Population Growth, Modern Slavery, and Ecocide
Dr. Kevin Bales, world-renowned expert on contemporary global slavery, shines a light on the human rights violations and ecocidal impacts of modern day slavery, which tragically still exists in much of the world today.
Dr. Bales discusses the history of slavery, from ancient civilizations to modern times, highlighting how it has evolved over time, including the role that population growth, patriarchal pronatalism, religion, political regimes, global and local economies, and conflict play in perpetuating it.
With practices such as debt bondage, forced marriage, and labor exploitation, modern enslavement is often difficult to identify as it is often camouflaged within cultural and linguistic norms and policies.
He also illuminates the disproportionate environmental impact resulting from global slavery, in terms of CO2 emissions, destruction of natural habitats, and decimation of non-human species populations.
He concludes the interview by highlighting the support needed to end this practice, and sharing his joyful experiences of helping thousands of individuals transition from slavery to freedom.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Kevin Bales 0:00
What's the difference between the enslavement of men and the enslavement of women? And the answer is it's a significant difference because men are enslaved fundamentally on their exteriors. They're used for labor. Occasionally, they might be sexually assaulted. But for the most part, men are enslaved for labor. They're enslaved to be child soldiers. They're enslaved to be disposable. And it's paradoxical to say that the enslavement of women is even greater than the enslavement of men, because slavery is sort of a terminal condition that once you're there, it shouldn't get worse and worse. But it is that way because women can be enslaved on their interiors as well as their exteriors. Their inner organs can be enslaved. Their ovaries can be colonized. We're talking about those fundamental notions of impregnation as genocide.
Alan Ware 0:50
That was Dr. Kevin Bales, world renowned expert on contemporary global slavery. In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll learn about his research that shines a light on the human rights violations and the ecocidal impacts of modern day slavery, which tragically still exist in much of the world today.
Nandita Bajaj 1:18
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:41
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy and ecological overshoot and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals.
And now on to today's guest. Dr. Kevin Bales is Professor of Contemporary Slavery and research director of the Rights Lab at University of Nottingham in the UK. He co-founded the NGO, Free the Slaves. His 1999 book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, has been published in 12 languages. The film based on Disposable People, which he co-wrote, won the Peabody Award and two Emmys. The Association of British Universities named his work one of the 100 world changing discoveries. In 2007, he published Ending Slavery: How We Free Today's Slaves, and in 2009 with Ron Soodalter, he published The Slave Next Door: Modern Slavery in the United States. In 2016, his research institute was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize, and he published Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World. And here's today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 3:02
Hello, Dr. Bales. We are so honored to have you with us today. You are a renowned anti-slavery expert and advocate with decades of experience, and you've carried out groundbreaking research into the facts of modern day slavery and also how to end it. You've traveled around the world to gain a wealth of information about the realities of modern slavery in people's daily lives. And you've written several heart-wrenching and illuminating books that describe those experiences. And you've helped free thousands of people from the devastating experience of slavery. Thank you for all of that incredible work. We are thrilled to have you here. Welcome to our podcast.
Kevin Bales 3:42
I'm very happy to be here. Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj 3:47
Well, great. In researching some of your work, we've looked at several of your presentations, and we'd actually like to start the first question by reading a quote from one of your recent presentations that overlaps so much with the work that we are doing. So the quote is "Slavery is intersectional. Slavery is interacting with global and local economies, climate change, political regimes, species loss, population growth, conflict, religion, and more - with unanticipated outcomes in ways that we are just beginning to understand." And you've been at the helm of illuminating that understanding for decades. We look forward to unpacking these inner linkages with you today. But let's start with the basics. What is slavery? How do you define it?
Kevin Bales 4:33
Well, slavery is really what it's always been. It's pretty fundamental in terms of one person completely controlling another person. But the key way that we define it, operationally defined it as well as legally defined it, is to call on the laws that were made first in ancient Rome, and then again, later in the League of Nations, when they published their first anti-slavery rules and so forth. And it's fundamentally this: that if you can treat a person as if they are your own property, and you can use and do to them anything that you can do with anything that is your property; in other words, you can buy it, you could sell it, you could exploit it, you could loan it, you could give it away as a gift, or you can destroy things that are your own property, if you choose to. If you can utilize, exploit, destroy, buy or sell another human being, that's slavery. And it's a solid fundamental definition that, as I said, curiously, actually erupts originally from Roman property law, which then becomes the property law of European countries and so forth, as well as the idea that you can treat people as if they are things. Now, if you can treat people as if they are things and you can control them, and you can control them using violence if you need to, then you're clearly in a situation of slavery. All of that is recorded in something called the Bellagio-Harvard guidelines, which were put together by a big team of international legal and human rights scholars about five, six years ago, because we were really struggling to find common ground on the definition of slavery around the world. For what it's worth, you know, the United Nations has within it seven different definitions of slavery and trafficking, and they don't agree with each other. And national laws don't agree with each other. And philosophers don't agree with each other when it comes to defining slavery. So there was an effort to find that kind of definition that can be both a legal definition, useful in the courts, and an operational definition, useful in empirical research work.
Nandita Bajaj 6:34
Right. And, you know, we're quite aware and concerned about the enormous global and economic political inequalities and exploitation that we see everywhere. So you know, we don't want to minimize the hundreds of millions of severely exploited workers in areas like agriculture and industry around the world who work with low pay in hazardous conditions. But it's so helpful to have parameters around the definition of slavery and to focus our discussion on those people, as you say, whose basic freedoms are completely curtailed under threat of violence. So that's very, very helpful. And it's completely surprising, as you said, that the UN has seven different definitions of slavery and how difficult that would be to uphold in the court of law, for example. And so practically, then, how many people are enslaved globally, today? And what are some of the main types of slavery that we see in the world today?
