The Needle and the Damage Done
by Alley Valkyrie
PDF Version (A4) available Here
I . The Fine Print
There’s a poster on the inside of my bathroom door, perfect for reading when you’re stuck sitting there for a moment or ten.
It’s a reprint of a vintage chart of the human skeletal and muscular system. The poster is all in French, although I bought it in the United States and then took it with me when I left for Europe. It was one of a series of posters that they sold in my local art supply store when I was living in Eugene, Oregon, produced by a company out of San Francisco.
I had been attracted to several of them when I was in the store, but not wanting to go overboard, I chose that one due to its theoretical usefulness.
And it has indeed proven to be useful. Countless passive viewings over the course of a decade resulted in my knowing the names of all of my bones and most of my muscles in French, long before I had gained an overall competency in the language. This corpus of knowledge has come in handy countless times over the past few years: I have a reliable tendency to injure myself on a regular basis, a tendency that unfortunately did not fade after moving to a country where most doctors speak only French.
Last winter, after somehow screwing up my neck to the point where looking towards my right just wasn’t happening, my doctor referred me to a kinesiologist1. At my first appointment, while in the middle of explaining what was wrong, I tried my best to turn my neck in the direction it did not want to go and out of the corner of my eye spotted something on the wall: the exact same vintage anatomy poster that was currently hanging on my bathroom door.
I laughed. The kinesiologist gave me a questioning look and I explained to him that I had the same poster at home, and that the poster was largely responsible for why I could accurately explain to him the muscles and body parts that were currently at issue. He laughed in return. I then asked him where he had gotten the poster, as it had not occurred to me this specific line of posters was available here, given that it was a US-based company.
He gave me the name of a local papeterie that I had passed by countless times before. And so the next time I passed by, I stopped in, and there on the second floor in the corner was the exact display of vintage posters the art store in Eugene had carried. Just as it was back then, several of them caught my eye and I had trouble choosing between them, but I finally settled on a botanical print of a dandelion. The poster was 8€, or around $10 in US dollars, about the same price that I had paid in Oregon a decade before.
I took the poster home and proceeded to hang it on the door that separates the living room from the hallway. Unlike the anatomy poster, this one would be at eye-level, not toilet-level. And as I secured the lower-right-hand corner to the door, I noticed the fine print in the corner for the first time: “Printed in Korea on Italian Paper.”
I paused for a moment, contemplating the journey that this poster took to arrive where it was currently being affixed. Italian paper, sent to Korea to be printed, then to San Francisco where the company was located, and then here to Rennes, France, most likely by way of Paris.
If I were to make such a journey, it would cost me a few thousand dollars in airfare. But this poster only cost me 8€, and given that it was about the same price as the first one, which I purchased a decade ago and over 6,000 miles away, it seems that the last leg of the voyage was pretty negligible in terms of the final sale price.
The fine print which led to this train of thought reflects the ‘fine print’ that underwrites the global economy. The journey that this poster had taken from origin to its place on my door is not an exception, but pretty much the norm. And it’s a norm that global capitalism doesn’t really want its consumers to reflect on the way I just did.
For the most part, we don’t reflect on it, until we are confronted with an incident such as that which occurred last March, when the Ever Given, one of the world’s largest container ships, accidentally ran aground as it was making its way through the Suez Canal and temporarily brought the system—encapsulated by that fine print—to a screeching halt. A halt that, over the course of the six days it was stuck, prevented global trade to the tune of $9.6 billion dollars.
II. The Race to the Bottom
It’s not as though there is any sort of revolutionary printing technology in Korea that doesn't exist in Italy in regards to creating posters like the one on my door. The paper is sent to Korea to be printed for one reason and one reason alone: because it is cheaper. It is cheaper to ship the paper from Italy to Korea, print the posters in Korea, and then ship them again from Korea to San Francisco (and then again to Europe) than it is to have them printed in Italy and shipped to the US.
This savings exists for two reasons: the ability of large corporations to exploit overseas labor, and the ability of large container ships to transport items en masse from Point A to Point B for a relatively low cost, even when Point A and Point B are literally half a world away. A savings that has only exponentially grown with the rise of globalization, the proliferation of “free-trade” agreements, and the often-coerced industrialization of the developing world in the name of “progress.”
Those two factors hold up the foundation of modern life as it exists in the Global North, a consumer economy in which goods are plentiful, affordable, and seemingly endless, a world in which by default we do not have to think much about where those goods are coming from, nor why.
