Another "Poverty Porn" Parody

These are coming out so quickly now.   I think this is a movement.  As the NPR article reports, the reactions against "poverty porn", "parasites of the poor", "accidental racism" and "boycotts of geeks of color" are not something I'm making up.

I have heard the frustrating cries from the technicians in Asia, Africa, and South America for over a decade.

This video parody shows Africans coming together, a la "We are the World", to donate radiators to poor freezing Norwegian children.   The way Norway is presented does have a grain of truth... it is indeed cold there, and the cold is something that would really seem frightening to Africans.  But they hit the out-of-context, Onion-esque, clueless notes that anti-export organizations don't seem aware of...



At FastCoExist.com, Ariel Schwartz and Nathaniel Whittenmore describe some of the same lessons I thought we learned in the 1960s, about "poster child syndrome" (the UNICEF campaign).  From Ariel's article:

"Guilt-tripping is still a commonly used tactic in trying to get people to donate money for the impoverished, though it is slowly being replaced by more hopeful messages from organizations like Mama Hope and Pencils of Promise. Nathaniel Whittemore explains in a Co.Exist post from earlier this year that this is strategic: "It supposes that after decades of being battered over the head by relief organizations flaunting horror images, there’s not much left but table scraps in the guilt bucket," he writes.

Fair Trade Recycling is a movement to recognize the crazy good things about repair and trade and even recycling in the emerging markets.   I could never have predicted the animosity directed towards technicians and recyclers in emerging markets, promoted by the very people I hung out with in college.  Remember the "boycott" of Fair Trade Cotton at Victoria's secret?

E-Waste Poster Children are everywhere.

I'm still working on the individual examples for the "legal malpractice" case.  It's just something I want to be very careful with, something that has to be done right.

More from the NPR article about the video, below.

"The video is humorous, but there is a serious message.  The point is that images of helpless Africans are just as inaccurate as the idea of helpless freezing Norwegians.   A lot of Africans cannot relate to the patronizing videos and development initiatives."
"The organization says it has certain goals with the video. "
"Among them that fundraising "should not be based on exploiting stereotypes" and that media should have more respect in portraying suffering children."

Environmental Malpractice Part 4: Poverty Porn

Born in:   Mexico, Mexico, USA, Palestine, USA, Taiwan, USA, Malaysia

So at our meeting in Vegas, Jim Puckett made the case that the world will be better if we all obey "international law", and that defamation of technicians, and closure of sustainable repair and reuse factories, is acceptable "collateral damage".  Jim presents himself, again and again, as an authority on Basel Convention.

The use of international treaties to simultaneously protect the 6 billion people in "non-OECD" nations from ... bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...  and the same time generate millions of well-intentioned dollars for a Seattle non-profit... This is not BAN.org's invention.  Poverty Porn has been around for decades.

Since my days studying international development at Carleton College, and as both a volunteer and employee (cross-culture trainer) for Peace Corps Africa, we've been aware of the "poster child" syndrome.  Here's a recent editorial on "Poverty Porn" by Nathaniel Whittemore at Co.Exist  (and here's a film from an admittedly donation-based organization in Africa, MamaHope.org, which does at least give hope for a different message).

The Hollywood and not-for-profit-Guilt-Industrial-Complex are really nice people to hang around with, as Jim and Mike both were in Vegas.  They are nicer people than I am.   Calling them accidental racists or ayatollahs of #ewaste was a decent into frustration.    If we are to turn them around, we need to first get their attention (which I've done) but then to find an alternative to the touchy word "racism".

Environmental Injustice and Work By Hand

The theme of the blog has been a defense of work done by hand.  Solving the E-Waste Problem [StEP], six years after we met at E-Scrap, has started a Best of Two Worlds campaign to champion the advantages of hand-disassembly of e-scrap.  They don't go far enough, in my opinion, towards defending trade between rich and poor (the poor prefer to hand-disassemble and repair rich people's stuff).  But it's progress.

In every developing city, there are people who have jobs that are "beneath" rich people.  [Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People is one of the top ranked posts of 2012].

If you take a camera very close to any job of any hard working poor person, you may frighten someone.   The butcher shops are "nasty".   Working in an auto garage exposes one to carcinigens and mutigens. Bleaches at the laundry and in mop buckets.   Repetitive tasks, risking motion injury, at assembly plants.  Mining.  Petrochemical factories.  Forestry. Smelters.   Working in 105 degree heat, smelling lignin, at a recycled toilet paper factory in Massachusetts may only look good to a migrant worker.

This technique of bringing a camera very close to one of the workers that picks our organic cotton "by hand", and making us feel guilty for using, owning, accessing things, is cheaply reproduced by even worthless idiot "non-governemental organizations".   It's like camera proliferation, arming idiots with the ability to combine poverty+unfamiliar-race+trade to impugn... anything.   Anything good or bad.  Even recycling.

Found Background (while cleaning my office)

I, too, was a poster child.

Found this "Mass DEP Retirement" poster today, while cleaning my office.  From the Apple Macintosh SE in the background, the photo would have been my first year at DEP, or just before I got the job there.  I think I was still at Earthworm Recycling, but moving to DEP at One Winter Street soon after.

While waiting for my hiring package to go through (a process which took months, and which I personally made an effort to shorten by running my own paperwork for new hires), I was writing a novel.  A short time after my retirement party here, my apartment in East Boston was broken into and someone stole the Macintosh.

It was like having a file cabinet stolen.  The computer was worthless, it was obsolete at that point, as far as resale value.  But I was unable to find the novel in the floppy disk drives, and had since moved to Microsoft.

