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The negative impact of colonial capitalism continues to be felt and experienced today, and it still hinders equity from being achieved in many parts of the world. Author and activist Rosemary J. Jolly joins Corinna Bellizzi to discuss how to dismantle colonial capitalism in effluent communities right now. She shares valuable lessons from her works on the prevention of torture, gender-based violence, and communicable diseases in poor communities in the global North and South. Rosemary also discusses what it takes to put an end to white privilege and racism, as well as the importance of living sustainably – both physically and emotionally.

 

About Rosemary J. Jolly

Care More Be Better | Rosemary J. Jolly | Colonial CapitalismRosemary Jolly has lived in South Africa, Lesotho, Canada and the US. She works on the prevention of torture, gender-based violence and diseases such as HIV in poor communities in the global North and South. She has co-founded rape-crisis clinics and has a passion for most forms of wildlife, even though she has been charged by a rhino (who was, after all, only protecting her baby).

She is currently interested in sustainability, not simply as an environmental strategy, but in terms of wellbeing. How can we stop not only extracting from the earth unsustainably, but also from each other? How do we protect humans, non-human animals and our environments from depletion, exhaustion and despair? What are the tools for this?

 

 

Guest Website: https://complit.la.psu.edu/people/rjj14

 

Additional Resources Mentioned:

Remaking A World In Crisis with Osprey Orielle Lake

The True Price of Saving The Planet with Paula DiPerna

Changing the Climate Narrative with Anne Therese Gennari, The Climate Optimist

Collaborative, Relational Leadership Can Change the World

Break Down The Power Majority with Dr. Kimya Nuru Dennis

Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis in One Generation with Paul Hawken

Year of the Nurse, A 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic Memoir by Cassie Alexander

 

Show Notes:

Namibia - 02:52

Yes, you have a beautiful background. I'm gonna put you on the main screen.

Refugees From Africa - 03:57

I understand also that having grown up in South Africa. You were living there in a time where it was an apartheid state.

The Effluent Eye - 06:15

Well, Well, you mentioned something that is a a big Topic in today's world. And that is white privilege.

Indigenous People - 13:08

You referred to this community as affluent. What can we learn from that?

Liberalism - 18:24

Yes, and I think it's not only waste but then I would go one step further and say when a liberal. Community.

Communicable Diseases And Viruses - 20:46

I think too that you mentioned earlier your work with people who have communicable diseases like HIV and AIDS.

Living Sustainably - 33:26

Exactly. And would you mind if I told you a story about how I came to that

Emotional Sustainability - 38:48

Think oh if we talk about emotional sustainability, so if you are on the on Trend piece.

Colonial Capitalism - 43:13

Yeah. Well, I feel like we've covered a lot of ground specifically as it relates to how we handle differences in communities during times of disease and the challenges that these communities can face.

Episode Wrap-up - 51:05

To find out more about Rosemary jolly and to pick up a copy of the affluent I which I still have right here.

 

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How To Dismantle Colonial Capitalism With Rosemary J. Jolly

Each week, I invite you to care more so that together we can create a better world. By reading this, you are a part of this story. In this episode, I hope you'll double down with me and help me build a greener world. I've decided to plant a tree for each new subscriber to our newsletter. Visit our website, CircleB.co, and sign up. You'll be the first to hear about new episodes of the show. You'll receive how-to guides to help you live a little better and a little greener, and you can even shop at CircleB.co for eco-friendly gifts like coffee, tea, chocolate linens, and more. One percent of your purchase price will also go to Earthwise charities and you'll be supporting this show along the way.

In this episode, we're going to talk deeply about equity, culture, and deconstructing colonialism with an effluent eye as I'm joined by Rosemary Jolly. She has lived in South Africa, Lesotho, Canada, and the US. She works on the prevention of torture, gender-based violence, and diseases such as HIV that disproportionately affect poor communities and the Global North and the Global South.

She presently serves as the Sparks Chair of Human Rights at Pennsylvania State University. Her work centers around complex questions like, “How can we stop not only extracting from the earth unsustainably but also from each other?” We're going to explore all of this and more as we explore her new work with this book, The Effluent Eye: Narratives for Decolonial Right-Making. With that, let me welcome her to the show.

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Rosemary, it's so nice to see you.

It's wonderful to see you. Thank you for having me here.

Namibia

You have a beautiful background. I'm going to put you on the main screen so everybody can take a closer look at this. I'd love for you to tell us a bit about that backdrop.

