Think global, act local

Things are growing at Columbia again. No, I don’t mean our minds (when are they not?). I mean actual, physical, plant-like things. The greenery and the nature, a rarity around here, always remind me of when I worked on a small, hydroponic tomato farm for two summers during high school. The farm’s owner—who loved to talk about baseball and give me long lunch breaks and would occasionally go on friendly rants about how crazy it was to allow 16-year-olds to drive—had a faded bumper sticker on the back of his old Volvo that read, “Think Global, Act Local.” I was kind of in awe of him at the time, and I fancied myself a bit of a global-citizen-in-training: I did Model UN and even convinced my parents to subscribe to The Economist! Needless to say, I thought this bumper sticker would make a great motto for how to live my life.

Since coming to Columbia, I’ve found that the University likes to pitch itself as the embodiment of this motto. We have a thriving, enclosed campus, and we have the Columbia Global Centers. We have a traditional Core Curriculum, and we have a Committee on Global Thought. We have clubs that work for sustainability in our dorms and dining halls, and we have clubs that work for the rights of people imprisoned in faraway lands.

Too often, though, we act as though global and local perspectives are mutually exclusive. People who work on local causes—from campus sustainability to tutoring local kids—judge those who attend to questions of more distant import as elitist or out of touch with their community, or else they ignore them all together. People who work on problems far from our borders—justice and peace in Palestine and Israel or public health from Nicaragua to Rwanda—condemn the localites for a narrowness of moral imagination, a failure to understand that problems bigger than those we see exist in the world.

Neither of these perspectives is fair, of course, and I would assign responsibility for this problem on what I call the increasing segmentation of the life of a college student. The expectations of the University, the job market, and even our peers force students to define themselves in narrow, specific ways. All the forces operating on a student who arrives at Columbia push him or her to specialize: pick a major, pick a club or two, pick an internship. Pick an issue to care about, as though what we care about in the world can be reduced to issues and interests that we can check boxes for on LionSHARE. Our lives become increasingly compartmentalized. Like Hugh Grant’s character in “About a Boy,” we divide our time into units: class, 3 units; student group, 2 units; internship, 4 units; 30 Rock on Hulu, 1 unit.

When we transform our experience into segments like this, we lose exactly what our education should be teaching us—the ability to see connections between things, to imagine the problems we care about not as issues but as parts of the one big world of which we’re a part. The global versus local divide represents one of the most troubling examples of this segmentation, not only because it always ends up being counterproductive, but also because it fails to represent the world accurately. To “Think Global,” we have to “Think Local” as well and think about how our local community reflects the broader world and interacts with it. To “Act Local,” we have to understand how the broader world affects our community and how our actions might serve as examples to those with similar goals elsewhere.

Dividing our lives into separate compartments and thinking about the world in terms of disconnected issues risks making us more like the protagonist of “About a Boy” than we think. Our concerns may matter more than his expensive shoes or his Mystikal album, but by failing to bring them together, we detract from whatever we seek to do at the global and local levels.

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in history. He is a former Spectator columnist and is a current member of the Editorial Board.