Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy, Ph.D. for Scholars Online
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Chapter 33: The World in the Twenty-First Century
69. Thu, May 22, 2014
During the last Apollo mission, the astronauts took a picture of Earth. Unlike previous pictures of earth from space, this time the astronauts captured an image of the whole globe, with one hemisphere entirely illuminated. The image was rather unifying: "We all live on the same earth, we are all connected," etc. A few decades later, we see more evidence of this from rather different quarters: economics.
It's not yet the case that all humans live in the same culture. There is increasingly a global language (English), a global game (football — which Americans stubbornly call soccer), and, in the form of the internet, global communications… but a global culture is still far away. There isn't even such a thing as a "US culture," so this probably shouldn't be too surprising. But a global economy is here, and aside from the few remaining hunter-gatherers, it includes just about everyone. Thus my laptop (again doing double-duty as an example as well as a word processor) almost certainly hails from the Foxconn factory in China. My favorite sweatshirt hails from Honduras. A few critical components for my cell phone probably come from the Congo. And so forth. This global economy allows unprecedented exchange of goods, an integrated flow of materials, products, and services around the world. This also leads to a few phenomena you've heard about: factory jobs from the US being exported overseas, for example. There is now money to be made in the business of dismantling and shipping factories to Mexico: an industry in exporting industry. The workers, of course, stay where they are. Even Mexico isn't enough for some companies, however, so there's a second wave of industrial migration in the works. The problems of 19th century American workers, for example low-paying, dangerous, and dirty jobs, are now reappearing in the developing world. The problems of the US today are probably unprecedented. But regardless of the immediate issue, what happens in the US has an immediate effect on China… and sub-Saharan Africa… and everywhere else… and what happens out there affects us here.
In some ways we've come to the other end of the spectrum from the disconnected river valley civilizations; in another way, we've replicated it on a global scale, if we count (as the ancient Greeks did) the oceans as a river. While we can speak of a global economy and are now used to near-instant transcontinental communications, most products still have to be physically moved, and for a lot of them, the seas are the highway. Be it via cargo ships or semis, though, the flow of commerce is all-but-invariably driven by oil.
Which leads us to from economic distress to environmental. The planet's ecological disasters are all integrated as well, by now. China's pollution is threatening to spread, via the atmospheric jet stream, to North America; China in turn is polluted by dust storms from Central Asia that sweep across the continent. Whether or not you consider climate change to be an issue, environmental problems are now transnational. Take, for example, the Aral Sea, which is drying up rapidly and is something of a contentious debate between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and those countries upstream controlling the flow of water. Take the increasing amount of trash in the Pacific Ocean. Whose responsibility is it to clean up such messes and mistakes?
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