The Skeleton in the Gear Closet

The hunting apparel industry is becoming more environmentally friendly. Why aren't we celebrating?

Most hunters are frugal consumers who like extending the usable life of their gear as much as possible. So why is “sustainability” a dirty word? Photograph courtesy of DeAnna Bublitz

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Looking back, I can’t remember if I said it first or my dad did. 

“Hang on, I have to shed a layer. I’m sweating my ass off.” 

Despite the many differences distinguishing my dad’s 57-year-old, 6-foot 4-inch body from my younger, smaller frame, we metabolize calories and pour sweat similarly — especially on opening weekend of rifle season when leftover summer temperatures linger in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains. 

We both drop our packs and start the layer-shedding shuffle. He ditches an old windbreaker patterned with regionally inaccurate leaf litter that smells like coffee and Copenhagen. I remove a $400 waterproof shell with pit zippers and a camo design resembling Minecraft grass. He keeps his cotton turtleneck layered over his short-sleeved cotton t-shirt. I leave on a thin, synthetic long sleeve and merino quarter-zip with thumb holes.

I’ve heard older hunters make fun of young guys for “all their fancy crap.” Thankfully, my dad is too kind to poke fun at me. He knows that I lucked into all this gear through my job rather than spending thousands of hard-earned dollars on it. He also knows that, when I talk about the wonders of modern hunting apparel, I’m not wrong. My moisture-wicking synthetics, merino base layers, and down puffy jackets do have a leg up on his cotton, Filson wool, and the fire engine red, 30-year-old rib knit union suit with the buttoned ass flap. But his gear is stitched together with memories, stories, and blood spilled from wild animals that became delicious meals. It still works perfectly well. Why would he get rid of it?

Amidst a societal overconsumption crisis, my dad is the face of some long-overlooked environmental superpowers of American hunting culture — a tendency toward frugality, “waste-not-want-not” ethics, and stretching the dollar. He buys products that are made to last and wears them for decades. In the age of fast fashion, his red union suit seems borderline revolutionary — and incredibly sustainable.

Lately, hunting apparel companies have been going through a sustainability glow-up of their own. They use recycled materials, donate overstock, and have mostly ditched dangerous forever chemicals. They resell second-hand products in brick-and-mortar stores and repair worn gear. They work hard to keep product “in the wild and out of the landfill,” as KUIU VP of brand marketing Kevin Wilkerson puts it. Once hunting gear enters circulation, consumers constantly come up with new and creative ways to extend its usable life.

But somewhere along the way, “sustainability” became a four-letter word for hunters, a word better suited for a climate change rally than a tree stand or a duck blind. So, rather than celebrating their strides in product sustainability outwardly, these brands have hardly said a word about any of it. 

The New Age of Hunting Apparel 

A cotton turtleneck and the red union suit of Hill family lore peaks out under the author’s dad’s jacket. The author, on the other hand, wears mostly brand-new technical gear.

The value of the hunting apparel industry is hurtling toward the $2-billion mark in 2030, one market study shows. If you’ve purchased camo recently, you understand why. Everything out there is exorbitantly expensive and highly specialized. Hunters with the means to do so are increasingly taking advantage of a groundswell of product innovation by outfitting themselves with “kits” specific to the species, regions, and seasons they hunt. There’s obvious logic to this; what an early season archery mule deer hunter wears in Utah is nothing like what a late-season tree stand whitetail hunter wears in Michigan. One outfit should resemble a mosquito net. The other should resemble an insulated military fortress. 

The pressure to buy new and buy more weighs especially heavy on hunters who know the undeniable power of quality gear. Hunters also grapple with an ephemeral question when confronting the annual onslaught of product launches; could this year’s kit get me closer to a 7-point bull than last year’s? How many different climates and ecosystems am I hunting in this year? The answers mostly depend on how deep a hunter’s pockets are and how willing they are to shell out.

“The consumer doesn’t just hunt in Montana anymore,” Sitka senior product manager of hunting John Barklow tells The Westrn. “They also hunt in Arizona and Alaska. They also travel east to whitetail hunt and they travel to Canada to snow goose hunt.”

“The consumer data used to back up that waterfowl hunters were only waterfowl hunters, and whitetail hunters were only whitetail hunters. But now, people back east aspire to come out west to elk hunt. Western elk hunters want to go to the Midwest for a whitetail hunt. It opens their aperture to have these diverse experiences with diverse species and environments. Hunters are traveling more than ever.”

