Archive for April, 2010

29.April.2010

The meanings of ‘animal’

Years ago I heard David Suzuki speak in Halifax. He was on book tour for his, then recent publication, The Sacred Balance. He told many stories that night and he spoke for several hours about the fundamental connectedness of life. Meeting and listening to Dr. Suzuki had a lasting impact on me. I recall feeling excited when he made note of the “no animals” signs posted in malls and restaurants.

No animals allowed signHave you ever seen that episode of the Flinstone’s where the aliens take Fred and then there’s a duplicate-alien Fred running around, and then when the real Fred comes back, no one believes or understands him? That is my worst nightmare. There is nothing so lonely to me – so utterly alone making – than being misunderstood or disbelieved. In my next life maybe I’ll keep a psychiatrist on staff to help me with this. In this life, I surround myself with friends that share my values. And when I heard David Suzuki taking the time, in a public and well attended lecture, to point to a common artifact of our culture and draw out the significance of the apparent contradiction, I felt totally sane.

In conversational language, we use the word “animal” in a way that excludes humans. Rationally and scientifically, everyone admits that humans are animals. But few people care that the sign says something so wrong. 1

The fact that so few people find these signs to be notable, is partly because so many people, deep down, deep deep down, beneath their scientific and rational brain, actually think we’re not animals. People act as though we’re special. Well, okay, we are kind of special. But it’s more than this. They also act as though we’re outside of, or separate from, or above, or better than, or not fundamentally connected with. And this might explain some of our less than intelligent modes of being in the world. This might be what’s wrong with the sign.

Now let me make this clear: the sign is not the problem. Sure, the sign is part of the problem. It’s at the very least a symptom or a reflection of the problem. But it’s also a state endorsed problem entrencher. It’s a kind of low level, under-the-radar, reinforcement of the idea that humans aren’t animals. The sign is, after all, quite common.

And this is the rub. If you actually talk to the people that act as though humans aren’t animals, they will tell you that humans are animals! Well there’s a fun (apparent) contradiction. The people who behave as if humans aren’t animals, still, intellectually, believe that humans are animals. 2 It’s sufficient here to say, simply, that the gap between what we believe intellectually, and how we actually behave in the world, is a gap that is of the utmost interest to advertising, the art of persuasion and social engineering.

We all have a gap between what we think, and how we act. So those of us who read the sign and don’t really notice what’s wrong with it, can at least be excused for being busy. But what is troubling about this sign, is that it was written by someone. Someone was paid to make this sign. Someone was paid to think about the meaning of the words.

Back in Halifax that night, Suzuki argued that this kind of sign is evidence of the human pretension that there is an invisible divide between humans and the nonhuman natural world. He also argued that this idea is at the root of our current incapacity to live in balance with our Earth. He also speculated that this idea, this human pretension, was a result of our Christian heritage. And still to this day, I find this interesting and compelling. Could it be that the mainstream Christian notions of  a soul, a heaven, and a human-centric God lies at the heart of our imbalance with the Earth? It’s possible. 3

It really boils down to this. That all life is inter-related. we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny so that whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. – Martin Luther King, 1967

  1. One could argue perhaps that the sign also excludes insects, and other animals, and so it’s not uniquely misleading in regard to humans. I don’t find this argument compelling, however, since we may have no power over the presence of insects and other small animals: we do have total power over whether humans are permitted on the premise or not. As we say in ethical studies, “ought implies can.” ↩
  2. Most contemporary, accepted theories about the human brain/mind, muddled as they are, acknowledge a gap between the conscious, thinking person, and the unconscious, subconscious, less-than-fully-conscious acting person. ↩
  3. I should add that there is a movement of educated Christians that are championing environmental issues, and using scripture to do so. I should also add that there have always been those more complicated, more thoughtful Christians that are as troubled by the other layers of common meaning of “animal.” ↩

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22.April.2010

Wilderness and the imagination

Jenny Kingsley is a good friend of mine. And she has just fulfilled an important requirement in her Masters of Fine Arts: she just defended her thesis. It’s not a thesis like the sort we often think of when we think of Master’s degrees. It’s a fine arts program in the department of creative writing.

