#166 The Disconnect Between Justice and Sustainability

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 166

The Disconnect Between Justice and Sustainability

It is so easy to speak of fair pay and equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, marital status, religious beliefs, disability or political opinions. And yet this is a vital part of sustainability that often gets overlooked and consequently social injustice is deeply threaded in our culture.

I would contend that not only does social injustice undermine our efforts toward a sustainable future but also the two are completely disconnected in our present society.

Stay tuned for E166, The Disconnect Between Justice and Sustainability.

Welcome back everyone to the Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast. This is your host Patrick and this is E166, The Disconnect Between Justice and Sustainability.

But before we get started, we have two things to do.

The first of the sustainability question of the week. This week’s question is somewhat task oriented. So here we go.

List five ways in your life that you are making efforts to be more sustainable.

Second: good news story of the week

Last week’s good news story was about Dracula frogs. This week’s story is about sea horses.

White’s seahorses, which is an Australian icon, is the only such creature on Australia’s endangered species list. Consequently, Australia continues to make efforts to restore the seahorse populations.

Just this past May hundreds to these seahorses were released north of Newcastle. The next release site is going to be in a tide pool north of Sydney Harbor. This is part of the largest release of captive-bred seahorse in history.

The seahorses were bred at Sea Life Aquarium in Sydney and is part of an on-going population rehabilitation program. Several more releases are planned for 2024.

These seahorses are also known as the New Holland seahorse. Populations have been in decline for years. The most recent release is the 6th such event for 2023 with a total of 400 seahorses being released.

And as you have likely heard me say, every little thing we do makes a difference. In this case it is very literal. This seahorse is 13 cm long which is about 5.1 inches. And I can say from personal experience that when you are diving and you find a seahorse it is really exciting because you don’t see them that often.

So, time to move on to this week’s topic concerning the disconnect we have between social justice and sustainability.

As I said above, the three pillars of sustainability are people, planet and profits. The challenge that we have is taking care of the people, meaning all of the people.

One of my favorite authors is Simon Anholt. He has been an advisor of various international leaders for much of his career. He wrote a book called The Good Country Equation, How We Can Repair the World in One Generation. It truly is a good read and something I highly recommend. At any rate, in part of his book he was discussing his childhood and shared something his father used to always say to him. And that was “Mind your privilege.”

But most of us in developed countries have no concept of minding our privilege because it is something we have always had. Even I will admit that despite growing up in a farming family and never really having any extra I had no concept of how privileged I was until I started traveling and working in third world countries.

I spent a considerable amount of time working with families that lived in a 150 square foot hand made thatched hut with a dirt floor and a fire pit in the corner for cooking. Not only does this make you appreciate what you have but it also makes you realize just how privileged you are to have what you have despite how little it may be. This is because we have choices and many of the people I worked with do not. They do not make a living. They are literally just trying to live.

While most of us sit comfortably in our day-to-day lives, 1.1 billion people around the world live in poverty subsisting on $2.15 per day.

Now, social injustice is an enormous problem that permeates every aspect of our society. Volumes could be written about this topic and indeed already have been. What I want to do is simply to focus on the disconnect we have between justice and sustainability in our food system.

In the US, 60% of fresh fruit and 40% of our vegetables are imported, with Mexico being the biggest supplier.

In the UK, approximately 65% of fresh fruits and vegetables are imported, with Spain being the largest supplier.

Australia only imports about 17% of their fresh produce. The top import countries for Australia are Malaysia, China, Vietnam, the US, New Zealand.

Considering that, let’s look at averages wages of agricultural workers in these countries.

US: $15/hr

Mexico: 71 pesos/hr or $4.18/hr US

Spain: 7 Euros/hr of $7.74/hr US

China: 19 yuan/hr or $2.18/hr US

Vietnam: 5.29 million dong per month or the equivalent of $1.36/hr US

Malaysia:1306 Malaysian Ringgit month or about $1.78/hr US.

My point being here is that in developed countries a significant portion of our fruits and vegetables are supplied by farm workers with very marginal wages. And you might argue that their way of life is better than being unemployed. Or perhaps their cost of living is significantly less that ours.

I would counter that by repeating something I brought up before. Check your privilege. We have choices. They don’t.

