On inequality, poverty, and ecological degradation

I have written just a little bit about the issues of poverty and inequality. My first foray into this issue was inspired by Vanessa Baird's piece Trash: Inside The Heap. Today, I would like to revisit these issues and promote a very interesting project. A couple of my friends, Lisa and Ingrid have started a blog called Half of The World. The blog is about how poverty and inequality are driven and perpetuated by neocolonialism and transnational organisations, but more fundamentally the way we in the most powerful nations on the Earth, each and every one of us, choose to behave. Our behaviour is deeply ingrained and self-serving, and results in calamities such as the dumping of petrochemical wastes in Africa, or the shipping of electronic wastes to Asia, or the degradation of environment in Delray, Africa, and Asia being far less financially and politically fortunate.  

The blog challenges people to live on $2/day for a week, and the purpose is threefold - 

• Highlight the disparity between the disparities between standards of living in industralised nations and unindustrialised nations - By forcing ourselves to make the sorts of calculations and sacrifices that are common for most people in the world, they wish to gain some understanding of how the Majority World lives, and how radically different our own lives are.

• By forcing ourselves to live with less, they hope to question our own taken-for-granted habits and think about the types of choices we have been making. They want to discover what we have become dependent upon, what we can actually live without, and what viable alternatives exist to reduce our daily consumption patterns. When making routine purchases, they desire to more frequently ask ourselves, “Do I really need this?”

• Most importantly, they wish to use this project as a springboard to share information and increase awareness about the nature of global poverty. They believe that one of the most decisive needs in the struggle against global poverty is a critical mass of people who are willing to substantially alter their lifestyle and work together to challenge the systems of inequality that both sustain their way of life and simultaneously produce mass starvation among the rest of the world.

There are striking parallels between what I have been writing about for the past year, and the motivations that have guided Lisa and Ingrid. Trash had provided a wonderful, although not fully adequate, lens through which to view the impacts of our choices. Although poverty may be a little more difficult to grasp, images of poverty surround us, even here in Ann Arbor, or just forty miles away, and this poverty results from the exact same choices that we make that result in trash, and ecological degradation more broadly. Rather than frame the issues through trash, they choose the lens of consumption, the differences I have written about here. This further reinforces to me that issues such as poverty, inequality, greenhouse gas emission, toxins in water, fracking, and trash are just different manifestations of more fundamental problems plaguing our societies. We cannot, and should not, think that we can address one without addressing them all; this is something we all need to accept.

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Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World

Put yourself in their shoes

This project isn't just about trash, yet trash is a most visceral manifestation of the fundamental problems our societies have created. I just re-read Vanessa Baird's fantastic piece from the New Internationalist, "Trash: inside the heap." Baird articulates the social injustice of the world as viewed through trash and waste. She writes, "The rich make it, the poor deal with it. The rich who make it are generally considered 'clean;' the poor who deal with it are considered 'dirty.'" How true.

Visiting the recycling plant a few weeks ago provided me with the most up-close view of the world of trash processing. The plant accepts materials from all over the region, and the material keeps coming in waves. Entire warehouses are filled with the materials, and as soon as those materials are sorted through, the next roomfull of materials is waiting to be sorted. To me, those materials have lives of their own (in a sense) and stories associated with them. Those materials are other than the air that we breathe and the land we stand on. This means that those materials have human lives associated with them, too. Not just the lives of the people that used those materials, but the lives of people that were involved in both material creation and fate after use.

After the tour of the facility, Caroline and I were wondering about the stories of the people that worked at the recycling plant. We wondered how they might be feeling given the cold day, the loud noise, the putrid smell, and spending their time in the constancy of refuse. We wondered if they were appreciated at all, and whether or not they even wanted to be there. Are they there because they could find nothing else to do? Do they have the choice not to be there? The founding documents of our nations proclaim how people are born equal, yet nothing could be further from the truth. This world has always been a world of haves and have nots, and most every material thing in our lives depends on this inequality, whether it is diamonds, oil, plastic, rare earth minerals, recyclables, trash or wood. We have founded our lives, the lives of those people with choice and power and money, on the bodies, hearts, minds and souls of those less fortunate.

I wonder whether we are willing to do what it takes to provide ourselves with what we want. How wonderful it would be if each one of us, in our upbringing, was made to fully carry out the tasks, at least once, of the people who really make our societies functional. I am not talking about investment bankers or engineers or doctors (the "clean" people), but rather farmers, sanitation men, electricians, plumbers, and people in countries less powerful than the US (the "dirty" people). Maybe if we put ourselves in their shoes, we'll see that not only are we degrading the environment, but we are devaluing the existence of these fellow humans.