In "Unraveled," entrepreneur, researcher, and advocate Maxine Bédat follows the life of an American icon—a pair of jeans—to reveal what really happens to give us our clothes.

We visit a Texas cotton farm figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms. Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines. Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked, and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them. Finally, those jeans we had to have get sent to landfills—or, if they've been donated, shipped back around the world to Africa, where they're sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and burned in mountains of garbage.

"Unraveled" is not just the story of a pair of pants, but also the story of our global economy and our role in it. "Unraveled" challenges us to use our relationship with our jeans—and all that we wear—to reclaim our central role as citizens to refashion a society in which all people can thrive and preserve the planet for generations to come.

Go to the catalog to borrow "Unraveled" by Maxine Bédat