Frustrated Idealisms
Apart from the polished professional blurb about myself, I want to get a little bit more real here and share some of my struggles throughout my professional trajectory. My CV may seem fascinating and somewhat impressive, or so I have heard, but the format hides a path filled with frustrations and rejections in my efforts to pursue a meaningful career. We don't often talk about these things, because we feel shame in failure and rejection. However, I do consider myself a true anthropologist and as such see valuable information in these experiences. After all, the personal is political and our personal struggles will tell us things about how society works. Mostly my career illustrates how difficult it is to find your path when you are critical about the ways societal problems are analyzed and managed (spoiler alert: I still haven't found it!). It shows that our institutions are so strongly built on capitalist principles that they become unwilling or unable to deal with the roots of the big existential crises our societies are facing.
No critical thinking at university
When I studied biology at the university in the Netherlands back in the mid to late 90s, I was incredibly bored and uninspired most of the time. I had a strong interest in nature conservation, but found that the field of conservation biology was uncritically focusing on 'sustainable development' in the Global South, blaming environmental destruction on poor subsistence farmers without any reflection on the devastations caused by our own consumer society. It was assumed that technological innovation would solve it all. Although I did establish a solid foundation of knowledge in the field of biology in general, I felt that my studies failed to provide me with the analytical tools and opportunities to address issues of environmental destruction in ways that felt right. I completed the program with three 6-7.5 month internships, one on moth ecology, one on primate behavior, and one on the international trade in live bears and in bear body parts as hunting tropies or Asian medicine.
No funding to study controversial topics
After completing the MSc, I tried to set up a research project to study the problem of escalating attacks by sloth bears on people in India, which were leading to many injuries and hardships, as well as deaths. I had heard about this problem from an Indian researcher from the Wildlife Institute of India who presented about it at an international bear conference in Romania, which I had attended as part of my last internship. I booked a trip to India and spent several weeks with him and his team to learn more about the problem of people encroaching into bear habitat and not knowing how to best avoid or handle encounters with bears. I then spent two years applying for funding with all sorts of conservation grants in order to do a year of field research, but I failed to secure any money and ultimately had to give up my efforts. While surely there were various reasons why my proposals were rejected, I also suspected that the controversial topic of protected animals attacking poor people was not something conservation grants were very eager to engage in. Most projects that received funding focused on wildlife ecology and the management of protected areas rather than addressing the complexities of human-wildlife conflicts.
The bureaucratic world of NGOs
In the meantime, I landed a job as a research officer with the NGO TRAFFIC Europe in Brussels, working on the analysis and regulation of international trade in endangered species in close collaboration with national governments and the European Commission. I had already done an internship with them during my studies, researching the international trade in live bears and bear parts. As a full-time employee, I worked on various projects, from live reptile trade to more generally the implementation of relevant EU legislation in Member States and Candidate Countries. It was a fascinating job and perhaps, in hindsight, I should have stuck with it, but I became frustrated with the bureaucracy of it all, with the tight format for our research reports, and language, and the large distance between our rather theoretical work and the actual issues on the ground. I found myself unequipped to inform international policy while not having the field experience to grasp the consequences of such policies on the ground. So I decided to pursue a PhD.
Great knowledge coming at a great price
By strange but fortunate coincidence, I ended up in a four-fields anthropology department at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the US in 2003. While I started out as a biological anthropologist and did some fascinating preliminary field research on the ecology of bonobos (pygmy chimps) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I remained more interested in complex conservation issues. Getting exposed to cultural anthropology opened my eyes and gave me the tools and answers I had unknowingly craved all along. The painful history of anthropology's role in the colonial agenda and scientific racism through the assumption of racial hierarchies has eventually motivated the emergence of postmodern anthropological reflectivity about the illusion of objectivity, about researchers' positions of power, about racial and global inequalities, about the persistence of colonial institutions, practices, and beliefs, and so on. These approaches motivated me to switch to cultural anthropology and I ultimately focused my own research on the moral negotiations in the design and implementation of governance in conservation and development by various international, national, and local organizations working around a national park in Uganda. So instead of looking at ways to best achieve sustainable development in Africa, as my biology instructors would have liked to see, I now looked back at the institutions designing such governance, 'studying up', to understand the reproduction of problematic assumptions about poor subsistence farmers in the Global South somehow being the biggest threat to nature on this planet. While I felt extremely fortunate to have found the opportunity to develop my critical thinking and theoretical grounding, it came at a high price. Doing a PhD in the US generally means supporting yourself with severely underpaid part-time teaching assistantships that are not reliably and consistently available. In addition, anthropologists are expected to find external funding for their year of field research through highly competitive external grants. Although I managed to secure a few small grants, I failed to land a proper one to fund the entire field work. I got a loan from my parents in order to continue, or else would have had to walk away with a second Master's degree. I made the investment with the expectation that the PhD would help my career, not yet realizing that it would be pretty worthless outside of academia.