They’re also spending more than ever. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2001 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, hunters spent $1.2 billion on auxiliary hunting equipment that year. (“Auxiliary hunting equipment” covers “sleeping bags, packs, duffel bags, tents, traps, binoculars and field glasses, special clothing, boots and waders, maintenance and repair of equipment, processing and taxidermy costs, and electronic auxiliary equipment such as global positioning systems.”) Hunters spent $3.9 billion on the same goods in 2021, according to the updated survey. Adjusted for inflation, that accounts for a 98% increase in auxiliary expenditures spread across just an 11% increase in hunter numbers (from 13 million to 14.4 million) since 2001.

So just how necessary is all that new stuff? Even though there’s plenty of what old-timers would probably consider extraneous crap, innovative new products keep hunters warmer, cooler, dryer, and generally safer while they’re out chasing their passions. 

But all the product innovation and entrepreneurial spirit undergirding the hunting apparel industry comes with an ironic paradox. If hunting gear is evolving to be more durable, versatile, lighter weight, stronger, streamlined, and generally better, aren’t we all going to need less of it?

The Patagonia Effect

The iconic outdoor gear brand has a reputation for environmental activism. Photograph by Nathan Congleton

Non-hunting outdoor gear brands started recognizing this irony — and the runaway consumerism tied to it — years ago. Enter brands using environmental ethics to compete for our almighty dollars. As consumers, we’ve put up with a lot of greenwashing bullshit, and we still do. But at least some of the brands we love are starting to think about their environmental footprints. 

Patagonia was one of the early leaders in product sustainability within the outdoor gear industry. In 2005, it started collecting used gear from its customers for its Common Threads Recycling program. In 2008, it launched a fully recyclable nylon waterproof shell. Then, in 2011, it did something that would forever change how the outdoor gear industry interacted with the notion of sustainability. 

Rather than telling customers to buy more of its environmentally friendly jackets, Patagonia told its customers not to buy its jackets at all. In the days leading up to Black Friday in 2011, it ran a simple, bracing, full-page ad in the New York Times featuring a photo of a black zip-up. Above the hoodless collar, four words shouted at the reader. 

“Don’t buy this jacket.”

The ad was supposed to be both a quip about the jacket’s durability and a lesson in buyer’s ethics. If you have one already, you don’t need another. It put part of the sustainability onus on the consumer. Readers loved it. So did buyers. The ad ripped a hole in the space-time fabric of the advertising world. It headlined business lectures on YouTube and shook marketing experts to their cores. 

The ethos behind that ad inspired a recent Patagonia documentary titled The Shitthropocene. Through interviews with scientists, historians, and Patagonia employees, it explores the evolution of our global consumerism problem in hilarious, self-deprecating detail. 

“Environmental impact was not always the heartbeat of our decision-making process. But throughout our history, durability has been the hallmark,” Patagonia head of product impact and innovation Matt Dwyer says into the camera. 

“[Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard] believed that, when designing a product, you make it durable. After that, you make it repairable … After that, we thought about resale, because we want to make it resellable. And finally, when the thing is so thrashed that it ends up in a pile, we want to make sure that we can harvest those ingredients and put them into the next useful life.”

The process of creating a circular economy for a piece of gear —by which a product goes from the manufacturing plant to the sales floor to the wilderness and back to the manufacturing plant again — is still in the nascent stages for the hunting apparel industry, Barklow says. He points out that major hunting brands are maturing in ways that more generalist outdoor brands matured years ago, due to relatively recent capital investments in brands like Sitka, KUIU, First Lite, Stone Glacier, Mystery Ranch, and others. But make no mistake — it’s on the horizon.

“I think it’s happening,” Barklow says. “Behind the scenes where I work, one of the primary points of the design ethos is durability. That word could be tweaked a little bit and, potentially, could be ‘sustainability’. Ultimately, we don’t want the product to wear out in the field. We also don’t want it to end up in a landfill.”

A Sustainable Future

A scene from Sitka’s repair facility. Photograph courtesy of Sitka

Sitka’s repair program has exploded in popularity in recent years, Barklow says. He chalks it up to the Sitka consumer’s overwhelming desire to fix an expensive product rather than see it go to waste. 