Obviously our food systems are completely unsustainable. Fortunately there are a lot of very smart people around the world taking a strong look at that right now. But I would also argue that unsustainable food systems require a steady supply of people without options. To have such a wonderful food chain that gives us so many choices is great from a first world perspective. However, it is just such a system leaves people out. Where is the social justice in that?

One of the three pillars of sustainability is people. To truly build a sustainable food system we need everyone at the table, even the most marginalized populations. This is the only way to include social justice in everything we do. Everyone must have a voice in the matter. And perhaps this is the only way to gather enough people to build the political clout to change the status quo.

Look at it from this perspective.

The most marginalized farm workers are the very ones that get the greatest exposure to the deadly pesticides that are used on our food. These workers often have no choice but to work for the large companies that are environmentally destructive.

But what if these workers had choices? What if they had enough clout to refuse to be exposed to all the pesticides? What would our food system look like then?

Millions of people around the world have no choice but to buy the cheapest food available. What would happen if everyone always had easy access to healthy organic whole foods. What would happen to the market share of the ultra processed foods that make up 60% of the average US diet?

We have all heard various accounts of small communities being polluted from industrial by products and waste resulting in contamination of land and ground water. Often times someone figures it out because of a significant increase in the rates of cancer or spontaneous abortion or other health problems. The same sort of things happen with contamination from industrial agriculture.

What if these small communities had the financial and political power to refuse such polluting industries? Where would these industries go and what would they do if they had no where to pollute?

This is why I say that an unsustainable system needs a stead supply of people without options and that is especially true for our food systems. True sustainability in our food systems ultimately includes and benefits everyone who participates in it. This is the foundation of social justice, equity and inclusion.

You have to ask sometimes what were we thinking. Well, I can tell you. We have chosen to focus all of our efforts on the one pillar of sustainability called profits.

Let’s look at another example of how we tried to fix something that wasn’t broken in the first place and how that created a significant amount of social injustice.

Historically the US is responsible for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions. We are responsible for 14% of global emission despite only comprising 5% of the global population. Our agricultural practices result in 21% of our emissions.

We now know that industrial agriculture is not sustainable. This is large-scale, monoculture farming with intensive use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. This foundation of our food system does not protect the environment nor does it protect human health. Furthermore we fail to see that environmental degradation and social injustice are actually connected. Allow me to explain.

Europeans colonized North America by stealing land from numerous peoples and communities with a tremendous amount of social diversity. With few exceptions, these Native American peoples had a rather sophisticated understanding of how to grow food and manage the environment without degrading the very thing on which they depended. This is the basis of regenerative agriculture.

As land was taken from the Native Americans the land use also changed. Traditional land management was replaced with European farming methods, that being the wholesale clearing of land and intensive farming. The end result was unprecedented deforestation, soil erosion and environmental degradation. Profits from these land seizures were then used to promote further destructive practices.

Next came the forced labor. An influx of indentured servants was followed by slave labor. After the abolition of slavery, share cropping prolonged the servitude of former slaves while supporting the profits of commodities such as cotton, corn, wheat and tobacco.

As colonization continued to spread west so did the destructive agricultural practices. Eventually government policies and subsides favored industrial agriculture and forced small to medium farms out of business. Wild and biologically diverse landscapes began to disappear as well as the things we depend on for survival: wildlife habitat, flood mitigation, water filtration and carbon sequestration. And all along the way, racism, sexism, and discrimination continued to build higher and higher barriers to anyone who was not white and male.

Hopefully by now you are beginning to realize that our total lack of connection between social justice and sustainability affects how we have developed our food systems. And it doesn’t stop there.

Take a long look at our social and community structure. We have a system that promotes segregation of poor communities and communities of color from white communities and those of affluence.

Fresh, organic foods, minimally processed foods are then sold to select markets at higher prices that are both geographically and economically inaccessible to marginalized communities. These marginal communities then purchase the cheapest food available which is the highly refined products of industrial agriculture. This is one reason we see a disproportionate rate of specific health problems in these communities. The National Institute of Medicine published a rather interesting study on this very topic. I have provided a link to that study in the resources section if you are interested.

For a decade now scientists have realized that soil health is key to mitigating climate change. But we can’t stop producing food. The answer to that dilemma is regenerative agriculture which is the concept of growing food but caring for the entire ecosystem.

