"They shouldn't have to make that choice." This was the NGO leader's answer to CBS Reporter (now anchor) Scott Pelley in 2008, when Pelley asked whether the scrap pickers in Guiyu had another job to go to.
Johnny Be Goode Enough.
Perhaps they did have another choice. Picking cabbage. Agriculture is an honorable job. A dangerous job, a job with insecticides, moving blades, and risk of death. But many of the Africans in TV repair could, if they wanted, have stayed in the rural sahel, Savannah or forests.
Just don't kid yourself, it's not "back to Eden."
MRO - Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul - if taken off the table - leaves worse choices.
This is the eighth blog about the decision to scrimmage environmental enforcement agents to arrest "e-waste #wastecrime criminals". I've focused on Joe Benson, because his was the case Jim Puckett put on display at a conference last November, showing off news coverage by UK Independent reporter Cahil Milmo.
Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Last November, at that "E-waste Summit" in Las Vegas, I had a face to face with Jim Puckett and Mike Enberg of BAN and E-Stewards, which I wrote about in the "Environmental Malpractice" series. That series of blogs centered around the Interpol crackdown (which we were documenting before Interpol's press release). Jim and Mike are really nice people with good hearts, and I wanted to try to just ask them why they wouldn't be concerned about a man like Joe Benson, who Jim had just run down in his Powerpoint (without recognize the man's name... You've been reporting his arrest for years, trumpeting it in your 2009 Annual Report, pairing the news with Pieter Hugo photos... and don't know his name...)
He never ever learned to read and write so well, but he could [fix a TV] just like ringing a bell.
"Collateral Damage?" Did Jim actually say those words? I swear he did. He said he felt bad for any individual caught violating international law, as a person. But the law must be enforced. If we can arrest a TV repairman, who can't we arrest for #wastecrime? Metal sorters? Cabbage fertilizers? Fair Trade Cotton farmers? Cabbage dealers? For most of the people in the developing and emerging markets, the bottom line is that Europe is a lot like Africa. Badges and handcuffs and financial fines are the tools of bullyboys. No habeus corpus, no Basel law broken, just a presumption of "primitive", based on what?
Ask Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird while Chuck Berry was in prison, convicted under the Mann Act, a border-crossing crime, like Joe Jackson (the boxer). It has been a few years, Benson seems ripe for a cross-border crime.
