Leather: Dead Skin, Environmental Nightmare

The Green Issue of Vanity Fair, currently on shelves, correctly notes in discussing the impact of our purchasing decisions that "fur and leather…mean slaughtering animals," but in an issue packed with otherwise thoughtful analysis, they missed the fact that in addition to the sad fact that wearing fur or leather means, literally, wearing a part of an animal's corpse (or many of them, if you're wearing a full length fur), both products have adverse environmental impacts that far outpace their faux fur and pleather (i.e., faux leather) counterparts.