“We have guys getting 500 days out of a pair of pants,” he says. “If they put a hole in those pants, we have a repair facility in our flagship store in Bozeman. You can come in with a Sitka product, get a bumper replaced, get a Gore-Tex patch, get a zipper replaced. We have made the commitment that goes with the durability. It’s an investment, not a purchase, that’s going to pay off for many years.”

Sitka has been using mostly recycled materials for years, Barklow says. So has First Lite, one of Sitka’s top competitors. When asked whether First Lite told its customers it was using recycled materials, First Lite senior category manager Logan Williamson admitted that it probably wasn’t front-of-mind for the brand’s marketing strategy. Some of that stems from a concern that its consumers would think buying a $400 jacket made from recycled materials would be a complete ripoff — and, at one time, those consumers might have been right.

“Ten years ago, the material technology of quality recycled products was not what it is today,” Williamson says. “So much has happened recently to prove that quality can come from recycled materials. If our customer is looking at a higher-end product, they’re thinking ‘if I’m going to spend four hundred dollars on a jacket, it better be made from the best materials.’ The education and expectation around the quality of recycled materials today is just something we need to continue to educate the customer on.”

Sitka and First Lite also have their sights set on being completely PFAS-free in the immediate future. Recently, multiple states started cracking down on products containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. These “forever chemicals,” of which there are thousands, are linked to developmental delays in children, reproductive health challenges in pregnant women, reduced infection response, and elevated cancer risk. They’re common in plastics, food packaging, textiles, fire extinguishing foam, and a variety of other sources. They leach into public drinking water. Now, states from California to Vermont require PFAS warning labels on products and have banned PFAS outright in aftermarket fabric treatments, children’s clothing, and food containers.

“Starting in 2022, all our new material developments were PFAS-free,” Williamson says. “By next year, all of our new garments will be PFAS-free. Changing over from old fabrics took a little more time, but we were already marching down that path years before it was mandated. That put us in a good position with some of this new legislation.” 

Rather than talking about these technical advances, hunting brands usually build product narratives out of words like “longevity,” “durability,” and “value.” One of the closing quotes of the Patagonia documentary, which comes from an interview with Dwyer, follows nearly identical logic to the “durability” narrative coming from major hunting gear brands.

“We believed then, and we believe now, that the best thing you can do for the planet is make a product that lasts as long as possible,” Dwyer says. “In theory, no product should end up in a landfill … but especially [not] waders.”

Sitka knows a thing or two about waders. In 2018, the brand launched its own pair of chest waders as part of their waterfowl line. Right now, the Delta Zip Wader sells for $999. The high price is justified by the product’s complete repairability from the straps to the boots, which allows it to grow with and work hard for its owner, Barklow explains. How did Sitka manage to market such an expensive product? Whether it intended to or not, its product description borrows a page from Patagonia’s 2011 playbook, encouraging its consumers to make a one-time investment in a product they’ll never need to replace.

“The Delta wader is destined to be the last wader you’ll ever buy.”

Conservation or Sustainability?

In 2022, Yvon Chouinard made headlines for donating 98% of Patagonia, valued at around $3 billion, to a trust and non-profit specifically formed for the brand to combat climate change and protect native habitats around the world. It was an example of the company walking the environmentalism walk in a massive way. It didn’t just donate a percentage of its proceeds; it gave away the very motor of its money-making machine.

Obviously, this is an unconventional business strategy — and an inaccessible one for most outdoor gear brands funded by private equity. (Patagonia has its own venture capital firm, Tin Shed Ventures, making it an extreme rarity.) But the move also proved that a man as wealthy and successful as Chouinard could still remain a hippie surfer after a multi-decade reign.  

Chouinard’s decision is a pure distillation of the concept of “brand identity,” something outdoor gear companies are especially adept at making profitable. They lean into the identity of their consumers because those consumers are exceptionally proud to be outdoorspeople. Like members of any political ideology, cultural identity, sports fanbase, or collegiate affiliation, outdoorspeople splatter their cars, water bottles, laptops, and coolers with sticker after sticker. They declare they’d “rather be on the trail,” that their “other ride has two wheels,” that they’ve been to 27 national parks and visited the gift shop at every one. Those obsessions define us. They help us find our community, where we’re safe and understood, and where our values won’t be called into question.

Two hunters climb a slope. Photograph courtesy of DeAnna Bublitz

For those who speak decal, if a Patagonia sticker means you value climate action, then KUIU, First Lite, and Sitka stickers mean you value wildlife conservation. These brands go out of their way to communicate with buyers that they support habitat restoration, GPS collaring projects, derelict fence removal, and other efforts that improve the lives of the species they love to hunt. 

