The environmental activist, Dorothy Field, remarked rather insightfully of the Not-In-My-Back-Yard opposition to ecologically damaging projects, "Sure I'm a NIMBY," she said. "I'm protecting my own back yard. If everyone was a NIMBY, all the back yards in the world would be protected."

Her remark could be dismissed as being flippant if it didn't have a commonsense logic that invites further consideration. And an avenue to this consideration happens to be provided by the ideas of Professor Frank Tester, a teacher of social and international development at the University of British Columbia.

Professor Tester is writing of the short and "troubled experiment" of capitalism and globalization in economic history (The Vancouver Sun, Mar. 13/09). In his critique, he notes that in capitalism's "postmodern" expression, "globalization involves agreement ‹ sometimes forced agreement ‹ among world policy-makers that we live best together with international and market-based economics, rather than with national economies managed by public officials and institutions." Globalization, he argues, forces national and even local economies to disconnect from the direct interests of the citizens living in particular places and to subjugate themselves to a larger economic design. "Globalization increasingly handed these interests over to market forces... guided by the non-elected officials and bureaucrats of international bodies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization." Multi-national corporations are also key players in this process.

How did this happen and what does it have to do with Not-In-My-Back-Yard?

The 200-year-old economic system we call capitalism came to a crisis in the United States between 1966 and 1980, according to Tester. Profits and production began to slow because of the limits set by a combination of "rigid labour markets" (unionization and other "social contract" responsibilities) and national money supplies that were too small and too inflexible to match the increasing size of corporations. These two rigidities of labour and financing "were addressed by taking production elsewhere," writes Tester. By going international, corporations were able to replace "managed trade" with "free trade". Trade deregulation and international banking allowed businesses to move to those places that provided a "natural comparative advantage". So countries such as Mexico, China and South Korea became manufacturing centres because of cheap labour. Costa Rica became the place to grow coffee and bananas. Mining was concentrated where the minerals were plentiful, smelting where the energy was cheap, and manufacturing where the costs were lowest. Investment, factories and production went to those geographical places that had "a natural advantage in producing certain goods."

This momentum of economic globalization overwhelmed countries and local economies. If the construction industry in Los Angeles needs gravel, it assumes it can extract it from a Sechelt hillside. If smelting in Korea or China needs metallurgical coal, then the Quinsam watershed is a logical source. If Norwegian investors want to supply farmed salmon to world markets, coastal British Columbia is ideal. If Plutonic Power has a market for electricity, the rivers of Bute Inlet offer legitimate energy. If mills in the United States or Japan need old-growth timber, then West Coast forests are targeted. If the world needs oil, then the corporate mentality assumes it has a right to develop the Alberta tar sands, to build distributing pipelines and to establish tanker routes from Kitimat through BC's coastal waters.

It is this sense of corporate entitlement that creates the Not-In-My-Back-Yard problem. Local communities are not being unduly parochial and protective; they are simply responding defensively to the assumption of ownership of their resources by corporate globalization. Big business has cultivated a persona of indispensability to national economies, of having rights and privileges that supersede local interests and sensibilities. Whatever is good for the corporate agenda must be good for global trade, for humanity, and therefore for each place where big money wants to invest. A small town is supposed to feel blessed rather than cursed by the arrival of a multi-national chain store. Every village, mountainside, valley or river is supposed to submit to the privilege of being chosen as a key ingredient in the global system of production and consumption.

This presumption of entitlement is an attitude that makes corporations aggressive, abrasive and offensive. They expect everyone to believe that they are economic saviours. But many small communities are beginning to realize that bigger and faster are not necessarily better, that quality of life is more basic and subtle than the package of appended complications arriving with corporate investment.

Many small communities are also beginning to realize that corporate agendas are essentially profit agendas ‹ they arrive when they can get what they want and they will leave when the "natural comparative advantage" is better elsewhere. So a lumber mill will close, issue its platitudinous condolences to the community, then move on to whatever opportunity benefits its competitive advantage. A mining company will do exactly the same. So will a pulp mill. Each will bid its obligatory and regretful farewell, and the abandoned community then inherits the resulting economic and social turmoil.

So, the Not-In-My-Back-Yard attitude is not as superficial, reflexive or parochial as it seems. It is rooted in a prescience that comes from bitter experience, from a perspective that corporations would prefer everyone forgot. It is also rooted in a love of place, for the special qualities that attract people to a unique location where they may choose to live with less material wealth so their lives can be fuller and richer in simpler ways. No one needs to apologize for wanting to protect such places.