The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [103]
Fortunately, there are ways to do things better, and people are working on all fronts, from increasing transparency in the supply chain (like Dara O’Rourke’s wonderful GoodGuide), to protesting and withdrawing investments from the busted system dictated by the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, to reducing the size of supply chains by promoting “local economies.”
Maybe you’ve heard about the local food movement, with restaurants and markets touting the low number of miles that food had to travel there and people calling themselves “locavores.” Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon, authors of Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet, point out that a local diet is about “getting to know the seasons (and) understanding where our food comes from, and at what risk to our health and to the environment.”127 More and more American consumers are choosing to support local farmers and food suppliers because the food is fresher, healthier, and tastier.
Many of them also realize they’re supporting the wealth and sustainability of their own communities, so there’s a moral, even patriotic implication to their choices. And a social one. Bill McKibben, one of today’s great environmental writers, applauds farmers markets in his book Deep Economy. They are the fastest-growing part of the U.S. food industry, he writes, not just because they provide good, fresh, delicious food. It is also because they are more fun. They rebuild community and the social fabric that has been so eroded by the hectic globalized economy. McKibben claims that on average, people have ten times more social interactions at a farmers market than a grocery store.128 I believe it! In Berkeley, my local farmers market is a few blocks away. It’s small, with a modest selection, with all local and organic food. I like going there. I invariably run into neighbors. It feels so, well, European—the idea of a leisurely walk to a market, putting my fresh vegetables and bread in my cloth bag, chatting with friends, and strolling home. It adds to, rather than undermines, the quality of my day. I can’t say the same about a trip to one of those gigantic megastores.
There’s a modest but growing movement to support local producers of Stuff other than food, too. In the United States, a nationally active group called the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) unites businesses working to promote local economies and community selfreliance: not just a local food system, but local energy (think solar cells and wind turbines), local clothing manufacturing, and green buildings from local materials.129 In this model, a global economy still exists, but as a network of locally sustainable economies that trade in products they can’t produce themselves. Trade—national or international—isn’t the goal, but a means to promote well-being, good jobs, a healthy environment.
Judy Wicks, one of the founders of the local food movement and of BALLE, even makes a connection between local self-reliance and security: “Wars are often fought over access to basic needs like energy, food, and water. Helping every region achieve food security, energy security, and water security builds the foundation for world peace. Self-reliant societies are less likely to start wars than those dependent on long-distance shipments of oil, water or food.”130
Internationally, there’s a growing group of more than one hundred communities that have declared themselves “Transition Towns”—many in Great Britain but a handful in the United States (including Boulder County, Colorado; Sandpoint, Idaho; and Berea, Kentucky) and elsewhere—that are working toward reducing energy consumption and increasing local energy production, food self-reliance, and industrial ecology, in which the waste of one factory or business is used as the raw materials of the next. According to the official guide to Transition Towns, one of the central