Kevin Bales 7:35
We don't have an exact and really super reliable number of estimation in on how many people are in slavery. We've been working on that for a very long time, and we're getting better at doing that measurement. But it's tricky, because this is a hidden crime, a very significantly hidden crime, not least because criminal statistics themselves are based around the idea of a crime event. In other words, someone steals your bicycle that's a crime event. It takes about 10 minutes. Even being assaulted is a crime event, and it might take at most 15 to 20 minutes or half an hour. But this is a crime that's uncountable as a crime event, because it begins when you're enslaved, and then it may not end until you die wearing that harness, right. It's a crime which conceals you from being counted, because you're under the complete control of another person. So that's just to say why it's tricky to try to get the best estimation. I think that conservatively we could say there are something like 40 million people in the world today in slavery. And that's an interesting number, because you mentioned all of those people in highly exploitative work around the world. Is that a billion people? Is it more than a billion people? It's a lot of people. But 40 million people in slavery, if that's the right sort of number, is by far the smallest proportion of the human population to ever be in slavery. If we look back in time, we can look at points in human history going right back to the first moments of recorded human history, where we see significant majorities and large numbers of people within a whole lot of different societies who are enslaved. And we know that, in part, because they kept better records in the past than they do today, because it wasn't a criminal activity. As opposed to say, if you look back to the Deep South, just before the Civil War, there was a census in the United States in 1860. And they were able to literally count precisely how many people were in slavery in the United States. And it was something like 4,392,666. I mean, it was just that kind of sharp number. But out of a population, about 20 to 25% of the population of the Deep South were people in slavery. Empires, like Rome, ran on slavery the way the United States runs on oil. It was just an absolutely foundational economic enterprise that provided all of the motive power, all of everything. I mean, it was just slaves were everywhere. They were investment items. They were worth a lot of money. And it meant that, you know, it didn't operate otherwise without people in slavery. And that was true of other past civilizations, and so-called civilizations, all the way back to the time of the Tigris Euphrates evolution and appearance of what people call civilization, which operates around the idea of civil, meaning a city, and because the first cities were built in those great floodplains in the Tigris Euphrates. And slavery really just flourished in that space, as it went from being hunter and gathering societies to these sedentary societies were there were people on the top, religious leaders and military leaders. And then there were a lot of people on the bottom who were building those walls, building those embankments, building those farms, building those things that made cities cities. It opens up. If you go back to cuneiform, the actual original human form of writing that occurs five and a half thousand years ago, there are cuneiform glyphs where you can read and it says, "we went to the mountains, and we took slaves, and we brought them back to be slaves. And we have this many females and this many children and this many males, and we're going to put them in these types of work". And the records are there in clay tablets, not paper, obviously. But it's been there and been with us for ever such a long time in very big and deep ways. And I suppose if there's something to say that's positive here, it's that even though 40 million sounds like a huge amount, and it is, we actually live in a moment in human history where, with the right kind of thought and effort, we could shut this down. We could really wipe this away. This is something that's very small compared to the situation that it was in the past.
Alan Ware 11:35
Right. As you mentioned, with that history, it really started getting going with agriculture and the agricultural empires. There's some evidence that even hunter gatherers would temporarily take slaves. I know in the Northwest US tribes with the salmon runs, they couldn't get people locally to do that. The salmon were coming, and they had to be processed very quickly. So their slave percentages probably were equivalent to the US South during some of those Northwest tribes.
Kevin Bales 12:03
It's possible. I was required to study the Kwakiutl and all of those other groups up in the Northwest and how they worked. And they were a very interesting subgroup of indigenous Americans in that they were the ones closest to having a kind of capitalist notion of property. And particularly, they had a very extreme notion of conspicuous consumption. The ceremony of potlatch was all about demonstrating how much wealth you had by just flagrantly, and ostentatiously, destroying things that took years to make, for example, just to show that you could. A little bit like an Elon Musk today, right? Shooting rockets into space for no good reason, you know, just to show you can. So you're right, though. That was a zone where it was likely to happen, but probably not for life, you know, probably enslavement or forced labor for restricted time periods.
Alan Ware 12:57
So that movement begins in the UK with people like Wilberforce in the 1700s.
Kevin Bales 13:03
Well, not exactly. If you look carefully, there's actually an anti-slavery movement that begins about 200 years before that in Spain, and particularly with a Catholic priest, and he becomes something else later, but his name, De Las Casas, and he begins to work with the king of Spain and he works with the clergy and within the political hierarchies of Spain that pushes through laws about treatment of people and about the encomienda system where people are a sort of serfs, but they're really slaves and the slaves and the silver mines all through the Caribbean and Mexico and so forth. So there is this interesting sort of first movement. But we're only recently getting the full picture of that. And I've only been learning about that in the last two or three years from new scholars who are doing stuff. Then it all kind of falls apart. And then it's really with the Quakers for the most part before Wilberforce, who began putting out the first laws, or the first statements within colonies before the United States is even the United States. They're very important in terms of pulling all this stuff together. And it's really the Quakers who recruit Wilberforce in 1787 to join with a committee that they've had going for decades to bring it into the slave trade. But they're not getting anywhere because nobody in the English aristocracy will even talk to a Quaker, because I don't know if you know Quakers, but they won't use honorifics. I mean, actually, I'm a Quaker. So I'll tell you that when I met the Queen, I didn't use honorifics. And people were a little bent out of shape when I said, "I'm very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Windsor". And she looked, she gave me a funny look, too. But one of the things is, is that you can't run a social and legal movement, if no one will read your letters, because you won't begin them with Dear Sir Alan, I am your most obedient servant, blah, blah, blah, right? So, in 1787, a number of Quakers got together with a number of non- Quakers, Anglicans, including people like Wilberforce and said, you know, if you'll talk to the people that need to be talked to, in ways that they will hear you, we'll continue to do the grassroots organizing that particularly among women all across the country of England, to begin to even think about things like the very first boycott of slave-made goods.
Alan Ware 15:14
And then a second anti-slavery movement begins after Britain bans slavery, right, in the early 1800s. And then the US and then finally Brazil in the 1880s. And then there's a Belgian?
Kevin Bales 15:29
That's the one no one remembers, except if you've read Adam Hochschild's amazing book, King Leopold's Ghost. Because in the very end of the 19th century, early part of the 20th century, King Leopold of Belgium takes the Congo as his personal property, the entire center of Africa, and then begins to sell it off or rent it off in big chunks, and basically just says to these investors, "You can do anything you'd like with the people who live there. You can enslave them. You can kill them. You can eat them. I really don't care. We just want to make cash, turn this into a cash cow". And the result is extensive enslavement, but even to the point of, particularly from the cash crops of rubber and some minerals, what amounts to a genocide. And millions of people are killed in a very short period, five to 10 years. But then the First World War breaks out. And this thing that had been kind of big news in a lot of places, particularly in Europe and North America, is just pushed out of the public consciousness and becomes something of the past not to do with that enormous transformation that occurs from the First World War with total war.
