Securing funding for events like the Living Traditions Festival must be challenging, but sometimes contradictions between the actions of sponsors and the purported values and commitments of the sponsored event and the host city — such as to causes like sustainability and protecting cultural diversity — are too glaring to go unopposed. Such was the case with this year’s festival. Particularly objectionable among the prominently-publicized sponsors:
• Marathon Petroleum, a major fossil fuel company that, in addition to exacerbating the climate crisis, has violated environmental standards in California, is one of the two largest industrial polluters in El Paso County, Texas (harming the majority Hispanic community there), and recently spilled 1,400 barrels of fuel into a creek in Indiana;
• Rio Tinto/Kennecott, a global mining giant whose environmental and human rights harms — even destruction of cultural heritage sites — are legion, too many to summarize. From Bougainville to Australia, Madagascar to Mongolia and far beyond, Rio Tinto has been destroying environments and cultures for decades;
• Rocky Mountain Power, which has, as The Tribune reported, “formally abandoned plans to accelerate the retirement of its two giant coal-fired power plants in Utah, plans that had included serious shifts to renewable sources of energy,” locking Utah into decades more of fossil fuel pollution;
• Pepsi, one of the worst global plastic polluters, a major purveyor of snack/junk foods and beverages worsening the global epidemic of diet-related diseases, and a company complicit in the destruction of the last remaining Sumatran rainforests.
Such practices plainly contradict the city’s sustainability commitments and undermine ‘living traditions’ across the world. The city needs to implement a sponsorship screening mechanism that would proscribe, for example, fossil fuel, global mining and junk food companies, and bring the actions of the Living Traditions Festival more in line with its stated values and goals.
Jon Jensen, Salt Lake City