I recently saw the film The Economics of Happiness. It was excellent. The first part of the film describes eight problems with globalization; the second part of the film suggests that localization is an answer and provides examples of people growing their own food and otherwise building community. It is a message I have heard before and it is a message with which I am in agreement.
For a number of years I have made efforts to localize myself. Every week I go to our farmers’s market. I grow some of my own food in a small vegetable garden and orchard. I patronize locally-owned businesses and avoid franchises and corporate stores. I volunteer and participate in my community. But does this make a difference?
The filmmakers traveled widely to take pictures of people growing their own food. I suspect that they made the trips in airplanes built in Seattle and fueled with oil from Arabia. I suspect they used cameras made in China by Japanese companies. They had a number of “talking head” interviews in the film, but the people they interviewed were not growing their own food — they were mostly sitting in offices.
I don’t want to sound like I am criticizing the makers of this superb documentary. This morning I dressed in clothes mostly made in south Asia, put on hearing aids made in Switzerland and eyeglasses made in the USA. I climbed on my bicycle made in Taiwan and rode to this independent cafe where I’m drinking a fair trade coffee from Nicaragua while typing this article on my netbook from China.
And so on. Localizing is a great thing to do; part of the local awareness that I see as an essential part of ecopsychology. But to what extent is it possible, in the 21st Century, to escape the spider web of capitalism and globalization? I suspect we need to go beyond individual lifestyle decisions and seize control of our governments back from the corporations. We need to begin reorganizing the social order so that ecological and human welfare come first.
Hi everyone…just discovered the website today, and look forward to being an active member! I was a student of H.T.Odum at the U of F, so my philosophy is slanted to some extent…having said that, I believe strongly in the “Think local, act global'” concept .
The current paradigm, obviously unsustainable, will end with a whimper, perhaps in our lifetimes…however it ends, it must. Will there be enough of us left to redesign the human experience on this Earth to make the necessary changes? If we preserve the written word, and with the willingness to learn from the mistakes to redesign the role of humans on Earth, I believe we can return to Eden, as it were, or was.
We have the knowledge to define the carrying capacity of any watershed…the Christian Bible proclaims, “divide not your countries from valley to valley, but from mountaintop to mountaintop….watershed management in a nutshell…but to do that, we have to accept those limitations….think locally, act locally, and be aware of, and limit, downstream and downwind pollution.
A world such as that will be far different from the one we live in…the upside is that we’re going to be placed in that world regardless…makes sense to prepare for it, don’t you think?
Odum was all about energy flow…energy, of course being constant, but more diffused each time it is used….knowing that, we can adapt our lifestyles to the energy available from that particular watershed. This means limiting the population to within those limits as well.
We need to live in villages..where we know each other, and assume shared responsibility for those within it…all forms of beings, sentient and non. That’s what I think ‘dominion’ really means…not to dominate, but to care for our domicile…our home.
I don’t recall saying (or even thinking) globalization is always bad. Your comment seems to be mostly a re-statement of what I was trying to say.
I wonder if there isn’t a “both/and” in this equation of localization/globalization. I agree that living a more locally-based life is an economic necessity, as well as an aesthetic and moral pleasing imperative, but … is globalization *always* bad?
As well as being inter-dependent beings within our immediate watersheds and natural environments, we (or at least many of us) are also a global people, fascinated and educated by difference and stimulated by the creativity and knowledge of cultures beyond our own.
Global communications open the world for us, and I suggest that can be a good thing. Many of the big decisions we must make in order to navigate the seas of the 21st Century are those we must make together as a whole; as humanity rather than individuals or nations.