Today’s Slaves Often Work For Enterprises That Destroy The Environment
Kevin Bales, author of Blood and Earth, spoke to Fresh Air’s Dave Davies about the connection between modern slavery and environmental damage:
“This whole book for me is about exploring and illuminating that relationship between slavery, environmental destruction and climate change. … I was amazed to discover the role that slavery plays in CO2 emissions and in the simple and basic fact of how global warming takes place. …
When we calculated up, very conservatively, how much CO2 is coming from slavery, it worked out like this: That if slavery were a country it would have the population of Canada, but it would be the third largest emitter of CO2 after China and the United States. …
I can point to … the gigantic mangrove forests at the bottom of Bangladesh, India, Thailand and Burma, that’s called the Sundarbans forest, and it’s the largest carbon sink in Asia, in other words, a place where carbon is taken out of the air and sequestered by the trees, both into the sea and into the trees themselves, so this is a very important forest for removing atmospheric carbon. This is also a place where slaveholders are using slaves to clear cut these mangrove forests, to put in shrimp farms, to put in rice patties, to burn the wood, to do a lot of different things with it, but it’s almost all slave-based deforestation.”
Photo: A child gold miner in Watsa, northeastern Congo. 2004
Marcus Bleasdale courtesy of National Geographic
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
areudirty
stormborns
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
kianamaiart
