For February's Mother Pelican installment, we take a detour from our exploration of Big Tech and Big Telecom exploitation.
Corporations market Valentine's Day as yet again another season for buying gift candy. But be aware of the links between many popular brands of chocolate, and the ecological devastation and child slavery that go into the production of cacao. Gift-giving is an act of love so make ethical choices that reflect the actual meaning behind the gift.
Chocolate is generally composed of two main ingredients: cacao and palm oil. In this article, I do not address the tyrannies of the milk industry or sugar industry—two other main ingredients in many chocolate products. Frequently, the collateral damages in the production of this gift are ecological destruction and even workers' deaths. Children are actually enslaved by cacao-producing companies (Hershey, Dagoba (now Hershey owned), Mars, ADMCocoa, Godiva, Fowler's, Kraft, and Nestlé) to harvest cacao, living in horrendous conditions, forced to work relentlessly, and injured from vicious beatings that often end in death. Too many “disappear” with no accountability.
The Peabody award-winning documentary, “Slavery: A Global Investigation” depicts tragic suffering of children enslaved in the Ivory Coast cocoa industry. Aly Diabete, a freed worker told reporters: “The beatings were a part of my life. …Anytime they loaded you with bags (of cocoa beans) and you fell while carrying them, nobody helped you. Instead they beat you and beat you until you picked it up again.” When told about the consumption of chocolate in the West, one child stated, “These people are eating my flesh.” This is neither an irony nor a trauma we can ignore.
In 2005, three former child slaves from Mali filed a suit against Nestlé. They were exposed to dangerous working conditions, forced to carry 100-pound bags of cocoa, and work between 12 and 14 hour days—often six days a week without pay and little food. Nestlé’s own written code of conduct condemns such practices, yet because they are not held accountable, plantations continue to injure children for the big business of ‘slave chocolate.’ The politics of blood chocolate echoes not only the mining of precious metals and gems like blood gold and blood diamonds, but all extractive industries—including lithium and cobalt for electric vehicles, bauxite for aluminum cans, and soda ash for glass.
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Production of chocolate also threatens wildlife and their rainforest habitats. Nestlé is one of the many corporations responsible for deforesting rainforests—the home of orangutans. ‘Oranghutan’ translates as ‘person of the forest.’ Nestlé Corporation and PepsiCo. plant huge palm oil plantations that are responsible for massive clear-cutting leading to deforestation. Clearcutting destroys the orangutans’ forests by stripping their land for palm oil. Tragically, orangutans who share almost 97% of our DNA making them our closest relatives, are killed because they are seen as ‘pests.’ The only apes found in Asia, these largest-in-the-world tree-living mammals are critically endangered.
Palm oil comes from the fruit of the oil palm tree native to West Africa and Southeast Asia. Palm oil is the cheapest, most versatile vegetable oil to produce due to its high yield—it is in over 50% of all consumer goods (snack foods, soaps, cosmetics, biofuels). Global production of palm oil has doubled in the last ten years. Conventional palm oil production and harvesting is without question disastrous for wildlife, ecological relationships, and human rights of enslaved laborers.
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Palm oil plantations are the leading cause of rainforest destruction in Indonesia. At this rate, 98% of their natural rainforests will be destroyed by 2022. Producing gigatons of greenhouse gases, these plantations are corroding the Earth’s atmosphere. Not only does the $44 billion palm oil industry maintain gruesome practices towards animals considered pests: orangutans are clubbed to death by plantation workers or buried alive during clear-cutting that also burns elephants, thousands of people are displaced, hundreds are exploited as slave laborers, and on a broader scale, clear-cutting rainforests emits immense amounts of greenhouse gases—the most egregious climate emergency culprit. Deforestation in Indonesia and Brazil account for approximately 70-80% of greenhouse gases. The burning of both countries’ forests can be clearly seen from outer space.[1]
Since palm oil is now getting bad press among conscious consumers, euphemisms abound. For example, palmitate is a palm oil derivative that can be found in baby’s milk formula—another appalling Nestlé specialty. Concerned consumers must navigate advertisements’ misleading messages. Numerous companies that manufacture obviously unhealthy products like Nabisco’s Oreos, claim to be ‘Certified Vegan’—yet, they, too, are responsible for the destruction of human and animal habitats where palm oil is harvested.