As stated above many Native American cultures had a rather sophisticated knowledge of regenerative agricultural practices that was part of their heritage. Yet even today Native American producers have long been left out of the agricultural conversation. It seems as if the only reason that is changing is because regenerative agriculture is now becoming a trend. We can learn some valuable lessons from Native American growers because their traditional methods show that caring for the entire ecosystem is not something they talk about. It is the way they live. For the Native Americans it is not regenerative farming it is indigenous farming.

What needs to happen is for us to get to the point that everything on our plate has a story that we can feel good about. For example, you can feel good about the fact that you picked fresh vegetables out of your own organic garden. You can feel good about the fact that the fresh eggs, and perhaps meat, came from the chickens that you raised while giving them the best life possible. And I can tell you that our chickens and turkeys practically live in the Hilton. They do not exactly free range due to the number of predators we have around the homestead. But, they have an enormous outdoor yard that is fully protected.

Can you really feel good about the meat you consume if you knew that cow was raised in a cruel restrictive environment and killed and butchered inhumanely? Can you really feel good about the vegetables you eat when that food was tended to by someone who has no choice but to work for a subsistence wage and deal with constant exposure to a high concentration of deadly pesticides?

But you could feel good about it if all of these farmer works were people who actually had choices.

The things that many of us don’t see is that there are many forms of discrimination for farmers and farm workers in our food production system just because they are people of color, women, LGBTQ, immigrants, or some one of low economic class.

The first thing we need to do is make the effort to understand the challenges faced by these members of our community. Then we need to support and implement the necessary changes to make improvements in equity, inclusion and social justice. Then we have a food system that is more diverse and more resilient because is has more assets. This is how we start to change the social injustice that threads its way through all aspects of social sustainability.

But do we presently have a system that actually promotes equality and equity. I would say no. The majority of farmers are white, heterosexual males. They are the ones in positions of power. They are the employers and farm operators. They hold all the assets and have the political and social influence. These are the very people that have the power to change the system to something that is equitable because this is the key to social justice.

As far as social justice is concerned, I think it is important to distinguish between equality and equity? While these terms sound familiar, the implementation of equality and equity actually produces very different outcomes especially for marginalized people. I actually read a very nice article on this that was published by George Washington University that will help you to better understand this topic I have provided a link to that article in the resources section.

Equality means that each individual or group of people has access to and are given the same resources or opportunities. Think of equal opportunity employment.

The concept of equity acknowledges that each person has different circumstance and provides the needed resources to ensure an equal outcome.

I am sure that all of us remember the old proverb, “If you give a person a fish you feed them for a day. If you teach a person to fish you feed them for a lifetime.

An equality based solution means that everyone has the same number of fish. An equity based solution means everyone has access to the same resources and tools to learn how to fish on their own.

Another example, and this was taken from the article from George Washington University:

Equality based solution: There is a community meeting about a local environmental health concern. All members of the community are invited and have equal opportunity to attend. The meeting is held only in English despite the fact that English is not the primary language for 25% of the community.

Equity based solution: the community leaders hire translators or provide an additional meeting held in another language.

So the bottom line is that equity is not about giving out wealth or redistributing wealthy. It is about creating and supporting pathways for success through fair access to sources to wealth. In relation to agriculture, this means access to learning opportunities, capital, farmland, technical support and government programs.

Now you have to realize that social and cultural systems are not naturally inequitable. But when those systems are intentionally designed to favor certain demographics for so long the outcomes we see may seem unintentional. But underneath it all the outcomes are rooted in discriminatory practices.

For example, according to a 2017 Census of Agriculture, white farmers received 2/3 more financial payout from government support programs relative to farmers of color.

An equitable solution means fair and just compensation for all farmers and farm workers. Safe working and living conditions. Promoting access to farmland and capital for farmers of color and new farming start up and providing support for women farmers.

Now I did come across an interesting article from the John Lewis Institute of Social Justice. This quote sums things up in a fantastic way.

The concept of social justice includes “... a communal effort dedicated to creating and sustaining a fair and equal society in which each person and all groups are valued and affirmed. It encompasses efforts to end systemic violence and racism and all systems that devalue the dignity and humanity of any person. It recognizes that the legacy of past injustices remains all around us, so therefore promotes efforts to empower individual and communal action in support of restorative justice and the full implementation of human and civil rights … .”

When we all get to the point where we realize that sustainability without justice just isn’t or when we all stand up and speak out and say “If you don’t have justice then neither do I” that is when we will make progress.

