The German ecological philosopher Wolfgang Sachs argues in his book The Development Dictionary that the only thing worse than the failure of this massive global development experiment would be its success. For even at its optimum performance level, the long-term benefits will go to only a tiny minority of people who sit at the hub of the process and to a slightly larger minority that can retain an economic connection to it, while the rest of humanity is left landless and homeless, groping for fewer jobs, living in violent societies on a ravaged planet. Given the above, one would expect massive efforts by media and educational institutions to explore all the dimensions of this subject. Yet when the mass media report on some aspect of globalization, rarely does the story express the connections between the specific crisis it describes and the root causes in the globalization process itself. We read too of ozone-layer depletion, the pollution of the oceans and the wars over resources such as oil and, perhaps soon, water.
Obfuscation is the net result.
I personally have had some harsh experience of this obfuscation. While working with Public Media Center in the run-up to the vote on GATT, my colleagues and I were preparing educational ads about GATT's environmental consequences, particularly the way it can challenge existing major environmental laws, such as recently happened to the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Clean Air Act. We collaborated on the project with fifteen environmental groups who signed the ad, among them the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, Friends of the Earth, Earth Island Institute and the Rainforest Action Network. The groups felt the campaign was important precisely because the media had carried so few stories about environmental opposition to GATT, and did not take it seriously. Public Media Center protested loudly, and finally Newsweek ran a small corrective notice.