The Dictionary of Human Geography (85 page)

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global commons
This concept emerges from the traditional commons used by a local community (see common property regimes), but also includes elements of free market environmentaLism (Rose, 1999a). The no tion of ?commons? is expanded to the global scaLe to address concerns about the environ mental destruction of the oceans, atmos phere, forests, Antarctica and biodiversity caused primarily by open access beyond the jurisdiction of nation states. In essence, the concept seeks to make modern humans, like traditional villagers, responsible for the commons so that it does not deteriorate due to neglect or exploitation. The concept has been applied to the oceans to prevent over fishing, to Antarctica and to outer space, which recognize these locations as the ?com mon heritage of (hu)mankind (CHM)? (in Whatmore, 2002a, p. 104). Since the emer gence of issues such as ozone depletion and global warming (see gLobaL warming), the concept is also applicable to the atmosphere. Attempts have been made to construct the world?s biodiversity, including gene pools, as global commons. This can be understood as an attempt to preserve original nature against the encLosures that enable property rights to be exercised, but with genetic manipulation it raises questions about the distinctions between so called ?gifts of nature? and social artefacts derived from nature. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The global commons idea is used to avoid the problems of open access, and to stop the privatization of the world?s environment (Buck, 1998; Goldman, 1998). There are important questions about who ?owns? the en vironment, and who should ?own? the environ ment. For example, is the Amazon rainforest the property of indigenous communities, the state of Mato Grosso or the country of Brazil, to be logged for economic benefits if so de sired? Alternatively, is the Amazon rainforest the ?green lungs? of the Earth in other words, part of the global commons? The concept of the global commons is appealing in that it can avoid the dangers of open access and private ownership, but it also potentially represents a new form of conquest where indigenous peoples? rights to self determination and their ability to survive are made subservient to what are seen as the environmental agendas of affluent Western countries. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The concept of a ?global commons? requires international agreements to be enacted in na tional legislation. Whatmore (2002a, p. 107) questions the global commons approach in relation to genetic material, and notes that legal arrangements for the proposed global commons, which unravelled, must be under stood as emerging from ?amidst, rather than ??outside??, the spatial practices of national sovereignty and private property?. The neces sity and the ability to include air, water and other environmental considerations within a form of property rights is contentious. Rose (1999a, p. 50) questions the necessity of a ?global commons? approach, when many of the so called global problems ?have com ponents that are much more localized?. She challenges Garrett Hardin?s largest issue for the global commons that is, population growth (see population geography) and suggests that it is the impacts of population growth (specific pressures on specific re sources) that should be managed at a local level. pm (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Global Positioning Systems (GPS)
The (NEW PARAGRAPH) most widely known Global Positioning System (GPS) consists of 24 satellites, orbiting the Earth twice daily at a height of 200 km, used to find locations and to geocode data (see geocoding). It was developed by the US Department of Defense and is managed by the US Air Force. A similar system, GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System), is operated by the Russian Federation. The European Union and Space Agency are devel oping Galileo, to be deployed in 2010 as a ser vice independent of, but interoperable with (see interoperability), both GPS and GLONASS. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The basic idea of a space borne positioning service is that at least four of the system?s satellites will be above the local horizon at any given time or location on the Earth?s sur face. The GPS receiver identifies a signal from those satellites, which contains information about each satellite?s orbital position and the time of the signal?s transmission. From these data and by trilateration (triangulation), the coordinate location and the elevation of the receiver can be calculated. In practice, built structures and vegetation canopies may obscure the line of sight between GPS receivers and satellites, reducing the accuracy of the measured location. Three satellites need to be visible to calculate location; four if elevation is also required (Clarke, 2003; Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) GPS readings typically are accurate to about 5 25 m: horizontal accuracy is generally greater than vertical accuracy. A problem is the distortion of the satellite?s signal as it passes through the atmosphere. The effects of this can be measured at fixed receivers where the loca tions given by the GPS are compared against their known positions, communicating any correction to calibrate GPS receivers nearby (a process known as differential GPS). An extension to this approach is to upload the information back to satellites for automatic correction (a Wide Area Augmentation System). However, no positioning service is absolute: it depends on the datum (model of the Earth?s shape) that is used. For GPS, this is the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84). Further