At the same time, our social safety nets are being stretched and torn. Logging companies are ravaging the last of our old-growth forests. Tobacco companies are cynically trying to buy their way out of responsibility for their deadly product. The ozone hole is growing, our garbage dumps are overflowing, our nuclear power plants are leaking and toxic chemicals have been found in mothers' milk. We're experiencing the results of a global economic restructuring based on the premise that the world is no longer made up of cities or even countries, but a single world order dominated by transnational corporations and mass consumerism.
Governments seem incapable of responding.
Worse than that, their agendas appear to be set by corporations and financial institutions. We have evolved a representative democracy in which the elite have centralized power for their own benefit. This situation has crept up on us, and it's only recently that most people have begun to notice. In order to understand the roots of this complicated problem, I've begun to examine our institutions and how they work. We learn that democracy involves citizens influencing public policy, rather than authoring it.