Part II: “The chains on you are binding me, I can’t rest ‘til we all are free”

Last week I talked about the glasses that we all wear: the dominant ideas in the world that give us a particular focus through which to view everything and don’t allow us to see that which doesn’t fit with those ideas. For example, our glasses tell us that each problem we encounter is isolated, and not connected to other issues.

Now let’s take off the glasses, change our focus, and see a different reality: everything and everyONE is connected.

Here’s an example: how is the recent devastation of the earthquake in Haiti related to your grandmother’s antique mahogany table? How did deforestation play into so many deaths? The cutting of Haitian trees began under colonial rule with African slaves sent to clear the forests to make room for foreign sugar and coffee plantations. In 1804 after the first and last slave revolution in history, Haiti became the first independent nation of Latin America. In 1915, the US Marines invaded the country and stayed for 19 years, controlling the banks and government before setting up a proxy force and a series of dictatorships to maintain US interests. (Meanwhile, a nearly identical history was happening in Nicaragua.) Forced deforestation continued in the 1940s during Rejete, the anti-Voodoo campaign when the Catholic Church gathered whole communities at gunpoint and forced them to watch their trees burn to prove that their Gods were not in nature. The campaign also served to clear peasants off lands US companies wanted for agriculture by destroying the Haitian people’s spiritual roots as well as their sources of income and food. Throughout this history, foreign companies benefited from deforestation by exporting tropical hardwoods to make high quality furniture, including your grandmother’s table. Due to such heavy deforestation, Haiti’s soil eroded, and the country was unable to produce its own food, so its people went hungry. Haitian peasants had no choice but to seek a living in the cities, building shacks packed into places like Port-au-Prince…shacks that fell down on top of them and added to the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the January earthquake.

Through this example, we can see that seemingly disparate problems are actually fundamentally connected. So where’s the good news in all this?

1. When we understand these connections, we make better choices. The El Porvenir coffee cooperative understands connections. They have seen that their lives literally depend on the earth: During Hurricane Mitch a nearby mountainside washed away, burying hundreds alive in a mudslide, while at El Porvenir not one life was lost because their trees retained soil even in the heavy rains. They grow their coffee – a cash crop that brings the community of 250 their only income – under the shelter of the same fruit trees that feed their families. They understand that to put pesticides and chemical fertilizers on their coffee crop would mean poisoning themselves. They also understand their connection to one another: this cooperative of ex-Guardia, ex-Contra rebels and ex-Sandinista fighters – all bitter enemies within the history of Nicaragua – live and work together peacefully. When asked how they achieve that, their reply is simple: “It’s the poverty that unites us, we have to work together to survive.”

2. When we work to solve one problem, we have a positive effect on related issues as well. These connections are not only true within the El Porvenir community, but stretch to encompass all of us: Each tree that the folks at El Porvenir cultivate for its shade and food provides habitat for the birds that not only fill Nicaragua with their song, but also migrate north to our own backyards and fill our own lives with that same song.

It is when we take off those glasses and begin to see the depth of connection all around us that we understand that our world is a very small place. We begin to see the role your grandmother’s antique table played in the deforestation of Haiti which pushed people into the inadequate housing in Port-au-Prince that collapsed on them in the earthquake. When we understand that we our fates are already connected, then we can join hands to work together for the world that we all seek.

“The only chain that we can stand is the chain of hand in hand, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”

Thanks to Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe and their book Hope's Edge for many of the ideas in this series of posts. -- Becca