This one hour video workshop takes us to two very different geographic regions in order to investigate the relationship between the global economy and local ecology. In the first segment, we look to China and Southeast Asia in order to answer the question, "What are the human effects of an increasingly modern and global economy?" In the second half hour, we focus on water as an element of local ecology in North America. There we explore controversies surrounding issues of conservation, allocation, and the unintended human effects on water resources.