Overt ethically-questionable corporations like Cargill are not the only culprits that terrorize humans and their local ecologies and intentionally misrepresent the facts; many so-called ‘health-conscious,’ ‘sustainable-production’ companies are also responsible. Earth Balance, the company that makes a popular plant-based butter spread, claims sustainability is its leading production standard. It also claims that its products are ‘animal-free.’ Yet, Earth Balance’s primary ingredient is palm oil. Even though Earth Balance states that its products are part of an ‘environmentally friendly food chain,’ it proves to be another greenwashing company using ‘sustainable’ and ‘healthy’ as manipulative marketing tools. ‘Green’ business maintains some of the most insidious and misleading economic practices.
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To uncover palm oil derivatives hiding in your ingredient lists, visit TreeHugger.
How can we negotiate the seeming contradictions between self-care, care for our children, and care for our planet? Social justice, animal protection, and environmental regulations are inextricably bound. And, that is exactly why there is hope—why we can and must collectively act to halt these environmental-justice disasters.
“Consumer-reduction” is an unpopular response to environmental crises and human rights' infractions because it supposedly implies personal sacrifice. As a mother, author, and artist, I'm not suggesting that we deny ourselves or our loved ones the pleasures of chocolate. My call to action is not about “consumer-shaming,” but rather it is a call to establish positive feedback loops that encourage us to reevaluate and replace our well-intentioned habits with more informed behaviors that generate diverse benefits for the health of our bodies, our communities, and our planet.
I'm suggesting that the alternative to convenience-culture is not inconvenience, but rather, we can shift our consumption of pleasures to a bioregional-resource use that offer greater accountability for racial and economic equity.
As a society, we should reject humanitarian abuses and ecological destruction, and focus on how to heal those relationships through models of environmental justice. As an example, I teach and live such a model: S.O.U.L. (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local). S.O.U.L. guides us to engage our local communities using surprising, coalitional practices rooted in ethical and equitable relationships—using only local resources. Through an urgent commitment to creative collaborations that focus on S.O.U.L., we can transform industrial-capitalism’s everyday tyranny and violence—entitlement. S.O.U.L. engages five place-specific strategies that create a bridge between individual response-ability (behavioral changes), community action-based creative collaboration (ex: Interfaith Resource Tree: demonstrates the skills and creative possibilities among members of our community so that when an individual or an institution (school or library, for example) need something, rather than purchasing it (online or at a big box store) they will have abundant access to a series of local resources and go-to advisors), infrastructural re-design—personal support (ex: parenting-accountability forums, deprivatized-shared transportation) and structural systems (ex: building energy audits, landfill regulations, waste management), corporate accountability (ex: local grocery stores banning single-use plastic bags, restaurants banning styrofoam, safe-drinking water hotline), and policy reform (Town Public Works maintaining water pipe system to avoid lead poisoning in water). These five interlocking spheres connect the private with the public, the personal with the political.
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Embodying bioregional ethics means genuinely practicing de-growth. As Rabbi Arthur Waskow tells us, “restraint is not self denial,” but an opportunity for joyful individual and community expression. Creative collaboration becomes integral to dignified living choices that develop work patterns rooted in equilibrium.
Instead of ignoring other peoples' exploited labor as a resource, we can establish infrastructures that support our local communities—where economics and ecologies can co-evolve rather than be in competition or opposition. Both the words “economic” and “ecology” derive from the Greek oikos, meaning home. Collaborating across cultural, economic, and ethnic differences, we can offer how the concept of home (oikos—economy/ecology) can become a model for interdependency that increases cultural diversity and biodiversity, a model for ethical everyday living rooted in collective creative problem-solving.