Alan Ware 16:30
And you're part of what's called the third anti-slavery movement?
Kevin Bales 16:35
Well, I think it's the fourth. I used to say it was the fourth. And then I got hep to De Las Casas, back in the time of Christopher Columbus. So I think we may be on the fifth, but it's the one that kind of blew up in the 1990s and the beginning of this century. And I have to say, when I started working in this space, because I think maybe I woke up to it a little bit earlier than most, but I would talk to people who were human rights experts, and I would talk to them about slavery and how extensive I thought it could be. People would say, "What are you talking about? There's no slavery anymore. Everybody knows that ended in the 19th century. How can there be slavery today?" And then, when I began to dig into it, I found out, like over in Geneva at the UN, they had filing cabinets full of files of situations of enslavement, going back to the 1920s, for example. And it just, you know, the more I looked, the more I found it. And that's what led me in time to realize I'm going to have to go deep on this and really document it firsthand in ways that explain how it works and how it fits within our world today.
Nandita Bajaj 17:35
And when you were starting to look at these documents, from these UN file cabinets, it's clear that slavery is considered morally repugnant to nearly everyone around the world. Were there some common themes that you were finding in terms of the conditions that were helping to keep it alive in some of the places that you first started researching?
Kevin Bales 17:57
Oh yes. And I think I, have to say, you know, you say, everyone around the world or most of us think it's repugnant, but I just wish that were true, in that if you live within a culture which has had a form of enslavement, which may not be called slavery, they may have a separate word for what they call slavery, and they say, well, we don't do that. But of course, giving a cousin into marriage to someone you owe money to, that's not slavery, you know, that's called the marriage bond trick or whatever. You know, I mean, I made that up. But the point is, you know, they've got lots of ways they can camouflage this within their linguistic modeling of it. So that when I ended up in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, and I'm around people who have clearly been living in hereditary slavery, and what I later began to call hereditary collateral debt bondage slavery, because of the nature of the social and economic mechanism of their enslavery, which was their great-great-grandfather had migrated from somewhere else, was of a different internal ethnicity in India, probably someone who wasn't even on the hierarchical system of caste, they're more of a tribal person, something like that, and had taken a loan from a local landowner who knew exactly what he was doing when he handed over a little bit of cash. And then, because they were illiterate and innumerate, found that they could never repay it, and it passed to their children, and it would pass to their children who passed to their children. So by the time I reached Uttar Pradesh, and you know, had time to interview people who were in the families who were in the situation, they didn't even know how many generations it had been. They thought it might be 5,4,6,12. I mean, they really weren't certain. But because there was no education, they'd never left the village, they are kept under complete control. Women and girls are sexually assaulted by the landowners who control these agricultural workers. The men are, in a sense, kind of shattered by that fact and a lot of other facts in their lives. And I realized, okay, so it's hereditary. It's hereditary, because they took a debt and gave themselves as collateral against that debt, forever in their family. They gave their family forever as collateral until the debt could be repaid. But of course, if your family's in hereditary slavery, how do you get any resources to buy your way out? So it's a perpetual motion machine for criminals, as it were, to keep people in slavery. I did meet one man who bought his way out of slavery. And it was because somewhere a distant relative had left him some money in a will. And he took this money and he took it to the man who had owned his family for generations and said, "I want to pay my debt". But this was a man who had never lived any other way. And he had nothing around him to be any kind of a model for freedom. He had been a ploughman, an agricultural ploughman. And after, not even a year, he went back to the landowner and he said, "Could I just come back? Because you used to feed me. Now I have to do all these other things that that I've never done before. And I don't know where I stand with anyone". And you know, that's institutionalization of a person in slavery, a bit like sometimes happens when people are in prison, they become really institutionalized. And he literally went back and said, "Take me back". That's the sort of thing that we've learned a lot about how not to let that happen when work is done for liberation and rehabilitation and reintegration.
Nandita Bajaj 21:10
Yeah, it speaks so much to the norms that become so deeply entwined, kind of in your DNA. It's what you've come to know as the reality, the only plausible reality for you is what you've grown up with. And even if it's the most awful circumstances under which you're growing up, it's what you are most familiar with. And that's where you find safety. And yeah, I mean, it's disturbing, but also completely understandable why something like that happens. And then you've also talked about how the institutionalization of slavery, of this practice, how it's driven by a couple of different factors, like supply and demand, where you've discussed growth in population, economic change, governmental corruption, etc. Can you speak to those three factors, how they perpetuate?
Kevin Bales 22:07
Oh certainly. And in some ways, it's the bizarre, phenomenal population growth that's occurred just in my lifetime that has been this remarkable transformation. I mean, it's literally the first moment in world history where we've had something like this happen, I mean, but that's true of so many things, because of global population growth and global warming, and a lot of other things going on right now. But the cost of people in the past who were in slavery was fundamentally high. It took a long time to work this out. And I worked with a number of economic historians. We reached all the way back into ancient Greece to see how many bowls did you have to sell to buy one slave? Or how much land could you buy with the cost of a person in slavery, and then you tried to convert that into say, dollars, and it becomes really tricky. But you can do it. And the basic lesson is, for almost all of human history, slaves have been expensive. And if you were going to make a rough estimate, you could say, well, one healthy young man who could do a bit of work in today's money would be about $45,000 to $50,000. So not cheap. And there would be some people who would be enslaved who would be worth a lot more than that when you look at the ancient records. They are sparse, these ancient records, but they're there. And then, you know, you begin to have other people who are like elderly or tiny children and they're not worth so much, and so forth. But there's a kind of clear pattern to what people want. They want strong, healthy young men in particular, because you can put them to work in all these sorts of different ways. You can watch that occur in the United States right up to 1860. The price of slaves was climbing and climbing all through the 1840s and 50s. There was an enormous insurance industry that insured your slaves for you, that was based in the north. They don't like to talk about the fact some of these big American insurance companies started off on slave insurance back in the 1840s, and 50s, and 60s. But, that said, they were significant capital investments in the sense that for the cost of a single healthy young man, you could buy a house in a lot of parts of America. You could buy 30,40 acres of land, of viable arable land. I mean we're talking significant investment properties when you bought these slaves. But when you make it illegal, and then when you literally flood the global reality with billions of people in a situation where there has hardly been more than 1 to 2 billion for thouands of years, it's a glut on the market. And we know what happens when there's a glut - prices collapse. And that's exactly what's happened with human beings, the cost of human beings has really collapsed. And just in the time that I've been working on it, which in some ways, in economic time, is the blink of an eye, what I've seen is the cost of human beings being very, very low to today, when we're up hitting over 8 billion on the planet, there's a lot of people who are enslaved for nothing. I mean there's virtually no cost. It's almost like picking mushrooms in the forest. You just take them when you want them and use them as you like and throw them away when you're done. And it's that kind of phenomenally valueless reality for other human beings that I find shocking, and I think most of us can hardly even comprehend.
