The Politics of Globalisation
Environmental impacts of globalisation are important politically. Though often inconsistent and incoherent, green thinking is perhaps the closest there is to an ideological reaction to globalisation, barring the extreme nationalist fringe. It is not unreasonable for people who are worried about the impact of distant, impersonal forces on their local communities to translate their concerns into distrust of globalisation – and especially of some of its drivers: big business and unelected global institutions.
Liberal Democrats are well placed to respond to the concerns of such people, while at the same time retaining support for globalisation. The slogan “Think global, act local” is consistent with the Liberal Democrat approach, which seeks to return real power to local communities and protect the global commons at the same time as enhancing prosperity for all.
Issues to consider
- How best can Liberal Democrats respond to the concerns of people who feel threatened by impersonal globalisation?
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 am
Any response to Globalisation must consider the impact it has on ecosystems and human societies most vulnerable to simplification.
It is those marginal communities that may hold the key to adaptation, in a changing world, like the tribal people of Sub-saharan Africa, whose ancient survival strategies may have a lot to teach us about how to preserve water and survive in a drought-stricken planet.
Somehow Western thinking prioritises marketability and profit over diversity and preservation of heritage. Although it is customary to pay lip service to “preserving diversity”, the reality of economic globalisation belies an arrogance of Western Societies that is deeply rooted in Ignorance, threatening to destroy what is unprofitable, regardless of its intrinsic value.
Western Markets require ever-increasing investments in those areas that promise future economic rewards; the privatisation of water is a case in point. When all water is privatised, only the more affluent shall have access to clean drinking water; unable to protect their environments from private concerns that extend their global power by acquisition, indigenous peoples will be driven from their homelands by the curtailment of free access to the prerequisite for life.
Yet it is they who can give us lessons, like the ancient farming techniques still practised in some areas of Chad, sharing the rainfall from one uphill field, down to its neighbours, in a sequence of small earth dams that retain water (and nutrients) just long enough to irrigate one farmer’s field, before breaching it to flow downhill, to the neighbour’s field. Thus a whole region survived the periods of drought, sharing a scarce resource equally and amiably.
Similarly, the denial of cultures, which often encapsulate millennia of wisdom on the need to judiciously use resources and arbitrate in conflict, results in a mentality that is predatory, even parasitic in its fundamental approach, fostering warmongers and insurrectionists.
Today, only where a culture is a saleable commodity does it find favour with Globalised, Corporate interest that recognise its economic worth, otherwise, it is displaced by mass “Kultchewre” that privileges “cheap” over quality and mass-produced “bling” over art and craftsmanship.
We must resist the drive to globalise both, commerce and culture, and instead preserve and protect the uniqueness of thought and belief, even where we disagree with its fundamental message.
Animistic belief is no less worthy than established, organised religion, and the fact that only a handful of native, First Nation survivors hold that belief is not a good reason to allow it to become extinct, by promoting mass cults of the Money Gods, and religions uniformity.
Similarly, ancient tribal laws, though often abhorrent to “civilised societies”, should not be viewed as legitimate targets for the Global Wisdom of the more numerous, “evolved” proponents of their own ideologies, social mores and customs.
From Aborigenals to Innuits, we are allowing global economics to destroy the patrimony that is human diversity, and the roots on which it fed: local producers on a small scale, selling their goods and services - of no value outside their niche markets- to a purely local community of consumers, often only able to barter their own produce in exchange.
The secret may lie in preserving the ecosystems in which these cultures evolved, allowing genuine conservation of habitats, through awarding Ethnic, Tribal Property Rights to the inhabitants of those ecosystems, as stewards of their own land, water and skies.
In such a perspective, the drive by global, corporate interest to fagocitate new environments and turn them into “resources” can be viewed as a push towards simplification, in the ecological sense, that would result in monocultures, vulnerable to sudden collapse, by removing all organisms, natural ecosystems, human communities, cultures and even languages that may be most resilient in those “niche” contexts.
Like the globalised banana crops, all descended from one single plant, have become vulnerable to micro-organisms that spread like wildfire, threatening whole economies with disaster, the new “opportunities” presented by GMO crops, mules that cannot reproduce, preported to be “safe for human consumption”, yet never really evaluated for their environmental safety.
Thus today we see Genetically Modified DNA entering the wild food chains or invading neighbouring “natural” crops, infiltrating into their very genomes and threatening to simplify them, to likely future detriment of the local populations, not to mention - once again - ecosystems.
Humanity is behaving like a gang of spoilt teenagers who want everything to be brighter, louder, glitzier and “cooler” than their forefathers, prepared to conduct uncontrolled experimentation with whole swathes of our Planet, because it is not they, in the first person who will have to live with the consequences.
An Entrepreneur is nothing more than a more efficient megaparasite.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
21. Simple, ensure that the wealth generated through globalization, is spread fairly throughout the world.
Less greed = more world stability
All communities would also have an incentive to try and preserve the world.
OOOOOHHHHH sorry, I think am dreaming again.