Alternatives to Plastic: Home Gardens. Photo: key lime_pie (flickr)

I recently came upon a blog by a Chicago woman committed to living as close to a plastic-free life as possible. Her journey to a life without plastic began last September, and over the months her postings about her adventures and increasing knowledge have gathered an audience in the thousands.

The statistics about our reliance on plastics are shocking: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the amount of plastic in our waste stream has increased from less than 1 percent in 1960 to 11.7 percent in 2006. And, while Americans drank 50 billion bottles of water in 2006, 38 billion of those ended up in the trash, according to Fast Company magazine.

The anonymous blogger, whose blog is titled Life Less Plastic, explains that she's doing this for personal health reasons, as well to do better by the environment. Among her most popular posts is an entry describing "What I'm Doing to Be Mostly Plastic-Free," which includes:

10. Washing my dishes with Dr. Bronner's bar soap. It works! I'm not kidding!
11. Bringing my own stainless steel coffee mug to the coffee shop. This is important because paper cups are lined with plastic.
12. Bringing along a reusable water bottle or mug for water, and NEVER drinking bottled water.
13. Bringing my own takeout containers to restaurants in case I have leftovers. This sounds embarrassing, but no one has ever even noticed that I've brought my own container except for the people I'm with.
14. Not buying aluminum food cans, excluding canned tomatoes and vegetable broth, which I haven't been able to give up yet. Hopefully, I can/jar some tomatoes this summer and do away with this plastic use, though.

In a society where plastic is pervasive and packaging alternatives are few, even Life Less Plastic's author hasn't been able to do without medicine, which comes in plastic bottles; toothpaste; and even some packaged foods she hasn't been able to find in the bulk section of nearby supermarkets.

Plastics have been around for a while, but we are only beginning to understand their potentially negative consequences. Without plastic, we wouldn't have seen the advances in science and medicine we saw in the last century. However, as the Chicago blogger points out, there are a lot of ways to "live a life less plastic."

What impact is the U.S. economic slowdown having on developing countries? Matt Homer of the World Politics Review writes that the weakening U.S. dollar is having an adverse effect on individuals in developing countries relying on remittances for large parts of their income. A bigger problem, however, is that the negative impact of the declining dollar is likely to go beyond the individual level. For a number of developing countries, remittances make up a significant percentage of total GDP, and several countries are already expressing concern that a decrease in remittances could hurt their entire economies.

In Tonga, for example, remittances account for just over 32 percent of the country’s total GDP. Yet because up to 80 percent of all remittances come from sources in the U.S., there is concern that continued declines in the U.S. economy “will hit Tonga extremely hard.” Economists in Nicaragua are also predicting that “any decline in the amount of remittances will undoubtedly affect consumerism within the Nicaraguan economy.” While around 40 percent of Nicaraguans receive remittances, most of which come from the U.S., economists estimate that almost 90 percent of remittance money sent to the country is spent in the local consumer economy.

Our economy is shrinking, inflation is increasing, and it looks like it's time to tighten our belts and settle down for the worst. But were the times we are leaving really so great to begin with?

For the first time since we've been paying attention to such numbers, the median family income (from 2000 to 2007) has actually decreased during a period of economic growth. Real median family income more than doubled from the late 1940s to the late ’70s. It has risen less than 25 percent in the three decades since.

According to New York Times writer David Leonhardt, "the larger point is still crucial: the modern American economy distributes the fruits of its growth to a relatively narrow slice of the population."

A responsible economy wouldn't allow this to happen. What's going wrong?

Photo: Hattie Page (flickr)

Conventional wisdom says that America's standing in the world will go up — maybe even way up — if either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is elected president. We'd sign multilateral global-warming treaties, seek advice from allies once again … maybe even accept an invitation to tea from Iran.

But the world is likely to respond to a Clinton or Obama presidency with only tepid applause if the two contenders continue spouting "dangerous and ill-informed" trade rhetoric, argues Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria.

In the magazine's March 10th issue, the influential columnist slapped the wrists of both Democratic contenders for promoting protectionist policies. All the talk about renegotiating Nafta, he says, has people in Latin America and India worried that one of their favored paths to greater economic growth — free trade and open markets — is about to close down.

"For a struggling farmer in Kenya," says Zakaria, in a not-so-subtle reference to Obama's roots, "access to world markets is far more important than foreign aid or U.N. programs."

The concern from abroad is real. The Economist, for example, recently warned readers to get ready for "grumpy isolationism."

But Zakaria, a left-of-center globalist, represents the concern emanating from what you might call the free-trade wing of the Democratic Party. (Online comments on his Newsweek piece include: "I'm an Obama supporter, but his crazy anti-trade talk is worrisome.") These were the New Democrats who cheered when Bill Clinton's 1993 push for Nafta seemed to finally rid the party of its longheld protectionist plank — and who hung their heads when his wife repudiated the pact in Ohio. (Obama largely followed suit, leading The New Republic's Josh Patanick to bemoan Obama's "disappointing" shift on trade. Matt Cooper of Portfolio.com labeled both Obama and Clinton "phony populists.")

