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Globalization
Excerpts From Path Without Destination
Possessions are signs of status, success, position, and power. It’s no wonder that our modern society has been called the consumer society. Unlimited economic growth has become the ideal of every nation in the world. In order to achieve such growth, we have destroyed lives, families, the social fabric, and our relationship with the natural world. We have passed the point of increasing human well-being by increasing material wealth.
August 1999The Common Good
An Interview With Noam Chomsky
If a true democratic society were allowed to function, it’s extremely unlikely that the things now called “inevitable results of the market” would ever be tolerated. These results certainly concentrate wealth and power and harm the vast majority. There’s no reason for people to tolerate that. These so-called inevitabilities are really public-policy decisions designed to lead to a certain kind of highly inegalitarian society. Talk about the inevitable processes of the market is almost entirely nonsensical, in my opinion. And if we did have a functioning democracy, we would solve the problem as Aristotle suggested: by reducing poverty and making sure that almost everyone had “moderate and sufficient property.”
November 1997To Raze A Village
The Modernization Of A Thousand-Year-Old Culture
Ladakh is a high-altitude desert on the Tibetan Plateau in northernmost India. To all outward appearances, it is a wild and inhospitable place. In summer the land is parched and dry; in winter it is frozen solid by fierce, unrelenting cold.
February 1997Global Villager
An Interview With Pico Iyer
America the notion is still very different from America the nation. What’s touching and almost regenerative is that, whatever is happening in the real America — where the murder rate is worse than Lebanon’s, and there is homelessness and poverty — America is still a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free. One interesting thing is that Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Reebok, pizza, enchiladas — everything that is hip and desirable — are all regarded as American no matter what their true origins.
January 1996Great Man Going
In the unfamiliar role of prey, we’ve come to recognize our own demise in the destruction of the environment. In the lifelessness we’ve projected on all other matter, we’ve come to see our own lifelessness.
January 1994Goodbye, Farmers
The money saved by corporations from producing food on cheap foreign lands, with cheap labor, and with pesticides banned for use in this country, is not passed along to the consumer. It simply serves to increase the profits of the corporations.
December 1978Food First — Beyond The Myth Of Scarcity
Book Excerpt
The world’s hungry people are being thrown into ever more direct competition with the well-fed and the over-fed. The fact that something is grown near your home in abundance, or that your country’s natural and financial resources were consumed in producing it, or even that you yourself toiled to grow it will no longer mean that you will be likely to eat it.
August 1978Tarnished Gold
Our Seed Stock Is In Jeopardy, But Do The Seed Companies Care?
Corn is the most valuable United States crop. When a few companies, or a few varieties, dominate its seed market, conditions are ripe for economic and ecological disaster.
July 1978Not Quite Our Sort
“Anything,” I say. “Anything but that.” They were trying to make me eat chicken. As an intelligence agent I had been through the wringer many times — torture, torture, forever torture. But I hate chicken. I detest chicken. I would tell them anything if I had to eat chicken.
November 1977
