Annual Editions : Global Issues 08/09 - 24th edition

UNIT 1. Global Issues in the Twenty First Century: An Overview 1. 21521 A Special Moment in History,Bill McKibben, The Atlantic Monthly , May 1998 The interconnected dangers of overpopulation, climate change, and pollution have been in the headlines for years, but doomsday has not yet arrived. Bill McKibben examines two important questions: What if we already have inflicted serious damage on the planet? What if there are only a few decades left to salvage a stable environment? 2. 41772 It's a Flat World, After All,Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times , April 3, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a well-known commentator who has contributed significantly to the debate about globalization . This article summarizes his latest book, The World Is Flat . He discusses a number of technological trends that are not only involving new participants in the global economy but also fundamentally changing the way people do business. 3. 41983 Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?,Jeffrey D. Sachs, Scientific American , September 2005 One of the United Nations Millennium Project's goals was reducing by half the level of extreme poverty by 2015. The director of the project describes how business as usual has to be replaced with programs that address the underlying causes of poverty by improving health, education, water, sanitation, food production, and roads. 4. 47250 The Ideology of Development,William Easterly, Foreign Policy , July/August 2007 The author critically evaluates both the economic and political assumptions of development theorists such as Jeffrey Sachs and Thomas Friedman. Easterly argues that the top down approach managed by international bureaucrats has done little to alleviate poverty while at the same time minimizing local solutions to economic challenges. This article is an excellent companion piece to other articles in this section, for it presents a distinctly different perspective. 5. 45389 Feminists and Fundamentalists,Kavita Ramdas, Current History , March 2006 The women's movement had great success during the twentieth century. Today it faces a backlash. The new challenges facing women are discussed along with strategies to meet them. 6. 47251 Unipolar Stability,William Wohlforth, Harvard International Review , Spring 2007 There is considerable speculation about the future of the United States' dominance of the international political system (defined as unipolarity). Some argue that the brief unipolar period between the Cold War (bipolarity) and the emergence of a multipolar international system is already drawing to a close. The author provides useful rules for evaluating these historic trends and examines built-in, self-reinforcing mechanisms that are resistant to change and therefore will perpetuate unipolarity. UNIT 2. Population and Food Production 7. 45390 The Century Ahead,Chris Wilson, Daedalus , Winter 2006 Rapid population growth was the dominant demographic trend in the twentieth century. The author argues that the twenty-first century is likely to be the century of aging. The implications of this demographic transition are examined in different regions of the world.