Another World is Possible: Freedom from Corporate Globalization

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Ever more powerful corporations will dictate not only the terms of business across the planet, but also the flow of information, culture, and basic ideas about what constitutes the good life. We are witnessing the dawn of a global monoculture in which most people on earth will watch the same television shows, dwell in the same sort of houses, and gobble the same brands of breakfast cereal. This not only makes the world smaller, but also dull and soulless. Why bother to travel when Sri Lanka begins to look like suburban Atlanta?

Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (see profile), who has charted the advance of Western culture over two decades in the once remote Ladakh region of India, notes that cultural uniformity is only the beginning. Traditional cultures come to believe that everything they know and create is inadequate compared to shiny new imports from the industrialized world. “Small kids living in the high plains of northern India now feel bad about themselves if their sneakers are not the most fashionable brand,” she says.

David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (see profile), articulates a vision that embraces global cooperation rather than globalization: “Information should travel around the planet, but not goods or raw materials,” he says. A breakthrough in solar power pioneered in Argentina, for instance, or a new beer-making technique perfected in Belgium should by all means be exported to the world, but not in the form of hardware or six-packs. We can all benefit by new ideas from abroad—and our local community and environment can also benefit when these ideas are implemented using local resources and workers.

This gets to the heart of the anti-globalization cause: protecting the vitality of local communities, which have provided humans, for all of our history, with food, shelter, companionship, security, and the simple satisfaction of a life that makes sense. This is not a fundamentalist movement, preaching isolationism and fear. Its internationalist outlook is obvious in the deep concern activists express about worldwide poverty, injustice, and environmental damage.

Despite the marvels of kiwi fruit on our breakfast table and fresh seafood in Chicago, the globalizing economy shows few signs of being able to improve life for the vast majority of people sharing our planet. Indeed, with its single-minded mission of expanding corporate profits no matter what, it poses an unparalleled threat to the local cultures and economies that sustain people’s lives. A business shutdown, a pollution disaster, or the general decline of neighborliness in your town means very little to the captains of the global economy, but everything to you. That’s the rock-bottom problem with globalization: The decisions that affect your life are made by people who live thousands of miles away and who ultimately don’t care what happens in your community, or any community anywhere. To fulfill modern civilization’s oft-repeated promise of creating a better world, we need to shift our energies from expanding the volume of global trade to boosting the vitality of local communities.

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