This content was first published on IGR – Italian Gemological Review no. 16 in 2023. The information provided here is therefore current as of the original publication date.
Now even cricket flour is environmentally sustainable, just like synthetic diamonds
What’s spinning to the Cricket this time? The antennas? Isn’t it that he’s pissed as hell about that green light (as of Jan. 24, 2023) granted by the European Union for the food use of Acheta domesticus meal (domestic cricket, to be clear) as an environmentally sustainable alternative (and here we go!) to meat consumption? Go ahead then and eat us, in the shape of: baked breads, sandwiches, crackers, breadsticks, cereal bars, cookies, sauces, pizzas, pastries, powdered milk, soups, drinks, desserts, snacks, and then we’ll get back to you when you have to face what is called (euphemistically) «skin and/or respiratory and/or intestinal adverse events» (caused by the chitin contained in the insects), as well as stomach upset at the mere thought! In the meantime, you malignant cricket-eaters, pack up carefully the advice I am bestowing upon you and preserve it, for my gentle soul of Wise Cricket always soars over your anxiety, whether conscious or unconscious.
Yep, whether you realize it or not, the fact is that you are the predestined victims of cheating, impostures and all that follows in the headline above. A first example? The above mentioned argument: «environmentally sustainable alternative to meat consumption». The trap lies in that term, “eco-sustainable”. And this is how you get leashed. Undoubtedly, «these Orthoptera are fast breeders, with a fast life cycle and consume significantly less feed than slaughter animal farms, resulting in much lower CO2 emissions, reducing water and land consumption». It is equally true that the problem can be solved if we all go veggie (by the way: 100% plant-based feeding is the most sustainable food as it can save the lives of 105 animals per head per year, according to www.essereanimali.org. Can we reasonably assume that the taste buds of carnivores experience as much excitement from products derived from the flour of Acheta domesticus as they would from a fine T-bone steak? Is it not that they want us to gobble down filth, by dint of decrees, for the sake of the energy transition?
The Eco-Everything obsession
And now, is there any relationship between these thoughts of mine and the focal point of this Review (which focuses on the broad field of gemstones and their use)? There is, you’ll see now. Let’s go back to the “eco-friendly” trap. Haven’t you noticed that, nowadays, whatever is offered is eco-sustainable, eco-friendly, green, carbon-free, carbon-neutral, from chicken to fish, from apple to salad, from offices to clothes, from diamonds to gold?
Does this sound serious? I want to assure you that what I am saying is meant with all due respect for people who are pure, are not swayed by catastrophism and conscientiously respect our sister Mother Earth, «who nourishes and governs us (St. Francis, The Canticle of the Creatures), who welcomes everything and everyone into her bosom, sustaining the life of everything and everyone».
Incidentally, how certain claims are artificially stretched has already been discussed in No. 15/2022 of this Review. But now we are witnessing the apotheosis of mystification, with a chastiser spraying manure out left and right through his watering can who at the end envisages in the form of Eco-Sustainable, Carbon-Free Immaculate Conception just two facts as champions of Eco-everything. First fact. He is the Brand Catalyst for Reflective Jewelry. Second fact, Reflective Jewelry sources its Synthetic Diamond needs from Diamond Foundry (yes, yes, that’s the one! See IGR No. 12/2021 and No. 14/2022).
And how would you like such a spiel to be called? Trick or treat? Well, from mystification to mystification, from deception to deception, let’s now see what the Catalyst has to reveal to us (oh my, how I love this qualification so new and intriguing to my antennae!). Of course, if what he exposes corresponds to the state of facts, there will be poop for everyone, much to the chagrin particularly of all the Eco-Everything Talibans.
Here’s Catalyst Kyle Abram single-handedly standing up to everyone, denouncing brands that are misusing ethics
So let’s go to https://reflectivejewelry.com/news/brilliant-earth-review and peruse the article entitled “The Ultimate Brilliant Earth Review: Bullshit or Ethical Jewelry Leaders?” Here, an ineffable Kyle Abram, Reflective Jewelry Brand Catalyst, a graduate student in Contemplative Studies at Brown Private University in Rhode Island, USA (I do want to go there too, for that degree, oh how much I long and sigh to be there!), will be shooting off his mouth at everyone and everything.
