Local? Global? How Should We Live and Interact?

Written March 10, 2008, especially for Proseminar, on a topic both of interest to me and of relevance to the program. Not my most stunning writing, but decent enough in its clarity and simplicity...Nevertheless, this essay ends on a note that is very much central to a large component of my upcoming thesis work, gauge-ing various degrees of sustainability across the gamut of human societies (as much as possible, of course). Also, we discussed regionalism today in politics (hoorah!)...

“Now, it’s feeling like a small town with six billion people downtown at a little sidewalk fair in Earth Town Square. There are Germans selling Audis filled with gasoline from Saudis to Australians sipping Kenyan coffee in their Chinese shoes; Argentines are meeting Mongols over french fries at McDonald’s, and the place looks strangely tiny when you see it from the moon…” – “Earth Town Square” by Peter Mayer (singer/songwriter)

Community! As social creatures, we humans cannot extricate ourselves completely from our social surroundings. We come to know the world through them, and there is strong evidence to support the claim that we leave this world by severing our ties to our society. We cannot live alone with any degree of safety comparable to that enjoyed by, say, a band of foragers. We may define our community in different ways, yet the integral role of other people to our prospects for survival defines our relationships as essential to our lives. Could this also possibly be a sufficient way for us to define home?

Let us define community as a group of people living in close proximity and interacting with each other and their surroundings. This definition stresses interconnectedness, a concept borrowed from ecology, which, after all, applies to us humans as much as to other creatures. Our focus now shifts to the question of the community’s surroundings. Where does the community end and the external world begin? How large is the purview of the community? How large can a community grow before it ceases to be a community?

In other words, the question is how should we define local? By miles? By regions? National or physical geographic borders? Population? At this point, I become unsure. Much writing has recently been released on the benefits of local-scale economies and the scourge of their global-scale counterparts. Still another set of writers continues to vouch for the advantages of globalization, a world in which “Australians [sip] Kenyan coffee in their Chinese shoes; Argentines [meet] Mongols for french fries at McDonald’s.” This is the part where an exploration of the various texts, for and against globalization, would be quite useful. I would like to research the various arguments and see which ones make the most sense and which ones fail to address critical considerations. There are many related questions I would like to address— How global is globalization? If two countries are trading with each other and nobody else, does that really count as global? Should different regions maintain strong communication and contact, or should localization involve greater degrees of isolation? Should communities or regions struggling to maintain a local focus create a network amongst themselves? How much does interconnection affect the outcome for each individual community or region? To what degree should we trade outside of the local system? Does local entail being completely self-sufficient? What does remaining incompletely self-sufficient mean for everyone involved? Who is the self remaining sufficient? Local government? The family? The individual? And how will we define or measure sufficiency anyway?

William McDonough once stated his design standards in a TED Talk, “Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.” I would like to examine how local and global focuses could contribute to the development of William McDonough’s standards. Would a local focus be in danger of becoming overrun by the tyranny of the majority? Would a global focus inherently counter the ideals?

Discerning the advantages of local or global systems is an intriguing question and very relevant to our time. How should we live? What will provide the best results for people? How should we interact? How does communication modify the course a local or global system takes? The questions proliferate. Because community has a crucial role in our lives, it makes sense for us to ask in what form or forms the community is most effective to us. The next question then becomes, “What are the primary functions of community?” How else would we define effectiveness if we did not understand what was supposed to be effective? In any case, questions about the way to define community, local, home, or global, and the way (or the extent to which) those systems should interact, are increasingly important in our contemporary world, where our sustainable behavior or lack thereof will reflect themselves in our own future. A final question, then, makes us wonder, “How does the concept of ‘our children’s future’ correlate to change? Can it be an effective inciting force, or is it an abdication of responsibility?” It seems we might find some direction in exploring the nuances of all these questions.