As you have likely heard me say before, I grew up in an environment that was narrow minded in every aspect. Everyone around me had zero tolerance for anyone that was not white or had different religious beliefs much less any sort of different sexual orientation. I have distinct memories of going to public places where there was a white section and a black section. There were separate restrooms for white people and black people. Everything was strictly segregated.

It was not until I moved to Colorado, started my educational process and traveled internationally that I was exposed to many different peoples and cultures. It was only then I began to realize that people are just people and we are all in this together. It was only then that I realize what I had been missing, that being a whole different world of people, ideas, cultures, music, food. What an eye opening experience it really was.

Unfortunately social injustice is still deeply threaded throughout our culture. Taking steps to change that is truly the only way we will ensure a sustainable future. But there are things we can all do to make sure that happens. As we figure out how to deal with our ever changing world and build a better future everyone needs to have a seat at the table.

It is one thing to agree with equity. It is another thing to stand up and make sure it happens. When it comes to applying equity to everyday life, many people are simply as a loss. Fortunately there are very simple things we can all do to promote social equity and inclusion.

-Use your voice because it is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Speak up when someone makes an insensitive comment about someone’s gender, race, skin color or sexual orientation and point out how such comments do not promote inclusion.

I did this one time during a Thanksgiving dinner with my family. My older sister was dating a man that was from India. He was even a board certified human internal medicine specialist. So we are talking about a highly educated man who was actually very nice. My parents did not like him simply because of his skin color and they were making comments about that over dinner. Let’s just say I got very vocal about their comments and they never talked like that in my presence again.

-Allow everyone to contribute to a conversation. Since I work in multiple different medical facilities, I have the opportunity to work with people from different cultures. Whenever we have meetings concerning hospital operations, there are alway people in the back ground that never say anything. When you notice this, go out of your way to ask their opinion.

-Learn to listen. Listen to someone else’s perspective without defending your own. Ask them questions about why they feel that way and learn from them. We truly start to grow when we listen to a different viewpoint and accept it while still holding on to our own beliefs. That is when we start to work together and promote positive changes.

-Empower other people around you that may be at a disadvantage. First of all do a little bit of personal reflection to increase your awareness of the inherent inequalities in the way our world works. Then you will have a better idea of how you can empower other people around you.

For example, because I am a veterinarian and because of how I have shaped my career, I am in a rather unique position to teach other people. I have spend a tremendous amount of time working in third world countries teaching other veterinarians that do not have the same educational level that is provided in the US. With this increased knowledge, those veterinarians can perform new procedures, perform new tests, and offer improved services. Consequently, they can improve their financial success in their practice and achieve a better standard of living.

I am presently working in a facility with a veterinarian from Mexico. He is working as a technician for now while he studies to pass the test needed for him to obtain a license to practice in the US. Whenever I have cases to work up, I include him in the process so he can continue to learn as much as possible.

So I would encourage you to think about your daily environment and find your own ways to empower other people. It is truly not difficult. And you never know, you just might make a new friend.

I do think it is quite unfortunate that not only is social injustice still threaded deeply in our culture but we also have a complete disconnect between social justice and sustainability. But reversing that going to require making systemic changes. But systemic changes are exactly what is needed for all of us to build a sustainable future by supporting all three pillars: people, planet and profits.

So let’s wrap up this episode by talking about the sustainability question of the week.

List five ways in your life that you are making efforts to be more sustainable. I would say that the answer to that is going to be different for everyone. So that is your homework assignment for this next week. Make you list of those five things.

One last comment before I close. For those of us that live in a developed country, I truly believe the first step to promoting social justice is something that Simon Anholt said, “Check your privilege.”

Until next week, this is your host Patrick signing off. Always remember to live sustainably because this is how we build a better future.

Patrick

Resources

Equity versus Equality: What is the Difference?

Episode Transcript

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 166

The Disconnect Between Justice and Sustainability

The three pillars of sustainability are environment, economic and social. Less formally these pillars are known as people, planet and profits. Knowing this, I do think that we fail at supporting a vital part of these three pillars.

It is so easy to speak of fair pay and equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, marital status, religious beliefs, disability or political opinions. And yet this is a vital part of sustainability that often gets overlooked and consequently social injustice is deeply threaded in our culture.