What a giant pile of unsold clothing in the desert can teach us about real resistance
According to this article:
“Chile's Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world, has been a dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers. A mountain of discarded clothing, including Christmas sweaters and ski boots, cuts a strange sight in the desert, which is increasingly suffering from pollution created by the fashion industry.”
Some further explanation from another article:
“Sadly, the desert is also a dumping ground for cheap, unsold clothing. Shein party dresses, H&M sweaters, and more are all heaped in growing mounds. The site contains an estimated 60,000 tons of clothes from Europe, Asia, and North America, the BBC reported. The nearby port town of Iquique is one of several ‘free zones’ in Chile, meaning there are no tariffs, taxes, or customs-related fees. This was meant to boost the local economy, but it’s been catastrophic for the local environment. Clothing that is transported to the port city and isn’t sold is then dumped in the desert because no one wants to pay fees to get those items out of the free zone.”
This is why I criticize capitalism. It’s not about promoting other isms. It’s about what the dominant economic ideology has done to human psychology and to the natural world.
To repeat something I wrote a few weeks ago:
Critiquing capitalism does not make you unAmerican, unpatriotic, communist, socialist, or Marxist. It makes you empathetic, open-minded, curious, and imaginative enough to say: None of the above. Who knows how many better options can arise if we’d expand our vision and stop viewing capitalism as our god? I say we find out.
A good step in that direction is to stop contributing to a culture that overproduces items like the unsold clothes now piled so high in a Chilean desert as to be visible from space.
As Dorothy Day reminded us: “If you have two coats, one of them belongs to the poor.”
But keep your guard up.
Find ways to live simply without turning it into yet another source of counterproductive virtue signaling.
In my years on the “left,” it was considered “selling out” for a “rebel” like me to make too much money or even want to make too much money. Your “radical” cohorts would look at you askance if you talked too much about basics like having health insurance — never mind retirement funds.
I eventually recognized this mindset as one of the most effective capitalist propaganda efforts of all time: Convincing “activists” to take a virtual vow of poverty to prove how “hardcore” they are.
How genius is it to make the (alleged) enemy actually feel morally obligated to voluntarily surrender resources? Radical “purists” prove their (alleged) commitment to their (alleged) cause by guaranteeing they never come close to advancing it.
Meanwhile, the Powers-That-Shouldn’t-Be churn on, unscathed and virtually unware that we even exist.
You can reject the tenets of false activism without living a life of self-sabotage.
The “free market” crowd leaves us with mountains of unsold clothes made by exploited workers.
The so-called “activists” eschew anything that looks like prosperity for fear of losing their (alleged) street cred.
How many better options can arise if we’d only expand our vision?
I say we find out.
This is very interesting. It would be interesting to find out the mechanics of the supply chain that made this mound. Yes this gives capitalism a bad strike. Surely there is an alternative like making this stuff into something else. I do know what, but seems to me there is some sort of recycle such as building materials.
My wife and I generate one bag of trash per month which includes so called "recyclable" waste. And yet I have no idea how, where or when the recycling actually takes place.
I met an entrepreneur at a cat show in Ancaster, Ontario selling really neat litter boxes. He said he tried using recycled plastic in their manufacturing process but because of contamination, left pits and other unsightly defects in the finished product. He now uses strictly virgin plastic in their construction.
I once spoke with a civil engineer on a job site and ask why construction debris was not recycled like residential trash. He said that's because the majority of residential recyclables end up in the same stream as the regular garbage from his experience working in the Toronto area. What a waste of time and money creating double and triple stream garbage trucks. All to be shipped over the border to Michigan in endless lines of eighteen wheelers to be dumped. NIMBY
There are only two recyclable household wastes: metals and cardboard. Collecting anything else at the curb is a waste of the resources used to collect and process. Because in addition, the food scraps we're being encourage to separate for collection to supposedly create methane gas for power generation inevitably fail due to cost overruns and/or the noxious odors IT creates in nearby neighborhoods.
Then there is the issue of that other household stream nobody wants to talk about. The kind that exits your household through the sewer, commonly known as sewage sludge. In the before time this waste was usually dealt with by incineration but hey, THAT generates too much carbon! Now IT is processed and sold to the public as garden fertilizer, including all the drugs, paint and chemical people flush down their drains.
HAS capitalism created all these things? I dunno, what about depleted uranium? You can't see IT from space but IT is a dangerous waste in middle eastern deserts. What about shuttered steel plants that the original owners just walked away from? You might see those from space if you know where to look. The old Studebaker plant, closed for near seventy years still exists in Hamilton.
The reason these waste dumps exist is because Mr. Money Bags ain't profiting no more. Kinda like the Pidgeon Pizza Party. The original owner of the pizza was full. Screw IT! Someone else will clean up the litter and maybe the roadkill IT may generate as well. If you have ever witnessed with your own eyes a family of racoons dead in the street because some simple minded fool threw a half eaten burger out the car window, you may find that rage you thought you never had.
I'm finished ranting, thanks for sharing Mickey Z.