Thank you so much. This background is very dear to my heart. It's in Namibia, what used to be known under the colonial regime of South Africa as Southwest Africa, but is now Namibia. It's where I go to recover from work. This particular piece is up in the North of Windhoek, which is the capital of Namibia. You can see in it zebra and springbok with some of the very common animals over there, and the non-human animals. Also, that wonderful environment that when you first look at it looks like it's not living. When you look closer, you see it's populated with everything including those trees would be filled and brimming with life.

Refugees From Africa

I understand also that having grown up in South Africa, you were living there at a time when it was an apartheid state and your family fled as refugees when you were seventeen. Now, that moment feels as relevant for many as it did for you then. I'd love for you to share a bit about that story and what perhaps we can learn from your family's struggle.

When we think of refugees, we often think of people in flimsy boats or people coming in great danger to themselves from Honduras across the Southern border of the US. We were very different refugees. We used to tease those people who could not believe we were refugees and say, “We were air people, and not boat people,” because when we arrived, there were still a lot of folks coming in those days in the early '80s from Vietnam to North America.

The difference was that we were White and therefore relatively privileged. However, we were poor and we were also thrown out in 1981. What happened was that my father started being called a communist. He's a doctor and my mother was very much associated with work with Black communities as well. We were under surveillance and we started to be increasingly harassed.

The thing is, when you get accused of communism, South Africa doesn't have anything to do with communism in the anti-apartheid era, or at least not necessarily. It's because that particular accusation carries the death sentence or life imprisonment under apartheid at that time. At that point, my father did in fact find a job in Canada as a physician, and we left.

The only way we could leave was by saying that we were going on holiday. Apart from our travel allowance and a little bit of education allowance, we left all our assets behind. With that being said, having a White education meant that we were much better set up to move than other people who were not white who would've found themselves in that situation.

The Effluent Eye

You mentioned something that is a big topic in today's world and that is White privilege. I think more people are starting to accept that there is a certain White privilege that comes from existing in these cultures and that part of de-colonizing capitalism is acknowledging that. I think that your work around this effluent eye perspective helps us to look at this a little differently. What I'd love for you to do is first talk about this concept of The Effluent Eye and how that can perhaps provide a new lens so that we can look at ourselves perhaps a little bit more critically and ultimately, move towards true equity.

In looking at what I call effluent, which let me just say in my accent, I need to be sure that we're not talking about affluence as in a lot. We are talking about effluence, which means the gunk, the rubbish, the pools of garbage, the decay, the pollution, and so on and so forth. In talking about that, I'm talking about what we don't see and what we cut out from seeing. What we are also honestly prevented from seeing.

The reason it's called the eye is because it's about our ability to be able to see that despite whatever barriers might be in the way. I feel like I need to give a very specific example. For example, growing up under apartheid, most white people would not have been exposed to the things that my family exposed its children to. My parents very deliberately lived in Black areas. We lived in a black medical residence where the black consciousness movement leader, Steve Boko, was a resident before he was killed by the police.

We lived in Lesotho, an independent country that had black people in it. I became very familiar with the living conditions of Black students from all over South Africa who were highly politicized at the time. I also became very familiar with the ordinary lives of Black people living both in apartheid and in Lesotho. Lesotho had no real income of its own so everybody was migrant labor to South Africa, which rendered it even poorer in some respects than poor Black communities in South Africa at the time.

I think that it's my attention or my desire to enable people to understand that even within your society, you can make the effort to pull back what looks like it's going to be unpleasant, and which we might be scared of seeing. That can turn out to be a huge resource. Instead of being frightened, instead of being afraid of black people, instead of being sequestered from them, I learned enormous amounts from those communities that I could never have learned while being sequestered in a protected White apartheid middle-class society.

Instead of being afraid of and sequestered from black people, try to learn something from them that you could have never learned any other way.

As a medical doctor, your father likely had options of where to live and where to practice. In a way, this was his activism to live in that community and to then get to a point where you had been tagged as a communist, which essentially meant that you had a death threat on your shoulders. You needed to get out. And at this point, at only seventeen years old, you had to flee.

I mentioned when we first got a chance to speak, that I think that it would be the hardest point at which to leave somewhere that you consider home to venture into a new land, a new climate, a new culture with different concerns, and also not living with the same kind of diversity that you had. That might not even be the right word. You lived in Black communities and now you might be in a space where maybe 1% of the community is Black.

