Cause and effect
How did we get here, to this point in history?
What formed our thoughts which made us engage in behaviours that culminated in a global pandemic?
A huge topic that has given rise to many discussions and heated arguments. I will highlight examples that I hope explain the cause and effect of the way we have been experiencing the world.
Reverence to looking youthful
Children are beautiful. In a purely artistic way, they have a cherubic form that is an aspect of many archetypes of beauty. The appearance of body hair signals the onset of puberty and then adulthood. These are normal processes all humans undergo and yet many cultures expect their women to shave. Somehow underarm hair has been associated with lack of cleanliness or effort to be someone else’s ideal of what may represent an immature view of beauty. Gillette advertising had everything to do with that belief.
[1]
I know that it isn’t logical, but I’ve seen it enough on the media and my peers have also demonstrated that they see female shaving as normal and attractive. I have shaved my underarms and legs for years, like most of the women I know. Instead of seeing body hair as the natural part of growing up, I too see leaving my sprouting hairs as an omission in my daily grooming. Such is the power of advertising.
The beauty and fashion industries are big business. I am not saying that encouraging women to be at their personal best is a bad thing. I am saying that the development of beauty products is bad when animals suffer due to experimentation on them for product safety. These companies still use animals to test their products:
- Benefit. …Clinique. …Estée Lauder. …Makeup Forever. …
- Maybelline. …OPI. …Victoria’s Secret.
The good news is that some companies have never tested their products on animals:
-Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap. …Nature’s Gate. Here’s another old-time cosmetics company. …Paula’s Choice. …The Body Shop. …LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics.
The following companies stopped using animals due to the mounting pressure from animal activists and “The industry trend is that if you don’t play the game and get out of animal testing, you’re going to be targeted, boycotted and left out in the cold” [2]
-Avon, Revlon Faberge Mary Kay Cosmetics Amway, Noxell, which makes Noxzema skin creams, and Cover Girl cosmetics
The cold reality was that they stopped because of the potential loss of income, not for their concern for the welfare of animals.
Fashion magazines and the media are contributing factors to low self esteem among teens . Young people see that they don’t fit the features or body types advertised as desirable. They are being told they ‘must’ buy many products that are actually bad for the skin and/or they don’t need, to maintain a healthy glow. The insecurities of youth continue into adulthood, supporting plastic surgery and strategic injections to achieve artificially what nature failed to provide.
Exploitation
The exploitation of child workers to produce cheaper goods has come to our attention and many have reacted to these injustices by refusing to buy certain brands. Ensuring that workers are paid a living wage is ignored in the pursuit of the cheapest suppliers.
1. Nestlé and Hershey’s. Their suppliers use child labour and underpay cocoa farmers.
2. H&M, Sports Direct and New Look They use child labour and underpay their workers. They will blame their contractors.
3. Microsoft, Have used child labour in mining colbalt. Apple Their Chinese contractor used schoolchildren to make their products. [3]
Human rights have prevailed and have shown to reap benefits for manufacturers as well as their workers overseas. Here is a list of ethically sourced brands and companies
- Cadbury, Camino, Divine, Côt d’Or, Delight Chocolate, Earth’s Choice, Eating Evolved, Green and Black’s, IKEA chocolate and many more brands are certified to only deal ethically with farmers. [4]
2. Fair Indigo, Raven & Lily, Patagonia and Continental Clothing, engage in ethical practices.[4]
3.“ Despite Apple’s not insignificant efforts, the richest, most influential player in the technology industry isn’t doing enough to protect the workers that provide the fundamental ingredients in its products.”
