not bring along social justice, quality of life, fair global trades, equality, and
environmental security to developing countries. Antidotes for social and environ-
mental disasters within developing countries, including Thailand, could be pro-
moting independence on foreign investment and foreign financial markets,
redistributing land, democratic economic decision making, and the support of civil
society organizations (Blewitt 2015 : 24). All of these remedies are quite abstract
and hard to implement as the dominant development paradigm used till now has
been the modernization paradigm. This paradigm aims at Westernization, capital-
ization, and economic growth. Although globalization is not equal to
Westernization, the main aim of this worldwide connectedness has been economic
globalization. That brings more negative consequences than positive ones.
Blewitt ( 2015 :28–29) reports that positive aspects of globalization in the
worldview of the market liberals are that it fosters economic growth, and with the
applied science and technology it would improve the environment and our
well-being in the future. In the view of these institutionalists, globalization speeds
up chances for cooperation, capacity building, and innovation that is good for the
environment. However, bad aspects that globalization brings in the eyes of these
market liberals are receding economy brought on by market failures and poor
governance that leads to market distortions. In the view of the institutionalists, weak
institutions and poor global cooperation cannot help correct environmental disasters
or counteract the ecological impacts caused by a nation-state. For
bio-environmentalists, the bad aspects of globalization are the depletion of natural
resources and unsustainable and ecological imbalances due to exploding economic
growth, exponential population, unlimited consumption, and hedonistic material-
ism. According to the social greens, globalization has brought bad consequences on
exploitation, social injustice and inequality, erosion of local-community autonomy,
increase of drug-related global crime, human trafficking, and new forms of slavery,
such as sweat shop workers, child labor, and prostitution.
All these bad consequences of contemporary globalization are indicators of
unsustainable development grossly overlooked by the modernization paradigm. We
have lost non-renewable energy and huge amounts of natural resources, and at the
same time, we are faced with industrial residues which are toxic, and the use of
even more chemicals tofight against insects and pests that have developed them-
selves to resist our conventional chemicals. Toxic gasses, such as carbon dioxide as
a result of the combustion of fuels,fluorocarbon emissions from industries, deadly
toxic gas from chemical warfares, and pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides used
in agro-industries, cause the greenhouse effect, air pollution, and acid rains. The
accumulation of the so-called greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane,
nitrous oxide, water vapor, and other gases, has caused the depletion of the ozone
layer that shields the ultraviolet ray around the earth (livescience.com 2016 ). The
ozone hole above the Antarctica and the melting of the icebergs on the North Pole
are symbolic representations of global warming. Global warming causes seasonal
changes and rapidly revives more growth of old extinction germs diseases such as
malaria.
90 6 Self-Reliance and Sustainability from a Thai Perspective