It was strange. It was comic and it was tragic. The first thing I would say is anybody who has dealt with 16 and 17-year-olds knows that that's possibly one of the harder times to move a kid of that age. I had already declared that I wanted to work in Afrikaans literature and English South African literature. I was set to go to a university in South Africa, and my parents had agreed that I would be the one member of the family who would stay behind.

They then realized that they couldn't do that because I might become a target. They were the primary targets at the time of the authorities, and they realized that there was a history of targeting family members left behind. I did indeed move to Canada. The interesting thing is we moved to Saskatchewan, which is a province in Canada that has a very large indigenous community.

We realized what North American racism looked like when my father pointed out that the private doctors, I mean private in the sense that in Canada, the government pays doctors but my father wanted to do something about the indigenous people who were dying of exposure after various forms of abandonment by the communities. They are taking on largely in response to alcoholism and all of the other social ills that go along with abandoned communities, communities that belong to the effluent.

Also, the Mennonite doctors who were working with him couldn't understand what his concern was. My mother also happens to be Jewish and they said to us, “You'll love Meadow Lake. There are no Jews and the Indians there on the reserve.” You would've thought that it was going to be very different from South Africa but it was quite hysterically not. We then moved to the north of Canada where my parents got involved very largely in Indigenous health and Indigenous education.

Indigenous People

I don't think that the similarities will be entirely new to people who've lived on that side of the track, so to speak, who felt disenfranchised and that they aren't seen by our culture. One of the challenges that I'm confronting in the PhD program I'm in at Prescott College is this idea of invisibility. It's almost like it's a willful invisibility. We don't collect the data. We don't ask the questions. We aren't considering this community the same way. You referred to this community as effluent. What can we learn from that?

Just to clarify what you are saying. I'm referring for example to people who are abandoned not by their families, but by state capitalism, and potentially by their families where there's been so much oppression on the family that they are abandoned. Why do I call them effluent? I call them effluent because to the normative racist citizen gays or to people who consider themselves normative citizens, those people may look like, “He could do better or she could do better. Why are they in sex work? Why are they taking drugs? What is the matter with them?”

If we use Canada rather than South Africa as an example, Canada, not in quite the same accessible way, and in fact, in a more invisible way tried to kill a lot of its indigenous populations. They took them into schools and colonized them and their land. We now know that those populations, both in the US and in Canada, but let's stick with Canada for the moment, especially the youth. They have massive differentials from White communities in terms of substance abuse, self-harm, sex working rates, despair, depression, and so on.

Here's the deal that Canada made with these folks. It said to them, “We've taken your land so now you can't be hunter-gatherers. You can't continue doing the forms of agriculture that you may have been doing.” Agriculture and hunter-gatherers in that community because we've made it impossible. For example, with hunter-gatherers, the Hudson Bay killed off a lot of the wildlife for beaver hats and so on. You can imagine how it goes from there.

Also, they moved, for example, they took the Inuit communities away from their summer and winter differential lifestyles and put them into Hudson Bay huts where they lived very closely together and got tuberculosis and other ills. They then said, “Your kids have TB. By the way, this one needs glasses so we are going to take them South.” They separated the kids and the parents. If you look at it that way, you can see that this community was given a choice, which is not a choice.

The choice goes like this. “We are going to physically save you, but you lose your culture or you can save your culture but biologically, you may lose your kids and they certainly won't be healthy.” That's one hell of a deal and that's where we're still sitting. The fact that indigenous women go missing to the extent that there had to be a Canadian governmental commission on Aboriginal sex workers and others who've gone missing and nobody's bothered to follow up. It's emblematic of the situation.

There’s a visual to accompany that too. The red hand mark over the mouth which we've seen in social media. It's a visual reminder of the silence that we forced.

An effluent community is silenced and they're not only silenced, but when they speak up, they're only seen. They can only be understood within a normative society. When somebody like that speaks up, like say a woman survives that kind of abuse and speaks up, that person has massive resilience and has something to teach us but a lot of times all we can think of is, “The poor sexually assaulted aboriginal woman,” and pity is not a mode of listening.

An effluent community is typically silent. But when they speak up, they can be understood within a normative society.