Nandita Bajaj 25:21
Yeah, you know, the price of the modern slaves that you've talked about collapsing with this corresponding growth, explosion of population in the last century, what degree do you think that the economic growth imperative that is constantly being driven by corporations, and profiteers is also a population growth imperative that ensures that they have a steady supply of cheap laborers, so they can keep the cost of enslavement as low as it is today? As you said, some of them nothing.
Kevin Bales 25:55
That's hard to untangle when you try to work out the economics of it. I don't doubt it. But I also don't think, it's going to sound like I'm contradicting myself, but I don't think it's a major driver of what you just described. But the reason isn't because it's not true. The reason is, because the billions of people that you're talking about being exploited economically to do that low level work, and that low level production and so forth, to keep things cheap, and keep things booming, that's a population of literally a couple of billion, at least, in my understanding. Whereas this is this leftover bit, this 40 million people that spread weirdly into all these little pockets of criminality or culture or disrupted lives because of conflict or environmental destruction and so forth. So it's a different sort of mechanism, which I think if you could somehow make it just poof, disappear, we'd hardly notice in the global economy, because 40 million's not many people in today's world, and when they're worth virtually nothing. And if you were the sort of human being that values the worth of people by their economic value, if suddenly all the people in slavery disappeared, most people would never notice and never probably even care.
Nandita Bajaj 27:10
Right. That is a very interesting detail. Because you're right, I mean, the couple of billion people who are being exploited for cheap labor, for environmental labor, for their environmental resources, etc, is different from this very specific definition of slavery that you're talking about.
Kevin Bales 27:30
But, on the other hand, and the flip side of that coin, which is in some ways, as scary as the other side, is simply that out of that 40 million, there are some pockets of a million here and a million there whose environmental impact is much greater than people understand. So here's one example. One of the pieces of deep analysis that we had to do as I was working on the book Blood and Earth was to understand how much CO2 emissions we could fix on slave- based industries. Basically, how much CO2 is slavery pumping into the global atmosphere. And we looked at all these different things about illegal deforestation because a lot of deforestation that's going on around the world is illegal. And most of it's, a lot of that's done with enslaved workers, or people who were enslaved in brick kilns across all of South Asia, which burned tires and all kinds of horrible things. And it's a completely ridiculous, ancient, biblical way of making bricks. We don't need this anymore. But it works fine if you've got slave labor and you don't have to pay your workers. Anyway, aggregating very carefully, always going for the lower end of every estimation, how much CO2 was being put out by slave work and slave production? The answer is, if slavery were a country, it would be a smallish country with about 40 million people in it, the United Nations thinks it makes about $150 billion a year in turnover. Call that its GDP. And now you've got a GDP about the size of Uraguay or a fairly small country. So if slavery were a country, it'd be a small, poor country, and it would also be the third largest emitter of CO2 after China and the United States. I'll tell you the first time I worked through those numbers I thought I'd made a horrific mistake. And I did it again. I kept getting the same answer. I sent it off to people who were much better and much more expert in CO2 estimation and so forth, some of the people at 350.org, Bill McKibben and his crew and said, "This can't be right" and they came back and said, "No, this, this looks right". But it's not surprising if you say criminals control human beings, and those human beings can be forced to do anything that the criminals like, and the criminals are very happy to say, let's cut down this entire protected forest, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Or let's go ahead and burn all the leftover tires in India in ways that it goes straight into the air and puts not just CO2 but noxious, cancer-causing chemicals into the air and on and on like that. So that led us to funny types of research, like we had to figure out how many brick kilns are there in South Asia. No one knew. No one had any idea. And so we ended up using some machine learning techniques to train the information from satellites to identify what was an active brick kiln. And by the end of the day, we got 58,420 or something like that. It's like that many brick kilns in all of Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and so forth. But all of them are pumping it out. And that's just one space, one zone right next to the largest carbon sink in Asia, which is the Sundarbans UNESCO World Heritage Site of of mangrove forests, which are also being cut by gangs of enslaved workers.
Alan Ware 30:42
Right, And there, you saw a lot of young boys, right, being lured into working in these fish camps?
Kevin Bales 30:50
Exactly. I mean, the criminals would simply go up river to these little villages, along the rivers in the bottom of Bangladesh, and say, "We noticed there's not even a school here. But you know, if your son's 10,12 years old, they can come work with us and do some of this fish processing. And we'll bring them back after the end of the season. And here's a little bit of advance on some of the money that they're going to be earning, you know, so here's how many Taka" or whatever it is. But then as soon as they're down the river on a boat, all that's over, and they don't go anywhere near where they said they would. They have no intention of ever returning the children to anywhere. And they're just slave children who are worked horrifically and also sexually assaulted and brutalized in these fish processing camps. And, occasionally, a few escaped. Occasionally a few are rescued. But it's a pretty horrific situation for any kind of children. And when I was able to talk to a few who had just escaped, I was asking them, you know, what was your health like, what was going on? And they said, "Well, we all had diarrhea, we all had diarrhea sort of all the time". And they assumed it was because they were eating the guts of the fish that they were cutting open and trying to process and that was almost all they had to eat. And they all knew other kids who had died of diarrhea, that was the only name they had for it. But when I asked what else was your health problem there, and this was the part that really shook me when they talked to me about this was they said, well, every child I spoke to had either seen or knew another child who had been eaten by a tiger. So being eaten by the tiger was the second largest mortality of these groups of children. And, of course, it's a shocking thing to hear. But then you put it into the context, and you realize this is the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Sunderban forests. One of the reasons it's a UNESCO - never to be troubled, never to be bothered, never to be cut - forest is because it's the last large habitat of Bengal tigers. It's where these beautiful animals live and the deer that they eat, and all these other things. It's an ecosystem which is rich and varied and phenomenal in its ability to suck CO2 out of the air because mangroves are really good at that. But you go in and you clear a bunch of the wood and you push all the prey animals away and build these processing camps and then you introduce little prey animals called human children. It's hard for the tigers not to do what tigers do.
