Why Question Globalization?

The word, globalization, is spoken everywhere and is emblematic.[1]  To some it means worldwide economic homogenization.  To others it connotes prosperity under the guise of “free trade.”[2]  Is globalization meant to imply the structure of an international corporate marketplace, the rise of religious evangelicalism around the globe,[3] a sanction of academic elite speaking professionally in EnglishWhy Question Globalization image, transformations in culture that are promoted by western values, or all of the above?  Is it the global standardization of economic accounting to measure and declare what is considered wealth, success, and growth?  Is a global legal order coming?  Is globalization a symbol of injustice, inequality, poverty, and unfair hegemonic trade rules?[4]  Does it mean slavery or selling your kidney to avoid starvation?[5]  Does it mean trading your child for a television?  The string of questions, ascriptions, labels and logos is endless.[6]  And the answer to whether it is working depends on who is asked and, in my world, whose dignity is respected by the machinations of globalization.[7]  Western peoples generally go about their daily lives without considering the impact Globalization has on every other person in the world.[8]  We often fail to question where the various products we consume originate, and mistakenly believe that our daily consumptive habits constitute little more than a drop in a large bucket of world problems.[9]  We are the Great Pretenders.[10]  “What needs explaining is our equanimity in the face of staggering developments.  How can we go about our business when things [global warming, cloning, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics] are happening?  How can we just read the article, shake our heads, turn the page?”[11]  Reality is indistinguishable from fabrication as we are flooded with sheer quantities of information.[12]

            I venture to say few people place in their comprehension that the amount of land that supports human life is minute in comparison to the Earth as a whole.  To drive this point in the classroom, I produce an apple—Malus Domestica[13], which aptly functions as a metaphor for the Earth.[14]  After cutting the red fruit into four equal slices, I ask my students to recognize that three of the four quarters represent the ocean.  Aside from our insatiable desire to pillage natural oceanic life and technologically ascend to being “marine pastoralists”[15] on fish farms, we do not yet grow plant crops on the surface of seawater.  I offer these three segments of “genus Malus of ocean” to the students.  It helps them to digest my polemic.  Of the remaining quarter, one half of it represents the inhospitable places on earth that do not support human life, such as the polar areas, deserts, swamps, or very high and rocky mountains.  Cut away and discard.  The remaining eighth is cut again into quarters, and three of the four pieces represent places where humans cannot grow food as they are locations on the earth that are too rocky, steep, have poor soils, or are highways and cities.  The remaining piece is a tiny 1/32 of the apple; the peel is the entire amount of worldly topsoil upon which all of the food for all of humankind grows.  Because of erosion and overfarming, over 25 billion tons of topsoil are diminishing each year.[16]  Disproportionately, it takes anywhere from five hundred to one thousand years to replace 1” of topsoil.[17] 

            Inhabiting a world of its own, to the side of this geophysical reality, the words “free trade” have taken on a moral undertone akin to “democracy” and “freedom.”[18]  Yet the connections and consequences of the deregulated and unrestricted movements of goods, money, and services must be exposed to a light different from the glare of its faith-based creedo.[19]  Granted, most of us can afford a cup of coffee every day, but at what costs? 

The buzzing world would not go away.  Without opening my eyes, I hit the clock radio.  My brain managed to hold one coherent thought: caffeine.

 

Beans.  I staggered into the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee.  It took 100 beans—about one-sixtieth of the beans that grew on the coffee tree that year.  The tree was on a small mountain farm in the Antioquia region of Colombia.  The region was cleared of most of its native cloud forests at the turn of the century: the fertile valley bottoms by cattle ranchers and the less productive hillsides by poor farmers who planted coffee and fruit trees.  Colombia’s forests make it a biological superpower: though the country covers less than 1 percent of the Earth’s land surface, it is home to 18 percent of the world’s plant species and more types of birds than any other nation.

 

Dense, manicured rows of Coffea Arabica trees covered the farm, growing under the strong tropical sun.  For most of this century, coffee grew on this farm in the shade of taller fruit and hardwood trees, whose canopies harbored numerous birds, from keel-billed toucans to Canada warblers.  In the 1980s, farm owners sawed down most of the shade trees and planted high-yielding varieties of coffee.  This change increased their harvests.  It also increased soil erosion and decimated birds, including wintering songbirds that breed near my home.  Biologists report finding just 5 percent as many bird species in these new, sunny coffee fields as in the traditional shaded coffee plantations they replaced.

