1st Edition
Globalism and Localization Emergent Solutions to Ecological and Social Crises
Considering the context of the present ecological and social crisis, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the relationship between globalism and localization. Globalism may be viewed as a positive emergent property of globalization. The latter depicts a worldwide economic and political system, and arguably a worldview, that has directly increased planetary levels of injustice, poverty, militarism, violence, and ecological destruction. In contrast, globalism represents interconnected systems of exchange and resourcefulness through increased communications across innumerable global diversities. In an economic, cultural, and political framework, localization centers on small-scale communities placed within the immediate bioregion, providing intimacy between the means of production and consumption, as well as long-term security and resilience. There is an increasing movement towards localization in order to counteract the destruction wreaked by globalization, yet our world is deeply and integrally immersed within a globalized reality.
Within this collection, contributors expound upon the connection between local and global phenomenon within their respective fields including social ecology, climate justice, ecopsychology, big history, peace ecology, social justice, community resilience, indigenous rights, permaculture, food justice, liberatory politics, and both transformative and transpersonal studies.
Introduction
Jeanine M. Canty
Chapter 1, Climate Justice and the Challenge of Local Solution
Brian Tokar
Chapter 2, The African Burial Ground: Roots of Ecological Destruction and Social Exploitation
Carl C. Anthony
Chapter 3, The Ties that Bind: An Earth Based Story of Home
Jeanine M. Canty
Chapter 4, Food Justice, Permaculture, and Global Urban Strategy
Stephen Polk
Chapter 5, The Declaration of Ek Balam: Protecting the Sacred in Corn
Devon G. Peña
Chapter 6, The Paradox of Digital Technology in Social Movements
Jade Begay
Chapter 7, A Climate Justice Compass for Transforming Self and World
M. Paloma Pavel
Chapter 8, The Evolution of the Environmental Justice Movement: Trans Local Voices for Systemic Transformations
Ana Isabel Baptista
Chapter 9, Ethical Path to Ecological and Social Survival
Asoka Bandarage
Chapter 10, Living La Vida Local: Small Steps Toward Global Change
Randall Amster
Index
Biography
Jeanine M. Canty, PhD, is professor at Naropa University. A lover of nature, justice, and contemplative practice, she focuses her teaching on the intersection of social and ecological justice and the process of worldview expansion and positive change. She is both an editor of and a contributor to Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices and selected works featured in The Wiley Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology, the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, Sustainability: The Journal of Record, World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, Shadows & Light: Theory, Research, and Practice in Transpersonal Psychology, and The Body and Oppression: Its Roots, Its Voices, and Its Resolutions.
Together the essays in this brilliantly conceived collection reveal the strengths of global activism. While presenting indigenous and local wisdom, these essays document the effectiveness of engaged local community through a myriad of lenses – whether indigenous food sovereignty, or environmental groups, or climate, economic and social justice movements. Along with glimpses of an innovative, potential and future well-being for us all, these pages give us a wide and fertile ground for change. Susan Griffin, author Woman and Nature (2016).
"Think globally, act locally"—there’s a lot of wisdom in that slogan, but what is the difference between globalism and globalization? Can localization work for the wellbeing of the whole planet? The contributors to this volume look at these issues through the complementary lenses of economic and environmental justice, racism, ecopsychology, permaculture, indigenous rights, digital technology, and mobilization strategies. The result is a thoughtful and useful response to the social and ecological crises that challenge us today. David Loy, author of Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis (2019)
A provocative collection of diverse climate justice voices from the ground that engages globalism as one of the most important paradigms of our time and analyzes how globalization has the potential to destroy our sense of place, belonging, and location. As our increasingly globalized world thrusts and displaces individuals and collective societies beyond our locations into larger unfamiliar and abstract spaces occupied by market profiteers, transnational corporations, and state governments, these authors offer perspectives, emergent solutions, and hope for our social and ecological crisis. Advocating and reclaiming a paradigm of localization could be truly transformative. This is an important book to read. Suzanne Benally, Executive Director, Cultural Survival
From the first word of the "Dedication" to the last sentence of the final chapter, this book’s radical thinkers open vistas to the futures we want. They do this via a relational understanding of the meanings of social justice and their deep and nuanced intersectional engagements with climate justice, indigenous struggles, food sovereignty, the promises and perils of digital organizing, living better (as in buen vivir) and transforming selves and worlds at the same time. This book’s heart is in just the right place, the space where ordinary people’s activism reaches toward total liberation, from the community just down the street to the ends of the pluriverse and everywhere between and betwixt. John Foran, Scholar-Activist, and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
