In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

BRINGING THE LESSONS HOME

In Business, July-August, 2005, Vol. 27, No. 4, p. 31

BALLE BEAT

Merrian Fuller

WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME how I became interested in creating local living economies, I often say it all started in a rice field in northeast Thailand - or what should have been a rice field. I spent the fall of 2000 studying the social and environmental consequences of “development” in Thailand - including the case of an enormous pulp and paper factory.
I read the company's brochures in advance of my visit. It sounded promising, claiming to have provided local inhabitants with a school, childcare, recreational facilities and a Buddhist temple (complete with its own emerald Buddha!). The company also reported using wood fiber produced by small local farms, and to be the first mill in this region to produce chlorine free pulp. It sounded great, like a model industry that has both made profit and been attentive to the needs of the local people.
Most Americans would leave it at that, unable to visit a factory halfway across the world, grateful to believe that industry finally has its priorities straight. However, I was able to go see what the plant was doing, tour the factory and surrounding fields, and talk with people affected by the production process. What I experienced left a searing question in my mind about whether I can be a conscientious citizen while buying products made halfway around the world, even when a company claims to be “sustainable.”
I saw brown foamy water flowing from the factory onto the surrounding eucalyptus plantations, part of a program the company called “Project Green”. The wastewater then seeped downhill into the surrounding lowland rice fields, where local farmers said it gave them painful rashes when they try to work their fields and destroyed their crops. The decimated fields behind their homes were a silent witness to their story.
I talked to one factory worker who was glad to have a comfortable job, but who also mentioned that he'd seen bribes paid to inspectors, messy chemical spills and workers who had become severely ill after working at the plant. I also saw no evidence of the many facilities and benefits the company claimed to provide to “the locals” - according to villagers living in the area there is a small colony of workers inside the factory walls that receives these benefits, and most of them were brought in from villages in the south. Additionally, during the factory tour, company officials admitted to my group that their production is still not completely chlorine free, which means that they are creating the carcinogen dioxin as a by-product on a daily basis.
When I asked a company official where this paper pulp ends up, he said about 50 percent goes to the U.S. to companies like Kimberly-Clark. All this destruction and suffering for toilet paper? How could it be?
This is when it hit me - we have created systems that produce horrendous outcomes without anyone in the supply chain needing to be “evil” per se. You have consumers who just want cheap toilet paper, government officials who just want their country to “develop,” company managers who just want to make money for investors and who sometimes even try to ameliorate their company's harmful impacts. Yet it all adds up to an extremely harmful outcome.
There are many ways to try to improve situations like this - government regulation, international labor and environmental standards, eco and Fair Trade labeling systems. But for me it starts by going local. We have separated ourselves so far from the people and land that produce the goods we consume that it is nearly impossible to understand the impact we are having. When we buy from local producers and local business owners, we start to see the impact our consumption has on the land, on the workers employed by local businesses or in cooperatives, and on the community as a whole as wealth circulates between community members. There are no easy answers to the challenge of finding sustainable ways to live on this planet, but I believe that as we move in the direction of creating local living economies we will find a path (or many paths) that allow communities to thrive without depleting communities in other parts of the world.

Merrian Fuller works with the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) office in San Francisco, which connects business networks across North America improving the social, environmental and economic life of their communities. She was formerly the director of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia. Visit the website at: www.livingeconomies.org. Email: merrianfuller@gmail.com.