 

With the habitats of birds and other insect eaters removed, pests proliferated and coffee growers stepped up their pesticide use.  Farmworkers wearing shorts, T-shirts, and sloshing backpacks sprayed my tree with several doses of pesticides synthesized in Germany’s Rhine River Valley.  Some of the chemicals entered the farmworkers’ lungs; others washed or wafted away, only to be absorbed by plants and animals.

 

Workers earning less than a dollar a day picked my coffee berries by hand and fed them into a diesel-powered crusher, which removed the beans from the pulpy berries that encased them.  The pulp was dumped into the Cauca River.  The beans, dried under the sun, traveled to New Orleans on a ship in a 132-pound bag.  For each pound of beans, about two pounds of pulp had been dumped into the river.  As the pulp decomposed, it consumed oxygen needed by fish in the river.

 

The freighter that carried my coffee was made in Japan and fueled by Venezuelan oil.  The shipyard built the freighter out of Korean steel.  The Korean steel mill used iron mined on aboriginal lands in the Hamersley Range of western Australia.

 

At New Orleans, the beans were roasted for 13 minutes at 400oF.  The roaster burned natural gas pumped from the ground in Texas.  The beans were packaged in four-layer bags constructed of polyethylene, nylon, aluminum foil, and polyester.  They were trucked to a Seattle warehouse in an 18-wheeler, which got six miles per gallon of diesel.  A smaller truck then took the roasted beans to my neighborhood grocery store.

 

Bag  I carried the beans out of the store in a sealed, wax-lined paper bag and a large brown paper sack, both made at unbleached kraft paper mills in Oregon.  (Sometimes I bring my own canvas grocery bag, but this time I forgot.)  I brought them home in my car; it burned one-fifth of a gallon of gasoline during the five-mile round-trip to the market.

 

Grinder  In the kitchen, I measured the beans in a disposable plastic scoop molded in New Jersey and spooned them into a grinder.  The grinder was assembled in China from imported steel, aluminum, copper, and plastic parts.  It was powered by electricity generated at Ross Dam on the Skagit River in the Washington Cascades.

 

I dumped the ground coffee in a gold-plated mesh filter made in Switzerland of German Steel and Russian gold.  I put the filter into a plastic-and-steel drip coffeemaker.

 

Water  I poured eight ounces of tap water into the appliance.  The water came by pipe from a processing plant.  Originally it came from the Chester Morse Reservoir on the Cedar River on the west slope of the Cascades.  An element heated the water to more than 200oF.  The hot water seeped through the ground coffee and dissolved some of its oils and solids.  The brew trickled into a glass carafe; I poured it into a mug with a “Made in Taiwan” sticker hidden underneath.  Later, I washed the mug, using much more water than I drank from it.

 

Sugar  I measured out two teaspoons of sugar.  It came from cane fields—former sawgrass marshes—south of Lake Okeechobee in Florida.  Water that used to flow across these marshes and into the Everglades is now drained into canals and sent directly to the ocean.  Or else it irrigates the fields, where it picks up nutrients and pesticides.  Populations of all vertebrates—from turtles to storks—have fallen 75 to 95 percent in Everglades National Park.  In November 1996, Florida voters rejected a plan to tax sugar growers to help pay for efforts to restore the Everglades.

 

Cream  I stirred in one ounce of cream.  The cream came from a grain-fed dairy cow in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle.  The cow liked to wade into a stream to drink and to graze on streamside grasses and willows.  As a result, the water got warmer and muddier, making life difficult for the coho salmon and steelhead trout living in the stream.

 

Wastes  The cow’s manure was rich in nitrogen and phosphorus.  The soils of the cow pasture were unable to absorb all the manure, so it washed into the stream when it rained.  The infusion of nutrients fertilized algae; decaying manure and algae absorbed oxygen from the water, making life still more difficult for fish.

 

Two hours after I finished my morning cup, my body had metabolized the coffee.  Most of the water and some nutrients passed into the Seattle sewer system.  They were carried by Cedar River water and mixed with other organic and inorganic wastes.  They traveled under the streets of the city to Seattle’s West Point sewage treatment plant on the shores of Puget Sound, next to Discovery Park. 

