Letters to the Editor
-
The false choice...
No one, and let me repeat that, NO ONE will do thing one about the environment when their own people need those precious resources to live and eat and develop. If you and a billion of your neighbors were poor, even by 19th Century standards and you watched your government toss all their money into Western Green Friendly projects with a payback in maybe 30 years, I bet you'd be pretty angry. Or maybe you'd just be too poor and hungry to care either way.
The fatal flaw in this statement, of course, is that most of the people want only one or the other. Periodically, and without little buzz from the West (whom equally doesn't give a shit about workers rights), Chinese workers have initiated massive strike waves and peasant revolts for no other reason than that they've not only been cut out of the loop of planning decisions which super-exploit them (ie: the unsafe mines, the massive industrial parks taking agricultural land etc) AND been denied their own ideas on how to initiate development in an environmentally sound way (notably oil workers and coal miners, who aren't idiots, realize that slow and steady development of resources behooves everyone, and keeps prices stable;people forget the autonomous unions that sprung up during 1989 that argued for worker control, and an end to corrupt party management).
Its not merely enough to argue for political rights; as Han Dongfeng, one of the labor organizers of the independent unions said after feeling the brunt of the 1989 repression, it means nothing if you are still economically reliant on the decisions of a party, whomever it is, and not on your ownership of economic means.
-
I'm guessing every smug "it's for the greater good" poster on here...
...Has never truly been penniless.
...Has never had to go without food - or been unable to feed their family.
...Has never experienced the strife and adversity of being jobless - not in cushy USA, with welfare/unemployment checks aplenty - but in a rural Third World land.
************
Yes, plastic bags are bad for the environment. Yes, they should be recycled and their use reduced wherever possible.
But treating the loss of livelihoods of 20,000 people as no big deal (or "acceptable losses" in the Green Movement) makes you just as heartless and callous as rich, pampered Republicans who could give a shit when they layoff thousands of American workers to preserve/amplify their own executive bonuses.
Myopia and inability to empathize with the little brown (or yellow) people of the world does the environmental movement no good.
It just makes us all look like privileged yuppie snobs who would sooner hug a tree than value human/social wellbeing on the same level as the spotted owl.
Just sayin...