Reflections on WTO - part three
by Paul Hawken
"Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency
toward standardization and uniformity. Conversely, during the growth stage
of civilization, the tendency is toward differentiation and diversity."
-- Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History.Those who marched and protested opposed globalization but they did not necessarily oppose internationalization of trade. Economist Herman Daly has long made the distinction between the two. Internationalization means trade between nations. Globalization refers to a system where there are uniform rules for the entire world, a world in which capital and goods move at will without the rule of individual nations. Nations, for all their faults, set trade standards. Those who are willing to meet those standards can do business with them. Do nations abuse this? Always and constantly, the US being the worst offender. But it does provide, where democracies prevail, a means for people to set their own policy, to influence decisions, and determine their future. Globalization supercedes the nation, the state, the region, and the village. While eliminating nations may indeed be a good idea, the elimination of sovereignty is not. One recent example is that of Chiquita Brands, which recently made a large donation to the Clinton administration after the United States filed a complaint with the WTO against the European Union because European import policies favored bananas coming from small Caribbean growers. There was no question about the policies: they restricted imports from large multinational companies in Central America (plantations whose lands were secured by US military force during the past century), and favored small family farmers who used fewer chemicals. It seemed like a decent thing to do, and everyone thought the bananas tasted better. For the banana giants, this was untenable. The United States prevailed in this WTO-arbitrated case. So who really won, and who lost?
The self-sufficient farmers who were making a decent living prior to the decision didn't win. Did the Central American employees at Chiquita Brands win? Ask the hundreds of workers in Honduras who were made infertile by the use of Dibromochloropropane on the banana plantations. Ask the mothers whose children have birth defects from pesticide poisoning.
Globalization leads to the concentration of wealth inside large multi-national corporations such as Time-Warner, Microsoft, GE, Exxon, and Wal-Mart. These giants can obliterate social capital and local equity, and create cultural homogeneity in their wake. Countries as different as Mongolia, Bhutan, and Uganda will have no choice but to allow Blockbuster, Burger King, and Pizza Hut to operate within their borders. Even Martha's Vineyard's refusal to allow a McDonald's could be nullified under the WTO regulations. The as-yet unapproved draft agenda calls for all governments to open up their procurement process to multi-national foreign corporations. No longer could local governments buy preferentially from local vendors. It could force governments to essentially privatize health and allow foreign companies to bid on delivering national health care programs. It could privatize and commodify education, or ban cultural restrictions to entertainment, advertising, or commercialism as a trade barrier. In addition, globalization kills self-reliance, since smaller local businesses can rarely compete with highly capitalized firms who seek market share instead of profits. Thus, developing regions may become more subservient to distant companies, with more of their income exported rather than being re-spent locally.
On the weekend prior to the WTO meeting, the International Forum on Globalization held a two-day teach-in at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle on just such questions of how countries can maintain autonomy in the face of globalization. Chaired by IFG President Jerry Mander, more than 2,500 people from around the world attended. A similar number were turned away. It was the hottest ticket in town ( but somehow that ticket did not get into the hands of pundits and columnists. It was an extravagant display of research, intelligence, and concern, expressed by scholars, diplomats, writers, academics, fishermen, scientists, farmers, geneticists, businesspeople, and lawyers. Beyond and before the teach-in, non-governmental organizations, institutes, public interest law firms, farmers organizations, unions, and councils had been issuing papers, communiquOs, press releases, books, and pamphlets for years. They were almost entirely ignored by the WTO. But something else was happening in Seattle underneath the debates and protests. In Stewart Brand's new book, "The Clock of the Long Now -- Time and Responsibility," he discusses what makes a civilization resilient and adaptive. Scientists have studied the same question about ecosystems. How does a system, be it cultural or natural, manage change, absorb shocks, and survive especially when cchang is rapid and accelerating? The answer has much to do with time, both our use of it and our respect for it. Biological diversity in ecosystems buffers against sudden shifts because different organisms and elements fluctuate at different time scales(flowers, fungi, spiders, trees, laterite, and foxes(all have different rates of change and response. Some respond quickly, other slowly, so that the system, when subjected to stress, can move, sway, and give, and then return and restore.
The WTO was a clash of chronologies or time frames, at least three, probably more. The dominant time frame was commercial. Businesses are quick, welcome innovation in general, and have a bias for change. They need to grow more quickly than ever before. They are punished, pummeled and bankrupted if they do not. With worldwide capital mobility, companies and investments are rewarded or penalized instantly by a network of technocrats and money managers who move $2 trillion dollars a day seeking the highest return on capital. The Internet, greed, global communications, and high-speed transportation are all making businesses move faster than efore. The second time frame is culture. It moves more slowly. Cultural revolutions are resisted by deeper, historical beliefs. The first institution to blossom under perestroika was the Russian Orthodox Church. I walked into a church near Boris Pasternak's dacha in 1989 and heard priests and babushkas reciting the litany with perfect recall as if 72 years of repression had never happened. Culture provides the slow template of change within which family, community, and religion prosper. Culture provides identity and in a fast-changing world of displacement and rootlessness, becomes ever more important. In between culture and business is governance, faster than culture, slower than commerce. At the heart, the third and slowest chronology is earth, nature, the web of life. As ephemeral as it may seem, it is the slowest clock ticking, always there, responding to long, ancient evolutionary cycles that are beyond civilization. These three chronologies conflict.
