Letter: Peddlers of fossil fuel, global mining and junk food are the wrong sponsors for Living Traditions Festival [Video]

Such practices plainly contradict the city’s sustainability commitments and undermine ‘living traditions’ across the world.

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 …