Sustainablog

As our friends over at Feelgood Style have noted, EDUN Apparel, the company founded by Ali Hewson (wife of U2 frontman Bono), isn’t just in the business of making stylish green clothing.  The company’s vision includes using trade (rather than aid) to support sustainable community development in the developing world, and encouraging the fashion industry to work with Africa.

The company’s t-shirt division, EDUN LIVE, in partnership with Spike Jonze’s VBS.tv and VICE magazine have created a series of videos presenting the cultural and natural environments around Kampala, Uganda, where a local textile company makes some of the organic cotton t-shirts sold by EDUN.

A visitor to the “Made in Africa” section of EDUN LIVE’s web site could have a hard time choosing where to start. While the company does use some of the videos to reinforce its green and socially responsible cred with a three-part series on Japanese native Yuichi Kashiwada’s organic cotton textile mill, “Made in Africa” goes well beyond company promotion. Videos on the Breakdance Project Uganda at the Sharing Youth Center, and the Uganda Skateboard Union provide glimpses into youth culture in the city. Another features the KCC (Kampala City Cleaners) Football Club, a social welfare program that eventually produced a national championship soccer team. And the three-part “Gorillas in the Midst” takes viewers on a trek through the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, with guide Levi and the WWF’s Dr. Richard Carroll, to see the magnificent, and endangered, mountain gorillas.

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This blog post was written in response to some unusually caustic replies received on my last Sustainablog post, “The Dissonance Between Dreams: Re-writing the Sust Enable Episode Scripts.” It was composed in the interrim between the second-to-last comment, and the final comment, which clarifies the author’s tone a bit and does lay out some common ground.  However, based only on reading the comment quoted below, the commenter inspired deep meditation into myself and to what extent I am trying to exploit privilege–even while claiming to be 100% supportive of global sustainability.  View the comments here.

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“It’s only irrelevant in the context of one who still feels entitled to the comforts and privileges that being white in Western civilization has afforded her.”

Overall, I think the most crucial component of changing the world is not privilege: it is responsibility. As someone who was born into a world with social systems favoring her, it is my responsibility to address and counteract these effects. As someone who enjoys the benefits (but not the costs) of systems that hurt the environment for future generations, I have the responsibility to try to undo the harm done in my name or the name of the dollar I spend.

You disparage psychology, but I believe that our shared psychological needs-take Maslow’s pyramid, for example-absolutely influences the immediate decision-making process of every human being. For Americans, it means that we often don’t opt to do the most responsible thing, if it is not also the most convenient and most personally-positive thing as well. Once again, this all goes back to perspective-if a hot shower feels good to me immediately, and I will never feel the worldwide damage that such an action causes, then I can hide from such knowledge and forgive myself for a single shower. With millions of people making such inner decisions-in situations with varying stakes-well, most of us can see the problem we are facing now.

I think psychology will be key, too, in fixing this little biological oversight-we can create social systems which enforce a global responsibility in personal situations (where our limited perspectives are failing us). If we can unite on truly valuing the Earth’s biosphere, then we as people, as lawmakers, can create systems of justice-environmental justice-that as validly as possible account for additions and subtractions of valuable assets within the Earth’s limited resources. This idea may sound radical-but it is amazingly simple. Often, the average person forgets that he or she is a lawmaker-that laws are not sacred nor eternal. People make them and break them according to their needs. Read the rest of this entry »