Where the Eco-localists Are Coming From
Trade makes many folks materially better off by enabling a local abundance of resources or skills to be shared across a wider area. However, increased trade often worsens economic inequality and depletes and pollutes the environment faster than would otherwise happen. Therefore, eco-localists see trade as a mixed benefit whose unintended negative impacts must be carefully managed.
Globalization of trade raises the stakes of both benefits and risks. On the risk side of the leger, taken to the extreme, it leads to a world in which everything is for sale, all resources are depleted, pollution is everywhere, labor is exploited to the maximum degree, and everything is owned by a tiny number of super-rich investors and entrepreneurs.
The scope of globalization that’s happened in the last few decades is unequaled in human history (the spread of the Roman Empire is one of several smaller-scale precursors). Corporations and banks delivered the technology and capital; trade agreements like NAFTA and trade partnerships like the E.U. contributed the legal framework; and fossil fuels provided abundant, concentrated, storable energy for manufacturing and transport. The result is an integrated global market in which a single product, such as a smartphone, may incorporate design elements from skilled workers in the U.S.; raw materials from 20 countries; and assembly by poorly paid workers in China, Vietnam, or India. The phone can then be sold in scores of nations. The intended benefit is that billions of people get to use a technology that, by its very nature, requires global supply chains, internationally shared technological expertise, and stable rules of economic cooperation and investment. The unintended side effects are that a few people become unimaginably rich while nature is poisoned and people’s mental, physical, and social health deteriorates.
Within the deteriorating circumstances of a world seemingly on the verge of environmental ruin and global conflict, eco-localist strategies are looking more and more sensible.
The winners of the globalization game include a growing global billionaire class and a fast-growing middle class in China, India, and other manufacturing hubs. Middle-class consumers around the world win by getting cheap goods. Corporations and investors reap a windfall.
However, society and nature are losers when globalization worsens inequality while speeding up depletion and pollution. Global economic inequality declined during some decades of the 20th century, but it did so mainly because of the Great Depression and two World Wars. Otherwise, the last century saw a relentlessly widening gap between rich and poor—a trend that has accelerated in the past two decades, not just in the U.S., but in China, India, and elsewhere. Indigenous cultures in less-industrialized nations are hardest hit, as globalization uproots people from traditional village life, thrusting them into cities and factories. Meanwhile, forests disappear, carbon accumulates in the atmosphere, wild creatures vanish, and floods and fires devastate more communities.
The United States, the country that invented consumerism, in part to deal with a glut of production, used to be the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. But, with cheaper labor available in Asia and the “productivity” gains from automation and other technologies, the U.S. has instead become the top global consumer, a center of global finance, the primary military superpower, and the trendsetting conductor of international rules of commerce. The share of U.S. jobs in manufacturing has declined by 35% since the 1970s. And that decline has created political and social problems including political polarization, which in turn is undermining democracy in the U.S. and other countries.
Eco-localists argue that globalization is authoritarian by nature: Increasingly, multinational corporations rule the world. Individuals and communities are powerless by comparison.
Eco-localists make the following recommendations to governments and communities:
- Incentivize cooperative, worker-owned businesses;
- Promote the meeting of human needs through non-market means—i.e., the sharing economy;
- Focus on the well-being of people and nature instead of simply aiming to grow GDP;
- Tax the rich and provide more economic security (including education and healthcare) for lower-income people;
- Re-localize production by regulating big corporations so that smaller, local producers and sellers can remain competitive; and
- Strengthen the rights of communities (including the rights of nature) and the fabric of democracy.
Where the Tariff Terrorists Are Coming From
The Trump tariffs are an unfolding story that changes daily. The goals of this astonishing set of new, constantly shifting trade policies are somewhat unclear, as statements by the president and other officials are sometimes contradictory. U.S. President Donald Trump himself has a longstanding fascination with tariffs, which he sees as coercive tools for achieving various international ends, not all of them economic.
Trump often laments the fact that America runs a trade deficit with many nations. In Trump’s mind, any trade deficit is a loss, and he wants America to win. Here is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, speaking on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, April 6:
We’ve got to start to protect ourselves... and we’ve got to stop having all the countries of the world ripping us off. We have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit, and the rest of the world has a surplus with us. They’re earning our money. They’re taking our money, and Donald Trump has seen this, and he’s going to stop it.
Still, trade rebalancing doesn’t seem to be Trump’s only aim. Tariffs could be used either as a weapon to extort concessions from other nations, or as a durable source of income for the government and a way to restructure trade over the long haul, favoring U.S. domestic manufacturers. Trump has cited both purposes. But they are fundamentally incompatible: If successfully used as a bargaining chip, then tariffs will be negotiated away and therefore will provide no long-term income to the government. If they are meant to be held in place to provide long-term income (Trump has even mooted the notion of replacing income taxes with tariffs), then there’s nothing to negotiate. As a side note, there’s one other possible motivation: Tariffs—with carve-outs to specific businesses, industries, or countries—have historically been used as a tool for corruption.
After the announcement of dramatically high tariffs on all nations on April 2 (dubbed “liberation day” by the administration in an Orwellian turn), the U.S. bond market immediately saw a dramatic sell-off, causing the interest rate the government pays on its debt to soar. Trump relented, delaying most tariffs for 90 days while leaving a 10% tariff in place on all nations except China, which he targeted with a 145% tariff. China has responded with its own 125% tariff on all U.S. imports. China has also cut off exports of strategic raw materials. It seems that the trade war Trump has initiated is almost entirely directed toward Beijing; much lower tariffs on other countries could conceivably be used to coerce those countries to stop doing business with China.
