Posts Tagged ‘globalization’
The Crisis of Globalization and the Search for Alternatives
Moving towards genuine self-reliance in times of war and climate collapse. The world is reeling from the crises generated by the war in the Gulf, the disastrous climate and ecological collapse, deepening inequalities, genocides, and other mass atrocities. Multilateral institutions like the United Nations appear to be unable to do much about these. Like any…
Read MoreTrump’s Tariffs = Localist Liberation?
Last week, on so-called “Liberation Day,” the Trump administration announced its new wave of tariffs. The language was poignant. Liberation. It was a word meant to stir, to conjure up the dream of breaking free from foreign exploitation. Dependence on global trade is indeed a trap. For decades, our deepening reliance on faraway markets and…
Read MoreLocal, Vernacular, and Alive
Local landscapes were once powerful forces in their own right, shaping how people lived, farmed, traded, and made sense of the world. The land created people, and as people worked, they changed the land. Over time a shared identity and distinctive culture emerged. Again and again, people have made their patch of the earth feel…
Read MoreThe Green Growth Delusion
In the annals of industrial civilization, the Green New Deal counts as one of the more ambitious projects. Its scale is vast, promising to reform every aspect of how we power our machines, light our homes and fuel our cars. At this late hour of ecological and climate crisis, the Green New Deal is also…
Read MoreA Localized Alternative to ‘Disaster Capitalism’
Like many disasters, Covid-19 shocked the world; like some disasters it changed the world economy in ways most of us did not predict. But let’s back up for moment. What if those post-disaster changes had indeed been predicted – planned even – by people long before the virus began its deadly spread? More than a…
Read MoreWhen Idiot Savants Do Climate Science
William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the…
Read MoreRemembering Pracha Hutanuwatr and Maria Mies
Sadly, two of my dear colleagues and soulmates ¬ Pracha Hutanuwatr and Maria Mies – passed away recently. I first met Pracha when he visited us in Ladakh in the mid-1980s. We immediately recognized that we were kindred spirits, and he invited me to Thailand and introduced me to his mentor, Sulak Sivaraksa. Deeply spiritual but…
Read MoreThe Cuban Paradox
Landing in Cuba is like approaching a vibrant emerald in the middle of the sea. Fields full of shades of green are scattered throughout the island’s territory in orderly plots; various grids of all sizes, some with small groups of cattle. Among these farms, several vacant lots stand out, demarcated despite not having much vegetation…
Read MoreWhy we must abolish the Energy Charter Treaty
Greta Thunberg made international headlines this week when she and other climate activists were briefly detained by police at a protest against the expansion of a coal mine in Germany. Thunberg was among the thousands of protesters who arrived to denounce the expansion of the huge Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine by German energy company RWE.…
Read MoreGetting out of the food-energy-climate crisis
On 11 October 2022, the International Monetary Fund’s head of research, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned that today’s high energy prices were not going away any time soon. The “energy crisis”, he cautioned, “is not a transitory shock”. The same could be said for what he called the “food crisis”. As Gourinchas noted, today’s high prices for…
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