 

There the solids were filtered, concentrated, digested, and sterilized with screens, settling tanks, bacteria, and chlorine.  An engineer deemed the sewage sludge clean enough for agriculture, and a trucker hauled it to pulpwood tree farms for use as fertilizer and soil conditioner.  An underwater pipe carried the treated liquids a mile into Puget Sound.  The flushing of the tides would eventually carry the liquids into the Pacific Ocean.[20]

 

            Individuals do have planetary impacts on a daily basis as the coffee story proves.  But they also have a great deal of difficulty paying attention to the ramifications of our abundant choices each day.  During the course of this class, the consequences of individual consumption will become more transparent and surprising, and to some, “free trade” may cause more questions than answers.


[1] “Globalization” has become a ubiquitous term.  The field of sociology, however, offers some useful starting points for grasping many of the fundamental connotations of this term.  For earlier “key ideas” primers, see Malcolm Waters, Globalization (1995); Globalization: The Reader (John Beynon & David Dunkerley, eds., 2000); Barrie Axford, The Global System:  Economics, Politics, and Culture (1995); Martin Albrow, The Global Age:  State and Society Beyond Modernity (1996); and John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (1999); The World Economy (John Williamson and Chris Miller, eds., 1991).  More contemporary writings include Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (2007); Herman Daly, Relations Among Nations: How to Go Global Without Being Globalized, Orion 11 (September/October 2006); Pankaj Ghemawat, Why The World Isn’t Flat, Foreign Policy 54 (March/April 2007); Moisés Naim, Think Again: Globalization, Foreign Policy 28 (March/April 2009); Jeffrey D. Sachs, A User’s Guide to the Century, The National Interest 8 (July/August 2008); The Grey Chronicles, Is Globalization Dead?, http://reyadel.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/is-globalization-dead/.

                [2] But see Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, Fair Trade for all: How Trade Can Promote Development (2006); Clive Crook, Beyond Belief, The Atlantic Magazine 44, October 2007. 

                [3] John Micklewait & Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World (2009).  Does science make belief in God obsolete?  See www.templeton.org/belief.

                [4] See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).  Devised by David Ricardo in 1817, the principle of comparative advantage has been championed, until recently, as the most significant tool in the economist’s toolbox.  See Clive Crook, Beyond Belief, The Atlantic, October 2007, at p. 44.

                [5] See E. Benjamin Skinner, A World Enslaved, Foreign Policy 62, March/April 2008.  Devised by David Ricardo in 1817, the principle of comparative advantage has been championed, until recently, as the most significant tool in the economists’ toolbox.  See Clive Crook, Beyond Belief, The Atlantic, October 2007, p. 44.  Andrew Cockburn, 21st Century Slaves, National Geographic 2, September 2003.  See also Albinos Being Slain for Body Parts in Africa, Arizona Daily Star, June 8, 2008, Sec. A, p. 19; William Saletan, Shopped Liver: The Worldwide Market in Human Organs, www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2164177.