I think you put that amazingly, but I also feel I need to pause because it's just a lot to absorb. If we look at effluence this way, effluence is waste. Using this language, we're admitting that the culture of the state sees these people as waste. It hurts because it feels true and that itself helps me to understand more this book that I recently read, which is called White Women. It's a book written by an African-American woman and an Indian-American woman, a South Asian, who are essentially coming forward and hosting dinners for White women to help them deconstruct their own racism.

It's not always pretty and their tone is not always kind. I listen to it in audiobook form, and you can hear their anger a lot through the words that they're sharing. Also, the uncomfortable moments that they've had to navigate and help these women navigate through. Criticism of that approach is, “You're not necessarily going to reach the people you might need to reach most,” but maybe it's not a problem of that. Maybe it's a problem of language and being as clear as saying, “You've treated us as waste.”

Liberalism

Yes, and I think it's not only waste, but then I would go one step further and say, “When a liberal community,” and I don't mean liberal in the sense of the Democratic party. When liberalism is a really hard thing because in South Africa, we had the perfect example of it in the sense that liberals voted for Black communities and voted for Black health and tried to vote for better schools and so on, but they never voted for the Blacks to have the vote.

Liberals are people who say, “I feel that Black people are humans along with us,” or, “I feel that indigenous people are humans along with us,” or, “I feel that HIV positive or drug users or substance abusers, or the mentally ill are people along with us,” so I'm going to give them something. My challenge is, what do we have to learn from them? They know the worst of what our society can do.

We don't know the worst of what our society can do. We haven't lived homeless. We haven't been taken off our lands. It's not about I'm going to give stuff to the effluent community. It's about after we have considered effluent communities are wasted. We then waste again by saying not, “How do I learn from your deep and genuine experience and have respect for you while I try to learn, no matter how muddled and horrible I might be in it, but at least start beginning steps to understand what has happened in terms of structural violence to your communities.” What gets wasted again is that opportunity, because that opportunity gets shut down by the liberals, including the liberal women who say, “I'm so sorry for you.”

It's the pity perspective, but how do we change it?

I’ve seen over and over again with women who have been sexually assaulted whom I work with a lot. They are considered to have lost their brains the moment that they were victimized, which is rubbish. Yes, they've been through a traumatic experience, but precisely because of that on their terms, including their time, we have something to learn from there.

Communicable Diseases And Viruses

You mentioned your work with people who have communicable diseases like HIV and AIDS and how they are treated by society. I grew up in the '80s. I saw how it was treated. Everyone feared it. If you would imagine, let's say you're growing up now and you saw how we treated COVID when it first arrived. People were afraid of touching or being near one another. They were wiping down their groceries with Clorox wipes.

We didn't know what we didn't know. If we're going to have something that's in recent past that we can compare against it is that was how people treated everybody who had HIV. We didn't want to be in the same room with them. They were ostracized indefinitely in many cases because they would come to pass before we would have enough knowledge and science to be able to support their journey to live healthfully again.

If we were to look into the deep past, it's almost like putting them in a leper colony from how we treated them. I have looked at this through fiction and also through nonfiction. For a while, when I was in my undergrad, I acted as a translator for doctors from West Africa who came to visit the Santa Cruz community. They were from Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Cote d'Ivoire. They spoke French. I spoke French and I had learned dialects from Quebec.

I already had the ability to shift and learn with them. We would help them navigate our community and meet with other doctors here. What they were looking for was inexpensive treatments because at the time, in the late '90s, all of the treatments for HIV and AIDS were very expensive. They essentially had priced out their ability to be in common use in many of these communities.

This was one part socioeconomic, and it was one part fear. It all got bundled up in two social problems where we looked at it especially when it comes to places like Africa or Haiti like it was a Black problem. It was a problem in these communities and also, it was a gay problem. It wasn't anybody else. We could somehow look at ourselves as, “You're a White woman, then I'm not going to automatically fear that you might have this disease but if you're someone else and you have these socioeconomic triggers and you happen to also be a person of color from Haiti or Africa, or disillusioned spots within the United States, then we'd see you with this lens perhaps what you call the effluent eye.”

Yes, indeed. Just to go one step further though. What a lot of people don't realize is that HIV AIDS is 100% heterosexual for the most part in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's important to remember because there are two things that touch on what you're saying. The first is that the profile of stigma was different in the US because, at the beginning, it was primarily what we call MSM, or men who have sex with men.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, it isn't. It's hard to talk about strains in clays, but basically, there is a form of the disease imported or that went back from the US and Europe back over to South Africa. For example, the South African men who have sex with men community but the majority of people are normal heterosexuals who happen to be born in the wrong era. I know that there are many people who give thanks that it's not treatable, but we now have an antiretroviral medication that makes it a chronic but manageable disease.

