ANTH 110 Response

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HELENA NORDBERG-HODGE SHIFTING DIRECTION: FROM GLOBAL DEPENDENCE TO LOCAL INTERDEPENDENCE

The arguments for changing directions—that is, for abandoning the emerging global economy in favor of community-based, localized, highly diversified economies—may be compelling, but such a change, is clearly not in the interests of transnational corporations or the governments they put into power. New political alignments may eventually prove effective, but meanwhile, citizens can already undertake a host of local activities that contribute toward the creation of new community-based economies. Some are well underway. Helena Norberg-Hodge lists and describes some of those initiatives and suggests what their contributions might be.

Around the world—from North to South, from far left to far right—recognition of the destructive effects of economic globalization is growing. However, the conviction that the solutions lie with localizing economic activity is far less widespread. Many people seem to find it difficult even to imagine a shift toward a more local economy. "Time has moved on," one hears. "We live in a globalized world." On the surface, this is a perfectly reasonable point of view. How, after all, can we expect to tackle today's global ecosocial crises except on a global level? But it's not that simple. We need to distinguish between efforts merely to counter further globalization and efforts that can bring real solutions. The best way to halt the runaway global economy would undoubtedly be through multilateral treaties that would enable governments to protect people and the environment from the excesses of free trade. But such international steps would not in themselves restore health to economies and communities. Long-term solutions to today's social and environmental problems require a range of small, local initiatives that are as diverse as the cultures and environments in which they take place. When seen as going hand in hand with policy shifts away from globalization, these small-scale efforts take on a different significance. Most importantly, rather than thinking in terms of isolated, scattered efforts, it is helpful to think of institutions that will promote small scale on a large scale.

CONCEPTUAL RESISTANCE TO LOCALIZATION Moving toward the local can still seem impractical or utopian. One reason is the belief that an emphasis on the local economy means total self-reliance on a village level, without any trade at all. The most urgent issue today, however, isn't whether people have oranges in cold climates but whether their wheat, eggs, or milk should travel thousands of miles when they could all be produced within a 50-mile radius. In Mongolia, a country that has survived on local milk products for thousands of years and that today has twenty-five million milk-producing animals, one finds mainly German butter in the shops. In Kenya, butter from Holland is half the price of local butter; in England, butter from New Zealand costs far less than the local product; and in Spain, dairy products are mainly Danish. In this absurd situation, individuals are becoming dependent for their everyday needs on products that have been transported thousands of miles, often unnecessarily. The goal of localization would not be to eliminate all trade but to reduce unnecessary transport while encouraging changes that would strengthen and diversify economies at both the community and national levels. The degree of diversification, the goods produced, and the amount of trade would naturally vary from region to region.

Another stumbling block is the belief that a greater degree of self-reliance in the North would undermine the economies of the Third World, where people supposedly need northern markets to lift themselves out of poverty. The truth of the matter, however, is that a shift toward smaller scale and more localized production would benefit both North and South—and allow for more meaningful work and fuller employment all around. Today, a large portion of the South's natural resources is delivered to the North, on increasingly unfavorable terms, in the form of raw materials; the South's best agricultural land is devoted to growing food, fibers, even flowers for the North; and a good deal of the South's labor is used to manufacture goods for northern markets. Rather than further impoverishing the South, producing more ourselves would allow the South to keep more of its resources and labor for itself.

It is very important to understand the differences between the economies of the North and the South. A project that might work well in the North is not guaranteed to be beneficial in less

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industrialized economies. For instance, introducing microloans for small-scale enterprise may actually contribute to the destruction of local, nonmonetized economies and create dependence on a highly volatile and inequitable global economy, where factors such as currency devaluation can prove disastrous. By the same token, we should recognize that pulling a thousand people away from sure subsistence in a land-based economy into an urban context where they compete for a hundred new jobs is not a net gain in employment: Nine hundred people have, in effect, become unemployed. The idea of localization also runs counter to the belief that fast-paced urban areas are the locus of “real" culture and diversity, while small, local communities are invariably isolated backwaters where small-mindedness and prejudice are the norm. It isn't strange that this should seem so. The whole industrialization process has systematically removed political and economic power from rural areas and engendered a concomitant loss of self-respect in rural populations. In small communities today, people are often living on the periphery, while power—and even what we call culture—is centralized somewhere else.

