This article just FASCINATES me...
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150209-the-network-that-runs-the-world
I've been interested for a long time in how subsidized transportation costs - particularly those associated with moving goods to market - affects trade, cultures, and the environment. While on one hand, we have created an efficient network of moving commodities across vast distances, on the other hand we have significantly altered the shape of the world we live in. And this may not be a good thing.
Consider trade. In the days of the silk road, trade took place across vast distances but also across a very long time frame. Goods were valuable because of the risks involved - bandits, spoilage, and other losses led to only a very select number of things that could be sent across the trade routes. This also led to the development of currency/cash as a way to transport wealth from one place to another. As sea routes expanded, the silk road became less important, but the types of things that could be put on the market was still relatively limited. These limitations have all but disappeared. The article points out that one of the few tasks still relegated to the human side of the crew involves checking "reefers" - refrigerated containers that have very perishable products requiring expensive climate controls. This astounds me, but it's how we get fresh strawberries in February in Utah.
Next, think about the impact that this kind of trade has on cultures around the world. From the factory towns that supply the ships, to the port towns where they dock, to the warehouse-like stores where the goods are actually sold... The entire world has been affected by the advent of cheap, efficient transportation of goods. It used to be that places specialized in products because they were close to the raw materials necessary to produce them - cotton mills were close to the farms, iron smelting was close to ore/coal, etc. Now we can shift goods and raw materials with such relative ease that there's no point in keeping things in the hinterland. In fact, the most valuable resource is the human workforce, so centers of manufacturing have moved in to ever denser urban areas to take advantage of the people. And it has had an incredible impact on the way we live and interact with one another, to the point that we're all becoming a kind of homogeneous mix of consumers who live nearly the same way (with the obvious differences between wealthy, middle-class, and poor).
Finally, there's the environmental impact. The article does pretty well describing what it's like in these port towns. I would just like to add that I recently watched a program where a couple of motorcyclists went from Scotland to South Africa. Across Africa, in what would otherwise be considered relatively remote areas, there were images of plastic bags and bottles strewn across roadside ditches. It was absolutely appalling. This relates to the first two points exactly - plastic, in particular light-weight plastic bags and bottles make for easy transportation of goods to the end consumer. The end consumer is not viewed as a human being, per se, but as a source of cash and as a part of the market, devaluing not only the person but the place where they live. The plastic does not respond to the local culture. It just is. Forever.
We don't pay the true price of these things. The fuel is cheap. The transport is efficient and pervasive. And it is having a deleterious impact on our world. We are burning (literally) our children's and grandchildren's futures, eliminating safe environments and rich cultures from the world in our insatiable appetite for new, bigger, and better. I don't think they will thank us for that.
Turns out, Marx was right:
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
...
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 connexions everywhere.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150209-the-network-that-runs-the-world
I've been interested for a long time in how subsidized transportation costs - particularly those associated with moving goods to market - affects trade, cultures, and the environment. While on one hand, we have created an efficient network of moving commodities across vast distances, on the other hand we have significantly altered the shape of the world we live in. And this may not be a good thing.
Consider trade. In the days of the silk road, trade took place across vast distances but also across a very long time frame. Goods were valuable because of the risks involved - bandits, spoilage, and other losses led to only a very select number of things that could be sent across the trade routes. This also led to the development of currency/cash as a way to transport wealth from one place to another. As sea routes expanded, the silk road became less important, but the types of things that could be put on the market was still relatively limited. These limitations have all but disappeared. The article points out that one of the few tasks still relegated to the human side of the crew involves checking "reefers" - refrigerated containers that have very perishable products requiring expensive climate controls. This astounds me, but it's how we get fresh strawberries in February in Utah.
Next, think about the impact that this kind of trade has on cultures around the world. From the factory towns that supply the ships, to the port towns where they dock, to the warehouse-like stores where the goods are actually sold... The entire world has been affected by the advent of cheap, efficient transportation of goods. It used to be that places specialized in products because they were close to the raw materials necessary to produce them - cotton mills were close to the farms, iron smelting was close to ore/coal, etc. Now we can shift goods and raw materials with such relative ease that there's no point in keeping things in the hinterland. In fact, the most valuable resource is the human workforce, so centers of manufacturing have moved in to ever denser urban areas to take advantage of the people. And it has had an incredible impact on the way we live and interact with one another, to the point that we're all becoming a kind of homogeneous mix of consumers who live nearly the same way (with the obvious differences between wealthy, middle-class, and poor).
Finally, there's the environmental impact. The article does pretty well describing what it's like in these port towns. I would just like to add that I recently watched a program where a couple of motorcyclists went from Scotland to South Africa. Across Africa, in what would otherwise be considered relatively remote areas, there were images of plastic bags and bottles strewn across roadside ditches. It was absolutely appalling. This relates to the first two points exactly - plastic, in particular light-weight plastic bags and bottles make for easy transportation of goods to the end consumer. The end consumer is not viewed as a human being, per se, but as a source of cash and as a part of the market, devaluing not only the person but the place where they live. The plastic does not respond to the local culture. It just is. Forever.
We don't pay the true price of these things. The fuel is cheap. The transport is efficient and pervasive. And it is having a deleterious impact on our world. We are burning (literally) our children's and grandchildren's futures, eliminating safe environments and rich cultures from the world in our insatiable appetite for new, bigger, and better. I don't think they will thank us for that.
Turns out, Marx was right:
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
...
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 connexions everywhere.
Comments
Of course, there's not much to be done about it. But perhaps awareness can help avoid the proverbial slippery slope...
I agree with the loss of crafts/skills, it's terribly tragic. Fortunately, many of them are being preserved by concerned people. Not all, but many.