Thoughts on the environmental and community benefits of locally based economies.
The advance guard of the green, sustainable living movement has already gone beyond emphasizing organic food to touting the even greater environmental benefits of local eating. So where will trends take us from here? I believe the movement is in the direction of what I'll call hyperlocalism.
What is hyperlocalism? It's the shift to a reliance on local products of all kinds, not just local food products. Eventually, I believe, it will be a practice of necessity, especially as dwindling fuel supplies lead to skyrocketing transportation costs. In the meantime, though, it's a movement that recognizes the environmental costs of all things carried over great distances: the fuel consumed, the pollution and greenhouse gases produced, the money that leaves a local economy to benefit large multinational corporations with little interest in the communities they market to.
Or course, there will always be goods that can't be found, grown or produced locally, so a certain amount of long-distance interchange will always be necessary. But the more we can produce the things we need within a narrow radius of space, the more lightly we can tread upon the planet and the richer our individual communities will be.