[6] Globalization is really a painting of the earth whose rendering can never be fixed.  The colors are always moving.  Some eloquent souls have made valiant attempts to draw the contours of the doctrine, and I provide some of their titles here as referential.  David Korten, The Failure of Bretton Woods, in The Case Against the Global Economy (Jerry Mander & Edward Goldsmith eds., 1996) (hereinafter Mander); Helena Norberg-Hodge, The Pressure to Modernize and Globalize, in Mander 33; Marten Khor, Global Economy and the Third World, in Mander 47; Maude Barlow and Heather-Jane Robertson, Homogenization of Education, in Mander 60; Richard Barnett and John Cavanagh, Homogenization of Global Culture, in Mander 71; Edward Goldsmith, Development as Colonialism, in Mander 253; Peter Berger, Four Faces of Global Culture, The Nat’l Int., Fall 1997; Moises Naim, The Five Wars of Globalization, Foreign Pol’y, Jan./Feb. 2003, at 29; Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (2008); Philip Jenkins, The Next Christianity, Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2002, at 53; Somini Sengupta & Larry Rohter, Where Faith Grows, Fired by Pentecostalism, N.Y. Times, Oct. 14, 2004, at A1, A10; Amy Chua, A World on the Edge, Wilson Q., Autumn 2002, at 62; Lawrence Friedman, Erewhon:  The Coming Global Legal Order, 33 Stan. L.J. 347 (2001); Benjamin R. Barber, The Uncertainty of Digital Politics, Harv. Int’l. Rev. (2001); Amartya Sen, Universal Truths:  Human Rights and the Westernizing Illusion, Harv. Int’l. Rev. (1998); Richard Falk, World Prisms: The Future of Sovereign States and International Order, Harv. Int’l. Rev. (1999); Stephen A. Marglin, Development as Poison:  Rethinking the Western Model of Modernity, Harv. Int’l. Rev. (2003); Barbara Stark, Women and Globalization:  The Failure and Postmodern Possibilities of International Law, 33 Vand. J. Transnat’l L. 503 (2002); Edward Said, The Clash of Ignorance, The Nation, Oct. 22, 2001; Tina Rosenberg, The Free Trade Fix, N.Y. Times Mag., Aug. 18, 2002, at p. 28 sec. 6; Steven A. Ramirez, Market Fundamentalism’s New Fiasco:  Globalization As Exhibit B in the Case for a New Law and Economics, 24 Mich. J. Int’l L. 831, (2003) (reviewing Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (2002)); John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism, Harper’s Mag., Mar. 2004, at 33; The Ecologist Report:  Globalizing Poverty, The Ecologist, Sept. 2000; William Greider, The Future of Globalization, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35990-2003Oct2.html; Bill Moyers Interviews Union Theological Seminary’s Joseph Hough, Now with Bill Moyers, www.commondreams.org/views03/1027-01.htm (broadcast Oct. 24, 2003); Jay Griffiths, Time’s Singed Chariot, The Ecologist, May 2003, at 15; Doug Henwood, Beyond Globophobia, The Nation, Dec. 1, 2003, at 17; Charlotte Denny, Global Economy Must Adjust to Include Millions it Puts in Poverty, The Guardian/UK, Feb. 25, 2004; Andrew Cockburn, 21st Century Slaves, Nat’l Geogr., Sept. 2003, at 2; Peter Landesman, The Girls Next Door, N.Y. Times Mag. 30, Jan. 25, 2004, at sec. 6; Larry Rohter, Tracking the Sale of Kidney on a Path of Poverty and Hope, N.Y. Times, May 23, 2004, at A1, A8; Nicholas Wood, For Albanians, It’s Come to This:  A Son for a TV, N.Y. Times, Nov. 13, 2003, at A1, A3; Paul Watson, In South India, the Way Out is Often Suicide, LA Times, May 30, 2004, at A9; The Puzzle of Governance in an Integrated Global Economy, Brookings Rev., Spring 2003; Tyler Cowen, The Fate of Culture, Wilson Quarterly 78, Autumn 2002; Jeff Chang, It’s a Hip-Hop World, Foreign Policy 58, Nov/Dec 2007; Pankaj Ghemawat, The World’s Biggest Myth, Foreign Policy 52, Nov/Dec 2007; Bruce Mau, Design and the Institute Without Boundaries, www.massivechange.com.  Recent adventuresome authors include:  Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (2008) Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (2007); and James Fallows, Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (2009).

[7]  As a Professor of Indigenous Law and Policy, I have studied the genocide of Indigenous peoples and have explored the long, historical polemic and legal sophistry of colonization.  A number of authors argue that economic globalization is still imperial hegemony by empires with only a change in name.  Edward Goldsmith, Development as Colonialism, in The Case Against the Global Economy 253 (Jerry Mander & Edward Goldsmith eds., 1996). Should our measurements of “success” or “failure” not be measured by currently accepted economic indicators, but rather by the degree to which we respect the dignity of all peoples and all species in residence on this planet?  See William McDonough, Architects, The Hanover Principles:  Design For Sustainability (1992).  In the text sections ahead, I explore the need for new characterizations of progress. 

[8] See Jared Diamond, What’s Your Consumption Factor?, www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02diamond.html?ei=5070&en=6e301caad83....  Whereas the Western perspective is often blind to its impact on non-Western regions, the non-Western regions are paradoxically brought into interaction, but then potentially systematically prevented from having a voice to speak their positions.  See, e.g., Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988).

