Global Change and Society
Global change in a societal context encompasses social, cultural, technological, political, economic and legal change. Terms closely related to global change and society are globalization and global integration. Globalization began with long-distance trade and urbanism. The first record of long distance trading routes is in the third millennium BC. Sumarians in Mesopotamia traded with settlers in the Indus Valley, in modern-day India.
Since 1750, but more significantly, since the 1950s, global integration has accelerated. This era has witnessed incredible global changes in communications, transportation, and computer technology. Ideas, cultures, people, goods, services and money move around the planet with ease. This new global interconnectedness and free flow of information has radically altered notions of other cultures, conflicts, religions and taboos. Now, social movements can and do form at a planetary scale.
Evidence, if more were needed, of the link between social and environmental global change came with the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. The crisis pushed the planet’s main economic powerhouses, the United States, Europe and much of Asia into recession. According to the Global Carbon Project, global atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide fell from an annual growth rate of around 3.4% between 2000 and 2008, to a growth rate of about 2% in 2008.
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Famous quotes containing the words global, change and/or society:
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)