Paper that travels halfway around the world and back is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the way labor is exploited in the name of savings. Pacific salmon and Dungeness crab caught in American waters are routinely sent to China for processing, then shipped back to the United States for retail sale. Same goes for fish caught in Norway, filleted in China and then sold throughout Scandinavia and Europe. Fruit grown in Latin America is sent to Thailand to be processed and packaged, then sold in supermarkets throughout the United States.
The environmental impacts of these shipments are ignored for the sake of increased profits.
Thanks to global labor exploitation and container shipping, the developed world has access to what they want, when they want it, to the point where younger generations are barely aware of the concept of “seasonal” foods, the fact that only three generations ago, one usually couldn’t buy strawberries in the winter or apples in the spring. It has been estimated that in the United States, the average meal travels approximately 1500 miles from farm to table.
The developed world takes this for granted and is often completely unaware, while the developing world pays the price.
Currently, 90% of the world’s packaged cargo is transported by shipping containers. Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, brings in an average yearly revenue of $30 billion dollars. Nearly 40% of the world’s container ships (including the Ever Given) are registered in Panama, Liberia, or the Marshall Islands, a practice known as “flag of convenience” that is utilized in order to avoid taxes, environmental and labor regulations, and safety standards.
III. The Hidden Costs
Starting in the early 1980s, locals living in and around the western coast of Finistère, Brittany, near the town of Plouarzel, found themselves amongst a puzzling and troubling mystery: a never-ending cycle of bright orange plastic telephone fragments started washing ashore.
Beachgoers would clean the beaches of the phone parts, only for them to reappear again soon after. The parts were those of a popular model of Garfield novelty phones, and over the next three decades, the grinning face of the cartoon cheshire cat became a local symbol of a much greater environmental issue.
Not long after the phone parts started appearing on the shore, locals started to suspect that the source of the phones was likely a metal shipping container that had fallen off a cargo ship, possibly sitting at the bottom of the ocean and undoubtedly contaminating the local ecosystem. Years of searching proved fruitless, the phone parts kept washing ashore, and despite steady local and international media coverage over the years concerning the issue, the source remained a mystery and the phone parts kept washing up onto the sand.
In 2018 alone, over 200 fragments of Garfield phones were recovered from the shores of Finistère.
Finally, in early 2019, a break came. A series of reports by the media outlet FranceInfo had jogged the memory of a local farmer, who as a youth in the ‘80s had gone searching for the source with his brother and had eventually found the shipping container in a sea cave off the coast of Plouarzel. After the story aired, the farmer caught up with the head of a local environmental group that was scouring the beach, cleaning up phone pieces, and told her what he had found over three decades earlier. There was a catch, however, the sea cave was only accessible a few times a year, when the tides were at their absolute lowest.
Six weeks later, the tide was finally low enough for a group of volunteers to enter the cave. And indeed, strewn amongst the rocks inside the cave were the rusted-away mental remnants of a shipping container and numerous pieces of Garfield telephones. Many of the phone pieces were partially buried or covered by rock, as was most of the container, making cleanup impossible. Eventually, many of those stuck pieces will likely find their way to the shore as well.
While the mystery had finally been solved after nearly 35 years, the implications brought more worry than relief. This incident and the pollution it wrought (and will continue to wreak) was the result of one single lost container. One of an average of 1500 containers that are lost every year at sea, the vast majority are never found or accounted for. There is no international entity responsible for either tracking lost shipments or attempting any salvage or cleanup efforts. The vast majority of lost shipments are simply forgotten and off our radar, as is for the most part the damage they are causing.
IV. Of Blood and Geopolitics
While the modern understanding and importance of the Suez Canal is of a waterway designed to keep the gears of capitalism running, facilitating the quick and affordable passage of the goods and commodities that our modern life demands whether it be crude oil or Garfield telephones, the origin of the Suez project was much more focused on the expansion of capitalism’s eternal bedfellow, colonialism.
Jointly financed by the French and Egyptian governments, the Suez Canal opened in 1869 after ten years of construction. Several smaller canals linking the Nile with the Red Sea had been attempted and abandoned over the course of time, with the first attempt said to have originated nearly 4,000 years earlier during the Twelfth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt.
The modern conception of a navigable waterway between the Mediterranean and Red Seas originated with Napoleon I, who was inspired by archaeological findings of an ancient canal which were unearthed during a French colonial campaign in Egypt and Syria at the turn of the 19th century. Incorrectly assuming that the project would need locks to operate, Napoleon abandoned the idea a few years later, but the idea was studied in the decades to follow by both British and French engineers, who concluded in in the 1840s that the project was indeed feasible.
