Two posts on the locovore movement.
First, Steven Landsburg picks apart the emphasis on counting joules:
... The implicit recommendation seems to be that when you’re choosing a tomato, you should care about all the energy costs.
... And here are some other things you should care about: How many grapes were sacrificed by growing that California tomato in a place where there might have been a vineyard? How many morning commutes are increased, and by how much, because that New York greenhouse displaces a conveniently located housing development? ...
Budiansky ignores all that to focus strictly on energy consumpion. But the quality of our lives depends on a lot more than energy consumption, so Budiansky’s narrow-minded computations are strictly loco.
How, then, could one ever hope to do the right computation? How can we possibly gather enough information to compare the opportunity costs of land, fertlizers, equipment, workers, transportation and energy costs (among many others) and reach a conclusion about which tomato imposes the fewest costs on our neighbors?
Well, it turns out there’s actually a way to do that. You do it by looking at a single number that does an excellent job of reflecting all those costs. That number is known as the price of the tomato.
The Rational Optimist continues the commentary:
[The book describes] the lives of six North Koreans in the city of Chongjin before they defected to the south. They lived free from the evils of consumerism, ... . They had few possessions at all, let alone SUVs. Their pets needed no grooming, because they had been eaten. And they lived as locavores off the land, in all its organic purity, recycling their waste so that the local farmland stank of ‘night soil’. ...
... North Koreans learned to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals...on the beaches, people dug out shellfish from the sand and filled buckets with seaweed.
Sounds like the ideal way of life as preached by much of the western environmental priesthood, does it not? Yet between 600,000 and 2 million died of hunger. The wildlife was devastated. Pollution was terrible.
...
There is something terribly wrong with the standard litany we recite about the environment. It just is not true that extravagant western lifestyles come at the expense of nature. The more I see of the world, the more persuaded I am that human prosperity is actually good for wildlife, because it leads to investment in things that boost biodiversity. ... Things that make it unnecessary to use the local forest as a source of fuel, the local valley as a source of food and the local stream as a dump for waste. Things that value a moose as something other than a meal.
The oft repeated recommendation of the environmental movement that we live more locally, live off the land, live with fewer choices, fewer inputs, fewer resources and fewer possessions would in fact result in devastation not just for human life but for wildlife too. Going back to nature would be a disaster for nature.
H/T Don Boudreaux for both.