[9]  See Mona Hymel, Consumerism, Advertising, and the Role of Tax Policy, 20 Vir. Tax Rev. 347 (2000); Mona Hymel, The Population Crisis: The Stork, the Plow, and the IRS, 77 N. Car. L. Rev. 13 (1998).  A trio of articles comprises Shopping and the American Way of Life, in Wilson Q., Winter 2004.  Robert J. Samuelson, Shop ‘til We Drop?, at 22; Paco Underhill, Inside the Machine, at 30; and Daniel Akst, Buyer’s Remorse, at 42.  There seems to be no end to shopping for identity modification and style.  See Youth Knows No Pain (documentary: Better Living Through Plastic Surgery, 2009); Randy Cohen, “Should Photos Come With Warning Labels?,” www.ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/should-photos-come-with-warning-labels;Alex Kuczynski, A Lovelier You, With Off-the-Shelf Parts, N.Y. Times, May 2, 2004, at sec. 4, p. 1, 12; Daphne Merkin, Keeping the Forces of Decrepitude at Bay, N.Y. Times Mag., May 2, 2004, at sec. 6, p. 64; Mary Tannen, Unnatural Selection, N.Y. Times Mag., May 2, 2004, at sec. 6, p. 78; Natalie Angier, Short Men, Short Shrift.  Are Drugs the Answer?, N.Y. Times Mag., June 22, 2003, at sec. 4, p. 12; Warren St. John, Metrosexuals Come Out, N.Y. Times, June 22, 2003, at sec. 9, pp. 1, 5.  Scientific inquiry into the precise recipe for human facial formation may allow doctors to soon perform fetal interventions to correct what is or will be considered a birth defect.  Can fetal cosmetic surgery be far behind?  See Jeff Miller, G Is For Genes and Faces, UCSF Mag., Aug. 2002, available at http://pub.ucsf.edu/magazine/200208/g.php; Paul Trainor, Development:  The Bill of Qucks and Duails, 299 Science 523 (2003). www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5606/523.  Obsession with stature in increasingly crowded, competitive China is dramatized by the cutting of shinbones in two to make legs longer.  Craig S. Smith, Risking Limbs for Height, and Success, in China, N.Y. Times, May 5, 2002, at A3. 

See also Benjamin R. Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007); Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (2007); Pamela Paul, Parenting, Inc: How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers – And What It Means For Our Children (2008); Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It (2008); Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (2007); William B. Irvine, On Desire:  Why We Want What We Want (Oxford Univ. Press 2005; Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy:  The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2004); Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style:  How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce Culture and Consciousness (2003); Susie Orbach, Bodies (2009); James J. Farrell, One Nation Under Goods:  Malls and the Seduction of American Shopping (2003); Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance:  Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600 (2005); Robe Walker, Consumed:  The Duet of Washer and Dryer, N.Y. Times Mag., Jan. 11, 2004, at sec. 6., p. 16 (Whirlpool is publishing a whole suite of products tied to the idea of the laundry room as ‘family studio.’); Olive Thompson, There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex (with the help of brain scanners, scientists are refashioning themselves as ‘neuromarketers.’  Can they finally make advertising a science?), N.Y. Times Mag., Oct. 26, 2003, at sec. 6, p. 54; Michael Fitzgerald, Predicting Where You’ll Go And What You’ll Like, N.Y. Times, June 22, 2008; George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism (2009).

Susan Strasser traces Trash Trends from 1800’s America to Present Day in A Social History of Trash, Orion, Autumn 2000 (there existed little trash before the “twentieth century.”  Stylistic changes made perfectly good items obsolete.  “Disposable products offered deliverance from the obligation to care for things.”).  See also Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (2006); Daniel Imhoff, Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World (2005); Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (2005); Lisabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic:  The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003).  . William McDonough has brought into our conscious the concept of “away,” where “culture is here, nature far away.” William McDonough & Michael Braungart, A New Geography of Hope:  Landscape, Design and the Renewal of Ecological Intelligence in Extreme Landscapes:  The Lure of Mountain Spaces (2002).  In Europe, Extended Producer Responsibility laws require manufacturers, not the government or consumers, to take responsibility for the environmentally safe management of their product when it is no longer useful or discarded.  See generally Noah Sachs, Planning the Funeral at the Birth: Extended Producer Responsibility in the European Union and the United States, 30 Harv. Envt’l L. Rev. 51 (2006).