Against Brilliant Earth and its deceptive and mystifying ads, against the Russian Alrosa, Tiffany&Co, Signet Group, Cartier, Zales Corporation, Rio Tinto, De Beers, BHP Billiton, Newmont Mining, the RJC Responsible Jewelry Council, Jewelers of America, the Kimberley Process, against Ethical Gold, Ethical Diamonds, in short against the whole thing. All that’s missing is just polar bears, the monk seals and Snow White with the seven dwarfs. Big names in the gemstone and jewellery industry and trade. Just Google these names, and you will get an idea of what it is all about. If proved to be true “our” Catalyst Kyle’s arguments would tear the whole Eco-Everything media-business circus to shreds. Next, a small anthology of the Eco-Everything gang war follows:
1. The self-proclaimed «world leader in ethical and responsible jewelry», Brilliant Earth, so much so that it is credited as being the patron of the entire movement. Its main suppliers include (or did include) those mining companies guilty of the countless atrocities associated with the Diamond’s recent history, that is Alrosa and De Beers. Being the first owned, for one third, by the Russian government, all the nefarious deeds committed by Putin’s Russia since 2014, Crimea/Donbass/Ukraine included are attributed by our Contemplative Studies Graduate to it. The second, Mama De Beers, in the judgment of “our” Catalyst must be considered accountable for the burden of the 3.7 million people death toll (yikes!) resulting from the “Bloody Diamonds” financed wars, in Africa. If so this would be matter for the Hague International Tribunal to charge both the companies! And may puteolent dejections fall from head to toe over the “Eco-Everything Jewelery movement world leader forerunner/advocate/supporter”, the one who boasts of employing only “Conflict Free/War-Existent” diamonds, so much for ethics and responsibility! Deception? It’s up to you to judge…
2. “Our” Catalyst notes that the 60 most prestigious companies in the industry, including Signet and Tiffany&Co, at the time were sourcing most of their supplies from the Russian company Alrosa and were all aligned in favor of “Ethical Jewelry”. So he places the following question: were they aware that Alrosa is actively mining uranium used for the Russian Federation’s nuclear armaments and that it is also involved in the company producing those weapons? It is up to you to decide if this is a hoax. And may the poop fall down…
3. The RJC, Responsible Jewelry Council, as a trade association, since 2004 has housed under its protective wings more than 1,200 members around the world (and how impressively these members are, even in terms of business volume, as they reach hundreds of billions of dollars!). This Association is dedicated to certify and validate the ethical Holiness status and counts members as remarkable as De Beers, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Cartier, Newmont Mining, Signet Group, Tiffany&Co, Zales Corp., Jewelers of America. Brilliant Earth – look at that – is in the number too, adopting the same narrative, according to “our” Catalyst.
In association with the other heavyweights this narrative, he argues, loudly proclaims the ethicality of its supply chain while all the “ethical miseries” (read nefariousness) that taint it are swept under the rug. And in so doing it fornicates under the table with those who have been responsible for decades for eco-humanitarian atrocities.
Simply put, this is ordinary business, where the opaque past is condoned in defiance of those “Chain of Custody Protocols” governing all the “Responsibilty” related standards, issued by the RJC and adopted by all its members. In support of his thesis, “”our” Catalyst brings up not only the “monsters” mentioned above, but even Rio Tinto, guilty – according to him – of sacrilegious desecration of certain caves sacred to Australian Aborigines, a veneration place for 46,000 years now, dynamited to make way for mining. Oops. And also on Rio Tinto, the RJC and all the other loyalists, garbage is being dumped without end!
And we wonder if this is a scam, not least because – it is again “our” Catalyst who says so – what Brilliant Earth’s (and, by extension, the RJC’s etc.) narrative induces in the audience with the “Conflict Free” storytelling is but an uncritical trust in the self-styled champions of the “Conflict Free” campaign!
Is there no question on how good “Conflict Free” diamonds (or diamond jewelry) sell when they are referred to the social justice (even racially motivated) urgency shared by all the sensitive souls of this world, including Millennials (those born between 1980 and 1995) and Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012). An Italian proverb says: «if the stakes are rich, it’s good to bet».