So Jenny wrote a manuscript. Her genre, very broadly, is creative nonfiction. Yup, that’s right. It’s nonfiction, written artfully. Think documentary but executed with enough thoughtfulness, attention to audience and writing talent, that you might be interested in it even if it’s not about your personal weekend hobby.

Jenny has written about the arctic and her journeys there. She is, among other things, an expert paddler. As it stands, it is an unfinished manuscript, although I have no doubt that she will find a publisher. I know this because I had the pleasure of attending her defense and while I haven’t actually read the manuscript, I have listened, carefully, to those that have.

I was delighted to discover that much of the challenge of writing such a book is in telling stories about the wilderness with integrity.1 This has been on my mind lately. Many conservation organizations choose to focus on the charismatic megafauna like the baby seals, grizzly bears and bald eagles, in their public communications. From a public relations stand point I totally get this. Humans that lack biological training, after all, have more compassion, emotional connection and willingness to act on behalf of elk than they do for invisibly small fungus and such.

But at least one concern is that while these public relations strategies make sense on an individual basis, there may be an aggregate affect of these campaigns on the public’s imagination. Over the course of forty years of saving whales, could it be that we’ve constructed a lopsided, incomplete, and too simplistic image of the wilderness we’re trying to protect?2

Now this was not exactly the centre of Jenny’s defense. Well, maybe it was. It was certainly on the minds of the committee members. These academics were, in moments, shall we say, disappointed, by the portrayals of wilderness by some authors and organizations. And it seemed to me that they spent the majority of their time during her defense pressing on Jenny to justify her literary decisions in this regard.

And while Jenny has been very cognizant of these, well, literary obligations, she was broaching them a slightly different angle. It seemed to me that the challenge occurred to Jenny as a challenge to shake readers out of our common and cliche conceptions of arctic wilderness and human experience there in. Maybe my reading of this is clouded by my experiences doing communications work. But as an author (or a brand manager) nothing is scarier than the preconceived ideas that folks have about your topic (or industry or company). People jump to conclusions, they pigeon hole, they try to know you. And then they fit you, and your topic, into a tiny little box. And then they pat your head and say good girl. All of this is tolerable if it’s an acceptable little box. But it’s an absolute nightmare if it’s a box that you really hate.

Of course there is a certain amount of this that is about ego, and about rejecting a mainstream view, and about distrusting the public, and about underestimating your reader, and about dismissing others as ignorant, and about repositioning yourself in the marketplace of ideas, and about dismissing your competition or those that have gone before you. But this is also about trying to see the world as new; about making the world new.

See, in academic jargon, the wilderness is, arguably, a human construction.3 Wilderness is a human concept. Sounds crazy to some. Many would just prefer to say that human stories about the wilderness are human stories, and that human experience of the wilderness is human experience and that human thoughts about the wilderness are human thoughts. Most folks would also prefer to say that the wilderness is still real even if we can only ever think of it, while we’re thinking of it. No big deal. We don’t need a Ph. D. to acknowledge this. And we don’t need a bunch of “quotation marks” everywhere. We don’t need to refer to other people’s ideas of wilderness as “wilderness” and we don’t need to arbitrarily dream up strained cognates of this word (wyld?), and start using them instead. I do, however, like the use of the word “wild.” And, like any philosopher, I love a good distinction.

And, admittedly, it’s easy to forget that our understanding of wilderness, is just an understanding. I’ll conspicuously switch to the first person here, so I don’t offend my reader’s intelligence. Sometimes I forget that the things I think I know are just things I think I know. And sometimes I forget that the thoughts I have about the arctic wilderness are just thoughts. This is a pretty common trap for me. 4

Jenny, luckily, has escaped relatively unscathed by these academic madnesses.5 Her genre actually depends on the concept of truth. And so, nonfiction, even creative nonfiction, actually has to work and give meaning and shape to the slippery concepts of truth, integrity, and representation.6

Plus, she’s a solid story teller, a disciplined writer, a great humourist, and someone willing to earn her moments of emotionally heightened story telling. And she’s willing to talk politics, gender and privilege. Like, she’s willing to actually talk about it. Good work, Jenny.