The colonial nature of governance in Uganda
I spent a 2-month period and an 11-month period doing field research in Uganda. During the second period, in 2008, I hired a field assistant and we lived in our tents on the compounds of eight different host families in three villages neighboring the national park. The aim was to do participant observation from the perspective of the villagers, examining the conservation and development governance they had been subjected to since the last two decades. This governance was heavily influenced by massive influx of international donors and funding when Yoweri Museveni became president in 1986, as well as by the researchers, NGOs, and tourists who followed. It included the violent eviction of 30,000 people in 1992 before the formation of the park, during which people were dispossessed, houses were burnt, women were raped, people were murdered, people died of starvation and disease in the aftermath. It also included a wide range of projects for conservation education, tree planting for carbon credits, development through income-generating schemes, conditional agreements for resource use, and so on. The results were a sharp boundary between nature and humans, a policing of who was allowed inside the park (tourists, researchers, tree planters, and rangers) and who was not (most locals), and an increased socio-economic inequality in the adjacent villages. Some local people benefited tremendously from living near the park, while others suffered as a consequence of the evictions, loss of access to natural resources, and crop raiding elephants and monkeys, for which they received no compensation.
I found that there was definitely potential for interesting and creative alternative approaches to conservation of the forest and the generation of income for local communities, that would also be more democratic and egalitarian. However, it would require the various organizations involved in governance to hand over a lot of their power, responsibility, and funding to the communities, and to listen and support instead of lecturing and criminalizing, something highly unlikely to happen. I once brought up the violence and injustices of the evictions during a research meeting in the park and was met with outrage and accusations of exaggeration, even though I had quoted from an official government investigation. The evictions had largely been erased or minimized and depoliticized in most writings about the park. An officer from the organization in charge of national parks in Uganda even subjected me and my research to an 'investigation' with the threat of getting my research permit withdrawn if I wouldn't become more collaborative... I realized that there was very little I could do to support the locals apart from writing about my research. I couldn't envision a clear way by which the institutional landscape and governing practices could become reformed. I decided that the best thing I could do would be to pursue that academic career, continue writing and teaching, and hopefully give a new generation of socially engaged students the handles for reflectivity and critical thinking, and the motivation to pursue radical social justice in our approaches to societal problems. I would facilitate access to the insights, tools, and inspiration that had been out of reach for me in my own education for so long. However, it would turn out that such an academic career was not accessible to me.
Rock bottom and treated like a parasite
After the field work, I wrote the dissertation, partly in the Netherlands and partly back in the US, and started applying for academic jobs. But none of us graduate students had been sufficiently prepared for the extreme competitiveness of the academic job market. We were also unable to envision jobs outside of academia, let alone market ourselves in that way. The neoliberalization of the university in the US and elsewhere has led to an overproduction of PhDs. Graduate students are important to research departments as a source of vibrancy and of cheap labor. And even though it's understandable that the academic career won't be available for everyone with a PhD, I think it's particularly distressing that society at large sees no value in the knowledge produced and many PhDs end up in jobs that are completely unrelated to their field of research. The system generally makes no room for people who ask difficult fundamental questions, for people who want to address elephants in the room. I applied for close to 100 academic jobs in the US and the EU and eventually managed to land a one-year part-time adjunct teaching position at Appalachian State University in North Carolina with no chance for renewal. With future possibilities and visa perspectives looking bleak and my mother developing Alzheimer's at age 63, I decided to return to the Netherlands in 2013. There, I applied with increasing desperation for at least 100 more jobs, from assistant professor to student administration to postal delivery. It was a terrible job market at that time; I only managed to get a few interviews and no offers at all. In the meantime, I had to apply for welfare in order to survive and was entered into a program for so-called participation, where you are required to spend a day a week for some months to pick up litter from the streets. It aimed to discourage people from applying for welfare with the assumption that picking up trash is a demeaning activity and the association with community service suggests similarities between people in need of welfare and people who committed a crime. In the meantime, this uncontracted labor displaced actual employees working for the trash service for a salary with benefits. Over the course of that year, I was increasingly pressured to find a job or alternatively I would be required to clean people's homes for 20 hours per week under a similar uncontracted arrangement, in return for receiving welfare. I saw my escape when I learned about a program for people on welfare to start their own business, with a course to write a business proposal and supplemented income to welfare levels for the first three years. I applied and got accepted.
The barriers to small social entrepreneurship
My time in Uganda had inspired me to explore self-sufficient living and I had played with the idea of getting a piece of land and starting an ecovillage. However, being completely broke, I instead started with a veggie garden on a rented plot with my mother upon my return to the Netherlands. I did a lot of research on permaculture and rolled into soap making. Having done various experiments with my own recipes and seeing the opportunity to start a business through the city program, I decided to start producing and selling natural artisinal soaps scented with blends of essential oils. I got yet another loan from my parents to get started and dove into the world of small entrepreneurship. It was a steep learning curve to build a customer base, to find the most reliable and affordable suppliers, to increase efficiency and scale in production, and to ensure enough sales and margins to pay for overhead and create some income for myself. As an anti-capitalist, I was suddenly forced to play the capitalist game and I resented the pursuit of money. I often had to complement my income with odd jobs, freelance research, and entrepreneurial subsidies. After the first couple of years, I increasingly engaged with the zerowaste movement and developments in the circular economy. Although I was always skeptical about both since there was a lot of greenwashing going on, I eventually started working with circular ingredients myself and I moved my business Kusala to BlueCity, an old swimming paradise where many circular businesses are housed and collaborate.