The period you are talking about was the transition from what was called AZT, which was a treatment that could keep you alive but was also very toxic to your body to the antiretrovirals that we have now. It's important to remember too that the only reason that the South got those antiretrovirals was because countries in South America and India decided for the first time ever were not going to keep the covenants on patented medicines. It’s because the cost was too high and then the floodgates opened but it was the Southern part who broke the rules. I'm sorry, but we are going to produce our own. We can't afford that cost. We cannot afford to allow the North to decide who's going to die in our populations.

It makes me so angry. The patentability of medicine that saves lives is completely unethical in my mind. We've done things like allow these companies to make insane profits for something like insulin or for an EpiPen.

EpiPen is interesting because I'm deathly allergic to yellow jackets. In Canada, my EpiPens, which were covered anyway by my employer, but were $50 bucks or $40 bucks and here they're $323 or something, and the best way to buy them is doubled because it's cheaper but if don't have a good income, how can you afford $200? I think the difficulty is having privacy.

The whole management of the development of medicines through private companies is deeply problematic. I would also say that the one thing that we learned from HIV, and we've already learned it from Ebola and God knows how many times we're going to have to learn it again, is that the drug is never developed until the disease affects people in the West and the North.

As long as the disease like Ebola sits in poor communities, frankly, that's what tells you it's an effluent community. It's like years before we send doctors. It'll be Medicine Without Borders which I'm not trying to say is not a good organization, but it's never on equal terms. Not even when it's so stupid that we leave it for so long that when it finally comes over in a plane or whatever, we don't have.

Ebola is a very simple virus and the medication for it was developed relatively quickly. When you consider that Ebola was discovered in 1976 in Central Africa, and we only started developing the medication in 2013, that tells you everything that you need to know about the relative importance of communities globally.

Also, the Zika virus. Now, it's starting to arrive in Mexico and Houston and finding its way into other communities where this particular insect, the mosquito thrives at the same time that how we've managed our ecosystems means that our bat species are declining, and the bats would be the natural predators for those mosquitoes. We get worsening populations of mosquitoes, and we now have the Zika virus coming in. It was at a point for me when I was pregnant with my second child that I was afraid to go to the Houston headquarters of the company I worked for because they were seeing outbreaks of Zika virus there.

Those are called zoonosis. These are diseases that transfer from non-human animals to humans but in a way, from an effluent eye, we can turn it around and say, “We are colonizing the world in terms of developing the world and extracting from the world so quickly.” Our supply systems depend so much on international travel and quick international travel that there's evidence that this zoonosis going to become increasing at an exponential level because of the way that we live.

However, instead of going to, “How can we deal with each particular wave of disease,” I think we need to go back to, “How are we living, what are we doing? What are the conditions under which we're developing these things?” If you go and look at it, “We don't know what the transmission species of COVID-19 is. They thought it was pangolins. It's not pangolins but we do deeply suspect that many of these diseases are happening in what are called wet markets, which means the animals are alive and they're either there to be bought for human consumption as food or exotic species. It's in that live environment where there are too many live animals and humans together that makes it ripe for the species jump.

When you look at exotic species, it means species that we haven't lived in close approximation with. At least not from a broad population perspective. Perhaps the people who lived in that particular area and have evolved within that environment for some time might have been exposed, but also, have potentially more antibodies innate because they've been in a similar environment. Now, we're a global species so you move it out and that's enough for one of these viruses to have the ability to replicate within somebody's body and mutate, and then become transmissible to somebody else and somebody else.

Our tendency is to look at the viruses being the enemy. An effluent way of looking at is to say what happens if not exactly that the humans are the pathogen because that suggests that we will always and forever be evil and sick, which I don't believe at all. It means, however, that the way we are living in relation to other non-human animals and our environment is sick, and we need to look at how that's happening rather than that.

We don't want to just always be dealing with the next exposure or the next pandemic. We need to be looking at how are we living which we know is not sustainable. We know that to live as a Canadian lives would need nine other globes or worlds for a global footprint and to live as an Australian would need eleven. Not all Australians, some Australians, but those things are averaged out.