  1. This is a challenge of writing a book on wilderness but also of defending it in an academic context. ↩
  2. Actually, I don’t think so. I think environmentalists have pushed our business culture to deeper and broader understandings of the natural world – but it’s a fun polemic! ↩
  3. This is not the case for all academics. This is also not the case for Jenny Kingsley. But in the humanities, and in the postmodern milieu that we find ourselves in, this is mostly the case. ↩
  4. Of course, I also wrote a thesis centred around these debates about knowledge. Nonetheless I’m thankful to the academics, in particular, the post-modern folks that press on me to really grapple with just how much stuff I make up about the world all of the time and just how my modernist sensibilities result in such things as holocausts, colonialism and environmental destruction. Thank you. ↩
  5. I am constantly surprised by my own academic training to find fault and to make criticism: in keeping with this training, I had one notable impulse of this kind during Jenny’s defense. At one point during her defense, Jenny said that folks that get to work and play in the wilderness are privileged. This is a partial truth, and I’m sure that she was referring to wilderness guides and folks that have the privilege to choose to work in the wild. But as I looked around the room at her defense, I saw a bunch of mostly white, middle class folks who made little outward acknowledgement of those working class folks for whom the wild is actually a place of risk, dreary monotony, and disconnect from community and family. That said, they did speak to the notion of entitlement, and Jenny has included the word “middleclass” into her preface. And since Jenny had to draw lines somewhere, I’m sympathetic with her choices. Nonetheless, the lack of attention to this issue, at her defense, left me wanting more. This is no longer a footnote! And this is probably worth another post, and it’s something I want to return to. I see this as a recurring challenge for environmentalists who want to actually connect with the outdoor-working working class. ↩
  6. So too, does the genre of fiction, give meaning to the notions of truth and representaion, although, I believe, in less direct ways. ↩

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21.April.2010

Alpha, Bravo, something, hotel, something…

Ever try to communicate your URL over the phone? On the radio? Sometimes this kind of translation can be very tricky. I’m not sure why exactly, but this sort of thing can make me think about faxing phone numbers or sending dates by morse code. We have codes for codes for codes. The codes below help us to hear the letters. It’s phonetic. And it reminds me of working with helicopters. Although, I can’t say that I ever remember someone saying “kilo.” Nonetheless, I’m fascinated by this kind of thing and I include it here for reference.

  1. Alpha
  2. Bravo
  3. Charlie
  4. Delta
  5. Echo
  6. Foxtrot
  7. Golf
  8. Hotel
  9. India
  10. Juliet
  11. Kilo
  12. Lima
  13. Mike
  14. November
  15. Oscar
  16. Papa
  17. Quebec
  18. Romeo
  19. Sierra
  20. Tango
  21. Uniform
  22. Victor
  23. Whiskey
  24. X-ray
  25. Yankee
  26. Zulu

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19.April.2010

Alpha, beta, something

Math was probably the class that I most often got to use Greek letters in. Well, maybe physics. We used Delta as a symbol for change. We used pPi to express the relationship of the radius of a circle to it’s circumference (or area). And we used Sigma to express a sum. I think. And that’s just it. I’ve always had a shaky grasp of the αa-beta. So, for my own reference, and possibly yours, here we go:

  1. α Alpha
  2. β Beta
  3. γ Gamma
  4. δ Delta
  5. ε Epsilon
  6. ζ Zeta
  7. η Eta
  8. θ Theta
  9. ι Iota
  10. κ Kappa
  11. λ Lambda
  12. μ Mu
  13. ν Nu
  14. ξ Xi
  15. ο Omicron
  16. π Pi
  17. ρ Rho
  18. σ Sigma
  19. τ Tau
  20. υ Upsilon
  21. φ Phi
  22. χ Chi
  23. ψ Psi
  24. ω Omega

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13.April.2010

Supporting Honeysuckle

Now this is a cool project. Or shall I say, it’s a tasty recipe. I feel like I get to brag a little because I’ve actually met this rising star. I know – cool huh. Her project has interesting politics. I think. Well, anyway how could I not support this exploration of sex, power and meat? I couldn’t. So, I’ve made a small pledge. Plus, I’ll get a very cool postcard in the mail. I dare you to watch this well made video and not be piqued.