Rural life in the West has been marginalized for many generations, and most Westerners thus have a highly distorted notion of what life in small communities can be. And even though much of the Third World is made up of villages, colonialism and development have left an indelible mark. In order to see what communities are like when people retain real economic power at the local level, we would have to look back—in some cases hundreds of years—to before these changes occurred. As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, I have seen with my own eyes how the largely self-reliant, community-based culture of Ladakh was transformed by economic development. Only a decade ago, the traditional culture was suffused with vibrancy, joy, and a tolerance of others that was clearly connected with people's sense of self-esteem and control over their own lives. Economic development, however, dismantled the local economy; decision- making power was shifted almost overnight from the household and village to bureaucracies in distant urban centers; the media educated children for a "glamorous" urban life-style completely unrelated to the local context and alien to that of their elders. If economic trends continue to undermine cultural vibrancy and self-esteem, future impressions of village life in Ladakh may soon be little different from Western stereotypes small-town life. An equally common myth that clouds thinking about more human-made rural economies is that "there are too many people to go back to the land." It is noteworthy that a similar skepticism does not accompany the notion of urbanizing the world's population. What is too easily forgotten that the majority of the world's people today—mostly in the Third World—already are on the land. To ignore them and speak as if people e urbanized as part of the human condition is a very dangerous misconception that helps to fuel the whole urbanization process. It is considered "utopian" to suggest a ruralization of America's or Europe's population; it China's plans to move 440 million people into the cities during the next few decades hardly raises eyebrows. This "modernization" of China's economy is part of the same process that has led to unmanageable ·ban explosions all over the South—from Bangkok and Mexico City to Bombay, Jakarta, and Lagos. In these cities, unemployment is rampant, 1illions are homeless or live in slums, and the social fabric is unraveling. Even in the North, urbanization continues. Rural communities are being steadily dismantled, their populations pushed into spreading suburbanized megacities. In the United States, where only 2 percent of the population lives on the land, farms are still disappearing at the rate of thirty-five thousand per year. It is impossible to offer that model to the rest of the world, where the majority of people earn their living as farmers. But where are the people saying, "We are too many to move to the city"? Instead we hear that urbanization is necessary because of overpopulation. The implicit assumption is that centralization is somehow more efficient, that urbanized populations use fewer resources. When we take a lose look at the real costs of urbanization in the global economy, however, we can see how far this is from the truth. Urban centers around the world are extremely resource-intensive. The large-scale, centralized systems they require are almost without exception more stressful to the environment than small-scale, diversified, locally adapted production. Food and water, building materials, and energy must all be transported great distances via vast energy-consuming infrastructures; their concentrated wastes must be hauled away in trucks and barges or incinerated at great cost to the environment. In their identical glass and steel towers with windows that never open, even air to breathe must be provided by fans, Jumps, and nonrenewable energy. From the most affluent sections of Paris to the slums of Calcutta, urban populations depend on transport for their food, so that every pound of food consumed is accompanied by several pounds of petroleum consumption and significant amounts of pollution and waste.

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What's more, these Westernized urban centers—whether in tropical Brazil, arid Egypt, or subarctic Scandinavia—all use the same narrow range of resources while displacing more locally adapted methods that made use of local resources, knowledge, and biological diversity. Children in Norwegian fishing villages enjoy eating cod, while people on the Tibetan plateau prefer their staple barley. Yet they are increasingly encouraged to eat the same food that is eaten in the industrial world. Around the world people are being pulled into a monoculture, which is leveling both cultural and biological diversity. The urbanizing global economy is thus creating artificial scarcity by ignoring local systems of knowledge and educating children to become dependent on a highly centralized economy. The end result is disastrously high levels of unemployment, increased competition, and heightened ethnic conflict.

It is precisely because there are so many people that we must abandon the globalized economic model, which can only feed, house, and clothe a small minority. It is becoming essential to support knowledge systems and economic models that are based on an intimate understanding of diverse regions and their unique climates, soils, and resources,

In the North, where we have for the most part long been separated from the land and from each other, we have large steps to take. But even in regions that are highly urbanized, we can nurture a new connection to place. By reweaving the fabric of smaller communities within large cities and by redirecting economic activity toward the natural resources around such communities, cities can regain their regional character, become more livable, and lighten their burden on the environment. Our task will be made easier if we support our remaining rural communities and small farmers: They are the key to rebuilding a healthy agricultural base for stronger, more diversified economies.

