The new scale necessitated creative work for multiplying
available resources, for looking at needs and availabilities
from a new perspective. Those who see globality in the Japanese
sushi restaurant in Provence or in the Midwest, in the McDonalds
in Moscow or Beijing, in multinational corporations, in foreign
investments mushrooming all over, miss the real significance of
the term. Globality applies to the understanding that we share
in resources and creative means of multiplying them independent
of boundaries (of language, culture, nations, alliances, etc.),
as well as in high efficiency processing equipment. This
understanding is not only sublime, it has its ugly side. The
world would even go to war (and has, again and again) to secure
access to critical resources or to keep markets open. But it is
not the ugly side that defines the effective pragmatics. Nor
does it define the circumstances of our continuous
self-definition in this world of a new dynamics of survival
needs and expectations above and beyond such needs.
Where literacy no longer adequately supports creative work based
on higher levels of efficiency, it is replaced by languages
designed and adapted to mediation, or to work destined to
compensate for an exhausted resource, or by machines
incorporating our literacy and the literacies of higher
efficiency. Hunting and fishing remain as mere sport, and
foraging declined to the level at which people in a country
like the USA no longer know that in the woods there are
mushrooms, berries, and nuts that can be used as food.
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