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13.April.2010

Best recipe ever

Someone recently pointed out to me that I sometimes exaggerate. But this is still the best recipe ever:

http://www.timirvin.com/2010/04/how-to-get-a-picture-of-an-tundra-wolf-howling/

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11.April.2010

On Peace and Non-Violence

Questions surrounding ends and means, principles and expediencies, strategies and tactics, have been swirling around my mind of late. In my meditations, I remembered that on Christmas Eve I posted the audio of a sermon by Martin Luther King. I took some time over the weekend to listen to it again and transcribe some of the relevant sections. 1 From Fair Trade coffee and a global economy, to the communications strategies of conservationist groups, I find these words relevant and provocative. I’ve included here roughly the first half of his lecture.

On Peace and Non-violence, excerpt

Massey lecture for CBC – part five, Christmas Eve 1967

Peace on Earth. This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We neither have peace within or peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears cower people by day and haunt them by night. our world is sick with war. Everywhere we turn we see it’s ominous possibility. And yet my friends, a Christmas hope for peace and goodwill towards all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian hoper. If we don’t have goodwill towards men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power – wisdom born of experience that tell us that war is obsolete.

There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. But the very destructive power of modern weapons of warfare eliminates even the possibility that war may any longer serve as a negative good – so if we assume that life is worth living, if we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.

So let us this morning explore the conditions for peace. And as we explore these conditions I would like to suggest that modern man really go all out to study the meaning of non-violence, it’s philosophy and it’s strategy.

We have experimented with the meaning of nonviolence in our struggle for racial justice in the United States. But now the time has come for man to experiment with nonviolence in all areas of human conflict. And that means nonviolence on an international scale.

Now let me suggest first, that if we are going to have peace on earth our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and as long as we try the more we’re going to have war in this world. The judgement of God is upon us. And we must either learn to live together as brother or we’re going to perish together as fools. As nations and individuals we are interdependent.

I have mentioned to you before of our visit to india some years ago. it was a marvelous experience. But I say to you this morning that there were those depressing moments. But how can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his  own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night. How can  one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes thousands of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night. more than a million sleep on the sidewalks of Bombay India every night, more than a half a million sleep on the sidewalks of Calcutta every night – they have no houses to go in, they have no beds to sleep in.

As I beheld these conditions something within me cried out, can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned? And an answer came, “oh no!” And I started thinking about the fact that right here in our country we spend millions of dollars everyday to store surplus food and I said to myself, “I know where we can store that food free of charge” – in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God’s children in Asia and Africa, latin America and even in our own nation, who go to bed hungry at night.

It really boils down to this. That all life is inter-related. we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny so that whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the inter-related structure of reality.

Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning with out being dependency on most of the world. You get up in the morning and go the bathroom and you reach for for the sponge and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. Then you go in the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning. That’s poured in your cup by a South American. Or maybe you want tea – that’s poured in your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having coco for breakfast and that’s poured in your cup by a West African. And then reach over for your toast and that’s given to you at the hands of an english speaking farmer, not to mention the bacon.

Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning you are dependent on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured. It is it’s inter-related quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the inter-related structure of all reality.

Now let me say secondly that if we are to have peace in the world, men and nation must embrace the non-violent affirmation that ends and means must cohere.

One of the great philosophical debates of history has been over the whole question of means and ends. And there have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means – that the means really aren’t important, the important thing is to get to the end you seek. So if you are seeking to develop a just society, the important thing is to get there and the means are really not important – any means that will get your there, they may be violent means, they may be untruthful means, they may be unjust means, to get to a just end. There have been those who have argued this through out history.

But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means because the means represent the ideal in the making and the end in process. And ultimately you cannot reach good end through evil means. Because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

It’s one of the strangest things that all of the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old came killing in pursuit of peace. Alexander, Julius Ceaser, Charlemagne and Napolean, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. Did you know that if you read Mein Kampf close enough, Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany, was for peace. The leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, president Johnson is talking eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek.