Alan Ware 33:10
And there was an example where you tried to then make it known to the Bangladeshi government, but there was a powerful shrimp mafia I think you called it, that has made the it very difficult to have this stopped, right?
Kevin Bales 33:22
Yeah, I think almost everyone in Bangladesh calls it the shrimp mafia because they are very powerful. And it's not just shrimp. It's also this fish that's processed. A lot of what those children were processing were fish that would then be made into cat food. Virtually all of that cat food is exported to North America and Western Europe for all these pet cats that people have. And likewise, the shrimp which the children were also farming and processing, and like that virtually all of that billions and billions of dollars worth of frozen shrimp, leaves South Asia every year for a trip to either in Western Europe or North America, where you go into this supermarket, you buy a bag of frozen shrimp. I have to say I haven't eaten shrimp since I was there. I just, I just can't see it in the same way.
Alan Ware 34:10
So, also in Congo, you went into the Democratic Republic of Congo, where also the destruction of the natural world, in a lot of those protected natural areas with chimpanzees and bonobos, and gorillas, hippos and you were seeing a lot of that destroyed for mainly mining. Is that the main activity there?
Kevin Bales 34:30
Yes and no. Well, let me back up a tiny bit and say we're really into a double threat situation where we're talking about something like the Eastern Congo, because yes, there's environmental destruction going on. And it's one of the richest ecosystems on the planet. You know, it's like the African Amazon or so you know, it's really amazing. And yet the people who live there are overpowered and living in fear because there is virtually no functional government. And you've got armed gangs, revolutionaries, they can call themselves military groups who can wander and fight with each other, but then can also take a village. Slavery can take this piece of land over here, can take this whole mountain over there and begin to bulldoze it and have it chopped to pieces by people with tiny shovels in their hands. I mean, so it's a level of chaos and exploitation, which comes with these situations of armed conflict, which makes it very easy to enslave people. You know when you've got a whole bunch of people with automatic weapons and you've got a little agricultural village or a little fishing village, it's easy to just round people up at gunpoint because there's no outside law, or military force which is going to interdict you. It's not going to happen. You're more likely, in one of those armed gangs, to be attacked by another arm gang who just wants your property. It's truly a kind of mafia situation. But the reality then is that you get even higher levels of destruction. So you get people saying, well, right over the border in Rwanda, still a lot of people are cooking with charcoal. So let's cut down this rainforest and turn the trees into charcoal that we can sell over the border in Rwanda. And oh, by the way, there were gorillas here, but people over there eat gorillas, or people over here eat gorillas, so we'll sell those. We'll kill them, even if they can run away, just so that we can sell parts of gorilla meat in the local markets and like that. The humans are fundamentally worthless, almost, except for the work that they can do. The gorillas are actually worth it for quite a bit more as meat, right. The trees are worth more as charcoal. And then what had been the fundamental part of the mountains and the valleys of this incredibly beautiful place is, sadly, under filled with minerals that go into our electronics. So, molybdenum, cassiterite and so forth, you know that they can really mine that out using slave labor, and then ship that out to places like Rwanda, but other countries as well. And that applies to a lot of other minerals as well.
Nandita Bajaj 36:56
Another connection you've alluded to, especially in the DRC, is rape as a weapon of war. There's actually a really powerful movie that speaks so much to some of the things you're speaking about. It's called City of Joy, that covers this whole aspect of rape as a weapon of war that's being used in DRC, for all of these, you know, mining militia and, and how these women basically, and girls, are bearing this incredible burden of assault and shame that they carry throughout their lives. That is another prong of this type of modern slavery.
Kevin Bales 37:37
And this is an area which, A , we don't know enough about, and B, we haven't tried to analyze as well as we should have done. And I'll just be totally honest. Whereas I wanted to jump in and do that work in the past, I realized, dude, you can't do this. You're a man. You can't do this work. And I'm still looking for collaborative women to work with me or use me as a resource or whatever. Because it's crucial. There's something if we step back like eight or 10 steps, and you say, what's the difference between the enslavement of men and the enslavement of women? And the answer is a significant difference because men are enslaved fundamentally on their exteriors. They're used for labor. Occasionally they might be sexually assaulted. But for the most part, men are enslaved for labor. They're enslaved to be child soldiers. They're enslaved to be disposable, right, and all of those things. And it's paradoxical to say that the enslavement of women is even greater than the enslavement of men, because slavery is sort of a terminal condition that once you're there, it shouldn't get worse and worse. But it is that way, because women can be enslaved on their interiors, as well as their exteriors. Their inner organs can be enslaved. Their ovaries can be colonized. We're talking about those fundamental notions of impregnation as genocide. That's a whole part of the literature around genocide as it affects women is that one of the ways that again, some research that I've worked on it with another team of what ISIS did to the Yazidi people, and that ISIS actually documented exactly what they intended to do. And they said, look, you know, our game here is we got to first kill all the old women against the Yazidi people. They said this is a population that we have decided are devil worshipers according to our definition, which means we can do anything we'd like with them. So we'll kill all the old women because they're useless. We'll kill all the men because they're a threat. And then we'll start looking at the boys to see if any of them are useful to us. But the women can be impregnated. And that's important because within the ISIS worldview, you can convert a woman to something useful by impregnating her with, in a sense, an ISIS zygote. ISIS impregnation, right? And to the point that they in their own literature said that this makes the mother the slave of the child. Because while the mother is enslaveable because of her status as a devil worshiper, the child she bears can actually hold her as property within this ISIS worldview. It's not just in ISIS. You know when I look around the world and see that what women put up with, how men justify all sorts of crazy mistreatment, and particularly the impregnation and forced impregnation as genocide, which is that's a whole area of research work that's been demonstrated for quite some time now.
