Borderless Society The Impact of a Borderless Society

Because of technology and the way in which society has evolved, people currently live in a world where there are virtually no geographic boundaries (Time, 2006). Goods and services can be transmitted anywhere, and people from all over the world can talk to one another via the internet and cell phones quickly and easily in real time. Even the food that is consumed by most people comes from places far away from them (Kloppenburg, et al., 1996). They have fresh fruit in cold weather areas of the United States in December, for example, and that fruit has to come from somewhere else. It is not possible to grow peaches in South Dakota in January, so there is no way that fruit is local. It had to be grown somewhere warm, picked, packed up, and shipped elsewhere. While there is nothing actually wrong with that per se, it does have impacts on the economy and the planet. These are all important to consider, and they will be addressed here. There are many requirements to get something from point A to point B, but the person who picks up an apple in Sioux Falls, or Minneapolis, or New York in December does not generally think much about where that apple came from and the journey it undertook to get there.

The global market comes with economic and ecological impacts that are both positive and negative, as there are pros and cons to everything in life. When purchasing goods for consumption, there are questions should be asked, such as:

How much fuel was spent transporting these products across the ocean?

Were any pesticides used?

If so, was it done in a sustainable fashion?

Were forests cleared to make room for grazing herds or larger agricultural fields?

These are the kinds of questions a person should be asking.

For this paper, two meals will be addressed: breakfast and lunch. The components of the meals will be listed, and where those components came from will be addressed. Additionally, the pros and cons of the...

The eggs came from a local farm. The steak was from Colorado. The bread for the toast came from a bakery in Philadelphia, and the milk came from Wisconsin. All of those components were local to the U.S. And the Midwest area, but they were all (with the exception of the eggs) processed somewhere else and trucked to the location where they were sold and consumed. The eggs were purchased directly from the farmer, but everything else came from the local chain grocery store.
Lunch: This meal consisted of fish, a pre-packaged salad, and some cheese and crackers. According to the packaging, the fish came from Argentina, the salad was packed in Tennessee, and the cheese was from France. The crackers were packaged in California. All of the products were purchased at the local chain grocery store, in the same trip where the breakfast items were purchased.

In order for everything to get to the table where they were eaten, they all had to arrive at the store by truck. The eggs would be the exception, since they were purchased at the farm where they were laid and collected, by the person who was going to consume them. There was no store, and no middleman. The items that came from other countries had to also travel by plane or ship to arrive in the United States, and from a distribution point where they were offloaded they had to travel by truck. There may or may not have been at least one storage or warehousing facility in that chain, as well. Without learning about and researching each distributor and company thoroughly, it is impossible to tell.

As with anything, there are both pros and cons to the globalization of the market (Kloppenburg, et al., 1996; Time, 2006). Two large benefits would be the availability of items that one could not previous get and the ability of companies to expand and grow because they can market to other places. The short-term impacts of those changes…