ABSTRACT
Not much more than a century ago in Western Europe and the US—even more recently elsewhere—almost everything that people used and consumed came from their immediate area. Their food came from their own land or from a neighbour’s. Their timber and fuel came from a local wood. Many manufactured goods were local, too, as shown by this 1912 account of how life in Farnham in Surrey had changed in the previous 50 years:
It is really surprising how few were the materials, or even the finished goods, imported at that time [the 1850s]. Clothing stuffs and metals were the chief of them. Of course the grocers (not ‘provision merchants’ then) did their small trade in sugar and coffee, and tea and spices; there was a tinware shop, an ironmonger’s, a wine-merchant’s; and all these were necessarily supplied from outside. But, on the other hand, no foreign meat or flour, or hay or straw or timber, found their way into the town, and comparatively few manufactured products from other parts of England. Carpenters still used the oak and ash and elm of the neigh-bourhood, sawn out for them by the local sawyers: the wheelwright, because iron was costly, mounted his cartwheels on huge axles fashioned by himself out of the hardest beech; the smith, shoeing horses or putting tires on wheels, first made the necessary nails for himself, hammering them out on his own anvil. So, too, with many other things. Boots, brushes, earthenware, butter and lard, candles, bricks—they were all of local make; cheese was brought back from Weyhill Fair in the wagons which had carried down the hops; in short, to an extent now hard to realise, the town was independent of commerce as we know it now, and looked to the farms and the forests and the claypits and the coppices of the neighbourhood for its supplies. A leisurely yet steady traffic in rural produce therefore passed along its streets, because it was the life-centre, the heart, of its own countryside (Bourne 1969: 103).
Today, of course, all that has changed utterly, and the food, fuel and manufactured goods we need for our survival are transported over very long distances to get to us. As a famous German study (Böge 1993) showed, even the components required to produce and deliver a pot of strawberry yoghurt had to travel a total of 2,183 miles. The huge increase in transportation has, perhaps, led to a proportionate 269increase in the range of product choices and the abundance available to people like us with enough money to benefit. However, our gain has been bought at great potential cost. The longer supply chains we rely on are less sustainable than those they replaced because of the amount of fossil energy required to keep them running. This in turn means that our survival depends on the continued availability of oil and gas at a price we can afford, something that is looking increasingly uncertain. The International Energy Agency accepts that world oil output will peak within the next ten years and that, after 2008, over half the declining output will be controlled by five OPEC countries (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) in the Middle East, giving them enormous power over its price (IEA 1998).