SHIFTING DIRECTION Many individuals and organizations are already working from the grass roots to strengthen their communities and local economies. Yet for these efforts to succeed, they need to be accompanied by policy changes at the national and international levels. How, for example, can grass-roots participatory democracy be strengthened unless limits are placed on the political power of huge corporations I How can local support alone enable small producers and locally owned shops to flourish if corporate welfare 1d free trade policies heavily promote the interests of large-scale producers and marketers? How can we return to a local context in education if monocultural media images continue to bombard children in every corner of the planet? How can local efforts to promote the use of locally available renewable energy sources compete against massive subsidies for huge dams and nuclear power plants?

The policy changes that would allow space for more community-based economies to flourish will certainly elicit objections. Some will claim that the promotion of decentralization is "social engineering" that would seriously dislocate the lives of many people. While it is true that some disruption would inevitably accompany a shift toward the local, it would be far less than that caused by the current rush toward globalization. It is in fact today's "jobless growth" society that entails social and environmental engineering on an unprecedented scale, as vast stretches of the planet and whole societies are reconfigured to conform to the needs of global growth— encouraged to abandon their languages, their foods, and their architec.1ral styles for a standardized monoculture. Others will interpret financial incentives for more localized production s "subsidies." However, these incentives should be seen as alternatives to current subsidies for globalization; that is, for transport, communications, energy infrastructures, education, and R&D in the technologies of large-scale centralized production. Moving in the direction of the local will actually cost less than we are now spending to move toward the global.

Rethinking our direction means looking at the entire range of public expenditures: The money currently spent on long-distance road transport alone offers an idea of how heavily subsidized the global economy is. In the United States, where there are already about 2.5 million miles of paved roads, another $80 billion has been earmarked for highways in the next few years, and plans are even being considered for a road link between Alaska and Siberia. The European Community, meanwhile, is planning to spend $120 billion ecus to add an additional 7,500 miles of superhighways across Western Europe by 2002 and is considering a tunnel to connect Europe with Africa. Throughout the South, scarce resources are similarly being spent. In New Guinea, for example, $48 million was spent m 23 miles of roads

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that allow timber interests to harvest and bring logs to the export market. Shifting this support toward a range of transport options that favor smaller, more local enterprises would have enormous benefits, from the creation of jobs to a healthier environment to a more equitable distribution of resources. Depending on the local situation, transport money could be spent on building bike paths, footpaths, paths for animal transport, boat and shipping facilities, or rail service. Even in the highly industrialized world, where dependence on centralizing infrastructures is deeply entrenched, a move in this direction can be made. In Amsterdam, for example, steps are being taken to ban cars from the heart of the city, thus allowing sidewalks to be widened and more bicycle lanes to be built.

• Large-scale energy installations are today heavily subsidized. Phasing out these multibillion- dollar investments while offering real support for locally available renewable energy supplies would result in lower pollution levels, reduced pressure on wilderness areas and oceans, and less dependence on dwindling petroleum supplies and dangerous nuclear technologies. It would also help to keep money from leaking out of local economies.

• Agricultural subsidies now favor large-scale industrial agribusinesses. Subsidies include not only direct payments to farmers but funding for research and education in biotechnology and chemical—and energy—intensive monoculture. Shifting those expenditures toward those that encourage smaller-scale, diversified agriculture would help small family farmers and rural economies while promoting biodiversity, healthier soils, and fresher food. Urbanized consumers may not be aware that most agricultural subsidies benefit huge corporations such as Cargill and other middlemen, not small farmers.

• Government expenditures for highway building promote the growth of corporate "superstores" and sprawling malls. Spending money instead to build public markets—such as those that were once found in virtually every European town and village—would enable local merchants and artisans with limited capital to sell their wares. This would enliven town centers and cut down on fossil fuel use and pollution. Similarly, support for farmers' markets would help to revitalize both the cities and the agricultural economy of the surrounding region while reducing money spent to process, package, transport, and advertise food.

• Television and other mass telecommunications have been the recipients of massive subsidies in the form of R&D, infrastructure development, educational training, and other direct and indirect support. They are now rapidly homogenizing diverse traditions around the world. Shifting support toward building facilities for local entertainment—from music and drama to puppet shows and festivals—would offer a healthy alternative.