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While living at Ecovillage Ithaca, I worked with my neighbor Frederick Laloux (author of Reinventing Organizations) who studies companies that incorporate the needs of employees, local communities, and environmental ethics into their ownership and decision-making models. This version of S.O.U.L. helps create resilient local economies, ecologies, and communities. It demonstrates group empowerment as we reduce our reliance on global supply chains (like international chocolate). S.O.U.L. offers cross-cultural examples and
biomimicry models (innovation inspired by nature) that can galvanize people of diverse backgrounds to find allies in unexpected places and actualize urgently needed deindustrialized, decentralized, and bioregional paradigm shifts.
In contrast to corporate greenwashing and industrial-techno extractive capitalism, borrowing strategies from an interspecies collective-intelligence communication network reflecting cultural biomimicry[2] practices will establish a resilient foundation grounded in the local. Such deep mindfulness rooted in nonviolence counters the power dynamics of exploitation with community ingenuity. Bioregional consumer literacy means we do not participate in extractive mining of any kind. A commitment to repurposing, to constructing co-beneficial, regenerative infrastructural support systems offers an antidote to institutionalized “habits of capitalism.”[3]
Local production and consumption reframes embodied energy within a “watershed consciousness,”[4] a hydrosocial cycle. Reciprocity reflects decentralized networks of solidarity and represents flexible systems that follow patterns in nature. It debunks the paradigm of nation-state, us-versus-them thinking that is implicit in austerity, corporate-bailouts, and increased profits for Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Ag, Big Oil, and Big Telecom. Within this radical regionalism, environmental racism in the U.S. is hopefully eradicated and not simply replaced with international green colonialism.
When we offer someone we love something that was made by hurting others, that is not true love. Before buying a “gift of love” ask yourself: What is it you really want this person to receive? Is there a better way—rather than sacrificing wildlife and humans? Can you give gifts without harming people and the environment? Are you ready to learn about local community possibilities of sharing: decolonizing local and global economies?
We choose love by dismantling corporate abuse of our cultural symbol of love. When you buy chocolate, make sure to only purchase from fair-trade socially and environmentally ethical companies.
In order to strategize how to seek solutions, we must recognize how we are contributing to the very corrupt trends (cultural epidemic of indifference, greed, entitlement and accumulation) we are trying to resist that result in escalating humanitarian and climate disasters. The story of slavery chocolate is not only about chocolate, it echoes the story of all consumer products whose global supply chains are rooted in ecological destruction and human rights' abuses. It is a microcosm of the bigger industrial-capitalist picture.
People want actionable steps, but unless we shift foundational infrastructures these steps are reduced to temporary Band-Aids. For the past fifteen years, my colleagues have asked me to write a book about creative-ecological-living philosophy and practice. I am not suggesting “50 Things You Can Do to Save the Planet.” Instead, we must come into “right relation” with the earth; we must learn to be adaptable through cross-generational skill and capacity-building through interspecies ommunication. Through practical living-in-place, we reanimate and strengthen what already exists. From this socio-spiritual commitment, we can engage collaborative circular economic tools for bio-cultural transformation. A cross-cultural, multispecies approach to climate-crisis mitigation weaves together simultaneous individual and collective action—generating the reciprocity of biosynergistic infrastructures.
[2] See my “Sacred Attunement: Shmita as Cultural Biomimicry” in Tikkun Magazine, 8 October 2021, and Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997.
[3] Harold Wilhite, The Political Economy of Low Carbon Transformation: breaking the habits of capitalism. New York: Earthscan, Routledge, 2016.
Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work engages feminist embodied theory, and has been the subject of several documentaries for international public television and film. In addition to critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era (Eifrig Publishing, 2017), her books include: Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014) and Climate Justice Now: Transforming the Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era (Routledge, forthcoming). She has published dozens of interdisciplinary essays in eco-literacy, environmental justice, epigenetics, philosophy, performance-studies, art, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies’ journals/anthologies. Her pedagogical practices, work as program director of Jews of the Earth, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Her photographs/performances have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, Artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in numerous collections including SanFrancisco MoMA, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Cara is a former professor of Performance & Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Critical Philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. She teaches, performs, parents, and lives a creative-zero-waste life. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com or via her websites, Cara Judea and Zazu Dreams. See also this article: Social ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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