Environmental Justice and Globalization

Globalization can be loosely defined as trade networks between disparate geographic regions, leading to the exchange of goods, people, and ideas. Improved technology and transportation tools, industrialization, and advancements in market economies have created a world in which globalization has become inevitable. As Held & McGrew (2003) point out, the evolution of physical, normative, and symbolic infrastructure has facilitated globalization since the industrial age, giving rise to banking systems, normative trade policies including tariffs, and the use of English as a global language (p. 3).

Globalization has entered public discourse relatively recently, and is "a relatively new idea in the social sciences," (Sklair, 1999, p. 1) but globalization has been a part of human civilization for over a thousand years, as the Silk Road and other long distance trade routes have created links between cultures that have been transformative as well as irreversible. Defining globalization can be tricky, as there are many different models of globalization and perceptions of it, depending on the cultural and historical conditions in which its systems take place.

Globalization also does not affect all people in all societies equally; the ages of colonization and imperialism prove that globalization can easily become systems of exploitation based on abuse of power rather than on mutual benefit.

The postmodern models of globalization may be shifting gradually toward more egalitarian forms of trade, but there are still important issues that need to be taken into account including the way globalization has the potential to erode languages and cultures of less powerful entities, or the way globalization is linked to environmental exploitation as well as labor exploitation. Whether globalization is focused solely on trade and economic exchange or on other factors like cultural imperialism and appropriation also impact the definitions of the term globalization.

Globalization affects the creation and identification of social issues and social problems because of the way worldviews and cognitive schemas are changed as a result of the process of exchange. Social science has moved beyond a simplistic understanding of globalization that focuses only on political and economic issues to observe and measure the effect of globalization on discourse and especially on how social issues or problems are conceptualized and addressed.

For example, globalization discourse has an impact on social norms and moral relativism, allowing for the emergence of universal human rights. Post 1: Gurjinder Grewal Freedom in cross-border trade is a significant but not sole part of the definition of globalization. There is no absolutely unfettered trade; trade is constrained by any number of factors from tariffs to supply and demand. Globalization is more about the potential for trade to occur, but that trade is not just material in nature and can be an exchange of ideas and culture too.

When "free trade" agreements like NAFTA are in place, they may be useful for cross-border trade on a large scale but end up having little to no effect on the movement of ordinary citizens. For example, NAFTA never allowed Canadians, Mexicans, and Americans to freely move and find work between the party nations as within the European Union.

Globalization almost inevitably leads to clashes between those who possess political and economic power to make trade agreements, and those who are most affected by those agreements like the indigenous people or ordinary citizens who have no real power in matters like oil pipelines. Post 2: Kirstin Hogerheide Defining globalization as the expansion of social systems is a clever way of putting it, because globalization is about so much more than just economic exchange of goods and services.

Even if economics is the underpinning of globalization, the effects are far broader than just mutual trade. The Ghemawat Ted Talk also shows how perceptions of globalization are often based on misconceptions rather than on reality, but that those perceptions can impact public opinion and therefore impact the legal constraints on globalization. It will be interesting to see how globalization legislation evolves from Trump's conflicted globalization discourse in which "America first" seems to clash with the president's own business interests.

Global Issue Journal 1 For this research project, I would like to focus on the issues related to the pipelines, not just Dakota Access but others that raise similar concerns. The concerns that can be addressed include the rights of indigenous people and disempowered citizens, when those rights can be too easily trampled upon by people in positions of power. Other concerns of course relate to environmental justice and environmental racism, which are linked to pipeline cases. The ongoing need for energy cannot be.