Slavery Footprint

One of the more common questions that open-minded, liberal-minded, and/or social-justice-minded people first learn to ask is, "Where was this shirt made?"  Chances are that if a piece of clothing that you are thinking of buying is made in China, you are about to buy an article of clothing produced by slave labor.  Indeed, chances are that if you are about to buy anything made in China or India that you are about to buy a slave-labor item.  Some of these open-minded folk search for non-slave-labor items until they find something made in the USA or Europe; others simply don't care at all that certain items like clothing are produced by slaves because, after all, clothing seems essential; still others look around for non-slave-labor items until they realize that doing so is very hard and oftentimes expensive.  I won't bother to point out (though I guess I am now) that the first type of person might be misled by a "Made in USA" label: let's not forget that the United States and Europe, where we'd like to think that civilization reigns and slavery is no more, are still greatly tainted by the worst evil mankind has ever known.

Now, I don't want to depress anyone, because being thoughtful about where our clothes come from is a good first step toward thinking about our slavery footprint.  And that's a good thing.  Once we start thinking about our slavery footprint in the smallest of areas we are likely to see how much of an impact our lifestyle has on slave labor.  Perhaps then we will begin to make changes to the way we live.  All of that is positive and I want to encourage thoughtfulness and lifestyle changes... God knows I, too, could still use a lot of changes to the way that I live if I want to bring down my slavery footprint.

Much like our carbon footprint, our slavery footprint is wide-reaching and can be roughly calculated.  When we do calculate it we might get depressed and greatly frustrated.  To some extent, actually, I do want to depress you, because running around as if everything is jolly won't help you gain insight into the impact your life has on slavery.  Unfortunately depression and frustration must often precede the most glorious transformations.  With that in mind I invite you to calculate your slavery footprint.  If you've done this already, I invite you to do it again and this time be as detailed as possible: take more than five minutes.  As you go through the calculation you will hopefully learn a lot about slavery in the world today but, perhaps more importantly, you will start to see what kind of life changes you need to make if we want to put an end to slavery.

Slavery Footprint