Nandita Bajaj 40:31
What you're talking about, we can go a couple of episodes on just that - the differentiation of enslavement of women, and how that differs from that of boys and men. And, of course, you know, it intersects so much with the work that we are doing and trying to raise awareness about the different types of coercive pronatalism and using women's bodies as vessels for religious propaganda, economic growth, war, ethnocentrism, etc. And, you know, on that note, have you found similar linkage between patriarchal religion and enslavement? Is it similar? I mean, is it what you were just talking about with ISIS? That's what that would look like?
Kevin Bales 41:14
Well, the short answer is yes. Absolutely yes. And you can see this, especially across Africa with a very broad view now. And one of the ways that this is demonstrated is that one of the great challenges that has to do with the protection of women and girls in Africa, is the fact that there are parallel legal systems in Africa. I had to learn about this. But the point being that, in most African countries, according to the constitution of that country, there isn't a single fixed constitutional law. There are parallel laws, which can sometimes cancel each other or not. So, there's the national law, but then there's the tribal law for the tribal groups that you belong to. And then there's the religious or Sharia or customary law all going along together, and they overlap. So if you're in the capitol, the government says, well, of course, you can't sell a nine year old girl into marriage in this sort of way. But you get out to the countryside, where everyone practices this particular religion, or have a particular tribal rule about this, and they say, yes, of course we can. And that's exactly what we'll do. And within the overarching African continent, pan government that has to do at the sort of international level, you literally have politicians who say, we are attempting to respect the beliefs of the tribal peoples of the different religions. And we can't necessarily impose these fundamentally European ideas about gender across these tribal notions, or these religious notions and so forth. And it creates, boy, a tangled situation. So in West Africa, there's a tribal practice called trecosi and it's mixed with a religious notion that, because there are these shrines which are called trecosi shrines, and they're inhabited by trecosi priests. And these priests can keep you from being cursed. They can lift the curses that have been put on you. They can improve your life through a material advantage or, or make you happier or solve your problems but you have to pay into these shrines and priests, a young girl - that's the cost to like lift a curse on your family or turn around the business profits that you're not able to make because you're going bankrupt. It costs one girl. And you give this gift to the gods is what they say. And the girl becomes a slave to the men who run the shrine, and she does everything. She does all the work. She always ends up being impregnated two or three or four times by the different priests and so forth. And most of the people around her say, wasn't she lucky to get to be able to be given to the gods in order to save her family from all this pain and suffering. The complexity of that inter linkage between duty to family, the profound diminution of the value of women as opposed to men, or boys as opposed to girl, within what's clearly a highly exploitative system that some men came up with a long time ago to run these shrines and so forth, it's just one example of that layered sexism. The piece of research that I've been just starting up actually has to do with the notion of revelation. And I know that sounds a little crazy, but when you look across religious groups, there are either, on one end of the continuum, there are groups like my Quakers, where there's actually a belief that anyone can have a revelation, that there's something out there, some people call it God in Quakers. Some people don't call it God, they call it whatever. But the point is that you can feel these things which are almost some kind of deep, powerful notions that come to you to help you to see the world in a better way and a greater understanding and lead you along. And then there are religious groups where the right, the ability to have a revelation, is restricted to a single man. So Warren Jeffs, the man who ran the fundamental Latter Day Saints group in the American Southwest, a man who had 80 wives, and half of them were under the age of 14, and who was the only person who could talk to God or could do anything, right. So I'm just hypothesizing in this new piece of research that the more restricted to a single individual, the notion of revelation is within a religious group, the more likely that religious group is to have high potential for child marriage, abuse, sexual assault, and even potentially enslavement and so forth. And at the other end of the continuum, I'm not done with the research, but I can't find any examples yet of highly egalitarian notions of revelation not being linked to highly egalitarian notions of other sorts.
Nandita Bajaj 45:47
Right. And, you know, this thing you are pointing to, with a lot of patriarchal religions or countries or tribes or ethnicities, often there is this backlash when you do bring up the rights of an individual and dignity etc, as some kind of a western conspiracy of liberalization and feminism. And in response, there is a fear often to challenge that backlash because of a very good thing that has happened in recent decades of pluralism, that we must respect all different practices and religions and traditions, etc. And so there is this nuance of when does our respect for practices, traditions, etc, supersede our respect and dignity for individual human beings which aren't subjective. They have been codified under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So it's not just something that the Westerners are saying to other countries or nations, that this is not a good practice for certain people within your tribal tradition, but we do have agreed upon principles. And so it becomes very complicated to try to disentangle, as you were saying, some of these deep, deep layers of religion, patriarchy, traditions, ethnic practices, etc, and to separate them from practices of enslavement or slave-like practices.
Kevin Bales 47:21
You're absolutely right on that. And one of the things that's so challenging is that, while you're right,we have some international conventions and things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and so forth, there's a such a large part of the human population who have never heard of it, or if they have heard of it, reject it. And they reject it because that's not what the Prophet says, or that's not what our interpretation of Christianity is about, or that's something to do with the Westerners, with the white folk, and on and on like that. And it's very difficult to try to find that space in which you can find the common ground in which you can talk about it in a careful way, which doesn't lead to a knee jerk reaction. And in some ways that common ground might be, to take it right back to questions of overpopulation, it might be to understanding what's happening to the planet right now because, in my lifetime, the population's gone from two and a half billion to 8 billion. I find it hard to believe that that's happened as a person who understands a little bit about human biology and evolution. It's just like this is a blink of an eye. And yet we've got this loading on the planet. And we're a hungry, hungry species. And we don't care really about hardly anything or anyone else when we get hungry. And it's just a terrible burden that we've placed here. And yet, part of it's linked to that whole idea about how many people we should be reproducing, and how many people can control that, and how many people are able to determine what that should be. And then we're into that zone that takes us right back to what you were saying a moment ago about the fact that here's a culture and this culture is run by men. And these men like the idea that they can raise a larger herd of cows, and a larger herd of women and a larger herd of girls. And they've got planned uses for all of those herds that they're bringing out. I'm being harsh here. But it's a shocking sort of reality. See, I think everything I've just said is exactly the sort of thing that would alienate the very people that I would hope to have a good conversation with about this and help to open different understandings as between the interlocutors. And yet it's so difficult, in part because I feel this very strongly, and someone who has an item of faith that they've been handed down, and they deeply, deeply believe whether it's any religion, right, I won't pick on anyone, but name any religion, and they're holding that as strongly as I hold mine.
