Our current market-driven system has seen an
increasing number of child labor sweatshops in Asia
making high-end athletic shoes for the rest of the
world. We see gold mining in Brazil has resulted in
poisoning mercury in the ancestral territories of the
Yanomami tribe in the Amazon. U.S. transnational
corporations manufacturing DDT, a chemical banned
for domestic use, but distributed profitably in Central
and West Africa. My contention is that the
globalization of a capitalistic system, with the resulting
disregard for nature’s life support systems, the
phenomenal cultural diversity across the planet, and
the local community values that are the real stuff of our
lives, is clearly not a paragon of beauty, excellence, or
perfection.