At present, investments in health care favor huge, centralized hospitals meant to serve urban populations. Spending the same money instead on a greater number of smaller clinics that relied less on high technology and more on health practitioners would bring health care to more people and boost local economies.

Creating and improving spaces for public meetings, from town halls to village squares, would encourage face-to-face exchanges between decision makers and the public, serving both to enliven communities and to strengthen participatory democracy. In Vermont, for example— where participatory democracy is still alive and well—people attend town meetings for lively debates and votes on local issues. In addition to the direct and indirect subsidies given them, large-scale corporate businesses also benefit from a range of government regulations—and in many cases, a lack of regulations—at the expense of smaller, more localized enterprises. Although big business complains about red ape and inefficient bureaucracy, the fact is that much of it could be dis.1ensed with if production were smaller in scale and based more locally. In today’s climate of unfettered "free" trade, some government regulation is clearly necessary, and citizens need to insist that governments be allowed to protect their interests. This could best come about through international treaties in which governments agree to change the "rules of the game" to encourage real diversification and decentralization in the business world. There are many areas that need to be looked at in this regard: The free flow of capital has been a necessary ingredient in the growth of transnational corporations. Their ability to shift profits, Operating costs, and investment capital to and from all of their far-flung operations enables them to operate anywhere in the world and to hold sovereign nations hostage by threatening to pack up, leave, and take their jobs with hem. Governments are thus forced into competition with one another for he favors of these corporate vagabonds and try to lure them with low labor costs, lax environmental regulations, and substantial subsidies. Small local businesses, given no such subsidies, cannot hope to survive this unfair competition.

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Today, governments of every stripe are embracing free trade policies: in the belief that opening themselves up to economic globalization will cure their ailing economies. Instead, a careful policy of using tariffs to regulate he import of goods that could be produced locally would be in the best interests of the majority. Such "protectionism" is not aimed at fellow citizens in other countries; rather it is a way of safeguarding the local culture, obs. and resources against the excessive power of the transnationals.

• In almost every country, tax regulations discriminate against small businesses. Small-scale production is usually more labor-intensive, and heavy taxes are levied on labor through income taxes, social welfare taxes, value-added taxes, and so on. Meanwhile, tax breaks (such as accelerated depreciation and investment tax credits) are handed out on the capital— and energy—intensive technologies used by large corporate producers. Reversing this bias in the tax system would not only help local economies but would create more jobs by favoring people instead of machines. Similarly, taxes on the energy used in production would encourage businesses that are less dependent on high levels of technological input—which, again, means smaller, more labor-intensive enterprises. And if gasoline and diesel fuel were taxed so that prices reflected real costs—including some measure of the environmental damage their consumption causes—there would be a reduction in transport, an increase in regional production for local consumption, and a healthy diversification of the economy.

• Small businesses are discriminated against through the lending policies of banks, which charge them significantly higher interest rates for loans than they charge big firms. They also often require that small business owners personally guarantee their loans—a guarantee not sought from the directors of large businesses.

• An unfair burden often falls on small-scale enterprises through regulations aimed at problems caused by large-scale production. Battery-style chicken farms, for example, clearly need significant environmental and health regulations. Their millions of closely kept fowl are highly prone to disease; their tons of concentrated effluent need to be safely disposed of; and their long-distance transport entails the risk of spoilage. Yet a small producer, such as a farmer with a few hundred free-range chickens, is subject to essentially the same regulations, often raising costs to levels that can make it impossible to remain in business. Large-scale producers can spread the cost of compliance over a greater volume, making it appear that they enjoy economies of scale over smaller producers. Such discriminatory regulations are widespread. For example, a local entrepreneur wanting to bake cookies at home to sell at a local market would in most cases need to install an industrial kitchen to meet health regulations. Such a regulation makes it economically impossible to succeed.

• Local and regional land use regulations can be amended to protect wild areas, open space, and farmland from development. Political and financial support could be given to the various forms of land trusts that have been designed with this in mind. In the United States, there are now over nine hundred such trusts protecting more than 2.7 million acres of land. In some cases, local governments have used public money to buy the development rights to farmland, thereby simultaneously protecting the land from suburban sprawl while reducing the financial pressure on farmers. Studies have also shown that developed land costs local governments significantly more in services than the extra tax revenues generated—meaning that when land is developed, taxpayers not only lose the benefits of open space but also lose money.

