Here’s a Mad Idea: What If Local Were Better than Global?
Globalisation has been destructive to the natural world.
During the fraught and dreary Covid years, when the day’s first glass of wine came earlier and earlier with the passage of the months, a spontaneous localism sprang out of sheer necessity. We bought items from our neighbourhood shops, we helped out our elderly neighbours, we went on socially distanced walks with those who lived close by. We spent time in parks and commons, we bought homegrown goods and homemade items. And with our cars and motorcycles gathering dust, and with buses and trains running stripped-back services; with only key workers (add clapping here) using Ubers and Bolts and Olas, the smoke and smog we had spewed by way of habit thinned: and we found ourselves in cities that had not been freed of clag since before Charles Dickens wrote:
‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.’
We spent time in parks and commons, we bought homegrown goods and homemade items.
But it did not last long. And I am not here to preach to you about the great polluters of fossil fuels or those — for they are ourselves, after all — whose need or want of a comfortable journey to the home of a friend, or a safe ride back to ours from a nightclub (and we know how painful heels can be) creates the demand that the producers satisfy. Rather, I want to ask a question: What if, in respect of the climate crisis and our attempts to deal with it, local were better than global?
Of course, as I have alluded to above, by staying local we lessen the number of ‘food miles’, as they say, that trucks and ships and other heavy vehicles unavoidably rack up as they move those divine avocados you love so much from where they are grown to where they are eaten. The vast bulk of the price you pay for the sweet little cherry tomatoes they do in Waitrose corresponds to the distance they travelled to reach your plate, which should give us some small indication of quite how far that is. Another proportion of the price is due to the packaging — which, being plastic, is liable to find its way up the nose of a sea-turtle or in the gills of a fish. If a community grows its own food, then less food is spoiled or wasted during transit, it does not need to be packaged in plastic, and it is fresher and so tastier.
The bulk of the price you pay for those little cherry tomatoes corresponds to the distance they travelled to reach your plate.
Local systems also have the upper hand over their more globalised counterparts by being more hardy: more likely to hold firm, adapt, and maintain a secure food supply should there be problems with the world’s supply chains, as there were during the pandemic years. The recent Crowdstrike event cast a fairly harsh light on the flaws inherent to centralisation and connectivity, namely that if you can find the right pressure point the whole thing comes collapsing down around your ears. Not for nothing does Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the brilliantly original Incerto essays (and also the man who saw the weaknesses in the financial system and made a killing off the crash of 08), champion decentralisation. (Not for nothing did Popes Pius XI and Leo XIII develop the notion of ‘subsidiarity’ first explored by Thomas Aquinas, which states that decisions ought to be made at the lowest possible level.)
The point of subsidiarity, which is rooted in Catholic teaching around the dignity of the individual and his or her link to the community, is also that as decision-making moves away from the places the decisions affect, so too does the decision-maker’s knowledge of those particular contexts. And context is everything: ‘I know that a tomato is a fruit,’ my father used to tell me. ‘I also know not to put a tomato in my fruit salad.’ Hence local communities know not what is best in general, but what is best for them. (The Athenian statesman Solon, asked what was the best form of government, replied ‘For whom? And at what time?’) People revolt against climate legalisation not because they want to live in a wasteland, nor because they hold no affection for the natural world. It is rather because that legislation treats everywhere as the same, when it manifestly isn’t.
Solon, asked what was the best form of government, replied ‘For whom? And at what time?’
But we are also fond of what is near to us. Even in my part of London, I know my neighbours, my postman, my priest, the people who work in the pub opposite, the man up the road who wears a rugby cap and carries around a plastic bag and didn’t like the Glazers’ ownership of Man United at all; the security guard in the nearest Tesco who took a punch from a junkie on a bicycle and reacted with the stoicism of a Victorian sea-captain; the lovely folk who run the nail salon. And I am fond, too, of the river and the parks, the local dogs and cats and the very bold fox who hassles the both of them. For this is my home, and it and the people who inhabit it make my life better in myriad ways. I owe it and them my respect and protection in return. And so I do my best to defend it against disrespect and despoliation. Localism gives rise to loyalty, and that is good for the natural world.
For Tony Blair, the march of globalisation was as certain as the fact that ‘summer follows autumn’; yet in respect of the climate crisis and its attendant threats and problems, globalisation has brought about, and continues to bring about, supply chains destructive to people and the natural world, monopolies with no ties or loyalties to a particular place, and monocultural crops for export: local farmers may grow a dozen crops; a big business will produce one. We are where we are, and ought to be pragmatic. If some law or new technology helps us protect the natural world from devastation, I am all for it. But it is worth reflecting, as we think back to that odd, almost surreal time from 2019 to 2022, whether there was an important lesson that we might draw from it. If there was, then it seems to me that we have yet to learn it.
