Environmentalists like to refer to the impact our lifestyles have on the earth as our footprint. The more we draw upon the earth's natural resources, especially non-renewable ones, without giving anything back the deeper and heavier the footprints we leave. The ideal people according to this formula would be able to pass their lives on earth having taken so little that they would leave no trace of having been here at all.
Akin to that are the costs associated with the actual procurement of natural resources. Something that most people aren't aware of is the hidden price paid to accommodate our demand for certain commodities and resources. I'm not talking about monetary issues here; it's more along the line of a moral issue. An example of this in recent history in North America was the United Farm Workers campaign for fair treatment of the migrant workers who picked fruit and vegetables in California.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s people were asked to boycott all produce grown in that state in an effort to garner fair wages and better living conditions for those temporary workers. By publicizing the plight of these people, the United Farm Workers forced people to realize the true cost of getting the produce to their tables. It was the unwillingness of people to accept maltreatment of workers as part of the price for fruit and vegetables that resulted in the boycott's success and the eventual protection of the rights of migrant workers.
History is chequered with examples of how society has willing turned a blind eye to the true costs of ensuring the availability of various resources for our comfort and pleasure. Governments and businesses have long counted on our selfishness to allow them to, in some cases literally, get away with murder.
Musician Stace England has created a new CD, Salt Sex Slaves that tells the story of one especially horrid example from the history of the United States. In the town of Equality, Illinois, in the years before the Civil War, slavery was illegal like it was in most other states north of the Mason Dixon Line. However, for some strange reason the constitution of the State of Illinois allowed for the leasing of slaves for salt production.
A man named John Crenshaw, a.k.a. The Salt King, pretty much had the monopoly on salt production in the area; in one year alone he leased 800 slaves from his neighboring states that still allowed for their ownership. He also ran a lucrative business of kidnapping escaped slaves and returning them to their former masters in the southern states. Hidden away in the attic of the mansion he built were cells complete with manacles where he could hold his victims until he was able to get them back to their owners.
Stace England has written a collection of songs that describe various scenarios that could have and did happen in and around the Wabash Salines. As one of the songs describes, we're not talking about digging up rock salt here; this process involved the rendering of salt from underground liquid saline deposits. This involved fires of extreme heat, which in turn meant hue amounts of wood to be burnt. "Three chords of wood to a pound of salt" is how one verse describes the work.
I don't know if you can begin to understand the amount of firewood that needed to be cut to keep the fires burning on a continual basis. Or, what it would have been like to work around open fires that were hot enough to bring saline water to a boil and keep it there until the water dissolved? As these folk were slaves, we can safely figure that little or nothing was done for their safety. Probably the only thing that bothered Mr. Crenshaw about injuries was the loss of labor.
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