I could probably write another dissertation based on the past nine years, but for now I want to highlight some observations of systemic forces working against small social entrepreneurs who aim to engage with societal problems and who value impact over profit.
Capitalist externalization of environmental and social costs: a piece of soap from the supermarket is cheaper than a piece of circular soap from Kusala because the supermarket soap is often made with palm oil and cheap labor. The ecological costs of deforestation for palm plantations are paid for by society at large, as are the social cost of exploitation of people for labor. Any decision to make a product more sustainable and just is an internalization of costs and causes the price to increase. This is why organic and fair trade products are much more expensive when they should really be cheaper.
Large businesses taking over: Our societies have become more and more dependent on large businesses flooding our markets. Because of larger scales of production and sales, they are able to buy larger quantities of supplies for better prices and can become hyperefficient with machines and streamlined processes. They have outcompeted many small businesses by offering better prices.
Greenwashing confusing customers: Many businesses with serious marketing budgets can present a fantastic green image of their products by overemphasizing certain positive aspects and hiding the negative ones. Small idealistic businesses often can't afford much marketing and may be hesitant to use it in ways that feel manipulative and dishonest. For customers however, it is not easy to recognize greenwashing and it may be hard to find or access small conscious brands.
Creation of need in pursuit of income: In many cases, it would be best for the environment and for humans if certain businesses and their products didn't exist at all. Even the most idealistic people will end up producing and selling junk that society doesn't really need simply because they had to find a way to generate an income for themselves. Perhaps this junk is made out of recycled plastic, but we could still easily do without it altogether. Of course the biggest players in this game of need-creation are the big brands in pursuit of the big bucks playing into our fears and desires, but social entrepreneurs often also fall into this trap. Are they truly addressing a societal problem or did they need an income first and tried to do it in an ethical way second? Imagine the possibilities if incomes were guaranteed and our economies were primarily need-driven...
Government policies favoring large dirty businesses: Although the Dutch government has committed to reducing use of primary resources with 50% by 2030 and to becoming fully circular by 2050, it is severely lagging behind in achieving that (see PBL 2023). I have seen many innovative start-ups failing to make it to the next level because of lack of financial support and guidance. In the meantime, the same government is still subsidizing the fossil fuel industry with €30 billion per year and continues to go easy on businesses responsible for incredible pollution, such as Tata Steel and Chemours, causing very serious threats to the health of citizens and to the environment.
Investors upscaling and derailing businesses: I have found that even small idealistic entrepreneurs tend to embrace the capitalist vision of entrepreneurial success, involving upscaling, usually with the help of investors. I have seen start-ups managing to land millions of euros of investments without having a solid business model only to go bankrupt several years later. Although there are certainly things to say for upscaling of circular and sustainable solutions, the barriers mentioned above already interfere heavily with the potentials for success. In addition, the motives and conditions of investors should always be carefully evaluated before handing them significant power over the future of your business.
At a crossroads
Currently, I am at a crossroads and coming to terms with the reality that my business will never create a comfortable level of income or make any significant difference towards the emergence of a circular economy. I remain driven to make a contribution to the much needed system change, but see few career opportunities to do so. I have applied for some research jobs in the past year, but once again only get rejections. I don't seem to really fit in anywhere and especially jobs for NGOs are highly competitive. Over the past years, I have joined climate protests and actions by Extinction Rebellion, but as a overworked entrepreneur the possibility for investing time and energy is incredibly limited.
Paid jobs where one can explicitly commit to system change are rather rare and mostly restricted to academia and NGOs. I am immensely fascinated and inspired by the degrowth movement and the proposals for a post-capitalist world, but it's a very academic movement and although it has gained some recognition in European and Dutch politics lately, it's still a long way from becoming a force to be reckoned with. Social movements need people, but people need income. As the system resists change, it can be challenging to find funding for movements in order to move beyond a heavy reliance on volunteers with the means to survive and time to spare, and to build organizations with paid employees who can more fully commit to the cause. Sadly idealists also suck at pursuing money, but securing funding for the transition to a post-capitalist world should be a very high priority.
Thankfully, I have a small financial buffer and a window of time to figure out what's next for me. Hence, I have started this website to express my rantings about the evils of capitalism, pursue my own research interests, and see what happens from there. Since I have lived in poverty for a long time, I have become skilled at making little money last a long time, so I can probably stretch it into next year, before I will need a new source of income. I know I am not alone in my struggles and frustrations. There are many people feeling trapped and exploited as workers and consumers, or else harrassed and excluded for not being willing or able to fit in and comply. I often wonder, if the many outcasts of society, all the ones who withdraw, the ones who seek alternative ways of living, if they would unite, organize, and form alliances, there could be an immensely powerful force for system change.