Care More Be Better | Rosemary J. Jolly | Colonial Capitalism

 

However, it's just to say that the idea, and forgive me for saying this in a foreign accent because in ways I love the US so everybody forgive me for this, but in ways, the American dream, if everybody had it, means that we would need fifteen or more other planets to be able to get the raw materials to do that. Let me put it simply, the planet is our host. What happens to a virus if you kill its host species? It dies. We're killing our host and then we're going, “Let's do a little touch up here and a little touch up there. I don't mean to be wholly depressing because once one realizes that, one can start to work on it.

It's an awakening process. I acknowledge I'm one person. It can be daunting to look at things like, “If I make all the changes that I can to live in a more sustainable way, to consume less, to work to preserve more, to use less energy, to drive less, to walk more to cycle, and to not use all of the resources that we have become so accustomed to using, a lot of times just for convenience. Sometimes unneeded and sometimes because we chose to live in the big beautiful house that's 40 miles from where we work.

If you look at all that, and if you make the changes, then the individual effect could be akin to a rounding error, a very small one. Let’s say 0.0000000003% if you're living with the land as much as you possibly can going zero waste and all of those things. However, that perspective keeps us from thinking in a solutions mindset to, “How do we go ahead and then shift in a bigger way?”

Living Sustainably

Would you mind if I told you a story about how I came to that?

One hundred percent, please.

People always used to say to me when I still worked in gender-based violence, but there were about thirteen intense years, both before and after the rollout of the drugs that turned HIV into a chronic manageable disease especially before I was flying out. I was from Canada and I was living for months at a stretch in very deep rural areas. People would say to me, “How do you do that? How does it make you feel to do that? Is that depressing?” I'd go, “No, because I've got some of the best women from the rural areas working with me, teaching me, and being with me.”

If everybody has the American Dream, we would need 15 or more planets to get the raw materials to do that.

When I got depressed, it's the definition of secondary trauma is when you're looking at something and you can't intervene. My points of being depressed were when I came back to middle-class Canada. They weren't standing side to side working with people when you're in a community and you are doing what you need to do.

I remember coming back and I have a secondary trauma and will always have a secondary trauma counselor because of the work that I've done. It would be not a good idea for me not to do that. Just to note, for any of you, I used to work with some sexually abused kids, babies, and such and it's not a good plan to do the kind of work I've done without it. I remember getting depressed. I said, “I keep on getting depressed when I go on my walk with my dog in the walk that I've done with my dog all my life.”

It means as long as he's life just down the road in Kingston, Ontario. He said, “Next time, take a look at what's there.” I was like, “Chris, I looked there. I've been walking there forever.” He said, “Just do me a favor. Next time, just stop and look.” I said, “When I get to that point, I start to cry and I have no idea why.” I went and I looked and what it was is that there were those ramps that kids are rollerskating off of. There was a ramp there, but it wasn't made out of particle board. It was made out of real wood and it had a sign on it saying, “Take for free.” It had been there for six weeks roughly every time I walked. In the community I came from, that was somebody's house. That's when I said to him, “You were right. There's something there.”

It’s because nobody in that relatively rich community and I'm talking in suburban middle class, but nobody had taken this incredibly valuable wood. Nobody had used it for a fire. Nobody had gone, “Wouldn't that be good on the roof?” Nothing. It just sat there. Those are the moments when I get depressed. It's not when you're working on it. When you're working in it and with it, you light up and you're with people who know what they're facing and they're working with you on the project. Whether the project is the prevention of gender-based violence, whether it's education about women's rights, whether it's sustainable gardening, you're in it with them and you feel better for it.

I resonate with that story because I think I have the same reaction when it comes to waste in general. Even in my own home, within my own four walls. I moved into our space and there were beautiful oak floors, the entryway, and the kitchen, but they stopped at the living room. They weren't of the modern style. The boards are thin. They're about three and a half inches wide, and everybody now wants the big planks, bigger or whatever.

I'm like, “There's at least three refinishes left to this wood. There's no reason to get rid of it.” I made the choice to go to a local wood flooring company and said, “I want to match this.” I even ran into skepticism with the person who worked there saying, “This is the more modern look.” They're selling me on it. I'm saying, “The kitchen cabinets and everything have this more classic feel. I'm okay with looking a little outdated as long as everything is used well.”

