At the end of the era of globalization - Open Evening Report

At the end of the era of globalization, turning again to the local
A talk given by Jerry Mander as part of a series of talks in which the Schumacher College Open Evenings move into town to reach the wider audience of Totnes. The event was held in association with Transition Town Totnes, 14/3/07.

Jerry Mander, at the start of this talk, stated as his main aim as ‘the dismantling of our present technological civilization’. The world faces a triple challenge: climate change, the approaching peak in global oil production, and the economic chaos that will result from these events. He sees the cause of these problems as the overuse of natural resources and the solution: ‘to do the opposite of what we are doing now’.

He was optimistic about the future in spite of the problems we face. The anti globalization movement first felt its power at the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. Protesters on the street gave heart to the poorer nations. These nations began, for the first time at Seattle, to stand up to the powerful G7 group and a coalition began to form amongst the less developed nations, China, Brazil, South Africa and others, comprising some 75% of the global population, which has later brought further WTO negotiations to the standstill they are at today. Many of the countries of Latin America, notably Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia now have popular leaders seeking to pull their countries out of the globalization process and stand up to economic pressure from the United States.

Globalization is a term which, essentially, covers the economic system imposed on the world, since World War 2, by the G7 countries. It involves the removal of barriers to the free movement of goods and capital across national boundaries, growth in global trade, movement of production (notably of clothing) to areas of the world where wages are low, and the giving of development loans to poor countries, committing them to commodity export in the attempt to repay these loans.

As Jerry Mander pointed out, this paradigm for global development is faulty and, in fact, was bound to fail since it depends on:

  1. a constantly expanding supply of natural materials
  2. a constantly expanding source of cheap labour
  3. a constant supply of new markets
  4. compliant governments, forced by the terms of their development loans to lower barriers to imported manufactured goods and food surplus from the US and Europe.

None of this is sustainable in the long term, in a finite world. We are running short of forest, fresh water, biodiversity, arable land, fish, oil and natural gas. Thus, the era of globalization is coming to an end and we have to find an alternative.

Jerry Mander dismisses as impracticable the energy supplies which might bridge the transition to full dependence on renewable energy, that is, nuclear and ‘clean coal’. He also points out that biofuels provide no solution, since they can only be grown in competition with the growth of food crops, so that growth of biofuel crops for the rich means starvation for the poor.

As he sees it, we have to develop the renewable sources of energy through wind, sun and wave. We need to ‘power down’ our economy to the scale these energy sources can maintain. He was thus very enthusiastic about the Transition Town Totnes initiative.

The mantra he proposed was ‘sufficiency, equity, sustainability’ with emphasis on the development of local economies and communities. The failed model of globalization must be replaced by:

Of course, this change will not be easy to achieve. But the world, and public opinion, is changing fast. Even in the United States there is increasing awareness of the problems of global warming and peak oil. This change may, paradoxically, have been brought about in part by the Iraq war with the resulting fall in George W. Bush’s popularity within the US, and increased resentment, across the world, against US (and British) policy.

Jerry Mander is founder and programme director of the International Forum on Globalization, an alliance formed in 1994 of some 100 leading international activists and scholars organised in opposition to the present global economic system. His latest book, co-edited with John Cavanagh, is Alternatives to Economic Globalization, 2002.

Summary by Geoffrey Haggis, March ’07

Schumacher College is part of the Dartington Hall Trust, a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and as a charity (company no. 1485560, charity no. 279756). Registered office: The Elmhirst Centre, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL, UK.