As Stewart Brand points out, business unchecked becomes crime. Look at Russia. Look at Microsoft. Look at history. What makes life worthy and allows civilizations to endure are all the things that have "bad" payback under commercial rules: infrastructure, universities, temples, poetry, choirs, literature, language, museums, terraced fields, long marriages, line dancing, and art. Most everything we hold valuable is slow to develop, slow to learn, and slow to change. Commerce requires the governance of politics, art, culture, and nature, to slow it down, to make it heedful, to make it pay attention to people and place. It has never done this on its own. The extirpation of languages, cultures, forests, and fisheries is occurring worldwide in the name of speeding up business. Business itself is stressed out of its mind by rapid change. The rate of change is unnerving to all, even to those who are benefiting. To those who are not benefiting, it is devastating. What marched in the streets of Seattle? Slower time strode into the WTO. Ancient identity emerged. The cloaks of the forgotten paraded on the backs of our children. It is not the fast things that will prevail. In the end, that which is slow is powerful. What appeared in Seattle were the details, dramas, stories, peoples, and puppet creatures that had been ignored by the bankers, diplomats, and the rich. Corporate leaders are certain they have discovered a treasure of immeasurable value, a trove so great that surely we will all benefit. It is the treasure of unimpeded commerce flowing everywhere as fast as is possible. It is like romantic love. Bright, shining, perfect, and unassailable. But in Seattle, quick time met slow time. The turtles, farmers, and priests weren't invited and don't need to be because they are the shadow world that cannot be overlooked, that will tail and haunt the WTO, and all it successors, for as long as it exists.
They will be there even if they meet in totalitarian countries where free speech is criminalized. They will be there in dreams of delegates high in the Four Seasons Hotel. They will haunt the public relations flacks who solemnly insist that putting the genes of scorpions into our food is a good thing. What gathered around the Convention Center and hotels was everything the WTO left behind.
In the Inuit tradition, there is a story of a fisherman who trolls an inlet. When a heavy pull on the fisherman's line drags his kayak to sea, he thinks he has caught the "big one," a fish so large he can eat for weeks, a fish so fat that he will prosper ever after, a fish so amazing that the whole village will wonder at his prowess. As he imagines his fame and coming ease, what he reels up is Skeleton Woman, a woman flung from a cliff and buried long ago, a fish-eaten carcass resting at the bottom of the sea that is now entangled in his line. Skeleton Woman is so tangled in his fishing line that she is dragged behind the fisherman wherever he goes. She is pulled across the water, over the beach, and into his house where he collapses in terror. In the retelling of this story by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the fisherman has brought up a woman who represents life and death, a specter who reminds us that with every beginning there is an ending, for all that is taken, something must be given in return, that the earth is cyclical and requires respect. The fisherman, feeling pity for her, slowly disentangles her, straightens her bony carcass, and finally falls asleep.
During the night, Skeleton Woman scratches and crawls her way across the floor, drinks the tears of the dreaming fisherman, and grows anew her flesh and heart and body. This myth applies to business as much as it does to a fisherman. The apologists for the WTO want more-engineered food, sleeker planes, computers everywhere, golf courses that are preternaturally green. They see no limits; they know of no downside. But Life always comes with Death, with a tab, a reckoning. They are each other's consorts, inseparable and fast. These expansive dreams of the world's future wealth were met with perfect symmetry by Bill Gates, Jr. the co-chair of the Seattle host committee, the world's richest man. But Skeleton woman also showed up in Seattle, the uninvited guest, and the illusion of wealth, the imaginings of unfettered growth and expansion, became small and barren in the eyes of the world. Dancing, drumming, ululating, marching in black with a symbolic coffin for the world, she wove through the sulphurous rainy streets of The night. She couldn't be killed or destroyed, no matter how much gas or pepper spray or rubber bullets were used. She kept coming back and sitting in front of the police and raised her hands in the peace sign, and was kicked, and trod upon, and it didn't make any difference. Skeleton Woman told corporate delegates and rich nations that they could not have the world. It is not for sale. The illusions of world domination have to die, as do all illusions. Skeleton Woman was there to say that if business is going to trade with the world, it has to recognize and honor the world, her life and her people.
Skeleton Woman was telling the WTO that it has to grow up and be brave enough to listen, strong enough to yield, courageous enough to give. Skeleton Woman has been brought up from the depths. She has regained her eyes, voice and spirit. She is about in the world and her dreams are different. She imagines a world where children do not live on streets; she believes that the right to self-sufficiency is a human right; she imagines a world where the means to kill people is not a business but a crime, where families do not starve, where fathers can work, where children are never sold, where women cannot be impoverished because they are mothers and not whores. She cannot see in any dream a time where a man holds a patent to a living seed, or animals are factories, or people are enslaved to money, or water belongs to a stockholder. Hers are deep dreams from slow time. She is patient. She will not be quiet or flung to sea anytime soon.
Paul Hawken, Sausalito, January 6, 2000
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Michelle Miller Pesticide Use and Risk Reduction Project Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems University of Wisconsin - Madison
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