http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/john/tags/localism/ Thoughts from the Foothills of Life's Learning Curve en John Casey Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:04:57 GMT Pebble (http://pebble.sourceforge.net) http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/john/2008/02/14/1203005927716.html Think about the things in your life. Your clothing. Your food. Your furniture. Think about it all, everything tangible that surrounds you in daily life. How much of that stuff was created within 100 miles of where you live, or where you bought it? The distances traveled by the products we buy are truly staggering. I read an article once that noted a study in Germany of strawberry yogurt; it found that the inputs to a container of yogurt traveled a total of something like 3000 miles before landing on the table, even though the strawberries and all the other food ingredients were produced inside the country. All of this travel led to a container of yogurt that was metaphorically drenched in oil. As another example, Emily and I recently went to the local unfinished wood furniture store downtown, to look for a new dresser (we’re still using some pretty sad furniture from our broke college days). As it turned out, the one we liked best was built by a company out of North Carolina that recently went out of ... http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/john/2008/02/14/1203005927716.html#comments http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/john/2008/02/14/1203005927716.html Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:18:47 GMT http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/john/2008/02/13/1202917423916.html I’ve been reading about the potential for future environmental catastrophe for awhile now, branching out as I went into books that studied collapsed cultures of the past and on to other topics even farther afield. You could call it my second great education, because although I always knew there was the potential for danger in the phrase ‘global warming’, I only recently awoke to a fuller understanding of its implications. From environmental studies and a sort of anthro-ecological history if you like, I found myself taking a sidetrack that would lead me to staring at another perilous danger of our time: peak oil. Along the way, while studying both of these topics through books, documentaries, podcasts, blogs, and plain-old web research, I kept coming back to the idea of getting back to local communities of people you trust. Whether it’s escaping the addiction to a petroleum supply that’s running out, or finding the most effective way to curtail my contribution to climate change, ... http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/john/2008/02/13/1202917423916.html#comments http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/john/2008/02/13/1202917423916.html Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:43:43 GMT