Localism

I've been watching a lot of the new channel "Planet Green" and I wonder sometimes how much of the new "green movement" is about substance and how much it is about fashion? I mean I think there's solid enough evidence that people in this country (and the rest of the world) need to change the way we organize and live our lives but I wonder how many people in the green movement actually get it.

Anyway, here's an interesting article on the subject...

Quote :

Localism
From Metropolis magazine
James Howard Kunstler

At the moment, the ideas bundled under the rubric of “localism” are regarded as a lifestyle choice, which is to say a fashion statement of environmental concern, practiced by those with the time and means for following fashions. “Locavores” who make a point to eat locally are represented overwhelmingly by college-educated, high-income Baby Boomers who buy those $6 pint baskets of boutique blue potatoes at the farmers’ market as much to make a statement of principle (and derive moral comfort from doing so) as to eat nutritionally sound, good tasting food. Meanwhile, the rest of America keeps driving to the Shop Rite for tubes of frozen ground-round, jugs of Pepsi, and bags of Cheez Doodles made (grown?) God-knows-where. So, the stylishly fit locavores end up looking like stuck-up moralistic snobs while the majority follows the mindless corporate programming du jour like the overstuffed lumbering TV zombies they have become. By the way, locavores also overwhelmingly drive to the farmers’ market, (as I have observed in my town) and usually in motor vehicles the size of medieval war wagons.

Localism, in this sense, is very much related to the current craze for styling one’s endeavors as “green.” Tom Friedman cheerleads for “green” globalism in his New York Times column while Time Magazine runs “Greencast” programs on its website, and all kinds of specialists design green cars, green light bulbs, green toilets, green campuses, and green corporate headquarters (all the better for hawking those Cheez Doodles). Much of this activity can be described, to borrow a locution from public relations, as blowing green smoke up our own collective ass. Such, alas, is the sorry state of our culture nowadays that just pretending to mean well, for most people and institutions, is good enough...

Read on here...
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_localism.html

Very interesting article.

I'm kinda on the same page.

Every one kinda wonders how we can make the present system work.

But I've always kinda wondered that the present system, while it's brought us where we are - with both good and bad fruits - is not necessarily the only way.

And that their may actually be new paradigms.

Certainly locally grown makes a whole heck of a lot of sense, to have geographical areas self sufficient with strategic trade to top up choices seems like a way we ought to be considering.

Smaller may be better, even when intiallty it seems to go against economies of scale. Certainly it does go against the current paradigm.

But is there a better economic and social paradigm.