Tap dance locally, globally

http://www.colostate-pueblo.edu/today/live_viewStory.asp?documentID=922
“New life for old shoes.” Colorado State University-Pueblo.

I came across this article online about a new instance of Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program (begun 1993). Since we’d focused on Nike a lot, and are talking about resistance globally and locally to global giants like Nike, I wanted to see what this particular project was about. And here it is: people donate their shoes and Nike will recycle them “to make soccer fields, basketball courts, and playground surfaces around the world.”

Here’s the key passage that I wanted to focus on in terms of Esteva and Prakash: “Because of the amount of landfill waste prevented from the program, and the global effort put forth by Nike in donating the playing surfaces, Gonzales said he thinks the program satisfies the service project theme of ‘Think globally, act locally’”.

Esteva and Prakash would cringe reading this because they adamantly reject the bumper sticker slogan: “Think globally, act locally.” They would rather us think locally, because “Those who think locally do not twist the humble satisfaction of belonging to the cosmos into the arrogance of pretending to know what is good for everyone and to attempt to control the world” (415). Yet, despite this nice idea, it seems as shaky to me as Nike’s professed help with the Reuse-A-Shoe program.

First of all, they bring up Native Americans’ conception of territory - but to what end? To impose THAT view back on those whose culture is based on ownership of territory? If part of their point is that no is right when making choices for others, then surely trying to un-territorize the entire world would be just as problematic as anything going on right now. Many Americans won’t give up their private healthcare much less their physical private properties. And who says who is wrong or right?

Esteva and Prakash don’t like the notion of imposing idealistically normative ways of doing things to various people around the globe. And that’s awesome. But this piece of rhetoric isn’t doing justice to their own hopes. I wanted to yell “Who are they kidding?” sometimes: it can’t be easy “Saying no to Wal-Mart” when you can’t afford anything else and “saying no to mindless jobs” when you are unemployed. I think they’ve gotten carried away on what would be nice versus what is feasible. More specifically, they do not offer explicit ways to make changes towards the desired goal and seem to get as caught up in their speech as the bumper sticker people.

Their point seems to be that “what is needed is…people thinking and acting locally, while forging solidarity with other local forces that share this opposition to the ‘global thinking’ and ‘global forces’ threatening local spaces” (416). I am trying to figure out if they would agree with the idea that if everyone looks out for themselves locally rather than interfering globally then things would be better globally. That sounds suspiciously like how capitalism is supposed to work in the first place, which is “to blame” for much of globalization’s problems according to many. Their example of when people do need to work with “outsiders” – the Austrians banning nuclear plants but having foreign nuclear plants right outside their borders – makes we wonder how they overcome this very example without thinking globally. How are the Austrians going to get outside allies if those allies don’t have some investment themselves in banning nuclear plants. And then, what is that investment? Are they interefering in the local affairs of Austrains or do they have some menacing global-thinking plan to ban all nuclear plants everywhere? Is it really a bad thing to globally organize around something that does seem basic – like banning nuclear testing? People who are concerned about global issues are not necessarily as bad as they make it out: I think environmentalists especially realize that it is one world that we live in so we have a right to have everyone’s voices heard on what they think is best. Countries, if not people, cannot remain isolated, so how can they restrict themselves to thinking locally? I guess I think this article was too busy playing with words to accomplish anything especially useful. Thinking and acting locally while sometimes forming outside allies seems so compartmentalized. I’m not convinced and would need to hear more from them with concrete examples.