Are you one?
Oxford University Press has selected "locavore" as its Word of the Year. It means someone who eats locally grown food. The four women from San Francisco coined the word proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius.
(For more perspective on the perceived and actual benefits of being a locavore, read this trenchant article about the complexity of managing carbon-footprints in the recent New Yorker.)
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The New Yorker article mentions the relatively low emissions of sea freight (per unit of cargo, presumably) as a reason it may be "greener" to ship some goods from overseas than to truck them across country. Shipping may become even cleaner with the advent - or revival, I should say - of wind propulsion systems like SkySails.
Thinking about geographic variations in energy costs, sources, and utilization does lead to some counter-intuitive ideas about the most efficient and effective ways to sustain our society and our planet. Embracing technology and information to engineer better strategies for solving big problems reminds me greatly of Buckminster Fuller.
I suppose it is true that compelling economic motivations are needed to drive change at this scale, especially if conventional wisdom and standard practice have obscured the other incentives. Bucky was certainly ahead of his time; perhaps today the world is finally ready to invest in his sort of big ideas for a small world.
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