But one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek but it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that in the final analysis, ends and means must cohere because the need is pre-existent in the means. And ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

Now let me say that the next thing we must be concerned about if we are going to get peace on earth and goodwill towards men, must be the affirmation of the sacredness of all human life…

  1. Wow, transcription is not straightforward. It would probably be a little easier with a foot pedal controller. All of the decisions around punctuation, paragraph breaks, and emphasis, are my own. ↩

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10.April.2010

Bank on your cell phone

Took this photo in 2000.

india-bank-on-cell-phone-we

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06.April.2010

The Olympics versus Tiger Woods

Ages ago I wrote about how the brand of the Olympics is a safer investment than investing in a single athlete or even an entire team. Since I wrote that, a particularly high profile athlete has had a massive brand crash. So it seems like a good time to underline the relative brand security of an entire team of teams.

In order to draw out this comparison, first consider that as of December 10th, reporters and opinion makers were still largely guessing that Tiger Woods wouldn’t lose any sponsors. Well he did. Many of them, I think. Companies became afraid of being associated with Tiger Woods. Wow. Now some didn’t drop him, they just suspended him, I believe. Probably, and I’m totally making this up, some of his sponsors just pretended to drop him and made him sign carefully crafted legal agreements and then forced him to adopt a 9-step process to rebuild his public image.

It is notable that sponsors dropped or suspended Woods in such a short period of time. If you do a site search for “Tiger Woods” on the Calgary Herald website you get a list of 165 articles. Now these articles are listed chronologically. And 12 of those articles occur before they reported on the infamous car crash on November 27th with this article: Woods’ wife rescues golfer from smashed up car. By December 3rd, the Herald published: Sponsors willing to give troubled woods a mulligan. By the 1oth of December the Herald had written: Sponsors begin to shun woods. By February 22nd there had been roughly 150 articles including: Dalai Lama weighs in on Tiger Woods. 1

Some might argue that this is evidence that the Calgary Herald wastes time and resources writing about socially insignificant issues. Some would argue that the energy that the Herald puts towards this issue is evidence that they lack journalistic integrity. But these issues are not mine today. Perhaps I will quickly note, however, that since these articles are about Tiger Woods, they are actually affecting, even constructing, the public opinion about Tiger Woods. They report the news and they make the news all at once. But this is a digression.

The point, and the point of comparison, is that an individual’s billion dollar brand was tarnished so much that in the span of a couple of weeks, his sponsors had to either drop him, suspend him, pretend to drop him, or at the very least, hold tense stakeholder meetings and press conferences. Wow. Now try to imagine what could possibly happen to the Olympics in order for that to happen. It’s almost impossible to imagine. The brand is too diversified. It’s too secure. And partly, I would argue, the public opinion shapers, like the Calgary Herald, have too much invested in the Olympics and the Olympic machine. When the Woods scandal came out, the companies involved with Woods pulled their ads featuring him. But if there was Olympic scandal involving individuals or teams, they would just switch individuals and teams. There is nothing that could happen that could cause the Olympic brand, in toto, to crash that hard, that fast. Even if some athletes became embroiled in some kind of publicity disaster, there would still be thousands of others. And even if some entire teams, or a few countries of teams became publicly toxic, there would still be entire other countries of teams to cushion the brand.

Of course, knowing this, it’s no wonder that the IOC carefully developed, and then enclosed, and then protected that brand within a vast legal framework in order to sell it to the highest bidders. How better to support the cause of amateur sport and international peace & cooperation?

  1. The number is approximate because some, not many, of the listings in the search were of comments, not complete articles. Actually, the number of articles might be more than that, since I did a search for “tiger woods” not “t. woods” or simply “tiger” or “woods”, etc. ↩

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03.April.2010

Fair trade, fairly traded

I drink a lot of coffee. And sometimes I like to have a well made coffee. And sometimes I’ll drink any ole’ gas station coffee. But generally speaking, it matters to me if coffee is grown organically. Even more so, it matters to me if coffee is certified as Fair Trade coffee.

And it’s not just me. Fair Trade is an important part of coffee culture in Victoria, and beyond. Of course, there are many people who don’t care about these things. There are even those that think that the price controls of Fair Trade coffee is a ruthless attack on market capitalism.