The Suez Canal Company was then formed in 1858, with 50% of the shares held by France, 44% held by Egypt, and 6% by private investors, mostly from France and the Ottoman Empire. The canal was constructed between 1859 and 1869, much of it with forced labor for the first five years.
The British, who controlled the most common existing sea and land routes between the West and the East, opposed the project from initiation to completion for fear that such a route—theoretically open to many or all nations—would threaten their control and supremacy. However, the British Empire then gained control of nearly half of the Suez Canal in 1875, when Egyptian leader Isma’il Pasha, who had been responsible for a significant portion of the canal’s financing, sold his shares to the British government to settle foreign debts he had incurred in his unsuccessful attempt to conquer Ethiopia.
With the Egyptian interests in the Canal handed over to Britain, the so-called “Great Powers” held de facto control of the Suez Canal for the next eighty years, greatly helping to facilitate the colonization of Africa a decade later. The 1888 Convention of Constantinople, signed by all the major European powers, declared the canal a theoretically “neutral zone” under British protection and guaranteed a right of passage for all, a right that would be violated numerous times throughout the 20th century during various wars and geopolitical skirmishes.
After the conclusion of WWII and the British relinquishing control of India, the strategic importance of the canal shifted from war and colonialism to that of oil shipments. The heightened reliance of the petroleum industry on the canal throughout the next decade collided with several simultaneous conflicts in the region: the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Middle East which aimed at Britain and France, and the Western struggle for power over Egypt, which was resisted strongly by newly installed Egyptian leader Abdel Nasser.
These interests came to a head in 1956, when Nasser nationalized the canal, stripping ownership from the governments of Great Britain and France. In response, Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula three months later, soon joined by French and British forces landing alongside the Suez Canal. The combined firepower of the three nations defeated the Egyptian forces, but not before Egypt had sunk nearly forty ships in the canal, rendering the waterway useless for the next five months. Significant pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union eventually convinced the three nations to withdraw forces, with the US threatening to destroy the British economy by selling the government’s holdings in pound sterling if Britain did not comply.
Egypt retained control of the canal, and the Suez Canal incident was seen as an international embarrassment for the invading nations, particularly Great Britain. In retrospect, the crisis is widely seen as the end of Britain’s role as an international superpower.
The Suez Crisis was also one of several military catastrophes on the part of the French, the others also notably related to colonialism (Dien Bien Phu, Algeria), which led to widespread feelings of betrayal by the government amongst the military and which eventually resulted in the collapse of the French Fourth Republic in 1958. The sense of betrayal reached even further, as French-American relations never fully recovered because of the French government’s perception they were stabbed in the back by their American ally during the Suez Crisis. This sense of betrayal was also in large part responsible for France’s withdrawal from NATO’s military command in 1966, a withdrawal that lasted for 43 years.
The incident had other long-standing repercussions in terms of global political relations. The lack of peace treaty between Egypt and Israel laid the groundwork for the Six-Day War a decade later, in which Israel occupied the Sinai as well as the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. With the exception of the Sinai Peninsula (which it withdrew from in 1982 in accordance with the Camp David Accords), Israel continues to occupy these territories to this day2, despite widespread international condemnation and the fact that such occupations are widely considered to be in violation of the Fourth Geneva Conventions.
It was also the first of a series of geopolitical crises that would shape the global order and the balance of power for decades to come, followed by the Berlin Crisis starting in 1958 (which resulted in the erection of the Berlin Wall), the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the aforementioned Six-Day War in 1967. This series of events culminated with the petroleum crisis of 1973, of which the consequences are still felt to this day, one from which the Western world never quite recovered.
To come full circle, the fallout from the petroleum crisis and its complicated geopolitical consequences only further underlines the need for global superpowers to be able to transport oil as quickly, efficiently, and as cheaply as possible. This need that can only be satisfied by maintaining the status quo, where tanker ships can traverse waterways such as the Suez Canal without issue.
That status quo came to a halt last March when the Ever Given blocked the canal for six days.
V. The Needle and the Damage Done
There’s currently a shortage of garden gnomes throughout the United Kingdom. Apparently this is a big deal. Gardening is more popular than ever due to the confinement, which has greatly increased the demand for garden gnomes. The gnomes, for the most part, are manufactured in China, and make their way to the UK by way of, you guessed it, a container ship. And while the recent Suez blockage isn’t the sole reason for the shortage—a lack of raw materials and Brexit have also been blamed—the blockage is highlighted as a significant factor.
