005. Frances Kelsey, 1960: refused to license thalidomide because the data was thin. Called obstructive for two years. Then the babies were born. Every one of them was outnumbered by a consensus, and the consensus was wrong every single time it was counted. Consensus is not a form of evidence. It is a form of employment.