“It’s a lot more tangible for the hunt consumer to look at a [wildlife conservation] initiative and recognize what is being done,” Williamson says. “That’s because it’s generally being done in their backyard. Through our Camo for Conservation initiative, part of our sale of waterfowl products and proceeds go to support Delta Waterfowl’s Million Ducks campaign. 

“We put a tremendous amount of hen houses in key nesting grounds throughout the Prairie Pothole region last year. That’s pretty tangible for a duck hunter. It’s ensuring greater nesting and hatching success. They realize ‘Oh, my money is going to help put more ducks in the air.’ They can feel good about their purchase.” 

But if hunters take pride in their contributions to the health of our wildlife and wildlands, many of them prefer to do so far away from society’s watchful eye. Aside from a few loud voices, the hunting community at large hasn’t shown much urgency in proving its value to those who disagree with it. In fact, we’ve been borderline defiant against any suggestion that we engage in virtue signaling. Why should we have to explain ourselves just to get an empty mark of approval?

But words matter — not as markers of political affiliation or identity, but as tools with power to communicate values and intentions. If “sustainability” has become a four-letter word for many hunters, then that massively contradicts the practice’s roots in indigenous subsistence and rural frugality, our taste for wild and local foods, and our passions for wildlife and wildlands. Those roots should reach much deeper into our collective consciousness than the shallowness of partisanship, clean sorting, and groupthink. They should actually make us a walking definition of sustainability. 

A Borrower’s Economy

Plenty of hunters — likely the majority — would willingly embrace that definition. Fellow hunter DeAnna Bublitz comes to mind. She provides a tangible example of what it means to weave sustainability into the very fabric of her hunting life — and she builds her hunting community while doing it.

DeAnna Bublitz hunts on a snowy day in Montana. Photograph courtesy of DeAnna Bublitz

Bublitz was 29 and living with meager means when she decided to try hunting for the first time. Even if she had expendable funds to drop on new hunting clothes, her options in 2013 would have been limited. Instead, she joined the ranks of new female hunters navigating the woods in mix-and-match clearance rack camo, base layers intended for running or hiking, backpacks built for school buses and campgrounds, and a good pair of hiking boots. 

“I looked ridiculous,” Bublitz recalls, laughing. “I had a clearance pair of Mossy Oak pants from Cabela’s that were a little too big. I wore a black Patagonia base layer and a high desert sagebrush vest. I capped it all off with a blaze orange Stormy Kromer cap. So I looked like some weird Elmer Fudd with this bright green hipster hiking pack.”

Bublitz fell in love with hunting in her first season. And yes, even in her ridiculous getup, she and her mentor got into deer. Bublitz didn’t quite connect because she was shaking too hard. But the outfit would get her through the next seven years of hunting, many of them successful, until it came time for her to make a significant camo purchase in 2020. She invested in a pair of Sitka Timberline pants — a perennial favorite among women. She still hunts in the same pair, just as Barklow intends for the products he designs. 

Around this time, Bublitz also started the DEER Camp gear library. In a storage locker on the outskirts of Missoula, she carries just about every piece of hunting gear one could need — short of ammo, guns, and knives. When hunters want to ditch used gear, rather than coordinating a sale on Facebook Marketplace or throwing hundreds of dollars of gear into a landfill, they bring it to Bublitz, where it might help a new hunter notch their first tag in an affordable manner.

The DEER Camp Gear Library in Missoula is open to anyone in need. Photograph courtesy of DeAnna Bublitz

“These are expensive activities,” she says. “We want to make them as accessible as possible. We want to get people excited about them and, hopefully, make them advocates for their outdoor spaces.”

Surely, Bublitz didn’t create the gear library strictly to extend the useful life of all the hunting gear that’s already in circulation. But getting one step closer to a circular gear economy was a convenient by-product of her effort to give back to her local hunting community, she says. 

Efforts mirroring hers are plentiful across the country. On Sept. 28, the Pennsylvania Game Commission will host its yard sale-style Outdoor Exchange where hunters can buy gently used gear at a discount. First Lite employees monitor a private Facebook group dedicated to buying, selling, and trading used gear. The National Deer Association and Passing Along The Heritage, accept gear donations for programming for new hunters, hunters with disabilities, and hunters from disadvantaged backgrounds. These are all examples of sustainability in practice, proof that hunters aren’t strangers to the concept in the slightest — even if some recoil at the word itself.