Compared to many of the other consumer items that travel by container ship, as well as many of the other consumer items that have been in short supply due to Brexit, one could argue that garden gnomes are quite far down on the list as far as “needs” go. And yet, the shortage has caused enough of a kerfuffle that the situation has been reported on by media outlets all over the world.
The widespread expectation throughout the developed world that one should be able to easily and cheaply acquire any given consumer good, no matter how frivolous it is, is one of many intertwined global addictions, most which trickle down from the greatest global addiction of all, that of oil.
Nearly every aspect of the world we live in, and the systems and apparatuses that make it possible, are dependent on oil. In a global capitalist system that is literally not only destroying us but also destroying the ability of the planet to sustain life, oil is the heroin that flows through the veins. It is the substance that keeps us going while simultaneously killing us, driving us to seek out the next fix while rotting us from the core. It underwrites all of the other addictions that depend on it, nearly everything that defines our way of life. Whether it’s our addiction to consumer goods or our addiction to travel, oil is the substance that has fueled the world as we know it, as well as the constant and often unspeakable acts that are undertaken by global powers in order to secure it.
Given the choice between continued addiction and detox, we have consistently chosen the former, despite knowing full well that it’s against our best interests in the long-term to do so. We know we need to quit for the sake of our survival, and yet we can’t bear the thought of trading the euphoria that comes from our next quick fix for the suffering that comes with extended withdrawal.
For the most part, we are aware of the consequences of the choice we have made, and those who are profiting of our addictions are even more aware. This is why they have gone out of their way to convince us that we can consume our way out of this crisis by making more “ethical” choices, choices provided by the same corporations that make most of their money of the “unethical” choices. And so, the next container ship will bring us “green” products from Clorox, disposable goods made from “recycled” plastic, and “sustainable” seafood that still went to China and back to be filleted.
But most folks who would read an article such as this to the end already know that they’re being conned. We know the situation is bleak. We try our best, but we’re still complicit. I go out my way to buy as little as possible, but I do love the dandelion poster that I bought that hangs on my wall, a poster that crossed more borders to get here than I have in my four decades on this planet. And I’m confident that most who buy that poster will never notice that fine print.
And yet, despite my understanding as to what it will mean to withdraw on a global level, and the suffering and chaos that such a withdrawal would bring, it gives me a bit of hope to know that a single mistake on the part of a single ship captain can literally bring the entire system to a halt. In terms of effectiveness, all the consumer boycotts in the history of the modern age pale in comparison to the impact of that single mistake.
There is very little about our world that is certain, but the one thing that truly is certain is that the system cannot hold. The disruption to the global system caused by a six-day blockage of the Suez is only a taste of what is to come. And while I admit that I don’t have the answers as to what to do when it comes, what I do know is that we cannot take our eyes off the fact that it is coming, and that we need to prepare for the inevitability of withdrawal.
“But every junkie’s like a setting sun….”
Neil Young
This essay first appeared on Another World, the Gods&Radicals Press supporters’ journal. Get early and exclusive access to essays, interviews, and discounts on purchases and free course enrollment by becoming a supporting member.
NOTES
1Basically a cross between a physical therapist and a massage therapist.
2Whether Israel still “occupies” the Gaza Strip or not is perhaps a matter of semantics. Jewish settlements on the Strip were dismantled in 2005, but Israel still maintains complete control of airspace and territorial waters throughout the region as well as six out of seven land crossings. Additionally, Israel keeps a population registry and has maintained a buffer zone within the Gaza Strip, of which the exact limits are unspecified, and which they have violently enforced at times resulting in the deaths of hundreds of civilians (the exact number is unknown) over the past fifteen years. According to UN estimates, 30 percent of arable land in Gaza is inaccessible due to the buffer zone.
Alley Valkyrie will be instructing a new course called Land: Loss and Reconnection. See this link for more information.
Alley Valkyrie
Alley Valkyrie is a writer, artist, and spirit worker currently living in Rennes, France. She is one of the co-founders of Gods&Radicals and has been interacting with a wide assortment of both gods and radicals for over twenty years now. When she’s not talking to rivers and cats or ranting about capitalism, she is usually engaged in a variety of other projects. She can also be supported on Patreon.