Nandita Bajaj 49:45
Yeah, you're so right. I mean, so many things you're pointing to. It's just a real complicated mess of a lot of conflicting values and ideas, and not just country to country. But even within our liberal left spectrum, within a lot of liberal countries, not a lot of people agree that this is an issue. And you know, which is one of the reasons we find your work so admirable, because you are linking, just like we are, the aspect of overpopulation with so many of the human rights violations that are not just the result of overpopulation, but the cause of it. You know, when you start getting to the bottom of what is at the heart of population growth, you start to see the worth and value of girls and women in cultures and countries, including ours, where we are seeing progressive diminishment of reproductive rights in order for girls and women to be able to decide their own fate.
Kevin Bales 50:42
And in some ways, against those notions like the idea that women and girls could decide their own fate at a global level, the question of slavery pales. I mean, 40 million people in a situation and it's horrific and should be ended. Absolutely it must be ended. But if we're talking about the 4 billion women and girls on the planet, who are being held to control and behaviors which are fundamentally damaging to themselves, and to the planet, and to the population, it really is a hard pressed one, to have to choose, which is the greater evil here, what can be done about it. I've got a paper that I haven't published yet, because everyone's not quite sure what to do with it. But it was all about what will happen with the situation of anti-slavery movements as the population grows and grows. And the title of the paper is "Slavery in the Anthropocene". And I end the paper with the sort of three scenarios. You know, one is we actually get a handle on climate change and population growth. And then we might also in the process, begin to get a handle on slavery, right? That's the happy one. But the third one is catastrophic. Global warming reaches levels that we can't even really live with anymore. I feel daunted. I won't stop struggling, but I feel hard pressed to see ways forward through a lot of these mounting challenges, particularly when there's so many people who are in the United States and all around the world are saying, oh, you know, this is just weather, whereas the underlying drivers like the growth of the population, and the weight of that on the planet, is undeniable. But one of the things that human beings are so good at is denying. Deniability is something that human beings can keep right up to the moment they're run over by the bulldozer or struck by lightning or, you know, whatever it happens to be.
Alan Ware 52:27
Yeah. Some of your research about slavery and armed conflict concerned me when you looked at that database from what 1989 to 2016. And you found that in 90% of the situations, there were child soldiers, forced labor or sexual exploitation.
Kevin Bales 52:43
In part because of the time I spent in the Congo and in places like Myanmar, what's been going on in the civil war there, and it got me thinking about how much slavery was going on in armed conflict now. We know it was once a big part of armed conflict, and certainly the Nazis use slave labor extensively. You know they committed genocide, but they also committed what they themselves called as a policy extermination through labor, so capture enslavement, and then working people to death was part of the genocidal formula that they brought to Europe and Eastern Europe and so forth. Finding out more and more about what really went on, for example, with slavery in the Second World War and also in other wars, I began to wonder how extensive it could have been. But we have that wonderful database. It's in Uppsala, Sweden, which is about all the conflicts. And they've gone a good way back and they keep it up to date. We took that database, and then for every single conflict, which is over 1300 of them, I think, just for that short time period, we said, let's dig into every bit of digging we can do and determine if there was any slavery in this particular conflict. I thought maybe we're going to hit half, maybe half of all the conflicts in the world would have slavery. And what we found was it was right at 90%. And it's child soldiers. It's enslaving people to be labor, you know, it's for sexual assault, it's for sale. If you have someone else to carry everything, cook the food, be cannon fodder, that means you don't have to expend your soldiers and your money to do that part of the war. And it works really well if you have a complete breakdown in any sort of, not just rule of law, but kind of moral sense of how we might treat other people.
Alan Ware 54:20
Yeah. And that concerned me, hearing how related slavery is to conflict, and then thinking of climate change, and all of the stresses that will put on populations and refugees and conflict and the potential for slavery to increase greatly. So you'll have plenty to be doing to help in the decades ahead. And I was wondering if you could share some of the success stories of what you have done through you and your organizations, and what that process is like to free some people from slavery.