But the vast majority of people that think about Fair Trade coffee, think it’s cool. On my view, you have to understand the coffee trade in the context of four hundred years of colonization to really see why it’s so important. Coffee grown in South America, for example, is grown as a cash crop by regions that have suffered centuries of invasion, debt incurred by corrupt regimes imposed by colonial interests, civil war caused by the resultant political instability, disease, genocide, religious persecution, and human rights atrocities that still continue to this day. So desperate communities will grow coffee beans at great social and environmental cost and sell them for very little. Four centuries of colonial abuse has taken away the ability of many communities to negotiate a better price.

Years ago, some clever do-gooders thought they might be able to help some coffee growing communities to negotiate a better price for their coffee.1 These do-gooders wanted to get a price for these communities that allowed them to save and build and to do more than live in abject poverty. They reasoned that if some coffee buyers shared the same values they did, that they would pay a little more so that others could live a better life. But how would customers know whether they could trust that the extra money was actually going to the farmers?

The solution was to create an arm’s length third party to assess and approve trade scenarios to certify that communities were actually getting a fair price. Now the term, “fair price,” is an interesting one. Free market purists will scoff at the term, arguing that a price is set by demand and supply and the willingness of individuals to pay. Free market purists will argue that there is no such thing as a “fair price.” But pretty much every other sane human will agree intuitively about the fairness of pricing, and this is all that counted.

So here we are in Victoria, years later, and there are many coffee shops that will serve only certified Fair Trade coffee. The certifications come from Transfair or, I think, a variety of twenty other international certifying bodies. And most coffee drinkers have heard of fair trade coffee. And this idea, “fair trade,” has become a valuable part of the brand of any company doing business in coffee.

And here’s where it gets interesting. It gets interesting because every coffee shop wants to be thought of as community oriented, and socially responsible and a good global citizen.

Starbucks, for example, will take out one page ads in the Globe and Mail telling readers about the way they serve Fair Trade coffee. And when I find myself at a Starbuck’s and the barista asks me whether I want dark or medium, I say, “oh, just give me the Fair Trade one.” The barista will inevitably say that they’re both Fair Trade. Now, inwardly, I’m smiling when this happens. Because I know that Starbucks only brews certified Fair Trade coffee one day a month.2 So then I say ask them to show me the label and what certifying body says its actually Fair Trade. And the poor embarrassed, and someone surprised, barista has to admit that it’s just Starbucks that says it’s fairly traded.

And that’s the difference between certified Fair Trade and fair trade or fairly traded. See, any free market capitalist can say the price they pay to cash crop exporters is fair. Anyone can say they serve fairly traded coffee. Yup, we bought this stuff from a family who couldn’t make the mortgage payments and were going bankrupt from medical costs and whose child was born deformed from the pesticides and fertilizers they are required to use, in order to pay the militia that was trained by the CIA – but don’t worry, we payed them a fair price.

This is why the third body certification process is so important. This is why I ask the barista to look for the TransFair logo. See Starbucks may very well pay all of their suppliers a good price. But unless they get certified, I don’t trust it. And I think they’re creating an illusion when their ad has the TransFair logo on it because they brew the certified Fair Trade coffee one day a month. This is pretty effective branding because most consumers don’t pay enough attention to see through this. This is also effective internal branding, since most of their employees even believe that all of their coffee is FairTrade. It’s a very convenient omission.

Now, in their defense, it’s not just Starbucks that does this. Actually that’s not a defense. But it is a dispersal of guilt. Well whatever. The point is that lots of coffee shops serve fairly traded coffee. When pressed on this issue, many coffee shops train their employees to say that they don’t serve certified Fair Trade coffee in order to pay the farmer more. The reasoning goes like this: since the certification body has infrastructure costs to pay, the certification process is more expensive, and that cost takes money away from the farmer.

I think this is unfortunate. I think it’s a fancy way to undermine people’s confidence in the certification process, while getting the benefits of the brand value that the very same certification process created. It sounds to me like the very same argument put forward by companies that claim governments shouldn’t regulate, because it costs the consumer.

  1. More than just a fair price, there are several criteria for Fair Trade including directness of trade and others. You read more here. ↩
  2. I should add that even serving Fair Trade coffee one day a month is better than nothing. And because Starbucks is so large, this amounts to a lot of coffee. So at least this much is good. ↩

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