Generally, the guy who is telling me that cotton kills is standing there in his cotton bdu pants that all the sar folks wear. He indicates then that cotton is okay for pants, but not for torso or core coverage. Lots of important torso parts are actually in his pants, but logic, and irony, have no place here.

Clearly, cotton doesn't kill. It only maims.
Usually the 'cotton kills' diatribe is directed toward folks who wander into the woods in cotton shorts and t-shirts, and get caught in a 40 degree rainstorm. If they were in polypropylene shorts and t-shirts, they would still be hypothermic. Fabric isn't the issue; poorly- designed or poorly chosen clothing is the real problem.


In the Northeast and midwest, folks who spend serious time outdoors, doing serious work, often wear cotton thermals and cotton Carhart coveralls. If cotton kills, you would see stacks of cadavers in the gutter due to textile-induced hypothermia. In the northwest Filson cotton have garments served for years.Carhart and Filson gear is not cheap, and is not second best. The synthetics enjoy the benefit of marketing services-marketers being the people who taught us that folks who live in a country with fabulously pure tap water should pay $4/gallon for bottled water from France. Marketing creates a new conventional wisdom, bring us synthetic garments, titanium cookwear, over-engineered cutlery. It all sells at a premium, confers status on the purchaser, and generates lots of noise in the literature. And it seeks to replace the cotton and wool garments, aluminum and steel cookware, and Mora knives, all of which do the job at least 95% as well as the new technology while costing a fraction as much as the new stuff.

Reading Blast's Blog brought this home to me recently. I had been coveting the Olicamp cup that slide over a nalgene bottle-one of his kit pictures revealed to me that a 15oz stewed tomato can with improvised handle serves the same function at no cost. Thanks, Blast-