A Day to Honor Dr. King, Break Down Barriers...and be Green
As we honor the message of Dr. King, we should take the opportunity to break down barriers by making the world a little closer through trade. While the environmental community encourages us to buy from others in our own community, those whose culture and experiences are most like ours, we want to encourage you to enjoy the work, skill and craftsmanship of those in cultures unlike ours.
As residents of one of the most trade-dependent states in the country, we should know that we are stronger when we all share in the fruits of our best ideas and work, ignoring the barriers and borders that seem to separate us. Sadly, it is a lesson that needs to be constantly learned.
Buying products from other cultures not only breaks down the cultural barriers that separate us, but is often the best for the environment. Studies show again and again than growing food and creating products where it is the most efficient, and then voluntarily trading, is the best use of energy and resources. Transportation represents a small portion of energy used in food production, meaning that efforts to limit purchases to a narrow radius of people, ignores most of the resource use.
We should take today (and, indeed, every day), to remind ourselves that we must move beyond artificial barriers that seek to separate local from outsider. It is good for the planet and for people everywhere.
Comments
Roll over Dr. King here comes the dollar.
"...we want to encourage you to enjoy the work, skill and craftsmanship of those in cultures unlike ours." -- Because we have this huge trade deficit with a country called China that is pouring out "quality" products. Yeah, I'm almost certain this is what Dr. King was getting to just before he was murdered. I hear he was reworking his "I have a dream" speech to, I have a dollar....It's a long stretch you are making by attempting to connect our greatest civil rights leader, fighting to improve impoverished people's lives though local community building with global economics. I do applaud you for the audacity to even attempt it.
"Buying products from other cultures...breaks down the cultural barriers..." Please explain how buying a plastic toy that was once made in the USA and is now made in China is breaking down cultural barriers?
Poverty or Prosperity
During the last two decades where the free market has been on the rise, the percentage of people in poverty worldwide has been cut in half. It would be not only audacious but inhuman to deny that reality. I will let you explain to the millions who have escaped poverty that they should have done it though "community building" instead of the free market.
You may continue to see the world as us vs. them and focus on the "trade deficit" that pits country vs. country instead of welcoming the rising prosperity of people across the world that is the product of free trade. But nobody would confuse that divisive mindset for the mindset of Dr. King, who wanted all to live better lives, seeing what connects us rather than dividing us along arbitrary lines.
The irony is that the barriers you advocate in the name of "community" are actually built on greed, designed entirely with the idea of grabbing every dollar for yourself. It is why Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus, the creator of microloans for the poor, says "Protectionism is built up in each nation in the name of the poor, but its real beneficiaries are the rich and clever people who know how to manipulate the system. By contrast, the poor have a better chance in a bigger open market. Everyone would benefit from the free flow of commodities, finances and people."
Paul Krugman adds his voice, saying in his book Pop Internationalism "If the West throws up barriers to imports out of a misguided belief that they will protect Western living standards, the effect could be to destroy the most promising aspect of today's world economy: the beginning of widespread economic development, of hopes for a decent living standard for hundreds of millions, even billions, of human beings. Economic growth in the Third World is an opportunity, not a threat."
What do you have to offer that justifies risking the poverty of so many who have escaped that trap other than fear and division?
I choose Prosperity (with you)
Mr Meyers,
I really appreciate you willingness to want to see a civil rights issue here with global poverty. It just wasn't at all clear when you wrote you original post. So, I appeal to your sensitivity to the well being of the unfortunate when I ask you to understand that I thought it as an insulting use of Dr. King's work supporting people who were so obviously being discriminated against as an argument for just a global economy.
Even though the World Bank disagrees with you on the reduction of world wide poverty (http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats) and Muhammad Yunus has a different take,
"Globalisation, an offshoot of the capitalist economic system, did unleash the forces of trade, growth and poverty reduction across the globe for a long period. But now it seems the day of reckoning is upon us...what is now certain is that far too many people around the globe are afflicted with the negative consequences of the destructive process inherent in capitalism and addressing their call for resuscitation has become a global imperative,"
it is clear that a global economy is working for the world's poor. Especially with food, "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/22/AR2009112201478.html?sub=AR"
Even Paul Krugman sees that by targeting specific world regions to solely produce certain food resources isn't vulnerable, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=1
For me to begin to even justify my position is simply wrong. It seems I can not offer a solution to save the world's hungry (all 935 million) because such an effective solution is already forming and in strong support by your sources.