The Global and the Local.

The anti-globalization protests keep coming, and the mainstream public keeps being puzzled. What's it all about? To an older American news-watcher, these disturbances might vaguely resemble the anti-Vietnam protests of a generation ago, except that they seem less visceral--a bit harder to grasp. The newscasters keep depicting the protests as shoving matches between anarchists and police, and have little to say about the issues the protesters are trying to raise. Few of the folks watching these newscasts, I'd guess, have much inkling of what profound implications those issues might have for them.

What may make these conflicts more meaningful, soon, is the growing number of them that are not set in the barricaded streets of Seattle or Washington or Genoa, but in the news-watchers' own communities--where growing numbers of people find their sense of security being eroded by a phalanx of larger forces. There is the "Wal-Mart" phenomenon, for example, in which a large chain store uses its marketing muscle to drive local stores out of business, while taking what used to be the local owners' revenues and sending them off to distant corporate coffers. There is the related "empty storefront" phenomenon, in which the increasing concentration of an industry into larger, more "efficient" outlets means fewer outlets remain in small communities (the numbers of independent car dealers, food stores, drug stores, book stores, and farms in the wealthy countries have all declined sharply in the past several decades). In the developing countries, there is the "structural adjustment" phenomenon, wherein international le nding agencies have pushed governments to adopt policies favoring production for export at the expense of local self-sufficiency. And wherever urban areas are expanding around the world, whether into exploding suburbs or imploding shantytowns, there is the "don't know my neighbors" problem. Even as we humans become more numerous, we become more socially isolated and uneasy.

As a result, many analysts perceive local community as the level of social organization at which we now have the greatest chance to mount effective defenses against these various destabilizing forces. That perception came into focus for me one day as I was listening to the Public Radio program, "Marketplace." First I heard a segment about mad cow disease in Britain, and how it could be seen as a symptom of precariously intensive agricultural practices. A biologist, Colin Tudge, commented: "If you want to reduce the spread of diseases, then you don't have huge numbers of animals in one place...and you don't take them several hundred miles to a slaughterhouse. You keep everything contained and local."

Minutes later, there was a discussion of the California power crisis, and the vulnerability of the electricity grid. The reporter noted that "a lot of advocates for alternative power believe the nation's entire electricity system was a disaster waiting to happen. They'd like a return to the way things were at the turn of the century when power production was local." He then aired a comment by Worldwatch researcher Seth Dunn, who affirmed that such a "return" would not be a matter of going backward technologically, but of using new "micropower" technologies to restore greater control of the power supply to individual homes, businesses, and communities.

The juxtaposition of these two stories was not just coincidence. In study after study, the evidence continues to mount: where local communities retain greater control of their own place in the world, their environmental stewardship tends to be more knowledgeable; their farms more productive; their health less vulnerable to epidemics; and their social fabric more intact. Yet, there's also a concomitant recognition that some forms of local protection--from disrupted climate, for instance--do need action on a global level. Many of those who protested in Genoa or Seattle have also said they're for the kind of globalization represented by international agreements to stabilize climate or ban landmines.

If the media paid more attention to the debate behind the barricades, what they might conclude is that as the rush to globalization intensifies, the need to strengthen local integrity within that process is becoming an increasingly critical, counterbalancing, need. The more awash we become in biological, cultural, and linguistic homogenization, the more we need that sense of "home" that comes with having strong local roots. The integrity of the living planet can be no better than that of the millions of variegated communities that make it up.