Started the novel again recently, about 15 years later, from memory.

I got too busy to finish the novel when DEP work got going.   Later, a few months after the party here

This, by the way, is the same desk today.   I originally scavenged that wooden desk out of a dumpster at the JFK Building in Boston - where EPA offices were.  I vividly remember tying up the loading dock while I positioned the paper recycling truck I was driving to where I could leverage the wooden desk out of the dumpster.  I finished my masters using this desk, and then it was my home office desk until about 2002.

Now it is a monitor demanufacturing table.




I wonder how many novels we destroy.  It's the same desk, swear.  EPA - Robin - deman.  If you are retiring from EPA, take a look, it may be yours.  No one ever, ever worked as hard on it as it is worked on today...

My Cousin Chevron's Taipei Hypothesis Grits

Chevron Agrees!!!!  With Chevron!

The Poster Child has so many uses.  Who needs a vetted "certification" or standard when you can take a picture of earth's most inexhaustible resource - brown kids under the age of 18?

We've seen the success of an "anti-ewaste" campaign which never had a number or statistic or even a proper interpretation of Basel Convention Annex III or Annex IX... they had something better, photos of children and the word "toxic" to describe something vaguely electronic and complicated which we all had in our basements and could feel guilty about.

Success breeds imitation.

Now Big Oil is into the act.   Take pictures of the kids, then make a demand for something you just so happen to already be doing (donating money to schools).   You co-opt the protest zeitgeist, steer it to your lightning rod, protecting your house.

The big difference between these two campaigns?

Probably the kid got some money from Chevron.  No kid ever got a dime from Basel Action Network.  They take jobs away but don't even write a thank you note.

And as long as we are making stuff up, here is a "hypothesis".  You know, that's an alternative to just stating something bogus as fact (like, 80% of the electronics exported are burned, or 80% of the e-waste collected is exported, or that Guiyu is "the most toxic place on earth", or that arsenic in Guiyu's river came from ewaste recycling rather than from the textile dyes, which are the source of arsenic in other rivers...).

Ahem, hypothesis, here goes...

"Jazz originated in New Orleans because poor families in close quarters encouraged music."

I've got a 15 year old on piano and an 11 year old on trumpet, right here, right now. Practicing.

Environmental Justice in a Pixelized City Slum

Fences around slums, to keep out the rich? 

   Last weekend, "Useless Lists of Jobs", was about pixelized slums, a bookend to the "Rich City, Poor City" UN Pixelizes World blog from last January.  Each describes just how much wealth is in cities inside "poor" countries.   Following our Fair Trade Recycling trips to Africa and South America, I'm thinking about specific encounters with relative poverty and relative wealth.

IFIXIT and TechTravels have made also made pilgrimages to "recycling slums".  We all have great photos, but need better research and statistics (like this from World Bank) about the jobs that are realistically available in this neighborhood of Lima.  The photo of the multi-colored walls on the Useless Lists of Jobs post is a little too pretty... when you see the slum from the air, colored only by the brown dust on the roofs, it's a little more textured.

View of neighborhood from the sky... less colorful..  No yards, pools or streets.

Not all of Lima is like this.  But a lot people live here
   
Environmental Justice via Ban on Trade?   Environmentalists have made a very strong case that exports of computers for recycling should be taken "off the table", made illegal, either through an amendment to the Basel Convention.  Recycling jobs, they argue, are so intensely hazardous that even export for repair (clearly asset, not waste management) should be illegal.   If the factory that made your monitor replaces a bulging capacitor, they say, it's a slippery slope to recycling harm...  So they would have us build a wall around the slums, to keep rich peoples' used equipment out.

These restrictions may keep rich people from Europe and America out.  But cities like Lima, Rio, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai and Guangzhou are also places of tremendous wealth. Outside the OECD, and in Lima itself, people are on high speed internet, replacing CRTs and LCDs with bigger and better gear.

e-Waste Poster Child Telethon from Disney (*Repost from 2011)

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Tomorrow (Monday) is our R2 Audit.  So I've invited a guest writer while I prepare the inspection paperwork.

"Hello, My name is Mowgli, and I am the spokesperson for the Poster Child Workers Union [PCWU].  You know me from my work in Hollywood's "Jungle Book".  But did you also know I was nearly used as a "poster child" for several charitable campaigns?  My creative boss at Disney frowned on that kind of thing.  Last I remember, Uncle Walt allowed my image to be used on an Italian Lira postal stamp - back in 1970 (see right).

"However, there are millions of boys and girls like me, in the developing world, who have no Disney lawyers to protect us from unauthorized use of our images.  For the most part, we don't mind so long as the photographer is trying to accomplish something good.   If my sister is in line receiving food or medicine from CARE, Save The Children, Oxfam, or Unicef, she's hardly in a position to complain, right?

"One group that has been using our images a lot is now being confronted by the PCWU union.   It's a 'watchdog' group which was taking our photos doing recycling work.   We thought recycling is good.  This is better than being a child soldier, a tantalum mine worker, a sex slave, or working in a textile mill.  Sure, our lives are tough, but if you were me, wouldn't you rather be recycling than doing something worse?  I mean, don't white boy scouts earn merit badges for recycling?

Walt Disney. (2023, July 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney

"Now, the official union position is that we can be bought.   Ok, that's so blunt...  But true.  We'll gag and writhe for a peso. But after the photographer leaves, what then?  Oy veh!  It turns out, no pay for the photo, and worse...! Their campaign wants to shut us down entirely!