Consumption without exploitation

“I don’t trust that there is some unilateral, final way to plant our feet in the earth without displacing something. It means that we should be humble.” —poet and clinical psychologist Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé (https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/) Commodity and consumption. Use. Life. Death. Exploitation. There is nothing about being alive either now or in our collective hunter-gatherer pasts that can save us from causing damage or death simply by existing. This does not absolve us from our responsibility to the world that gives us life. Any action attempting sustainability has to begin with caring for the ecosystems that sustain us; but we will, somehow, still cause damage. In the West’s predominant culture, it’s hard to find examples of the humility that Dr. Akómoláfé speaks of. Michael Gibb, a journalist who previously investigated conflict finance for Global Witness, wrote a wide-ranging piece about the injustices of global supply chains (https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-supply-chain-metaphor-obscures-about-global-justice) , covering everything from the insidiousness of metaphors (with a nod to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s classic Metaphors We Live By) to philosophy, including my favorite philosopher John Rawls, and the links between bars of gold and violent warlords. Speaking of the products we buy in terms of a “supply chain,” he wrote, “steers us away from a deeper reflection on the systemic pressures and incentives that created the problems in the first place – not least the pressures to increase profits through larger production volumes at ever-lower prices. These pressures regularly combine with wider problems, such as weak labour protections, poor environmental regulation and outsized corporate influence, to pass on the resulting hardships to those least able to resist them, such as miners and textile workers.” It reminded me of part of an interview I heard with filmmaker and educator Nora Bateson (https://norabateson.wordpress.com/about/) about walking into a cell phone store and, on being asked what kind of phone she was looking for, said that she wanted one “without slavery.” Such a thing, it turns out, is almost impossible to find (https://www.hermes-investment.com/ukw/wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2017/11/Hermes-Modern-Slavery-Take-Note-Cobalt.pdf) , and no amount of conscious consumerism on our parts is likely to change that. You run into the same issues with electric cars. Elon Musk talked a good marketing line, but a Tesla’s battery still requires cobalt, the same rare earth metal linked to slavery in cell phones. The Canadian documentary (https://www.nfb.ca/film/angry_inuk/) Angry Inuk (https://www.nfb.ca/film/angry_inuk/) provides a different, more delicate model for sustainable commodity, one driven by a local population with an interest in maintaining the health of their ecological system. The point that the people in this documentary repeatedly make as they advocate for the right to sell their handmade sealskin products to the world is that subsistence will not give them a future. They cannot hunt solely for their own subsistence and at the same time resist the offshore oil wells that would provide jobs but devastate the entire ecology of their home. They need to participate in the global economy, but on their terms, without themselves or their ecosystem being exploited. Angry Inuk points to the question at the heart of our modern battle between private property rights and the health of the global commons: Can a community and ecosystem participate in the global economy at a level that’s locally sustainable? People of a Feather (https://arcticeider.com/pof/) is another documentary (https://arcticeider.com/pof/) about a community struggling to maintain not just its way of life, but its life and all the lives around it in the face of upheaval caused by upstream hydroelectric dams. The residents of the community at the center of the film have lived in balance with ice, seal, eider ducks, and the sea for countless years. But as massive Canadian hydropower projects pump fresh water into the ocean at the wrong times of year, responding to southern neighbors’ needs to heat their homes, the resulting imbalance in ocean salinity puts the entire ecosystem at risk. That’s the other side of the private property/commons coin—the pillager, the absentee landowner, the mandate of corporations to place shareholder return and personal profit above all other values. Stories like these, and plenty of ongoing situations I follow here in Montana, expose as a fantasy the libertarian dream that we can all get along without laws, government, and regulation as long as we “don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.” In order for that precept to work, we first have to agree on the definitions of “hurt” and “take,” whether you’re facing a belligerent neighbor or a multinational mining corporation. This agreement is the fluid result of continual compromises with no settled answers. There will a...