“On just about every continent, many of those miners are risking their lives to provide you with a device that lets you read this while you’re waiting in line for the bathroom.”[5]
“These are some of the biggest companies in the world, with combined profits of $125 billion and there is no excuse that companies aren’t investing some of that profit into ensuring that they can trace where the minerals they are using are coming from,” says Dummett. “Anyone with a smartphone would be appalled to think that children as young as seven carrying out back-breaking work for 12 hours a day could be involved at some point in the making of it.”[6]
“Billionaire wealth has soared by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 — six times greater than the wages of regular workers, which have risen by a yearly average of only 2 percent, according to Oxfam International.” [4]
Agriculture
Industrial agricultural practices defy Nature. They propagate the misguided notion that large scale production is necessary to feed an increasing population. They also promote the application of artificial fertilizers, which do not contribute to the ecosystem or structure of the soil. They decrease soil fertility because chemical nitrogen stimulates excessive microorganism growth, which, over time, depletes organic matter in the soil.
“By the end of World War II, the United States had built 10 large-scale nitrate factories to make bombs…The industry quickly shifted from munitions to fertilizer and domestic consumption began to skyrocket, driven… by the rise of new hybrid strains of corn, “the first kind of high-yielding grain cultivar dependent on higher fertilizer applications.”
Industrial agriculture’s reliance on plentiful synthetic nitrogen brings with it a whole bevy of environmental liabilities: excess nitrogen that seeps into streams and eventually into the Mississippi River, feeding a massive annual algae bloom that blots out sea life; emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon.”[7]
One might say that these negative impacts are but the tip of the iceberg. The reliance on fertilizers has led to the increased use of herbicides and insecticides, which some knowledge of nature’s diverse and integrated systems has shown us are catastrophic to flora, fauna, soil, waterways and air.
We have escalated our use of poisons and hormones in the last several decades. Because it is difficult to trace the cause and long term deleterious effects of these chemicals on the body and to provide undeniable proof of said effects, the use of poison continues unabated. We all know that poisons are, well, bad. The question is how much does it take to show the effects of poisoning?
I returned to do some supply teaching work, after 20 years away from the profession and was shocked when I looked at classroom student information lists. I saw one or more of the following designations for almost every child:
1- attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
2- oppositional defiant disorder (ODD)
3-autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
4- anxiety disorder
5- depression
6- bipolar disorder
7- learning disorders
8- conduct disorders
Industrial scale livestock farming
“Their defenders say that the close controls on industrial-scale farms mean that disease, pollution and the carbon footprint can be kept to a minimum. Such farms also produce for consumers at a lower cost than small-scale farms.”[8]
Watch a documentary on factory farming and you will witness the brutal reality that animals suffer so that we can have access to cheaper meat. Meet the neighbours whose health and quality of life are negatively impacted by high density animal factories. Hog farms in particular are ticking time bombs that are barely held back in toxic lagoons. Legal avenues to enforce protection are met with failure. Individuals cannot compete with conglomerates.
A Natural approach to farming
Mindful and studied approaches to farming will change the landscape: land, water and atmosphere. Sustainable practices, such as crop rotation and the use of compost for instance; green manure, biological pest control methods and special reduced cultivation techniques are all employed to maintain soil productivity. A major benefit to consumers of organic farming is that meat and produce obtained are free of contamination.The importance of this science cannot be overstated.
Advocates of organic and sustainable farming you may like to look up:
Joel Salant: emotionally, economically and environmentally enhancing agriculture.
Allan Savory: Holistic Planned Grazing is the practice of charting grazing moves that consider the time that a plant is exposed to a grazing animal so that the plant’s recovery is planned.
Michael Pollan: famously wrote: “eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And don’t buy food you’ve seen advertised on TV”.
The problem is in the approach to farming as a whole. Industrial farming is fraught with issues and is unsustainable. Ideally the farm would be combining agriculture with animal husbandry.
Plastics
Who could have predicted the success of an ad campaign in the 1950s launched by big beverage companies like Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, along with Phillip Morris and others and who formed a non-profit called Keep America Beautiful, would be pivotal in the pollution of the world’s oceans and the death sentence to many marine animals. Who could have predicted that many generations would have been convinced that recycling plastics was a good thing?