In urban areas, zoning regulations usually segregate residential, business, and manufacturing areas—a restriction necessitated by the needs and hazards of large-scale production and marketing. These could be changed to enable an integration of homes, small shops, and artisan or 1ther small-scale production sites, as was traditional in the world's great cities. A rethinking of restrictions on community-based ways of living would also be beneficial. Zoning and other regulations aimed at limiting high-density developments often end up prohibiting environmentally sound living arrangements such as cohousing and ecovillages.

In the Third World, the majority are still living in small towns and rural communities and are largely dependent on a local economy. In this era of rapid globalization, the most urgent challenge is to stop the tide of 1rbanization and globalization by strengthening these local economies. A number of policy level changes could help to do so:

• Large dams, fossil-fuel plants, and other large-scale energy and transport infrastructures are geared toward the needs of urban areas and export-driven production. Shifting support toward a decentralized, renewable-energy infrastructure would help to stem the urban tide by strengthening villages and small towns. Since the energy infrastructure in the South is not yet

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very developed, this could be realistically implemented in the near future if there were sufficient pressure from activists lobbying northern banks and funding agencies.

• Colonialism, development, and now free trade and globalization have meant that the best land in the South is used to grow crops for northern markets. Shifting the emphasis to diversified production for local consumption would not only improve the economies of rural communities, but also lessen the gap between rich and poor while eliminating much of the hunger that is now so endemic in the so-called developing parts of the world.

• Countries in the South are also being hit hard by free trade agreements such as GATT and NAFTA. They would be far better off if, contrary to the aim of such treaties, they were allowed to protect and conserve their natural resources, nurture national and local business enterprises, and limit the impact of foreign media and advertising on their culture. Since free trade can pull people away from a relatively secure local economy and put them on the bottom rung of the global economic ladder, even "fair trade" may not always be in the long- term interest of the majority in the South.

• The South would benefit enormously from an end to the promotion of Western-style monocultural education. Instead, efforts are needed that would give preeminence to the local language and values while promoting more location-specific knowledge adapted to the bioregion and the culture.

• Local economies and communities in the South would also benefit if support for capital— and energy—intensive, centralized, health care based on a Western model were shifted toward more localized and indigenous alternatives.

• It is also of critical importance to elevate the status of primary producers (especially farmers) and rural life in general. In the South today, the message being transmitted by the media, advertising, and tourism is that rural life is, in effect, a lower evolutionary stage. This message puts intense psychological pressure on people to become modern, urban consumers. This indoctrination process can be countered through the use of a variety of media, from comic books to theater and films, and through exchange programs that expose people in the South to the realities of life in the North. I have termed efforts of this sort counterdevelopment, since they are conscious attempts to counter the forces that are promoting an unsustainable, highly polluting, consumer life-style around the world.

In the South, the majority of people still get their spiritual, cultural, and economic strength from their connection to the place where they live. We need to keep in mind how our assumptions about human nature and about the "efficiency" and "superiority" of Western industrial culture are helping to destroy the existing fabric of local economy and community. Before the incursion of the West, people enjoyed singing their own songs, speaking their own language, eating the food from their own region. Even today, most adults would prefer to be able to maintain their culture and remain in their communities. Rather than pulling people into westernized urban centers where they are robbed of their cultural and personal identity and made dependent on a global economy, we need to allow people to stay where they are and be who they are.

GRASS-ROOTS INITIATIVES Economic localization should entail an adaptation to cultural and biological diversity; therefore no single blueprint would be appropriate everywhere. The range of possibilities for local grass- roots efforts is as diverse as the locales in which they would take place. The following survey is by no means exhaustive but illustrates the sorts of steps being taken today.

• In a number of places, community banks and loan funds have been established to increase the capital available to local residents and businesses and allow people to invest in their neighbors and their community, rather than in distant corporations.

