Promoting sugar ethanol production in Brazil encourages an industry that degrades the environment and exploits workers

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Posted on September 22, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Renewable fuels

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

As we learned from the experience of sweatshop assembly — discovering that our cheap consumer goods are made by workers horribly exploited in poor countries — we need to examine the conditions in which our hoped-for alternative fuels, in particular, sugar ethanol, are made.

The suger industry has a pretty bad record in poor countries where the climate is suitable for sugar cane production — for horrible working conditions, use of child labor, and severe degradation of the land where it is produced, along with pollution of water and air.

So since we focused on sugar ethanol earlier today, spurred on by Thomas Friedman’s sugar ethanol boosterism, I thought it would be a good idea to find out more about the sugar industry in Brazil.  Check it out.  This is hardly a model on which to base ecological hope.

Do we want to stretch out the life of our fossil-fuel-based mobility by adding sugar ethanol to our cars at the price of this kind of suffering?

The central question of the project I am in the process of creating (see ‘About Margaret Swedish’) is this: as we face our ecological crisis, as global warming, peak oil, population stresses, and resource depletion all begin to collapse in on one another and our societies in this next generation — what kind of human beings are we going to be as we go through the crisis?  What kind of human beings will we be as we invent the new way of being on this planet, and what will that way of being be like — nasty, aggressive, violent, selfish, destructive? — or formed by a sense of our common humanity, solidarity with the poor of our world who still have a right not to be poor, compassion, unselfishness and generosity?

How will you answer this question for your children and grandchildren?

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