We make it part of our mission to promote the practice of thoughtful, eco-minded shopping\u2014which you Valentino Flats can see everywhere on Refinery29, from Amber Valleta's treatise about responsibly made clothing to Greta Eagan's four-point checklist on how to shop without being evil. \nAnd, in a lot of these conversations, conventional cotton crops up as \"The Bad Guy,\" a claim that is always supported by the same facts and figures about pesticide use, health risks, and the dangers of GMOs. However, these conversations rarely include the cotton industry, and that's not totally fair.

So, in the spirit of constructive conversation, we invited eco-journalist Alden Wicker of Ecocult and senior direct of Cotton Inc.'s agricultural and environmental research team, Dr. Edward M. Barnes, to talk through the points and counterpoints of how cotton really affects the planet.

You wouldn't think a nice, bland textile like cotton would be so controversial. But \"The Fabric of Our Lives\" has become a flashpoint in the battle for more sustainable and ethical clothing. Advocates of eco-friendly fashion accuse the cotton industry of heavy pesticide and herbicide use, dangerous working conditions, and even putting the consumer's health at risk when we wear its products.

Given how passionate I am about the aforementioned issues, I jumped at the chance to debate a real, live cotton scientist. As a 12-year employee of Cotton Inc., Dr. Ed Barnes\u2019 loyalties definitely lie with conventional cotton. But, I hoped he, being a scientist, would treat me to some real talk.

Before we spoke, I spent some time talking to sustainable-fashion advocates and gathering the latest data on the cotton industry. I wanted to go Valentino Pumps into this debate with the objective facts, check my biases at the door, and keep my mind open to opposing views. In fact, I did learn a thing or two about cotton. And, I think Dr. Barnes did, too.

Alden Wicker:<\/strong> Thank you for speaking with me. As Valentino Sneakers Sale you know, the impetus for this interview was Amber Valletta\u2019s April story for Refinery29. The first thing said was that conventionally grown cotton is one of the most heavily sprayed plants in farming.

Ed Barnes:<\/strong> That is definitely not the case. Critics like to say that cotton uses 25% of the world\u2019s pesticides. It\u2019s one of the urban legends that floats out there on the Internet. Global data is hard to get, but we use data from Cropnosis that tracks sales of pesticides around the Valentino Ballerina Shoes world. It\u2019s not the perfect data source, since it\u2019s based on dollar values, but we know that cotton uses about 6% of pesticides used. This was surprising to me, but there\u2019s a lot more pesticide use in fruits and vegetables.