A possible outcome would be the commercial isolation of China and the end of its rise as a global superpower capable of eclipsing the U.S. However, if this is indeed Trump’s goal, his strategy seems to ignore the fact that China already has a broad sphere of influence, including trade alliances with Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (i.e., the BRICs countries). Further, engineering a clash between the U.S. and its European allies on one side and BRICs nations on the other might not end well, given the fact that Trump has already torched his country’s leadership of the Western alliance through his authoritarian posturing, his undermining of NATO, and his threatening of friendly nations with enormous tariffs. We’re already seeing the European Union negotiating with China to lower trade barriers to Chinese electric vehicles. Prospects for driving a wedge between Asian nations and China might be even worse.
Trump’s strategy does have its cheerleaders. Here’s influencer Ken Rutkowski’s breathless paean:
[Tariffs represent]... a new economic philosophy that restructures the global trade system, repositions the American worker at the core of the system, and challenges the 30 years of offshoring conventions. [They are] a decades-in-the-making strategy to restore industrial self-reliance, real wage growth, and economic security. The new playbook views tariffs as versatile tools. This regime sees them not only as revenue generators but also as negotiation triggers and economic equalizers. Protection? Yes. Leverage? Absolutely. Alignment? Finally. From Wall Street to Main Street. The endgame? A more balanced global economy where America consumes less and produces more, while China consumes more and exports less. It’s a forced rebalancing—one tariff at a time.
Trump’s tariffs are often said to benefit U.S. workers in the long run. Yet this ostensible objective seems contradicted by the administration’s fascination with AI—which, according to Bill Gates, will eliminate all but three kinds of jobs. Further, our supposed worker-centric future is being designed by billionaires, whose interests rarely coincide with those of workers.
If the Trump tariff goal is a world dominated by America, it’s an America that is itself dominated by super-wealthy elites, an America that is no longer a fully functioning democracy, an America with no checks or balances on executive power, an America with no law that its top officials are required to obey, and an America where noncitizens and potentially citizens as well can be whisked off the streets without warning and deported to foreign prisons. New York Congressman Ritchie Torres summed up the situation well:
If a superpower were intent on engineering its own decline, it would antagonize its allies, paralyze its economy with the certainty of uncertainty, erode confidence in the world’s reserve currency, discard due process, defund medical and scientific research, sabotage the most critical form of critical manufacturing—domestic chipmaking—and grow its deficit until debt service devours the largest share of its budget.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, steeped in hostility toward environmental protection, will not use tariffs to avert environmental catastrophe. Not only has Trump abandoned the Paris climate agreement, but his domestic policies include promoting coal mining and oil drilling, softening pollution regulations, expanding logging on federal lands, and weakening if not killing the Endangered Species Act.
Is There Any Overlap? And What Direction Should We Embrace?
Tariffs could reduce global trade, which seemingly would align with eco-localists’ aims. Perhaps tariffs could be used to protect communities and livelihoods, and as a form of economic defense against globalization. However, eco-localists tend to see tariffs as a tool of last resort, one that often has nasty unintended consequences, such as increased international hostility and higher prices for essential goods. The word “tariff” rarely shows up in books on ecological economics. However, in Beyond Growth, pioneer ecological economist Herman Daly did discuss tariffs briefly:
Nearly all policies for sustainability involve internalizing external environmental and social costs at the national level. This makes prices higher. Therefore free trade with countries that do not internalize these costs, or do it to a much lesser extent, is not feasible. In such cases there is every reason for protective tariffs.
Tariffs, used protectively, could slow or even reverse globalization, providing time and wherewithal for societies to deal with the unintended side effects of recent decades of corporate-led trade expansion. However, this hinges on using tariffs explicitly and consistently to promote policies that reduce pollution, resource depletion, and unfair treatment of workers. There is nothing in the Trump team’s statements to suggest these are significant aims.
Many eco-localists advocate deliberately shrinking the industrial economy to reduce its impact on nature. Shrinking the U.S. economy is not Trump’s explicit goal, but it is an almost certain result of his tariff policies. Liberal and conservative analysts agree that trade barriers will, in David Frum’s words, “make U.S. goods more expensive to produce, costlier to buy, and inferior to the foreign competition.” But rather than reining in trade for the purpose of reducing pollution and exploitation of workers, Trump and his team seem to be intent on accelerating environmental degradation (fossil fuel products are exempt from U.S. tariffs) and increasing economic inequality by weakening government health and safety programs and doling out lavish tax cuts to the rich.
So, even though both eco-localists and Trump administration officials have at times promoted the use of tariffs, they propose using them for entirely different reasons, and, presumably, would achieve very different results. One group is concerned with protecting nature and minimizing economic inequality so that humans and other species can persist. For Trump and his team, the environment is irrelevant, and workers are chumps useful merely for gaining national power. Once achieved, that power can then be leveraged internationally through belligerent tariffs, with the goal of bludgeoning the entire world into submission.
The Trump team’s maximalist power grab is certain to provoke reactions. The world has been plunged into a trade war, but trade wars have a nasty tendency to turn into shooting wars. Within the deteriorating circumstances of a world seemingly on the verge of environmental ruin and global conflict, eco-localist strategies are looking more and more sensible. While there is no likelihood of their national adoption in the U.S. anytime soon, they are perhaps most applicable and effective at the community scale.
Indeed, this is the moment when eco-localism is most desperately needed. As soaring consumer prices, supply chain disruptions, and reductions in government-provided funding and services threaten communities, localists can help bolster local markets and inspire mutual aid efforts, helping mobilize folks to take more responsibility for their own collective resilience and well-being.