We ended up sticking with that, but it meant that the project would take longer because they had to get the wood in. The wood didn't come pre-finished so now we had to finish it once it got into place, work on the matching, and use the water-soluble as opposed to oil-toxic polyurethane stuff. At the end of the day, I love my floors.

Exactly, because you have a meaningful relationship with your floors.

I also understand that. I think part of this comes from exposure to the value of these things. I think so often we see them as waste. If you watch somebody come in and rip out flooring, it is completely unusable after. It is ripped out with crowbars and things like that, you can't burn it because if you burn it, it has all these chemicals and stuff in it that make it not friendly. You can't rework with the wood because it's been splintered and shredded in spots. What's responsible? The responsible thing is to preserve the natural life of something like this as long as possible and to say, “I'm going to value it.” I guess I care less about being on trend than I do.

Emotional Sustainability

Let me talk about emotional sustainability. If you are on the on-trend piece, and believe me, I know that feeling. Before people who might be reading or whatever think that I might have gotten over this quickly. I was raised poor so I struggle with the issues of money because being poor is not fun. I arrived in Canada and I knew my parents had no money. I explained the situation and I had $50 a week I think it was for everything. I remember I had to wear shoes that broke and I had to staple them together. I got big blisters on my feet and it's not fun.

On the other hand, because I've been poor, I have to be careful that paranoia about money doesn't take over because if that paranoia about money takes over, it means as Linton Kwesi Johnson, who's a Caribbean poet, a Black UK poet, says, the more a man has, the more a man wants. You are on that endless slightly panicky feeling mission to have the next, the best, and the safest. The weird thing about that is it's not emotionally sustainable because you think having stuff is going to make you emotionally stable, but it's an addiction or any other addiction.

That's what leads to hoarding.

I write about it in the book, but during the Ebola outbreak in October of 2013, there were hoarders, including medical hoarders in the US who hoarded the desperately needed hazardous protection outfits that were needed in West Africa to the extent that West Africa ran out of them but people had them in basements here. Nobody was going to need a hazmat outfit, including the breathing apparatus for Ebola in Pennsylvania. It's a mad thing.

I got to interview on this show one of my friends who worked as a COVID nurse at the worst of the pandemic in Oakland. She wrote a book specifically about that experience and published it under her pen name because she didn't want to be revealed as somebody who's still an active nurse. The reason she volunteered for that work was because she had experience in the trauma unit with burn victims. When you're working with burn victims, you need the full hazmat gear.

Nurses who are working in that way can feel very claustrophobic the first time, the second time, or the third time. It's hard to wear all of that gear, especially for a long shift. She even ran into those issues too where they were being asked to reuse the same mask multiple times when they knew it wasn't safe. You're the frontline and there's a reason they refer to it as the frontline.

I think that we don't have enough coalitions between frontline workers internationally. I remember during HIV. For the people who operated during HIV in South Africa, one has to understand that more people were positive than weren't. In other words, there was a 33% prevalence in the area where I worked. You don't test people without their permission, obviously and so every operation the doctors went to into the rural hospital I worked in, they were triple gloved.

I remember taking a Canadian doctor out there who was a colleague of mine, and she came stumbling out of a cesarean section operation going, “Rose, I couldn't do anything in there. I felt like the Pillsbury dough,” because she's not used to operating with three sets of gloves but you have to do that because of potential needle stick injury and blood. People develop differential skills for dealing with these issues. I think that in terms of the clumsiness and the feeling of not being able to breathe that comes with a hazmat outfit. Think about just putting on a master in COVID and then up that for your friend by an exponential amount.

Colonial Capitalism

I feel like we've covered a lot of ground, specifically as it relates to how we handle differences in community, especially during times of disease, and the challenges that these communities can face. How society, how the state or the government treats these disparate communities. I feel like the underlying current here has been something we talked about in our off-recording conversation initially, which was how do we use this overall perspective to reduce the harm that we're doing as we're working to dismantle colonial capitalism? How do we do that?

Episode Wrap-up

In this last section of our interview, I would love for you to provide your perspective on how we might get there, what tools there might be, and even read your book, which is exceptional, heavy, and also, quite well-researched. It's a course essentially in a book, The Effluent Eye. I very much encourage interested people to pick up a copy. It's Narratives for Decolonial Right-Making. I feel like this is the last stage of the interview, and I'd love to have you back, but let's wrap up with that perspective of reducing harm.

