I was wrong.
There, that wasn’t so difficult.
At university a lecturer told me that it was common for environmentalists to hold equal and opposite beliefs at the same time. Maybe I should have listened a little more carefully.
For most of my adult life, I’ve believed in the myth of fairtrade - which is the concept that poor farmers get a better price for their crops by encouraging thoughtful and good-willing consumers to pay a premium for their products. Initially I thought it was an idea which would change the world. Later I revised that to believe that it was at least doing something positive for the families who grew fairtrade products. At the same time I believed that there was something seriously wrong with world trade when the rich got everything they dreamed of whilst the poor suffered.
Over 15 years (and many, many others have been at it much longer), we wrote letters to supermarkets, held street protests, repeated various stunts to bring the public’s attention to the unfair way that the poorest farmers were treated and the good of choosing fairtrade. Eventually we persuaded the supermarkets that there was an ‘ethical’ market and that consumers would - shockingly - pay more for certain products. Suddenly ethical was mainstream. Read the rest of this entry »
01-20-2008 |
17 Comments »The following is excerpted from an interview with Ruth Padilla Deborst in the August 2007 issue of Christianity Today. Padilla Deborst is a distinguished theologian and educator and current president of the Latin American Theological Fellowship. She will be a featured presenter at the 2007 OTM conference Hear. Listen. Connect.
What good, if any, can come from North American Christians having such a concentration of wealth and power?
I don’t think it’s very useful to say, I’m sorry I have so much power. I wish I didn’t have it. Or for individual North Americans to try to erase that inequality personally. You could step out of the grid, but the grid still exists. Rather, I think you need to say, I do have power. Whom is it supposed to serve?
The free-trade agreements between our countries are supposedly about giving people opportunity. There’s something to that: Part of human dignity is the capacity to work. But people need to be granted that option. How can free-trade agreements really be free when this country subsidizes its agriculture and other industries in order to favor its own interests? North American Christians can do something about this with their own political power - by calling for trade agreements that are both free and fair.
Read the rest of this entry »07-30-2007 |
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“Fair trade needs to move from guilt to solidarity. Guilt is a demeaning emotion. It’s another way of exerting one’s superiority. And it’s repulsive to the recipients. Pity doesn’t recognize the humanity, the equality, of working people. They don’t want pity. They don’t want a special break - they want an even break.”
- Adam Neiman, founder of No Sweat Apparel
This quote was excerpted from the May issue of Sojourners magazine in an article entitled What Would Yeshua Wear?, which also mentions our very own Joe Turner. Hurray for Joe!
05-06-2007 |
7 Comments »Over this last week I’ve had a couple smallish opportunities to do something smallish and been encouraged in both of them. First of all I finally followed up on a suggestion from Julie Clawson, and bought fair trade sugar from Amazon. We had run out of sugar (probably not a bad thing) and so I though it an ideal time. However, I was feeling a little guilty, because this sugar costs 4 times “normal” sugar, and we are not exactly in brilliant financial straits at this time. My friend Karl (a Mennonite, interestingly), encouraged me in this. He said that I am simply assuming the full fair price of the sugar, instead of outsourcing that full cost to someone else who is actually a lot worse off than me financially. This made me feel good. I also felt stoked when I actually received the box full of 10 one pound boxes of sugar via Amazon. I read the little blurb on the back about the Alter Trade Foundation and their Alter Eco Products, and I felt rather proud of myself.
The other thing I did this last week was inspired by Anna and by something Brian Mclaren said at an event I recently went to. He said that one of the evil results of nationalism is that nobody cares about any place. That is, we think of ourselves as Americans, and thus not as a member of this little neighborhood above Nathan Hale High School. Brian said “Learn your address–not your street address–your environmental address. You live in a watershed. Something is happening in terms of water geographically and environmentally where you live. Check it out on google earth.” This got me to thinking about my particular watershed, and little old Thornton Creek down there and how stuff moves at various rates down into that, and gradually out into Lake Washington, Puget Sound, and the Pacific. And it made me notice litter. So I grabbed a plastic bag when my girls and I walked down to the park next to Thornton Creek, and we picked up litter along the way. My two preschool girls really got into. It became “It’s *my* turn to hold the bag” and “Look, there’s some more garbage–I’ll get it!”. Made me feel really good in lots of ways.
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05-02-2007 |
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