I’ve been increasingly surprised by how few items I actually need. I’m currently down to one ~35L backpack and I am still purging unnecessary items from it (side-note: I’m not looking forward to returning home and having to go through all off the stuff I left in storage). This minimalist approach is in contrast to the sheer amount of stuff I see on a daily basis. We try to visit a market in each city we go to and I’m amazed by the abundance. In South Korea, one market had probably enough cloths for tens of thousands of people piled in precarious towers. In Taiwan, there are huge bags of traditional folk ingredients that I mostly don’t recognize (one of the stalls we saw in Taipei had about 10 ~2mx1mx.5m bags of garlic sitting on the street). As we explore these markets, I’ve spent more time wondering how all this stuff got here and if it will ultimately be used.
This musing was further complicated when several giant bags of some of the Taiwanese mystery ingredients were certified by Intertek, a “British multinational assurance, inspection, product testing and certification company” (wikipedia). Why is a UK company certifying traditional Taiwanese ingredients? How was it doing quality assurance? Were these ingredients shipped through the UK and then to Taiwan? Where did they come from in the first place?
Jordan showed me a podcast episode featuring a professor that studies food networks and how suppliers get around quality assurance (e.g., something like selling basil leaves mixed with strawberry leaves to cut costs). This taught me that it would be a Herculean task to hunt down the data to understand the dynamics of these supply and distribution chains. But at it’s most basic, these particular bags of ingredients were being sold in Taipei, after being certified by a UK company, and likely being supplied by another organization. Who is the supplier? How is demand anticipated and communicated back to the supplier? Is it? Is anyone responsible for ensuring sustainable consumption?
Of all of the many questions above, I find this last one most intriguing as, to me at least, it requires a need for nature to have rights within the economic system. Even if nature has document rights, someone needs to voice and exercise them.
Palau seems to have found an interesting and effective system. In Palau, our guide told us that there is a two-system government - the regular republic government and an indigenous government system that, in theory, has something like a veto power over the republic government. Because the indigenous government places great value on the environment and it tends to be a local priority, Palau has passed several impressive environmental protection policies, including creating marine sanctuaries, banning reef toxic sunscreen, and eliminating exploitative foreign fishing contracts. Palauans involved with the indigenous government system also seem deeply interested in learning to make more informed decisions - our boat captain asked us about how RADAR works because the US military proposed a new RADAR development on the island and he wanted to better understand the technology before his community’s meeting with the chief(s?) about it.
This system seems to work to help defend nature from overexploitation for Palau and its neighbor, Yap (where I was told the indigenous government is something akin to a formal judiciary body). Both benefit from small scope (island) and homogenous, strong, and environmentally conscious indigenous communities. I wonder how replicable this model of institutionalizing a voice focused on the environment and tradition is as a way to better protect nature. If so, I would imagine the most useful form of international aid would be a more supportive role (e.g., empower local communities and provide specific information, resources, etc. when only requested by the community, like the approach described in Easterly’s White Man’s Burden).
I’m curious to know if there are other successful systems where nature has some form of institutionalized power. Let me know your thoughts!