In the Grand Scheme of Things

Sure, TOMS shoes can be viewed as an environmentally friendly company if we were to look at just the commodity chain analysis of a TOMS shoes. But, if we look at the larger scope of purchasing a pair of TOMS shoes, a different picture is portrayed.

The United States is a consumption addict. We are using up more of the world' natural resources per capita and in the process trashing the world because of it. Annie Leonard explains

Unfortunately, TOMS is not doing anything proactive to curb our addiction. Instead, they are encouraging it by perpetuating our addiction into a form of "heroic shopping", where people buy items that claim to better the lives of others and therefore, become a "hero" through shopping. Because, when we buy a pair of TOMS shoes, we're just not buying a comfy, hip pair of shoes, but buying into a humanitarian ethic. Slavoj Zizek calls it our "cultural capitalism", our tendency to merge our consumption addiction with our feeling of obligation to do something for others. We buy redemption for being only a consumerist by buying a product that also is said to do good, either for the environment or for others.

You can watch Zizek's spiel on cultural capitalism here.

This just feeds into our consumerism because we no longer feel guilty for buying a product. Thus, TOMS shoes and their one-for-one campaign prolongs the problem they are trying to solve in 3 ways.

1. By encouraging consumption, we are not going to get over our addiction for products and will continue to degrade the environment. We're covering up our consumption problem as philanthropic. Every pair of shoes purchased (21.5lbs of carbon dioxide) adds up and contributes to global warming. The impoverished situation that the kids without shoes are in is worsened by the environmental consequences of our consumption.

2. The charitable act continues to leave them in the same situation of poverty they are in, except now, their feet are comfortable and they are less likely to get podoconiosis. I agree that the disease debilitates communities by making it difficult for people to walk and travel, which impedes them from effectively accomplishing their daily tasks. However, even without podoconiosis, the people in those communities continue to live in poverty because, there is no established infrastructure that can provide them with a steady income. As Zizek eloquently puts it

If you just operate the child [give him/her a pair of shoes], then they live a little bit better but in the same situation which produced them.

3. This form of charity reinforces relations of inequality inherent in donor-recipient exchanges. As Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte wrote in Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World, this consumerist act allows us to feel close to the suffering individuals but it also replicates the power divide that exists between the developed and developing nations, the haves' and the have nots'. Thus, there's less of a desire to help the developing nations prosper.

Mathis Wackernagel and Willliam Rees in Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth defines sustainability as "living in material comfort and peacefully with each other within the means of nature" (32). They argue that

Sustainable development therefore depends both on reducing ecological destruction (mainly by limiting the material and energy throughout of the human economy) and on improving the material quality of life of the world's poor (by freeing up the ecological space needed for further growth in developing countries and ensuring that the benefits flow where they are most needed) (32).

So, in the grand scheme of things, TOMS does not promote environmental sustainability insofar as they  are perpetuating our consumption addiction and prolong the poverty existent in the developing nations they give aid to.

But can we really blame TOMS? They are after all a company that wouldn't exist if it didn't capitalize on our cultural capitalism...