THE story for many years to come.

Further to my post about dairy farmer payouts of yesterday. Here is a comment from the Trendwatching site:

THE story of 2006, 2007, 2008 and many years to come? Consumers, governments and business leaders are finally feeling the pressure to confront and act upon the fact that unbridled production and consumption comes with mounting pollution and at a significant human/animal/earth cost. Now, since virtually every think tank, trend firm, eco-blog, former US presidential candidate and oil company has chimed in on the issue, we'll refrain from rehashing endless studies and scenarios on the globe's future. Instead, we'll focus on one sub-trend — locality — that is still emerging and as such can offer brands additional inspiration to come up with new goods, services and experiences that are part of the solution, not the problem.

Let's start with 'eco'. Now that carbon footprinting has become a household term in mature consumer societies, expect consumers' desire to find out about the origins of a product to become a given. Questions no one ever asked a few years ago will become an integral part of the purchasing process. How was the product made? By whom? How did it get to its point of sale? What effects on the environment will it have after purchasing?

Increasingly, this transparency will pit distant production against local production. Above all, local production holds the promise of less pollution due to less transport. And, in prosperous and regulated nations, chances of inhumane labor practices are smaller, too.

A slew of projects and publications are fanning the current debate on local versus global production. Not too surprising, it’s the food and beverage sector — which can be both closest to, and most removed from nature — that finds itself at the forefront of the eco-meets-local debate(my italics) while the apparel industry (sweatshop, anyone?) is feeling the impact of ethics-meets-local more than any other industry.

Interesting sites
No impact man - learn about dumpster diving-inter alia.
The 100 mile diet - eat local for global change
"A study in Iowa found that a regional diet consumed 17 times less oil and gas than a typical diet based on food shipped across the country. The ingredients for a typical British meal, sourced locally, traveled 66 times fewer “food miles.” Or we can just keep burning those fossil fuels and learn to live with global climate change, the fiercest hurricane seasons in history, wars over resources…"

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

The Books that go with them
The 100 Mile Diet