What Have We Developed Into?
Lessons from Ghana on Nature, Fashion and Healing
For traders, the quality of a bale can determine whether they earn back what they paid for it. Zaria, who had been selling second-hand goods at Kantamanto for 12 years when we met her, described the reality very simply:
If the things are good, you get your money right now, but if the things are not good, you suffer before you sell it.
Listening to Zaria made the economic imbalance tangible. Poor-quality clothing does not simply become somebody else’s waste: its costs and risks can also be transferred to people whose livelihoods depend on finding value in what others have discarded.
We followed this trail beyond the market – to Agbogbloshie, the Korle Lagoon and eventually the coast at Jamestown.
There, fishermen told us that waste entering the sea has become part of their working lives.
Nowadays, when we cast nets into the sea, instead of catching fish, we end up catching clothing waste, which is heartbreaking. Waste is a problem.
When we interviewed these fishermen, who were deprived of a large amount of fish by the super trawlers off their coast and were suffering from the massive amounts of waste in their fishing nets, we had tears in our eyes. How can it be that we, humans from the so-called “developed” countries, cause such damage to people’s lives, thousands of kilometers away –who used to live a good life, feeding their families?
And with this, our journey began to raise a bigger question.
What does “development” actually mean?
Not far from Kantamanto and Agbogbloshie lies the Korle Lagoon. Today, it is heavily polluted. Yet for Ga communities in Accra, the lagoon and surrounding waters have cultural and spiritual significance.
In Jamestown, we spoke with a traditional community elder, a shaman. He remembered a time when everyday materials returned more easily to the earth; they were simply biodegradable. On the contrary, he described plastic as something that has become a “choke in our life”. His message was strikingly direct:
Let’s go back to our old system.
Of course, going “back” cannot mean recreating the past. But his words made us question the direction in which industrialised societies have travelled.
We tend to measure development through economic growth, infrastructure, technology and material wealth. Industrialised societies have become extraordinarily good at extracting, producing, consuming and discarding.
But what have we developed into if this progress destroys the ecosystems on which life itself depends?
In our interview, Mahu also spoke about microfibres observed in her laboratory work and pointed to abandoned fishing nets and shredded polyester clothing as possible sources. She stressed that discarded clothes do not simply disappear when we stop using them – and that countries already struggling with their own waste should not have to absorb ever-growing quantities of unwanted clothing from elsewhere.
This is the physical afterlife of our consumption.
There is no real “away”. Plastic persists, fragments and moves through ecosystems. What leaves our wardrobes can ultimately become part of a much larger environmental story.
Humans ARE nature
Our conversations in Ghana repeatedly brought us back to connection.
Dr. Kofi Amponsah, a conservationist and Director of Biodiversity Research at the University of Ghana, put it this way:
My message would be: natural is better, in a way that it is sustainable … because everything is connected.
What kind of development sends huge volumes of cheap clothing around the planet, only for part of it to end up in another community’s waterways and fishing nets?
And who should be learning from whom?
The physical afterlife of our consumption
At the University of Ghana, science gave another dimension to what we had been witnessing.
Prof. Dr. Edem Mahu, marine biogeochemist and founder of the Future Ocean Leaders Academy, has co-authored research documenting microplastic contamination in coastal lagoon sediments around Accra. Her wider research has also documented microplastics in fish off Ghana’s coast and in mangrove oysters sampled across West Africa.
Why are we leaving nature in this state? We are going to make the planet uninhabitable.
At Kantamanto, people repair, resell and reinvent enormous quantities of clothing, keeping garments in circulation that might otherwise be discarded.
Fashion designer Titus Nartey Gakpe, founder of Calcul, works with second-hand fabrics and natural dyes. His ideal fashion world is one in which high-quality, sustainable things are produced because people actually want them – rather than overproduced and pushed onto consumers.
Our ways of producing … the Western world can learn from us.
That sentence stayed with us. There is a tendency in industrialised societies to associate indigenous and traditional knowledge with the past. But what if understanding ourselves as part of nature is precisely the knowledge humanity needs for the future?
Of course, this does not mean that Ghana has all the answers. Ghana itself faces enormous environmental, economic and social challenges. No country, culture or community is homogeneous.
But what if we stopped assuming that the industrialised world does?
A society can be technologically advanced and ecologically disconnected at the same time. It can be economically wealthy while impoverishing the living systems on which that wealth ultimately depends.
Perhaps development should not be measured only by what a society can produce, but also by what it can preserve: whether rivers are alive, whether wetlands can regenerate, whether fishermen find fish rather than discarded clothing in their nets, and whether the next generation inherits more than waste.
Redefining fashion – and reconnecting
We also met Yayra Agbofah, founder and creative director of The Revival. His work turns discarded clothing into new designs while linking circularity with community and social impact.
One of my main wishes for the fashion industry is to put a stop to it and to redefine what fashion is while putting the planet first.