Kevin Bales 54:51
Certainly. And, you know, one of the things about that, that is very heartening is how it's not extremely difficult. It's not very expensive. And once you do it the right way, it won't go backwards. And I think one of the best ways to illustrate that is earlier I mentioned these families that are in hereditary types of collateral debt bondage in agriculture in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. And there are thousands and thousands of these families in this situation in the very rich agricultural plain of Uttar Pradesh, who are caught up in these small villages, and they've been owned by the local landowner forever. Now, when I first went up there, I met Indians who had already begun working out how do we get in there? How do we change the situation? We can't just run in with a truck, take everybody and then run off, right? Because if you do that, they'll just get some new slaves, and the people you have will take an awful lot of time and effort to try to figure out how they can rebuild their lives and so forth. The thing that's exciting to me is a process that I've been supporting myself for a very long time as a charity supporter. Because of the groups that do this is that they have, they take of one of these villages, and they go to the village and they say, we're going to establish a preschool in this village. And the local slaveholder, the landowner says, oh I don't know, we don't need a school. And they say, you know, we're going to have a special lunch program, and the lunch program will feed all the children in the village. And then the slave holder thinks, oh, somebody else is going to pay to feed my slaves. And that sort of calms them down. So the person who's come in there, as the government teacher, is, in fact, herself, an ex-slave from one of those villages, who's gone through education, who's gone through liberation, who understands the situation, who speaks the language perfectly, obviously, because she's from the same ethnicity and all. And she gets the moms to come and help her make the lunch program. And they start having conversations around the giant pot of dhal and rice and everything else that they're cooking. And the kids are learning their alphabets. And they're learning about rights. And they're not working in the brick kiln, they're out working in the fields part of the time, at least. And it's a process where it's a trojan horse, right? It's a trojan horse injected into this village, which inside of it is all of these liberation workers that you don't realize are liberation workers. And it takes a while, because you're talking with people that have never known freedom, no concept of freedom. And I have to say one of the things that we know from other work at the Rights Lab to do with survivors of slavery is how being enslaved dramatically alters your ability to think about things, and particularly how it makes you aspatial. It makes you feel like you shouldn't ever be moving. And it makes you atemporal. You should never think about the past or the present or the future because you can be beaten up just for thinking about the future or the past. So you're really trying to overcome some pretty profound things that it's very hard for us to comprehend, like being atemporal, or you can never think of the past or the future, or the idea that you think I would never move my body unless I had permission. And this is a huge impact. It's hard to grasp when all your life has been in free movement and free thinking. But the point comes to this. It's that the women of the village who get it first, who begin to listen and just listen and after, it sometimes takes a year or more, before somebody says, "Well wait, so you were in a village like ours, but you're not anymore. How did that happen"? And then the woman who's there is the teacher, trojan horse, cook, etc says, "Well, first we did this. And then we did that". And the women of the village get totally behind it. And they haven't talked to me about this because they wouldn't to a man. But they've told my women colleagues that of course, they were going to do anything because they said, "Even if it costs us our lives, if it means that our daughters will not be raped, we'll do whatever it takes". And the process then comes to finally a moment of confrontation, but it's gentle, and they get other people to come and be there and they get friendly law enforcement to come and hang around with them on the day that they say to the landowner in the slaveholder, "We're done. We're not doing this anymore. This isn't happening. We've already started our own credit union over here, we're going to do this over there. The kids are going to go off to this other school". Sometimes the slaveholders will try to threaten them or try to push them around. And sometimes there's a bit of argy bargy that goes on with that later, but not always. A lot of times they say, "Well, yeah, fine". And weirdly, and ironically, often the slaveholders make more money after the village is free than they did when they were slaveholders. Because all of those people turned loose to do what they want to do and create lives that they want to create, lead them to opening a shop or doing a different type of farming, or becoming a musician or, you know, whatever, and it changes. And the economic power of that community begins to grow in ways that it could never under the blight of slavery. I just have to say I love stuff like that. There's a group called Voices 4 Freedom. And it's the number four, right, Voices 4 Freedom, which is a registered charity in California, which also funnels funds into that kind of work in northern India.
Alan Ware 59:51
And how big of an investment do you think it would require from the entire world to get rid of slavery? Do you have any kind of estimate?
Kevin Bales 1:00:00
Oh yeah. Twenty-three billion dollars.That was Elon Musk's take home pay last year. Just to show you how completely wonky and horrific our global notions of value are. And so my number is rough. It's a guestimation. But, you know, when I tried to figure out how many people were enslaved in the rich countries, where they cost them a lot more to get out of slavery, and in the poor countries, I think it's something like 23 billion, something around there.
Alan Ware 1:00:25
So that 23 billion would be about 2% of the US military budget, I think it's now hit a trillion dollars. A pretty small amount. And what do you think most of us regular, everyday people like Nandita and myself and listeners can do to contribute to the end of modern day slavery?
Kevin Bales 1:00:44
I would love to have something really exciting to offer you. If I could say, Alan, get a rope and some bright flashlights and go to this particular, right, and then do a Spider Man thing. You know, I wish I could say something like that. But when a number of years ago, we said, let's examine all possible things that the average person can do to support people coming out of slavery. And we did basically a cost benefit analysis and a whole bunch of other things about what's possible. And the fundamental thing that came down to it was make a small, regular donation or a big regular donation, but even a small regular donation, to an anti-slavery organization that's getting people out of slavery. Give them some stability. Admittedly, in the United States, there are some great NGOs that do anti-slavery work. But they're not on the tip of everyone's tongues, say like everyone's pointing to the Polaris Project, for example, which is a great organization in the United States, like the way you would point to the Red Cross. And in some ways, we need to elevate and support some of those organizations to the point that they become like a Red Cross, that everyone knows what you say, the minute you say that, that kind of medical change we need for liberation change.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:50
Yeah, and another thing you know that you've mentioned several times about how much of the exploitative labor and minerals and things that we consume are actually going to these really rich countries, especially the United States and Western Europe. And I've heard you mention, you know, really pulling back on our greediness and consumptive habits as a way to saying no to some of these products that are, especially electronics right, that are using up a lot of these mined resources, which are very much in line with with our message of really just minimalism, embracing simple lifestyles of finding joy and abundance and simpler things rather than having more, which is driving so much of the demand for these things. But yeah, this was really a wonderful conversation with you. Thank you truly for shining a light on the egregious abuses of power, both of humans versus other humans, and then also against the natural world. Such an honor to have you Dr. Bales. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Alan Ware 1:03:00
Yes, thank you for spending so much time with us. And thanks for your decades of dedication and tireless efforts in that, and elevating this urgent but very underreported, modern humanitarian crisis.
Kevin Bales 1:03:13
Thanks for having me ever so much. You know, I do live on a small island and it's a very quiet life I live. So getting to talk to other people is actually a bit of a thrill for me in some ways. But the other part of it is, when I woke up to this, when I began to really see it, first I read about it, and I analyzed it, I thought about it carefully. But then I went, and I met people who had just come out of slavery. And I began to just see the realities of the situation of people in slavery, and hear about them from the horse's mouth as it were. And I realized, this is something I can't put down. This is just too big and too misunderstood or not understood. And if I've done a little bit to make push that along, I'm very happy about that. And I have to say, there's nothing like job satisfaction when people go from slavery to freedom. That's big. That's huge. Sometimes you feel like you've sold your soul and your organs to try to make that happen. But when it happens, it's one of the biggest thrills, moments of joy in the world that I could ever offer to anyone. And you can be part of that in a small way, you know, or a big way if you choose to be, because we've got plenty of room in the anti-slavery movement for at least another two or three or four or 5 million people I'd say.
Alan Ware 1:04:22
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. To receive monthly updates about new podcast episodes, publications, events and engagement opportunities sign up to our newsletter at populationbalance.org/subscribe or by clicking on the link in the show notes. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:05:07
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