“In fact, the greatest success of Keep America Beautiful has been to shift the onus of environmental responsibility onto the public while simultaneously becoming a trusted name in the environmental movement. This psychological misdirect has built public support for a legal framework that punishes individual litterers with hefty fines or jail time, while imposing almost no responsibility on plastic manufacturers for the numerous environmental, economic and health hazards imposed by their products.”[10]
The Medical System
This is a huge topic, but I think that I can safely say that when there is a profit to be made, there will be corruption.
When we treat the symptoms and ignore or fail to pursue the causes, we condemn people to a life of drug dependence and the numerous side effects.
Confronting and/or lobbying against the originators of our poisonous environment requires irrefutable science and money.
Often a sympathetic ear is the best therapy.
Cause and effect
I hope that I have shown you that our views are shaped by our environment, from how we view our bodies to our consumption practices. I also hope that we will continue to question why we do the things that we do.
If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is that:
- Nature is treating us like one collective.
2. The cause and effects of the virus involved two factors.
a) People had a compromised immune system due to pollution and possibly other past medical interventions or issues.
b) i]The domino effect of our unsustainable practices, which led to the depletion of wildlife habitat, which prompted the capture of wild stressed animals. Add the additional stress of caged prey and predator in close proximity. The stressed Pangola [we think that is the source] had a virus [maybe initially from a bat], which mutated to include us as a host, and when the animal was slaughtered, someone got infected with the contagious virus. And the rest, as they say, is history.
ii] Rumours continue to circulate that the virus was released from a bio-lab.
Accidents happen and given the growth of bio-labs throughout the world, incidences due to human error are likely to increase. [10]
3. Our families and friends are much more precious than we had previously thought.
4. We can wean ourselves off of our wasteful consumer lifestyle.
5. Nature has strict laws of integration and interconnectedness that we don’t fully understand.
6. We need to change our mindset and stop polluting and exploiting our environment and its inhabitants.
Solutions to consider
We can all agree that we will not be returning to ‘business as usual’ once the virus plays itself out. So let’s consider the steps we would ideally take in order to establish a natural and sustainable way of living.
We could start an organization of governmental bodies that would gather to discuss the new direction for humanity. There could not be vested interests. Specialists from different fields: educators, farming experts, scientists, cognitive psychologists, biologists, geologists, legal representatives, etc. would be part of that organization.
People, not monetary gain, would be the guiding factor in building a new society. By saying that people are to be considered first, we would not be harming each other, polluting, or producing unnecessary goods for gain. The only way to accomplish the ‘people first’ notion would be to consider how you would treat your loved ones and extend that to the rest of humanity. Remember, nature treats us as one.
We need to be in balance with Nature so it will not react negatively toward us through diseases and natural disasters. Nature is an integrated system. We have to be integrated with each other.
People need to have their basic needs met by providing an income. This is not to say that everyone gets the same things. People’s needs vary as much as there are differences in personalities. Some are happy with little; some want more and that is fine as long as someone else does not suffer in order for them to have more. Along with this income is education as a means to study nature’s laws and human relations.
We will continue to develop technologically but not to oppress each other but to develop an integrated society that is open and diversified.
Marshall Davis Jones at TEDxHollywood tells us a beautiful story about our being meant to be connected. We were never meant to experience life alone.
Nature does not operate in terms of good and evil. How close we are to the laws of nature will determine how she will react to us. If we continue to exploit and pollute, nature will respond to us with calamity and hardship. If we respect the laws of Nature and strive to stay in balance with her, we will experience plenty and diversity.
The choice is in our collective hands.
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/womens-razors-marketing
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/02/business/cosmetics-companies-quietly-ending-animal-tests.html
[3] https://www.careeraddict.com/10-companies-that-still-use-child-labor
[4] https://www.worldvision.ca/no-child-for-sale/resources/fair-trade-chocolate-guide
[5]https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-merchant-iphone-supplychain-20170723-story.html
[7] https://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/04/history-nitrogen-fertilizer-ammonium-nitrate/
[9]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/more-recycling-wont-solve-plastic-pollution/