“The notion of being environmentally responsible or sustainable, the actual practices, are not dissimilar across these different cultural and political groups,” says author, communication consultant, and vegetarian-turned-hunter Tovar Cerulli. 

“But language carries so much baggage and power in the context of several decades of this partisan divide between the so-called environmental community and so-called hunting community, even though there’s lots of overlap.”

The Four-Letter “S” Word

The hunting apparel industry’s preference for words like “conservation” and “durability” over “sustainability” is mostly just semantics. But it also hints at a need to play things safe. 

Brands in their relative infancy can’t afford outrage. Sure, it’s impossible to tell how many hunting apparel consumers burned their Carhartt jackets, smashed their Keurigs, and poured their Bud Light down the drain in largely unfruitful efforts to prove that going “woke” means going broke. But the risk of alienating a largely conservative consumer base still looms large in the hunting industry.

“People don’t resist change so much as they resist loss,” Cerulli says. “They don’t want their friends to turn away from them because they started using ‘leftist environmental language’ … especially now with social media and the speed with which things happen. If any brand in the hunting industry gets seen using that language, they might risk getting a firestorm of people being upset with them and questioning their loyalty to hunting.”

The idea that hunting apparel brands could get canceled for caring about things like sustainability and climate change should sound ridiculous to any hunter who cares even a smidge about wildlife conservation. If you zoom out enough to see the whole picture, sustainability and conservation are clearly two fish in the same bucket. 

Few entities have more power to paint that picture than hunting brands themselves. That’s why something gets lost when the hunting industry hesitates to talk about sustainability for fear of upsetting a more conservative consumer base — especially when non-hunting outdoor gear brands, respectfully, won’t shut up about the environmental ethics behind their products. It grows the divide between how hunters and environmentalists are perceived, a divide that makes it much easier for the non-hunter and the anti-hunter to cast the hunter aside.

The Next 30 Years

The author and her dad ride out a cold, damp evening sit together.

As Cerulli points out, the ideological division hunters and non- or anti-hunters engage in has “shut down a certain exchange of ideas and openness to different perspectives — even though there are a lot of us who don’t sort neatly into those groups.” 

That’s a damn shame. It also reeks of cowardice from those of us who don’t “sort neatly.” We should be talking about how climate change might impact the future of hunting opportunities in North America, how long it takes for a pair of waders to break down in a landfill, or how certain waterproofing treatments leach harmful chemicals into our waters. If we try to keep a tidy line of demarcation separating us from environmentalists, we risk getting further cast as an enemy to society’s larger ecological goals. As merely 4% of the current U.S. population, hunters can’t afford bad PR.

Instead, the hunting community and the industry that outfits it could start to blur that line. We could embrace the everloving shit out of complex environmental ethics. At the very least, that would open up more breathing room for those of us who refuse to choose between hugging a tree and carrying a gun. We might even recruit new hunters along the way. At most, it could help the hunting public be a step ahead of the game for once, rather than beating its chest while teetering on its heels. This starts with how we talk about sustainability and environmentalism as part of the outdoor recreating public. Many hunters are quite well-suited for these conversations. We tend to care deeply about the wild world around us. 

We’re also familiar with making the best of seemingly hopeless situations.

I tiptoe along an icy game trail behind my dad. It’s nearing the end of the week, and we’re navigating snow and dense fog as the temperatures plummet into single-digits. We hike higher into the alpine without intercepting tracks, instead remarking on the beauty of the forest after the first snow, the silence of it all, how surely deer and elk would motor downhill after this random arctic blast. I pull on another synthetic puffy layer, and he bundles up in more scratchy sheep’s wool. At the end of the week, we both leave the Beartooths without seeing a blessed thing.

When we arrive home on the last night, I hang my merino base layers next to my dad’s red union suit, hoping both will dry before morning. I try to picture my own camo in 30 years — maybe it will hang next to that of my own kids, old and worn, ripe for teasing. Like my dad, I probably won’t mind, but I probably won’t replace much of it, either. If I do these next 30 years right, my gear will carry too many memories for a landfill to hold.

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Katie Hill is a freelance outdoor journalist and managing editor of The Westrn. For more of her work, check out her website and follow her on social media.