errors will arise as this is converted to a local datum or coordinate system (notably when the three dimensional model is projected on to a two dimensional grid). (NEW PARAGRAPH) GPS is popular for in car ?satellite naviga tion? and likely to be integrated more fully with portable communication and computing tech nologies such as mobile telephones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), further fuelling the growth of location based services, includ ing ?Where am I?? or ?Where?s my nearest . . . ?? queries. GPS can enable personal navi gation and discovery, and have clear social benefits (in search and rescue and emergency management, for example). However, because people might be tracked and located, so GPS (NEW PARAGRAPH) (together with closed circuit television, radio frequency ID chips, biometric ID cards and high resolution remote sensing imagery tech nologies) is sometimes given as an example of geosurveillance, emotively described by Dobson and Fisher (2003) as threatening geoslavery the erosion of privacy, permitting governments or other organizations the ability to locate where ?their? people are at any time of day and to monitor (or control) their time space geographies (cf. surveillance). rh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Brimicombe (2006); Monmonier (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
global warming
Global warming is the in crease in global temperature resulting from human activities that ?enhance? (exacerbate) the so called natural ?greenhouse effect?. The term ?climate change? (see climate) is used increasingly, because although the global im pact is warming, impacts vary throughout the world. Human induced climate change is seen by many environmentalists as the most serious environmental problem, because it ex acerbates other environmental issues. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Greenhouse gases are mostly natural com pounds (water vapour, carbon dioxide, me thane and nitrous oxide) that allow the Earth?s atmosphere to trap heat released as longwave energy from the Earth?s surface. This process, called the greenhouse effect, means that the earth is 33›C warmer than expected given its distance from the sun. At an average temperature of 15›C, the Earth supports many lifeforms. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has provided scientific analyses of various greenhouse scenarios to inform the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and the Climate Change Convention in Kyoto in 1997 (O?Neill, Mackellar and Lutz, 2001). The Kyoto Protocol came into effect in February 2005, after ratification by 55 countries that were responsible for 55 per cent of emissions in (NEW PARAGRAPH) The largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the USA, and the largest emitter per capita, Australia, rejected ratification. Concerns about the Kyoto Protocol range from weak tar gets and an emphasis on creating trading sys tems (see environmental economics), to its exclusion of rapidly developing economies such as China and India. There are also issues of ?baseline inflation?. The choice of 1990 as a base year meant that pollution from redundant heavy industry in the former East Germany was included in the base figure. Under the Kyoto (NEW PARAGRAPH) Protocol, the Annex One (developed) countries agreed to an average reduction of 5.2 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from a base year of 1990 by 2008 12. Australia secured an 8 per cent increase in emissions, including foregone land clearing (Hamilton, 2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH) There have been natural cooling and heat ing periods throughout the Earth?s history, but the IPCC found that ?most of the warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities? (IPCC, 2001, p. 10). These include increased levels of carbon diox ide (coal burning, transport and clearing of forests), methane (burning natural gas, seep age from landfill sites, rice paddies and cattle) and nitrous oxide, mainly through agricultural activities (see Munasinghe and Swart, 2005). The impacts include rising sea levels and changes in the location, intensity and fre quency of cyclones, droughts and floods. The changes are yet to be fully understood, because of the lag time between emission and cumulative impacts. While initial predictions of global warming have been lowered, there is uncertainty about the significance of clouds, the operations of ocean currents and the threshold levels of ecosystems. What is certain is that emissions of carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases are increasing, that they have a long lifetime, and that the average temperature of the Earth is about 0.7›C warmer than 100 years ago. While these pro cesses are still occurring, lowering the initial predictions merely means that the impacts will be delayed by a few years. pm (NEW PARAGRAPH)
globalization
A big buzzword in political speech and a ubiquitous analytical category in academic debate, globalization operates today rather like modernization did in the mid twentieth century as the key term of a master discourse about the general state of the world. The most common political ver sion of the discourse depicts globalization as an unstoppable process of global integration, a supposedly inevitable process that while being driven by free market capitalism also necessitates all the free market reforms of neo liberalism. Here, for example, is Thomas Friedman (1999, pp. 7 8), a columnist of the New York Times who has made a name for himself by interpreting practically any event anywhere in the world through this same simple discourse. Globalization, he says, (NEW PARAGRAPH) involves the inexorable integration of (NEW PARAGRAPH) markets, nation states, and technologies to (NEW PARAGRAPH) a degree never witnessed before in a way (NEW PARAGRAPH) that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before. The driving idea behind globalization is free market capitalism the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There is both a historical irony and a logical paradox in this sort of argument. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The irony is that while Friedman and others hype the new ness of globalization to promote free market capitalism, they forget that in the middle of the nineteenth century global eco nomic integration was depicted in very similar ways as a prelude to advancing a defiantly anti capitalist Communist manifesto. In their famously lyrical account of the globalizing activities of the capitalist business class (the ?bourgeoisie?), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued thus that: (NEW PARAGRAPH) The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every coun try. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigen ous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, uni versal inter dependence of nations. (Marx and Engels, 1998 [1848], p. 38) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Marx and Engels saw these interdependencies forged by capitalist globalization as leading ul timately to a global revolution by the workers of the world. By transcending local loyalties, increasing competition and intensifying exploi tation, globalized capitalism would, they thought, create a globally united working class that would eventually revolt. This global revolution has still not happened, but the lo gical steps in the argument made by Marx and Engels were clear. By contrast, the contempor ary argument that globalization is inexorable and yet necessitates reform is paradoxical. Global integration cannot be inexorable exactly if politicians and pundits have to keep promoting neo liberal policies as the only way for it to function effectively. Nevertheless, this is precisely what they have been doing from the late 1970s onwards (see Harvey, 2005). ?There Is No Alternative? to free market policies, argued the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and, follow ing her lead, TINA touts the world over have endlessly repeated the mantra that globaliza tion is inevitable and that it necessitates neo liberal policy making (e.g. Bhagwati, 2004; Wolf, 2004; Friedman, 2005). In the context of this instrumental use of globalization in creating a taken for granted worLd for policy makers, there have been four main academic responses. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first and most sceptical scholarly approach to globalization has been to argue that it is nothing but hype. Hirst and Thompson (1996) have suggested in this way that globalization is a myth, and that the pic ture of integration proceeding farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before is empir ically unsound. Against the claim that global ization is new, they highlight how significant forms of globe spanning economic integration existed in the first decades of the twentieth century as a result of imperialism and the other nineteenth century economic develop ments noted by Marx and Engels. Against the claim that corporations have become state less engines of border crossing enterprise, they show how even large transnational corpor ations remain shaped by national supports and norms. And against the TINA tout pro motion of free market fundamentalism, they argue that policies that are not neo liberal can still provide successful models of national de velopment. However, in attempting to counter the hype, Hirst and Thompson miss many of the ways in which new networks have expanded and deepened global interdepend ency from the 1970s onwards. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Charting the development of global net works over time has in turn been the basis of the second main academic approach to glob alization. Perhaps the most exhaustive examin ation available defines globalization thus in terms of the extension, acceleration and in tensification of consequential worldwide inter connections (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, 1999). The four authors argue that if globalization is conceptualized as ?the widen ing, deepening and speeding up of global inter connectedness? (p. 14), it is also possible to pick it apart as ?a process which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact generating transcontinental or inter regional flows and networks of activity, inter action and the exercise of power? (p. 16). The precision of this approach is useful insofar as it provides clear parameters for assessing just how far global integration dynamics have cre ated globally shared forms of common fate. They themselves also provide tremendous amounts of empirical data showing the chan ging extensity, intensity, velocity and impact of different sorts of space spanning networks over time. However, their approach has two limita tions. First, it obscures the ways in which global interconnections can also create deeply diver gent global fates, or what critics of cosmopoL itanism and other idealistic accounts of transnationalism describe as discrepant cos mopolitanisms (Robbins, 1998). These discrep ant communities are all also underpinned by global interconnections, but in ways that create vastly varied fates ranging from the soft cosmopolitanism of wealthy migrants and transnational capitalists (Sklair, 2001; Calhoun, 2003; Mitchell, 2003), to the carceral cosmo politanism of those imprisoned in global spaces of exception (see exception, spaces of) (Gregory, 2004b; Sparke, 2006), to the critical cosmopolitanism of grassroots globa lization activists and associated anti neoliberal NGO networks (Routledge, 