And our lack of satisfaction with – a personal dark side of – consumption has been chronicled in significant publications:  John DeGraaf, David Wann, & Thomas Naylor, Affluenza (2001); Kalle Lasn and Bruce Griersen, Malignant Sadness, Adbusters, June/July 2000; Charles Shaw, Are You Unhappy? Is It Because of Consumer Addiction?, www.alternet.org/story/82013; Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More Is Not Enough (2005); Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox:  How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (2004); David Callahan, The Cheating Culture:  Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (Harcourt 2004).  No doubt the medical literature is over-brimming with pharmaceutical responses to the spread of what we label as clinical depression stemming from life style choices.  See, e.g., Kalman Appelbaum, Pharmaceutical Marketing and the Invention of the Medical Consumer, www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030189 ; David Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac:  The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression (2004).  See also Robert H. Frank, Why Living in Rich Society Makes Us Feel Poor, N.Y. Times Mag., Oct. 15, 2000, at sec. 6, p. 62 (Special Issue.  Spending, How Americans Part With Their Money); Elizabeth Austin, But I Don’t Want to Be a Millionaire:  How the Media Makes it Hard To Be Middle Class, Wash. Monthly, October 2000, www.commondreams.org/views/100600-104.htm; James Vlahos, Americans are Spending Millions on Mood-Altering Drugs for Their Cats and Dogs.  Is It Because We’ve Driven Them Mad?, N.Y. Times Mag., July 13, 2008, at page 38.

[10]  See David Ehrenfeld, Pretending, Orion, Autumn 2000.

[11] Thomas de Zengotita, Numbing of the American Mind: Culture As Anesthetic, Harper’s Mag., Apr. 2002.

[12]  The Marxist Frankfurt school in Germany, for example, criticized mass culture as integrating all peoples into the status quo and intensifying capitalism.  The school’s work was particularly influential from the 1930s until the 1950s and set the stage for British Cultural Studies.  Douglas Kellner, The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies:  The Missed Articulation (2006), available at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/frankfurtschoolbritishculturalstudies.pdf.

                [13] The wild apple is Malus Sieversii.  The Latin word for “evil” is malum, and the plurual in Latin for both apple and evil is “mala.”  Language constructs power and vice versa.

[14]  This exercise comes from Zero Population Growth, Inc., A World of Six Billion Wall Chart and Activity Guide:  Thought Provoking Activities on Population, Resources, and Our Environment (2000)

[15] Peter F. Drucker, Beyond the Information Revolution, Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1999.

[16] Michael L. McKinney & Robert M. Schoch, Environmental Science:  Systems and Solutions 325 (2003).

[17] Id.

[18]  William Finnegan, The Economies of Empire: Notes on the Washington Consensus, Harper’s Mag. May 2003.

[19]  The aphorism “a rising tide lifts all boats” has become associated with the idea that general economic improvements will benefit everyone in the economy, and therefore governments should focus on free market policies that will improve the economy. The rapid economic growth in America during the 1960s seemed to support this view, but recently economists have questioned an uncompromising belief in this dogma.  See, e.g., James R. Hines, Jr. et al, Another Look at Whether a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats in The Roaring Nineties:  Can Full Employment Be Sustained? (2001), available at http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/hoynes/publications/HHK-Final.pdf.

                [20] Alan Durning & John Ryan, Stuff: The Secret of Life of Everyday Things, 7 Northwest Environmental Watch (Sightline Institute 1997)  (used with permission, www.sightline.org/site/free-use-policy). I thank them for their graciousness.  Stuff also chronicles the secret life of hamburgers, tennis shoes, newspapers, and soda.  Students recognize the primacy of this small book as a teaching tool.  See also www.storyofstuff.com; The 2007 Green Guide, An Ecosystem of One’s Own, Vanity Fair, May 2007, at 203 (The Second Annual Green Issue) (example of one’s daily ecological footprint; meanings of food labels); Marketplace Blogs: Greenwash Brigade, www.marketplace.publicradio.org