I don’t know exactly what Eve wore for modesty and warmth, or what Adam put on for flash and protection, but I can tell you that it wasn’t a fig leaf. Our most distant ancestors came through the Ice Age without their bits going black with frostbite because they wore second-hand skin. Fur. We are, as I’m sure even the least perceptive of you will have noticed, nude underneath our pyjamas. Naked apes. We don’t have enough hair, fur, fluff or feathers to deflect even the finest drizzle. We shiver in pathetically bald bodies for a reason — and the reason is that we look better in suede than cows do. A beaver would look stupid in a beaver hat, but Byron looked fab. And mink knickers suit Kate Moss far better than some stoat.

We shed our thick short and curlies because it was our natural selection, our destiny, our personal ecology, and instead gained those uniquely human attributes: taste and vanity. We wore other species’ skins when they had no further use for them, and we’ve been doing it for a long time. How fur went from being practical and chic, stylish and sensible for 100,000 years, and then all of a sudden became the cagoule of shame in the past decade, is one of the oddest about-faces in all civilisation.

There have always been people who are funny about their relationship with animals — vegetarians who got religion, a few people who swept the street in front of them so as not to hurt a flightless fly — but the majority of us, the vast, vast majority, have gone on eating anything dumb enough to taste good with chips, and squashing cockroaches wherever possible. But that odd prejudice, the fatwa on fur, has become automatic and universal in our select and ethically compromised bit of the First World. The virulence and viciousness of fur vigilantes mean that few of us now bother to brave the spittle-flecked venom of that nylon Taliban of self-righteous pressure groups and dim, new-age absolutists. The argument against fur has always been more about class and money than dumb critters. Fur, restricted to the point of prohibitive expense, is now symbolic of wealth and power.

Enough. A number of furriers are now taking back the morality of skin. They are mostly from the north — Scandinavia, Greenland, Russia and Iceland — where fur has always been a practical business in a most practical part of the world. In Denmark, fur is an agricultural business. That famously dictatorial, cruel and authoritarian society farms more mink than any other country, and it does so in conditions that most Danish pigs could only dream of. Of all the animals that we kill for our personal use, mink have by far and away the easiest passing: well fed and unstressed, they’re gently gassed.

One of my favourite shops is a remarkable furrier in Reykjavik. Eggert Johannsson makes beautiful, sensible clothes out of pelts. He is a missionary for what he calls “ethical fur”: well sourced, responsibly farmed and humanely culled. Seals, for instance. The European Union is debating whether to ban sealskin on anyone except a seal. In Greenland, hunting them is the subsistence income of the east coast. It’s what they do. It’s what they’ve always done. There is nothing else to do. There is nothing else. They can’t grow cut flowers instead. In Iceland, parts of the shore where the seals congregate were sold as agricultural assets. Farmers would facilitate the natural seal colonies, protecting them from predators, and once a year they’d cull them. But since the seal market has collapsed, so have the care and value of the shoreline, and so have the seals. All over the North Sea, their populations are fluctuating. They’re caught in fishing nets, shot by fishermen. They hang around ports and fish farms like water foxes. The seals have gone from being valuable, protected and plentiful, to being waterborne vermin and endangered, because we have removed their value thanks to ignorant squeamishness and class politics.

The argument goes that once we may have needed fur, but now we don’t; we have, instead, technology. Well, leaving aside the aesthetics of real, I assume you all know how polymers such as nylon, polyester, Terylene and so on are made. That they use fossil fuels, and intensely über-polluting processes that involve some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet. But that’s okay, and besides, nothing compares with the eco-catastrophe that is Zac Goldsmith’s shirts, sheets and tablecloths. I’ve been there. I’ve seen the greatest environmental disaster on the globe, greater than an armful of runways or nuclear bombs, worse than deforestation or any city’s urban sprawl: the murder of the Aral Sea in central Asia by the drying-up of the Oxus River, reducing an area the size of Denmark to a toxic, salted dust bowl, and all caused by cotton.

Cotton is an ecological nightmare. Our demands for a cheap, inexhaustible T-shirt supply cause more damage than oil wells. Cotton has to be grown as a mono-crop, so you can’t have cotton in your allotment, or sell it in the farmers’ market. It’s as thirsty as a sailor on shore leave, as susceptible to infestations and diseases as a Haitian hooker. Processing cotton is dirty and intensive; picking it and weaving it are two of the most hideous and exploitative jobs on earth. Compared with a cotton shirt, a fur coat is as morally blameless as St Francis’s foreskin.

The most poignant argument for fur is not where it comes from, or who first wore it; it’s what it looks like and how it feels. A polyamide coat connects you to an oil well and a factory; fur joins you to your heritage. It is 100,000 years of history and culture. We wear fur because it is our story. If you haven’t put on a fur coat recently, or ever, try it. Cast aside your prejudice and feel it. You can sense it’s not simply a statement of fashion, wealth or even warmth; the connection is ancient, truly visceral. Fur is the cover, the binding, of our long, long, story. And if you’re still not convinced, then would you for a moment consider your own cushions, your pillow. The feathers inside, the bird fur, where do you imagine that came from? How do you imagine all that duck and goose skin was gleaned? I’d hate for you to be a hypocrite. Sleep well.

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