Localisation

I’ve been reading a lot online about Transition Towns, and the theme they keep coming back to again and again is that of ‘relocalisation’. In a world of increasingly expensive transport, due to rising costs of fossil fuels, the smart money will be on communities that derive most of their power, food and consumer goods locally – however one might define that.

This dovetails nicely with the growing consumer sentiment that rejects the big box experience in favour of small local stores, farms, and service providers. My wife’s business gets regular calls from Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) in India offering to slash her costs on many of the services she now sources locally. She doesn’t even return their phone calls because she, like so many other business people, knows that the strength of your organization stems not from keeping your costs as low as possible, but from the relationships you have with the people upon whom you rely.

If she needs him to, her IT provider will come in on her day off and recable her office. Or she can call her printer in a panic and know that he will not only turn around a book for her in a heartbeat but will also support the causes about which she is passionate.

This brings me to my friends Russ and Kerry. Russ is a farmer who tills a little over an acre (or so he reported last time I asked him). It just so happens that the acre in question is scattered over a variety of backyards in Strathcona and environs. Now Russ has taken the big leap and is offering a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) option for food grown uber-locally. My weekly food box, combined with what I grow myself should ensure me a summer’s worth of veggies grown not only using organic principles and good old fashioned elbow grease – but also grown within about a kilometer of my house, ensuring better taste and nutritional value than anything I could get in a supermarket.

Similarly, Kerry is the mom of one of my son’s classmates. A week or two ago she started posting pics on her facebook page of the simply amazing ‘super hero’ capes that she was sewing for her daughter and a friend at school. Word has quickly spread, and now several of us have commissioned her to do the same for our kids.

The interesting point about Kerry’s capes is that they are priced competitively with many of the things that you could find in the plastic wastelands of big box toy retailers. Only, unlike so many of those toys, these are not meant to be observed, they are meant to be played with using the full force of a 6 year old’s imagination. While locally produced, and fundamentally different from most things you would buy in these stores – they are in my mind a far superior product.

As the price of fuel creeps up, the simple fact is that no realistically achievable level of efficiency or electrification of our transport fleet is going to keep the price of low-quality disposable items made offshore from ratcheting steadily upwards.

This is to say nothing of what a spike in diesel costs will do to a ceasar salad that has traveled 1500 km, or a calorie of food energy that took 12 calories of fossil fuels to grow.

The point I’m trying to make is that in the next economy things will be different – in some ways greatly so, but they don’t have to be worse. Very few of us pine for a return to a Victorian era lifestyle of quiet games of jacks by a roaring hearth and the christmas stocking that contains nothing but a single Seville Orange. Things will be different, and probably simpler – but as we turn increasingly to our friends and neighbors for solutions to a whole new set of problems, we may find that ‘different’ is much more desirable than where many of us are now.