posted 6 years ago
This is tough. Honestly, we'd need the global will to fix things in Ecuador and at least a dozen other places in similar straits.
Practically speaking, we can rally together to muster that will, doing things like identifying not only the gross products, but the specific companies in particular that are responsible for pressuring the local governments (people with badges) to sell the food forests for lumber, oil, and minerals. If we do that, we have options in voting with out dollar, and getting others to do so.
This isn't exactly the same, but it's laterally related. We all know that palm oil is a concern. For that reason, my much better half and I have stopped buying all products that contain palm oil. It's a lot of ingredient reading, but we do that anyways, and we can't really eat many processed foods anymore, but if everyone did exactly that, palm oil wouldn't be an issue.
I think that, for Ecuador and all places that share it's issues, we should boycott certain substances and products derived from destructive environmental practices. I think we should develop a list and try to get some traction here on Permies, if that's the sort of thing the membership will get behind.
We can take pictures of ingredients lists and maybe have a wiki that lists common brands and goods that we could eschew in favour of competing products that are better sourced.
We could contact organisations, like SumOfUs.org, that rally public sentiment for good causes and against bad ones, and that can stop platforms from allowing them advertising and publicity. If these bad products can't be bought on Amazon, that's a serious chunk of market share down the drain.
Because we're consumers distributed across the globe, what we can do, I think, is vote with our dollars and get as many others on-side as we can.
Great question, by the way. That's the first step after realising something's wrong.
-CK
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein