itsjamilerr:

Throughout the year, anniversaries, and especially on Valentine’s Day, suitors and lovers buy cut flowers, diamond jewelry, and gold jewelry to symbolize their affection. Problem is, we tend to overlook that in gifting our lovers with these aesthetically-beautiful symbols, we are supporting industries that damage the environment, utilize forced cheap labor, and cause serious health problems elsewhere.

Flowers: The beauty of cut flowers masks a system of growth and production marked by environmental degradation, labor abuses, and the exposure of almost 200,000 people in the developing world to a variety of toxic chemicals.[1] Compensation is poor, relative to the risks involved. For instance, on an average day, one woman working in a Colombian carnation field will pick over 400 top-grade flowers. Four such flowers will cost just under $4.00 at a US florist, more than the worker earns in a day.[2]

Child labor, dismissal from employment due to pregnancy, and long hours of unpaid overtime are common, especially before holidays such as St. Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. & By the way, flowers are highly a pesticide-intensive crop. Flowers carry up to 50 times the amount of pesticides allowed on foods, yet flowers entering the United States, while checked carefully by the Department of Agriculture for pests, are not inspected for pesticides, because they are not considered food.[3] & Over 50 percent of workers report at least one symptom of pesticide exposure. Acute organophosphate pesticide exposure causes increased salivation, tearing, blurred vision, nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, urinary and fecal incontinence, increased bronchial secretions, coughing, wheezing, and sweating. In rare cases “involving more severe acute intoxication, dyspnea, bradycardia, heart block, hypotension, pulmonary edema, paralysis, convulsions, or death may occur.” [4]

Diamonds & Gold: Both have stuck thanks to traditional ideas of symbols for one’s love and social class. But ass you can guess, mining for these are highly hazardous and labor intensive. Diamond mine owners violate indigenous peoples’ rights by joining with local & national governments in activities that have the effect of destroying traditional homelands & forcing resettlement.[5] 

Now there’s also an issue with dirty diamonds.. They have been used by rebel armies in Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to pay for weapons used to fight some of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most brutal civil wars. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone killed and mutilated tens of thousands of people through its “signature tactic” involving amputation of hands, arms, legs, lips, and ears with machetes and axes, a tactic that was used to gain control over diamond mines. & With the financial support of the diamond industry’s trading centers, and backed by child soldiers forcibly conscripted and drugged to blunt their fear, reluctance to fight, and innate revulsion to killing, the RUF made millions off of diamonds that were extracted by thousands of prisoner-laborers.[6]

But back to just simply mining for diamonds and gold.. With research done, it’s safe to believe that mining is the world’s most deadly industry. Forty workers are killed each day, and scores more injured, in extracting minerals, including gold, from the earth. Over the last century, tens of thousands have been killed working in mines, while union-busting and human rights abuses have helped maintain cheap labor forces.[7] 

ALTERNATIVES: Although I only barely touched upon a few of the issues and sides related with these industries, I want to bring to light better alternatives to these chosen objects of affection. Those who choose to buy flowers can purchase locally or internationally-produced, organically-grown, labor-friendly bouquets (available at some Whole Foods Market natural and organic food chain stores), or grow and pick your own! Alternatives to diamonds include cubic zirconium, synthetic (or cultured) diamonds, & a company, LifeGem, actually creates diamonds from carbon captured during the cremation of human & animal remains. & as for gold, recycle gold! gold can be melt down & reused and this let’s us stay away from “dirty gold” or just make sure the gold came from somewhere environmentally and socially responsible.

Anyway, I applaud you if you’ve read to this point (or even skimmed, haha). These issues of cheap labor and causes of bad health clearly do not apply only to the cut flower and mining industries! There’s such thing as “fast-fashion” (and fast food..) too!

I want to believe that we don’t need materialistic things to prove an affection. America’s just so greedy. I say we all go nude and share unique tokens of love and intimacy for this upcoming holiday. (;

I fully respect and support this view on one of America’s most pervasively irrelevant and corrupt holidays. Yes, it’s cliche to say that one should be showing love and affection everyday of the year, but forgive me for not being creative enough to think of another way to do so. Intimacy and affection go a lot farther than shiny and thoughtful (because it’s hard to seem thoughtful when all of America is aware of the occasion and everything it embodies - at least IMO).

Show love to your special someone instead of making materialistic impressions. Just  try to keep the gag factor down for the single people, I guess. You knew at one point or another how it felt, haha.