Care More Be Better | Rosemary J. Jolly | Colonial Capitalism

Just to say colonial capitalism are these huge words, but let's say what we're talking about. We are basically talking about a culture that developed during and after post-Enlightenment Europe, which is in the 1400s, 1500s, and 1600s, where the idea was to go all over the world to get the raw materials to bring them back to Europe, process them, and sell them back to the world at a huge profit.

That model comes to be called colonial capitalism because that's how it started. I call it colonial capitalism because you can say that we're in capitalism now. It's important to remember, for example, in the US context that the loan that capitalism took to get going was slavery. That labor was never paid for. It has never been sustainable. That's an important point to make, to begin with.

The second thing is, “How do we take care of ourselves and do good when we seem to be facing overarching difficulties?” The first thing I would say is it's not helpful to feel alone. Working in coalitions of people and alongside people is important. One of the things that our modern life in Canada and the United States teaches us is that you are an individual. You have individual rights. You have individual responsibilities.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, what we learn is we have collective rights and collective responsibilities. Ubuntu, which is often spoken about by people who know Southern African philosophy and religion, all Ubuntu means, “I wouldn't live if you weren't living. We are interdependent,” and that exceeds humans. It's not only that I say to my mother, “I wouldn't be living if you weren't living or if you had not lived.”

It's also that I say to animals, non-human animals, “I would not be who I am if you were not who you are.” I can even say to the ground underneath my feet, “I would not have ground underneath my feet unless you are who you are.” I'm not trying to say that non-human animals and the ground beneath our feet are something we fully understand, but we don't have to fully understand other forms of being to know that we have a relationship with them.

We do not have to fully understand other forms of being to know we have a relationship with them.

Once we get that kind of independent joy, the kind of joy that you have in your relationship with, I know this is going to sound weird, folks, but with your flaw, you get energy. That energy is an emotional joy that helps us approach these seemingly completely intractable issues. The other thing is we are not exactly the culture that has all of the knowledge. We have to go to the cultures that were colonized and are colonized and go altogether, “What can we do? What is the next step? How can we learn a new way of living that's not all about, ‘I need to accumulate, I need to use, and I need to consume?’”

You guess what happens when you consume. You crap it out. The good news is most human crap can be used for other things or can be dealt with in one way or another but the kinds of crap that we are producing industrially now are not consumable in the long run. We need to figure out ways to do this and it's interesting. There are brownouts all the time when you go to South Africa now for historical reasons I won't go into, but it's nice once in a while to look at not having electricity as a moment to stop everything.

Stop the computer, light the candle, and do whatever you're doing, but just stop. The weird thing is the world doesn't stop. The world keeps going. I think those are the kinds of ways in which we need to do self-care. My two points about this are, if you're going it alone, even when you think you're doing a good thing, just remember that's a bit of an ego complex thing. No one can do that and not only that. Even more importantly, it's not fun so don't go it alone. Find the communities in the things that you're interested in and work with those communities.

The second thing is we can't do it alone because we don't have the knowledge. It's going to take everybody. It's going to take everything. It's going to take every non-human animal and we have to do self-care. My last point would be harm reduction. Never look at something that you do and say, “It's not enough.” As long as you're doing the most that you can do within your communities and with other people, go, “Harm reduction is still a thing. It's still a positive.” Sustainability is a goal. Perfection is utopian and I'm not really into perfection myself.

Nobody's perfect.

That's why I'm not critiquing you.

I think that's my question about going zero waste, just as an example because I think the emotional difficulty of moving in that direction is such, especially when you have children at home that it's so hard for most people to maintain without losing themselves into the work of it. If that makes sense.

That makes everything total sense to me. I think that we need to allow ourselves to live and enjoy our environments. People who have children are allowed and should be able to use resources that people who don't have children don't use. We all have different needs, thank goodness. Also, we all have different goals and desires. That's what's going to make it better. We're not all on the same pathway and panicking every time. We don't make the perfect zero. It's not emotionally sustainable, which means people get drained, which means they can't bring their energy and joy to sustainability.

I think that's such a good point and a nice point on which to land. Thank you so much for joining me, Rosemary Jolly.

I appreciated it, and it was my great privilege and enjoyment. Thank you so much.

I'm thrilled to have you as part of this community, and I hope that you'll come back for another conversation when we both have time. As it stands now, we come close to the hour, and I'd like to keep my episodes right around that. Thank you so much for joining me.

You're welcome.

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