Perhaps it's not surprising to see the candidates try to nuance — or, in Clinton's case, outright disown — their previous pro-trade statements. But it's worth watching how the eventual winner chooses to frame the issue this fall, and whether they can find, as Zakaria recommends, "a way to speak about the pain of globalization" while acknowledging its benefits.

One way may be to emphasize how trade can reliably advance America's stated aim to lift millions abroad out of extreme poverty. Surely the candidates can argue that America can both create good jobs and open our markets to products like cotton from Mali. Such a move would not only lend a hand to poor African farmers, but also help us climb back into the world's good graces.

Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Will America's economic troubles spill over to South Asian markets?

India, because of its close economic ties to the U.S., could get caught up in the downdraft. Rising inflation rates are causing the country's conservative commercial bankers to squirm in a country usually considered the poster child for modernization. India ships more of its goods to the U.S. than to any other country — so if Americans curtail their spending in an economic slowdown, Indian businesses could lose big.

How can India maintain its high rate of economic growth despite the U.S. slowdown?

The Brookings Institute calls for India’s government to economically reform by addressing its major inefficiencies in connecting the rural poor with the mainstream economies. BusinessWeek points out the need for reforms in agriculture, infrastructure, health care and education. But it adds that reform "is the last thing" on the mind of India's ruling Congress Party.

The New York Times reports that despite concern over Nafta among Mexican farmers and U.S. big sugar companies, in time Nafta should make the U.S. consumer and the Mexican farmer better off.

Bernd Debusmann published an article today examining the extreme lack of foreign language and international training among Americans.

Debusmann points out that this isn't a new trend, and despite the surge of American citizens enrolling in Arabic language classes post 9/11, about half the number of American college students enroll in foreign language classes today as compared to 1965.

The book was entitled "The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis" and its author found that a deficit of language skills threatened U.S. business and national security. That was in 1980. The words "globalization" and "jihad" had not yet become household terms.

Fast forward to the present and the latest report on foreign languages and international education by the research council of the National Academies: "A pervasive lack of knowledge about foreign cultures and foreign languages threatens the security of the United States as well as its ability to compete in the foreign market place."

So has nothing changed since the late Paul Simon, then a congressman, later a senator, warned about the consequences of a tongue-tied America? Judging from a wealth of statistics, there has been much effort but little progress.

While the immigration debate in the United States is largely focused on the U.S.-Mexico border, an article from National Geographic looks a bit farther to the south. An estimated 400,000 migrants from Central America cross the border into Mexico every year, and though some stay to work in Mexico, most are headed for the U.S.

The economic prosperity of the U.S. has a strong pull effect on the Latin American poor, and the money that migrant workers send home to their families is having an increasingly large impact on their national economies. In Honduras, for example, remittances sent home from the U.S. made up one-fifth of the country’s gross national income in 2006.

“There is no solution to this,” a former Chiapas state official said wearily, after ticking off a list of southern border upgrade programs that have fizzled into ineffectiveness over the past decade. “You can put all the control measures down there that you want, but it’s not going to be fixed. The solution is to eliminate poverty.”

In a daily analysis from last week, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Benn Still suggested that the United States is “exporting inflation worldwide.” The latest action by the US Federal Reserve may have staved off inflationary disaster domestically but only to the detriment of other nations who peg their currency to the dollar.

Venezuela struggled with inflation rates over 20 percent in 2007 (Bloomberg). Argentina and Bolivia face similar concerns. Official data puts Russian inflation for 2007 at nearly 12 percent (Forbes). Several Gulf Arab states also find themselves with inflation over or near 10 percent. In China, rates near 7 percent registered in December 2007 represent the highest inflation in over a decade. China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao recently announced Beijing would freeze short-term energy prices in an attempt to curb consumer price increases (NYT).

Today the Christian Science Monitor posted an article about how the declining dollar is affecting migrant workers in the United States:

Across the US, the falling dollar value has sent ripples through immigrant communities that send money to family overseas. As some currencies for developing countries have risen substantially against the dollar, many immigrant workers are increasing their workweek by up to 20 hours or taking second jobs. If the dollar's slide continues, the US may become less attractive to migrant workers, analysts say.

Today an International Herald Tribune article asks, "is economic history about to change course?" As power transfers from the west to the east, many economists are worried about a protectionist backlash by governments in attempt to regain control.

"Economic theory tells us that globalization is a win-win, but it isn't, at least not in the West," Roach said. "The theory was written for another era. We have to ask some hard questions about unfettered capitalism. We need a new script."

The risk is that Western governments, mindful of the growing backlash among voters, will be tempted to rewrite the script by engaging in old and new forms of protectionism.

Many are predicting 2008 to be a year for the economic history books.

A sobering piece on Chinese/American trade by James Fallows in this month's issue of The Atlantic:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

Fallows concludes:

Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends—suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic—will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.