Globals, Locals, and Mobals

Abstract

Earth may be a planet of shrinking functional distances, but it remains a world of staggering situational differences. From the uneven distribution of natural resources to the unequal availability of opportunity, place remains a powerful arbitrator. Many hundreds of millions of farmers in river basins of Asia and Africa live their lives much as their distant ancestors did, still remote from the forces of globalization, children as well as adults still at high personal risk and great material disadvantage. Tens of millions of habitants of isolated mountain valleys from the Andes to the Balkans and from the Caucasus to Kashmir are as bound to their isolated abodes as their forebears were. Of the seven billion current passengers on Cruiseship Earth, the overwhelming majority (the myth of mass migration notwithstanding) will die very near the cabin in which they were born. In their lifetimes, this vast majority will have worn the garb, spoken the language, professed the faith, shared the health conditions, absorbed the education, acquired the attitudes, and inherited the legacy that constitutes the power of place: the accumulated geography whose formative imprint still dominates the planet. The regional impress of poverty continues to trap countless millions who are and will be born into it and who, globalization notwithstanding, cannot escape it. The “wealth gap” between the fortunate and the less fortunate, still largely a matter of chance and destiny, evinces a widening range resulting from the perpetuation of privilege and power in the so-called global “core” and its international tentacles. Those disparities, represented at all levels of scale, will entail increasing risk in a world of rising anger and weapons of growing destructive efficiency. At the same time, the notion that the world, if not “flat,” is flattening under the impress of globalization is gaining traction. As noted in the preface, the idea that diversities of place continue to play a key role in shaping humanity’s variegated mosaic tends to be dismissed by globalizers who see an increasingly homogenized and borderless world. “Flatness” is becoming an assumption, not merely a prospect, as implied by the titles of numerous books and articles of recent vintage (Fung et al., 2008).