• "Buy-local" campaigns help local businesses survive even when pitted against heavily subsidized corporate competitors. The campaigns not only help keep money from leaking out of the local economy but also helped educate people about the hidden costs to the environment and to the community in purchasing less expensive but distantly produced products. Across the United States, Canada, and Europe, grass-roots organizations have sprung up in response to the intrusion of huge corporate marketing chains into rural and small-town economies. For example, the McDonald's corporation—which added nine hundred restaurants worldwide in 1993 and plans to add a new restaurant every nine hours in the coming years—has met with grass-roots resistance in at least two-dozen countries. Polish activists, for instance, succeeded in blocking the construction of a McDonald's in an old section of Cracow, and activists in India are working to keep McDonald's from entering that

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market. In the United States and Canada, the rapid expansion of Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has spawned a whole network of activists working to protect jobs and the fabric of their communities from these sprawling superstores.

• An effective way of guaranteeing that money stays within the local economy is through the creation of local currencies. Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) schemes have sprung up in the United Kingdom (where there are over 250 in operation), and in Ireland, Canada, France, Argentina, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. These initiatives have psychological benefits that are just as important as the economic benefits: A large number of people who were once merely "unemployed" and therefore "useless" are becoming valued for their skills and knowledge. [See chapter by Susan Meeker-Lowry.]

• Another idea is the creation of local "tool lending libraries," whereby people can share tools on a community level. By reducing the need for everyone to have their own agricultural or forestry equipment, gardening implements, or home repair tools, people can keep money within the local economy while simultaneously fostering the sense of neighborly cooperation that is a central feature of real community.

• One of the most exciting grass-roots efforts is the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, in which consumers link up directly with a nearby farmer. Significantly, in a country where small farmers linked to the industrial system continue to fail every year at an alarming rate, not a single CSA in the United States has failed for economic reasons. [See chapter by Daniel Imhoff.]

• By connecting farmers directly with urban consumers, farmers' markets similarly benefit local economies and the environment. In New York City, there are now over two-dozen farmers' markets, which add several million dollars annually to the incomes of farmers in nearby counties. Cornell University's "New Farmers New Markets" program aims to add to these numbers by recruiting and training a new generation of farmers to sell at the city's markets. The project is particularly interested in attracting unemployed immigrants who have extensive farming skills.

• The movement to create ecovillages is perhaps the most complete antidote to dependence on the global economy. Around the world, people are building communities that attempt to get away from the waste, pollution, competition, and violence of contemporary life. Many communities rely on renewable energy and are seeking to develop more cooperative local economies. The Global Ecovillage Network links several of these communities worldwide.

• Creating local economies means rethinking education—examining the connection between ever greater specialization and increasing dependence on an ever larger economic arena. Today, modern education is training children around the world for the centralized global economy. Essentially the same curriculum is taught in every environment, no matter what the cultural traditions or local resources. Promoting regional and local adaptation in the schools would be an essential part of the revitalization of local economies. Training in locally adapted agriculture, architecture, artisan production (pottery, weaving, and so on), and appropriate technologies suited to the specifics of climate and local resources would further a real decentralization of production for basic needs. Rather than educating the young for ever greater specialization in a competitive, "jobless growth" economy, children would be equipped for diverse economic systems, that depended primarily—but not exclusively—on local resources. This, of course, would not mean that information about the rest of the world would be excluded; on the contrary, knowledge about other cultures and cultural exchange programs would be an important part of the educational process.

RECONNECTING TO COMMUNITY AND PLACE The economic changes just described will inevitably require shifts at the personal level. In part, these involve rediscovering the deep psychological benefits—the joy—of being embedded in community. Children, mothers, and old people all know the importance of being able to feel they can depend on others. The values that are the hallmarks of today's fast-paced atomized industrial society, on the other hand, are those of a "teenage boy culture." It is a culture that demands mobility, flexibility, and independence. It induces a fear of growing old, of being vulnerable and dependent. Another fundamental shift involves reinstilling a sense of connection with the place where we live. The globalization of culture and information has led to a way of life in which the nearby is treated with contempt. We get news from China but not next door, and at the touch of a television button we have access to all the wildlife of Africa. As a consequence, our immediate surroundings seem dull and uninteresting by comparison. A sense of place means helping

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ourselves and our children to see the living environment around us: reconnecting with the sources of our food (perhaps even growing some of our own) and learning to recognize the cycles of seasons, the characteristics of the flora and fauna. Ultimately, we are talking about a spiritual awakening that comes from making a connection to others and to nature. This requires us to see the world within us, to experience more consciously the great interdependent web of life, of which we ourselves are among the strands.