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How does our footprint reflect the economy of our country, including its colonial relations?
As Slovenians, we are lucky enough never to have been colonized or be the colonialists ourselves. This results to our economy being influenced mostly just by trade or business deals and collaborations, but also laws enforced by alliances, unions and organizations which we take part in.
The problem coming into picture here are opposing interests of environmentalists and capitalists. Let's take a look at the European Union: on one side, EU is fighting very publicly against pollution, contamination, pesticides and constantly urges all of its member states to preserve nature and improve their statstics about ecology with long-term plans that involve strictly set goals with exact due dates. On the other hand, the EU members are negotiating about Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement. Sadly, all signs show that they will accept it. This agreement will cause less or no control over regulations regarding environmental safety. For example, because US regulations would ovethrow the current EU REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Reatriction of Chemicals) regulations, a new law about substance use would be applied. The EU law states that a company has to prove that a substance is safe before it can be used, but the US law states that any substance can be used until it is proven unsafe.
In our daily lives we often see the environmental activists passionately promoting the EU plans like the Europe 2020 strategy, but in reality it is the corporations deciding about the future of earth. While the actual decision making is done in secret and hidden from the public eye, we are supposed to be happy and satisfied with the "alternative truth" which is presented to us.