2003; Sparke, Brown, Corva et al., 2005). Part of the reason why Held and co authors tend to downplay such discrepancies between global networks may in turn be traced to a second limitation with many network centric ac counts; namely, their relative inattention to the uneven deveLopment of spatial organiza tion itself. This weakness is often amplified in assessments of globalization that stress what the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984) once called time space distanciation; that is, the establishment of space spanning relations of regulation, trust and interaction between people at a distance. Commentators from across the political spectrum, Giddens himself amongst them, have thus unfortunately tended to describe globalization as some sort of end to geography in which time space distanciation has reached its final fulfilment in the creation of a smooth, borderless, post national, supra territorial global landscape or, what Thomas Friedman has recently described as a ?flat? world (see, e.g., Giddens, 1995; Ohmae, 1995; Appadurai, 1996; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Scholte, 2000; Friedman, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In response to all the pre emptive epitaphs to geography, a third more geographically sensi tive approach to globalization highlights how capitalism has created new forms of uneven development involving both deterritorializa tion and reterritorialization. David Harvey (1989b, 2006b) has argued thus that while cap italists shrink distance and create time space compression because of their deterri torializing efforts to reduce the frictions of distance, they also episodically require a reterritorializing spatial fix in which fixed cap itaL investments are made and through which crises of over accumuLation can be tempor arily resolved (see also Harvey, 1999 [1982]). This argument has also led him to interpret the recent resurgence of american empire in terms of the tensions between place transcending and place remaking dynamics on a global scale (Harvey, 2004b). Drawing further attention to the changing shape of American global place making in particular, many other academics have highlighted how flat world visions of globalization obscure the asymmetries and attendant geopoLitics of to day?s US centric global order, including the exceptional privileges reserved by the USA within global governance institutions such as the internationaL monetary fund and the World Bank (Anderson, 2002b; Gowan, 2003; Peet, 2003; Agnew, 2004; Pieterse, 2004; Smith, 2004; Sparke, 2005). In a different way, research on the governance of international borders has shown how the bor der softening emphasis in flat world business discourse also obscures diverse forms of con temporary border hardening (Nevins, 2002; Newstead, Reid and Sparke, 2003; Sparke, Sidaway, Bunnell and Grundy Warr, 2004; Coleman, 2005; Sparke, 2006). Meanwhile, the ongoing need to track how business prac tices are themselves constantly reorganizing the geography of commodity chains has led yet other scholars to chart the unevenness of the global economic map of production, trade, dis tribution and consumption (e.g. Dicken, 2003: see also Mittelman, 2000). And it is this uneven and constantly shifting map that has in turn inspired interest in glocalization as way of ex ploring reciprocal LocaL gLobaL reLations that avoids end state end of geography ideas about global flattening (Swyngedouw, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) With a related repudiation of what she calls an ?impact model? of globalization, the geog rapher Gill Hart?s recent work also illustrates a fourth form of academic response to globaliza tion focused on how its hegemony as a neo liberal discourse both works and breaks down in practice (Hart, 2004). Hart argues that this hegemony serves amongst other things to make the forced privatization of public goods and spaces seem natural, and in response she suggests that ethnographies of the ties between different places and people can help denaturalize such dispossession (Hart, 2006: see also Tsing, 2004). Such counter hegemonic critiques of neo liberal globalization discourse have now developed a diverse set of compliementary strategies for debunking TINA tout inevitability ideology. Such strategies range from efforts to chart the emergence and marketing of globalization dis course as a form of ?Globaloney? or globalist common sense (Steger, 2005; Veseth, 2005), to examinations of how it has been re engi neered and spread internationally by ?World Bank Literature? (Kumar, 2003), global busi ness schooling (Roberts, 2004; Olds and Thrift, 2005) and business funded think tanks (Peck, 2001b, 2004), to studies of its uneven implementation in the actual organiza tion of business practices themselves (Dicken, 2003; Ho, 2005), to research into its impact as a form of geo economics that shapes both na tional and transnational statecraft (Smith, 2002; Roberts et al., 2003; Sparke and Lawson, 2003; Hay, 2004; Jones and Jones, 2004; Gil bert, 2005), to feminist investigations of the masculinism of arguments about the inevit ability of global capitalist penetration (Gibson Graham, 1996; Massey, 2005). Such examin ations of the performance of globalization discourse can bring it down to size and allow academics and their audiences to see it ?stutter? (Larner and Walters, 2005, p. 20), but, just as importantly, they also clear the way for investigations of the actual power geometries of globalization in the lived worlds beyond the buzzword and its flat world imaginative geography (see also geog raphical imaginary). ms (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) El Fisgon (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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