4. Speaking of “Conflict Free” diamonds and following the saying «if the stakes are rich, it’s good to bet» – the “Catalyst” again argues – we must be aware of the Mephistophelean occult subliminal persuasion technique put in place by the creators of the “Ethical Jewelry Movement” in their effort to use the quest for fairness and increase psychologically driven sales through the generalist press, trade press, fashion advertising, the Internet, bloggers and so on:
a) As much as 20% of the entire world diamond and gold production is due to more than a hundred million small-scale miners. Their livelihoods are marked by conditions of extreme poverty, exploitation and ecocide (conscious destruction of the natural environment);
b) The “Bloody Diamonds” – referred to in the 2006 movie Blood Diamonds, the trigger for the ethical problem – purchased by the aforementioned “artisanal” miners, were used to finance the African wars of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in the aforementioned 3.7 million deaths (for which no one has been held accountable, compensated or repaid), including those of Zimbabwe whose diamonds in 2009 were certified “Conflict Free” by both the RJC and Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (whose credibility, as a result, fatally fell down);
c) The resources of their land should lie under local communities’ control including those who are breaking their backs digging with shovel and spike, and for their total benefit;
d) The Responsible Jewelry Movement was born precisely to subsidize these inescapable needs, to straighten out these unfair wrongdoings, to bring social justice where there is none (J.C.’s note: it’s like saying: «Ghe pensi mì», milanese dialect for «I’ll handle it»);
e) Hence, the whole narrative underlying the sale of “Ethical Jewelry”, first and foremost championed by Brilliant Earth and, in turn, by the RJC and their followers. Saying otherwise: is there anyone out there who could argue theoretically that this case is not fair and right? What about the practice put in place? Go back to boxes 1, 2, 3 above, please. Non solum, sed etiam;
5. Switching to the other component of jewelry, namely Gold, what does “our” graduate student in Contemplative Studies have to say about it?
- He says that a substantial 80 percent of it is produced by large-scale, industrial-type mining, and that such activities are the most harmful among the industrial activities as a whole. Here, the yellow metal goes all of it straight into bank vaults. No good. One should oppose such a trend, “our” graduate says, since those giant multinational corporations solely driven by profit are destroying the environment, with their awful holes (shafts, tunnels, underground and open-pit mines, quarries and the like). All of this is raping our Mother Earth! (Now, I say, Bad-Mouthed Jiminy Cricket, would you allow your mother to be raped? Would you not? So, are you getting my point?).
- He also says that the remaining 20 percent is mined on a smaller scale in “artisanal” type activities, where the resulting harm to the miners is awkward since for the separation of gold from the sterile material, these poor guys use to employ mercury and fry the gold/mercury amalgam in the same pan where they cook their lunch, contaminating themselves and the environment. And, by doing so, they contribute to the drastic reduction of their life expectancy. As for the environment, on the other hand – and entire regions are concerned here – it will suffer a devastation and pollution to such an extent that it is supposed to persist for centuries to come (horror and dread). The whole thing only for the purpose of reselling the product of their own degrading work at a price 30% below market value – just to survive – being locked forever into the poverty cycle.
- He says that now, however, there is a White Knight who will reverse this miserable condition of things, clearing contamination and environmental havoc and lifting those poor people out of misery. The Rider is called Fairtrade/Fairmined Gold, another initiative supported by Brilliant Earth (and all its followers), which is now riding it and carrying it forward, both media and publicity-wise.
- He says that, listen up, if you nonetheless happens to browse the web pages of Brilliant Earth Fairmined Gold, where would you end up, pray tell? On the advertisement of Recycled Gold, rated – on a par with Fairmined Gold – as Highly Ethical Gold, with a third party assessment by the Scientific Certification System Global Services (SGB)! And even a stone knows that Recycled Gold (including Certified Gold) is exclusively obtained through a refinery, and that it is impossible to trace the original provenance of Recycled Gold since it can only be traced back to the refinery that melted it down and later sold it to jewelry manufacturers who in turn pass it on to retailers after attaching the designation “Jewelry Made with Eco-Friendly Recycled Gold”. And it is well recognized what a hold the little magic word “Recycled” has in the collective subconscious (especially of those who, apart from their own pockets, are concerned about the salvation of Planet A, being Planet B currently still out of reach: Proxima Centauri b, Alpha Centauri System, Centauri Constellation, only 4.3 light-years away from Earths, if you are interested). So much for fair gold mining and fair trade that are supposed to lift the fortunes of people trapped in the eternal cycle of poverty!
