Grateful Dead

dead.net the official site

I appreciate all the info. on the cotton industry, good to know. BUT,what is with all the whining about lengths of sets, song choices, John Mayer and Bob Weir's personal life, ticket prices, etc. You guys are so "ungrateful"! The Dead have kicked ass touring for 50 years and it seems like the ultimate double standard to judge who is on drugs and who isn't when you look at the Grateful Dead audience. Bob is old and still going strong, not sure you will be when you are his age. As for the shirt whiners real hippies invented tie dye shirts so they wouldn't have to spend stupid amounts of money on clothes. Quit whining and make your own shirts or buy them from fans who make them.

-Cotton is the most widely used textile crop on earth - covering almost 5% of Earth's cultivated land -Cotton is second for most pesticide use of all crops & it uses 25% of all of the petrochemical based pesticides, fungicides and herbicides globally. -In the US, it takes about 1/3 of a pound of pesticides and herbicides to grow enough conventional cotton for just one T-shirt. -The Environmental Protection Agency considers seven of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton in the United States as "possible," "likely," "probable," or "known" human carcinogens (acephate, dichloropropene, diuron, fluometuron, pendimethalin, tribufos, and trifluralin) -These chemicals absorb into the soil which can affect nearby crops, get into water supplies and rivers and affect many lifeforms downstream -Because cotton is grown primarily for its fiber, it is regulated as a non-food crop yet the majority of the cotton plant in the form of cottonseed, approximately 60% by weight, ends up in our food supply! -Most cotton is heavily processed using additional resources for stripping, waxing, bleaching, dying and softening 2,700 liters of water is used to grow the cotton for just 1 t-shirt!!! ( & that doesn't even account for the processing dying etc....) That's enough water for 1 person to drink for 900 days or enough water to flush your ( non low flow) toilet 270 times! -All this & then there's all the energy consumption as well in growing, manufacturing, processing, transportation etc.... So - ORGANIC COTTON is the wiser option for both the health of people and the environment (hemp is even better - especially when in relation to water consumption which is becoming a BIG issue in California, but at the moment it's not as readily available) :( ORGANIC FARMING - uses nontoxic pesticides, fungicides & herbicides. Come on Dead.net, the least you could do is have a small section of sustainable clothes like Jerry Garcia & Phish's sites. The best thing you could do is switch to either hemp or 100% ORGANIC cotton clothing like Neil Young's site/tours. Stop damaging the planet, the water & the food supply!