"In three remarkable years between 1969 and 1971, Friends of the Earth, the National Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were created and the first Earth Day was proclaimed." [from Jamie Metzel's Hacking Darwin.]
What is globalization?
The music you listen to is your own concern. The volume and time at which you listen to it is of concern to your entire apartment complex.
Some issues will always be personal. Your favorite music, for instance. Technology - like a stereo that can play at 100 decibels - can turn personal issues into community issues.
Factories that made enough goods to sell across state lines, trains to carry those goods across state lines, and telegraph lines to rapidly communicate across state lines changed us from a confederation of states into a union. Before Lincoln, nearly all communication stated, "The United States are ..." After Lincoln, it stated, "The United States is ...." Technology changed states' issues into national issues.
Today, container ships have driven down the price of transportation to effectively make ours one global market. The marginal cost to transport one can of beer or soda 3,000 miles is one cent. A sweater is 3.5 cents. The internet lets you have a video conference with someone in Croatia as easily as you would talk to your neighbor. The technology of the late 1800s made us a nation. The technology of the early 2000s has made us a globe.
You will hear - you have heard - a lot of nonsense about globalization from nationalists who want you to believe that those globalists in the apartment complex want to dictate what music you listen to. Nobody cares about your taste in music but they do want to sleep uninterrupted at 2 AM. The fact that you find it exasperating to think about how dependent we are on foreigners and they are on us doesn't mean that it is effective policy to ignore it. Globalization is not about 7.5 billion people dictating how you live; it is about acknowledging how many people depend on you - and how many people you depend on - to live.
It is likely cliche and probably minimally helpful to say that some issues are truly personal, some involve your family, some the folks in your neighborhood, some the people in your state and some are global. Where the proper boundaries lie for determining whose concern those are will shift and be subject to debate. That's true. But what is also true is that just as our space program let us see the earth as a whole, our technology continues to make our world larger, making us increasingly dependent on faraway people. Just as you can't un-see this picture, you can't undo the inter dependencies that define our world. Globalization isn't about creating those inter dependencies; it is about having mechanisms - like the UN and WTO - to address them.
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