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SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES
STARTS FROM TOLERANCE
source: www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/0/
a0a298536f43dc51802567a5005a1d09?Opendocument
www.tebtebba.org/tebtebba_files/ipr/racism.htm
P. Lugo, “Greening the Summit”, Ottagono n° 152, Editrice Compositori, Bologna 2003, p. 108.
website: www.apartheidmuseum.org/start.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3011327.stm
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intro: tolerance is not a marginal element when speaking about consumption and, more broadly, the economy. We are often pushed to think about money as the main exchange tool necessary to have access to goods and services that are not freely provided. This is not always the case. Today many people in many countries of the world (in the North as well as in the South) still lack access to even basic goods and services because of their religion, gender, origin, skin colour, etc. In this sense, tolerance values are at the heart of sustainable consumption patterns and, more broadly, of more sustainable lifestyles... In other words, tolerance means that everybody should have the right to access the same goods and services.
the debate: the link between sustainable production/consumption and anti-discrimination has generated an interesting debate in which positions are often divergent:
- on the one side, there are those – e.g. indigenous people organisations - who feel that globalisation is a new form of racism, discrimination and intolerance. “Present-day globalisation is basically the imposition of the culture and system of the global capitalist market economy including its ethos and values [...]. This is what is considered superior because it supposedly leads to more economic growth. It does not matter if it kills small and sustainable economic and production systems, such as those found among indigenous peoples.” Globalisation is felt as a new form of colonialism that uses international rules for intellectual property rights - negotiated in the framework of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) - instead of crass gunboat diplomacy,* “depriving us of control over our natural resources” >[www.tebtebba.org/tebtebba_files/ipr/racism.htm];
- on the other side, some authors state that even if “capitalism can be a cause of racial discrimination - because economic development heightens competitive relations and these in turn evoke group hostility- [...] it can also be its enemy”. This is mainly due to the fact that an employer's interest is in selling products and services irrespective of the ethnic characteristics of employees and customers: money is not black, brown, yellow or white! In other words racial discrimination is not economically advantageous! [www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf].
initiatives: around the world there are many initiatives that can help us better understanding what has been stated above. They are good examples of the link between tolerance and equal access to goods and services...
- In South Africa, several initiatives have been undertaken to nurture the memory of the apartheid period.* The Apartheid Museum, the first of its kind, was built for an estimated 80 million rands (about 8 million euros). It illustrates the rise and fall of apartheid. A series of 22 individual exhibition areas takes the visitor through a dramatic emotional journey that tells a story of a state sanctioned system based solely on racial discrimination. The visitor is handed a ticket with a card with either ‘white’ or ‘non-white’ written on it, regardless of his or her race. The tour continues in this way. There are separate entrance doors, benches where some can sit and others can’t, and so forth: just like the age of racial segregation when fewer than 20% of the population - whites - forced the remaining 80% to live and die as second class citizens;
- in the same provocative vein the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising campaign to raise the money needed for a national memorial to Martin Luther King in Washington asks: “What if Martin Luther King had not had a dream and the civil rights movement in the United States had never fought its campaign for equality?” In one ad a smartly dressed Halle Berry is seen arriving at a restaurant flanked by two friends - only for the Oscar winning actress to be escorted to the back of the building to sit in the ‘coloured section’. In another of the ads American weatherman and entertainer Al Roker is shown walking around a gym, unable to find a running treadmill that is not marked ‘white guests only’.
looking ahead: these are just two examples to keep in mind that today discrimination still excludes people somewhere from access to goods and services... and that our trip-tick towards more a sustainable lifestyle also includes the fight against all forms of discrimination.
* Diplomacy involving intimidation by threat or use of military force.
** Beginning in 1948, the white elected National Party government initiated a process which turned over 20 million people into 2nd class citizens, damning them to a life of servitude, humiliation and abuse. Their liberation in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela, the prisoner who became president, is a climax in the saga of a nation’s resistance, courage and fortitude.
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