Synchronicity, Bananas and The Lost City of the Monkey God

I am not sure if one could call it synchronicity or not but I am always surprised as to how often what I read for pleasure somehow gets connected to what I am thinking about as I read bits and pieces from the various mainstream media outlets. Last week, of course, various media outlets were all commenting on the forest fires in the Amazon forest. A subtext to all of the concern was the fact that Brazil was doing very little, if anything, to fight the fires and that they seemed reluctant to allow other countries to tell them what they must do. As a side point, it is interesting to note that the world's attention span is so short that there is little news about the fires being posted this week. How can an event be the ecological disaster of the decade one week and not be newsworthy a few days later?

At the same time, I was reading the news about the fire, I was listening to Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God as I did some spinning and weaving. It is not a great book and there were a number of times that I was glad that the audiobook app allows one to speed up the reading. Preston only spent ten or so days in the Honduran rainforest with the expedition that uncovered a massive city buried in the jungle and therefore had to "pad' the book with a lot of detail about both the various myths and expeditions to find the city and a lot of history both pre European contact and what has happened in the last hundred or so year.

There is a long history of companies - specifically fruit companies - clearing great swaths of forest to plant fruit like bananas in Latin America. The bananas, which is not a fruit native to the Americas, was being grown so that they could be shipped to the US market. There were huge profits to be made especially because the companies were so willing to manipulate and in many cases outright control the governments of those countries. Safe labour practices and environmental stewardship were not considerations for companies. They destroyed thousands and thousands of acres of forest so that we could eat fruit. They brought down, without shame, any government who tried to exercise any control over the rampant rape of the countryside. The companies subjugated the population to create a docile workforce - it was the worst type of colonialism.

The fact that the destruction of the rain forest is still occurring today should not surprise us. That does not mean that we should be complacent about it but rather that as with all things - eventually, we reap what we sow. Before we demand other countries to stop doing what we did for decades, we must demonstrate that we are prepared to change our behaviour. If a country has become fiscally dependent upon the income from harvesting such crops and therefore sees no choice but to expand the amount of agriculture land, we need to assist them in developing other ways of generating income that are less destructive to the environment. That may mean for example, that we will have to pay significantly more for items coming from those countries. We shaped those countries activities by our consumer behaviour. We need to change those behaviours.