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Can we afford to "act locally?"
Sep. 20th, 2006 06:55 pmIn my recent entry on The Third Way, I observed that "for most people, the mantra 'think globally, act locally' is hard to accept when the whole world seems to be accelerating out of control." What I didn't admit is that I count myself among those people.
Of course, local-scale issues shouldn't be ignored. Modern mass culture tends to make citizens feel that our particular town or city is essentially small and unimportant, which is why few people complain when local news coverage takes a backseat to national and international events. But all scales are relative; from an individual human's perspective, even a ten-family village is a large and important thing, and in fact, the quality of local drinking water is a far more immediate and pressing issue to the average human than the results of the latest national election.
The problem is that global-scale forces can also act on individuals. For instance, air quality here in the small city of Redlands depends heavily on the driving patterns of millions of people throughout Southern California. The national election affects me too; after all, national-level policies can change the amount I spend on taxes, the waiting time at airports, and (indirectly) the cost of food at the grocery store. And on the global scale, climate change and biodiversity loss have ramifications that reach into every corner of the world.
The fact is, if we don't have a healthy planet to live on, eventually local-scale issues simply won't matter, because we'll be too busy dealing with the disastrous consequences of the global issues. So it's hard not to prioritize global-scale solutions to global warming over the question of how close I personally live to point-sources of pollution. My health may suffer as a result, but not half as much as it will if Octavia Butler's predictions about the effects of climate change on the American economy prove accurate.
Of course, local-scale issues shouldn't be ignored. Modern mass culture tends to make citizens feel that our particular town or city is essentially small and unimportant, which is why few people complain when local news coverage takes a backseat to national and international events. But all scales are relative; from an individual human's perspective, even a ten-family village is a large and important thing, and in fact, the quality of local drinking water is a far more immediate and pressing issue to the average human than the results of the latest national election.
The problem is that global-scale forces can also act on individuals. For instance, air quality here in the small city of Redlands depends heavily on the driving patterns of millions of people throughout Southern California. The national election affects me too; after all, national-level policies can change the amount I spend on taxes, the waiting time at airports, and (indirectly) the cost of food at the grocery store. And on the global scale, climate change and biodiversity loss have ramifications that reach into every corner of the world.
The fact is, if we don't have a healthy planet to live on, eventually local-scale issues simply won't matter, because we'll be too busy dealing with the disastrous consequences of the global issues. So it's hard not to prioritize global-scale solutions to global warming over the question of how close I personally live to point-sources of pollution. My health may suffer as a result, but not half as much as it will if Octavia Butler's predictions about the effects of climate change on the American economy prove accurate.