Now, which attribute mentioned in the title of this article would you choose to define this kind of situation, if the whole thing proves to be exactly as reported? How about it? I can’t hear you! To the rhetorical question as to whether all of them can be trusted the “Catalyst” demurely answers “no, not only should not all of them be trusted but rather a boycott campaign should be started until they change their minds”.
It is up to you to judge the whole issue.
Before ending I would like to point out the following:
- I agree with people who, consciously and in their own way in even the smallest things, contribute by their responsible day-to-day action to avoid land, water and air pollution and contamination of our common homeland that is Our Mother Earth. And people who strive to avoid wasting natural resources and using them in the best possible way are also included.
- I do not share the attitude of anyone who, due to their interest (whatever it may be, either money, power or attachment to the chair) takes positions that can be ascribed to: catastrophism, ecological extremism and dogmatism, green washing and recycling, cheating/imposture/deception/fraud cloaked in ecologically sustainable and even responsible (how responsible?) green. With the whole Eco-Everything in tow.
After all, this Planet of ours, in its 4-plus billion years, has undergone transformations and catastrophes certainly not due to human action (as Homo habilis, humans have only been here for 2.5 million years and, as Homo sapiens, for 200,000 years), from which it has each time recovered by starting over or nearly so.
See, kindly: tectonic-geological activities, continental drift, collisions with celestial bodies, precessions of the equinoxes, shifting of the poles, glaciations and warming on a 100,000-year cycle due to variation of the distance between aphelion and perihelion in the Earth’s revolutionary motion around the Sun on the ecliptic, solar activity and radiation, reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field at 200/300,000-year intervals, and the more. Relax, for in its remaining next 5 billion and more years (before it is swallowed up by Brother Sun who will “explode” as a Red Giant Star) our Blue Planet will see some more, whether we (human and non-human) will be still there or not.
We’d be better off worrying instead, about other numbers: in 1950 the creatures made in God’s image totaled 2.5 billion; in 1960, 3 billion; in 2000, 6 billion; today, 8 billion. And it increases, every year, by 1 percent, equal to 80 million thinking bipeds, or the population of Germany. Will our hero (the Planet) be able to sustain us all? Admittedly, it is inelegant to mention this, but it needs to be said. Think about it. Just for eating, will you still want to rely on meat, milk, butter, cheese and various dairy products? Well, how many cattle would be required, counting every person and year? And did you know that each bovine releases 120 kilograms of methane per year into the atmosphere, a figure that when multiplied by 20 gives 2.4 tons of CO2 equivalent, the much reviled CO2? Just multiply this figure by 1 billion, which is the number of cattle in circulation on Planet A, to get a clear idea of the scale of this issue.
That’s why I was saying half-jokingly, in my overture, that we’d better become vegetarian if we want to save the Planet A. And, that, just for that kind of nourishment. Think of everything else (heating, transportation, work and all the other energy-consuming activities that make up the “flab” of the sentient biped that’s living well, or decently well, on this Globe). What about the rest (a good portion) of the sentient bipeds who are still not faring well? Would you like to deny them access to all those CO2 factories that are the above-mentioned activities associated with their material well-being? Or what, in alternative? And then, why do people come and break our pixels with the CO2 associated with Carbon-Free and Carbon-Neutral Synthetic Diamond vs. Natural Diamond, when the involved CO2 is roughly 4 grams? «But do me a favor, do me, every limit has a patience!» (Totò, an Italian comedian). Let us face the real problems of mankind, and not the artificially created ones, and not be misled by tendentious narratives!
Your Bad-Mouthed Jiminy Cricket
Counter-Current Gemology from the “Bad-Mouthed Jiminy Cricket” Luigi Costantini, published on IGR – Italian Gemological Review #16, Summer 2023
