CALIFORNIA IS FAMOUS FOR BEING A TRENDSETTER. BLUE jeans (San Francisco), indoor shopping malls (Los Angeles), theme parks (Anaheim), and the Internet (Silicon Valley) all got their start here.
One of the strongest current trends in Sonoma County, California, where I live, is localism. In Santa Rosa, my city, a downtown storefront is home to Share Exchange—perhaps best described as a localist mini-mall, hosting a “Made Local” marketplace, a “share space” coworking center, and a cooperative business incubator. Signs on Santa Rosa windows and lampposts advise residents to “Shop Local,” “Bank Local,” “Eat Local,” and “Compost Local.” A new county-based nonprofit power agency, Sonoma Clean Power, started up in 2014. Menus at an upscale restaurant at the center of town proclaim, “We feature organic food from local farmers.” And Sonoma County is now estimated to have about 250 small commercial food producers.1
Of course, localism is not unique to California; it’s blossoming across America, with “Go Local” programs thriving in Boston, Atlanta, Tacoma, and other cities. The US Department of Agriculture lists 8,144 farmers’ markets in its National Farmers’ Market Directory, up from 5,000 in 2008. Indeed, local food is one of the fastest growing segments of American agriculture, though it has yet to become as popular as blue jeans or shopping malls.
To be sure, localism has its critics, who argue that it amounts merely to a snobbish, nostalgia-driven fad; they say globalization—in effect, anti-localism—has given us economic growth and cheaper consumer goods, lifted hundreds of millions in poor countries from poverty, and contributed to cross-cultural understanding. Localism, its detractors say, rows against the tide of history.
Localism’s supporters counter that globalization has spurred economic inequality and destroyed jobs. Further, localists worry that globalization is an inherently unsustainable trend that will leave households and communities high and dry when it inevitably falters. Nearly everyone agrees that global communication and cultural exchange are good things, and that complete local self-sufficiency is probably both unattainable and undesirable. Nevertheless, localists contend that, during recent decades, the economic pendulum has swung much too far toward globalism and is now poised to reverse itself, making localism the dominant trend through the remainder of this century.
Throughout this essay, as I illustrate the case for the desirability and inevitability of a return to shorter supply chains, I’ll circle back to examples and evidence from my home region. Readers can readily find similar examples in their own neck of the woods. We’ll also explore ways in which a localized future might challenge many of our current habits and expectations, and suggest ways enlightened policy makers could help ease the passing of globalism and the re-rooting of communities in place.
What Has Globalization Done for You Lately?
Broadly defined, globalization can be said to have a long history. The Roman Empire, the post–1492 European age of conquest, the British Empire, and the massive expansion of international trade that started in the late 20th century each brought more long-distance communication, travel, and transport of goods. All of these projects resulted in an increase of wealth for elites in urban trading centers, and mounting costs borne mostly by indigenous peoples and nonhuman species.
The last of these four great projects—for which the term globalization was coined—was by far the most intensive and extensive. It was driven by the convergence of key resources, developments, and inventions: cheap oil, satellite communications, container ships, computerized monitoring of inventories, the flourishing of multinational corporations, the proliferation of liberal trade treaties, and the emergence of transnational bodies such as the World Trade Organization.
For economists, globalization made perfect sense. The doctrine of comparative advantage held that if low-wage workers in Shanghai can make widgets cheaper than unionized factory employees in Camden, New Jersey, can, then widget manufacturing should move to China. And, to a large extent, it did.
Economists said everyone would eventually benefit, but casualties quickly mounted. Real wages for American workers stopped growing in the 1970s. Manufacturing towns throughout the Northeast and Midwest withered. Meanwhile, China began burning immense amounts of coal to make mountains of toys, furniture, clothing, tools, appliances, and consumer electronics, cloaking its cities in a pall of toxic fumes and driving its greenhouse gas emissions to world record-setting levels. In effect, the United States was importing cheap consumer goods while exporting jobs and pollution. In both China and the United States, levels of economic inequality soared.
These trends have direct and indirect manifestations in Sonoma County. In the first half of the 20th century my region’s economy was diverse and agriculture-based. Farmers and ranchers produced a variety of foods including wheat, hops, prunes, apples, eggs, milk, and beef. Building materials were sourced from nearby forests and quarries. Today the county banks on one significant product: wine. Most of it is exported. Grapes have become an ecological blight on rural areas, where vineyards extend from horizon to horizon, crowding out ecologically diverse native oak woodlands. Wine leaves by the truckload, while everything else the people of Sonoma County need and use arrives on the backs of eighteen-wheelers—much of it from China. The vast majority of food consumed here, once locally grown, is now imported. Processed and packaged edibles available in downscale supermarkets and fast-food chain outlets in Santa Rosa are identical to what you’d find anywhere else in America these days, and contribute to rising regional rates of obesity and other food-related diseases.
California is one of the most trade-dependent states. Silicon Valley (just a couple of hours’ drive south of Sonoma County) generates legendary wealth, purportedly from the groundbreaking ideas of its engineers and technicians. One of the hottest of these ideas was the smartphone, an invention that has swept the world. But the idea of a smartphone would amount to little without cheap labor in Asia with which to affordably manufacture hundreds of millions of these little devices, and without mines around the world churning out raw materials from which to make them.
Northern California’s wealth—derived largely from globalization—draws people to live here. As a result, this area has some of the highest land prices and rents in the nation. That’s not a problem if you’re a high-flying tech baron or vintner; but if you work in the service industry, or are trying to make a living growing anything other than grapes, it’s tough to get by.
Taking cost of living into account, California has the highest poverty rate in the country. The state is home to about 12 percent of the total US population, but a full third of US welfare recipients. Income inequality is already higher here than in almost any other state, and it’s increasing fast: according to The Economist, in the last five years the number of Californians earning between $50,000 and $100,000 fell by almost 75,000, while income brackets above and below grew.
Project these trends a couple of decades into the future and you arrive at some version of hell—a society that is socially and ecologically ruined. A lot of Californians have already done that visualization exercise, and that’s what drives them to want more local manufacturing jobs, more locally grown food, and stronger communities comprised of skilled, motivated, engaged, and decently paid people.
But the argument for localism is actually much stronger than this: even if we desperately want more cheap foreign-made goods and are happy to trade away economic equity and ecological sustainability in order to get them, globalization is a self-limiting game that has nearly run its course.
Fueling the Engine of Globalism
Without cheap transport fuel, globalization as we know it would not have been possible. True, Britain and Spain managed to build trans-oceanic empires using sails, but today’s vastly larger global trade empire requires oil-fueled container ships, diesel-powered trucks and trains, and kerosene-guzzling jets and rockets (the latter to thrust communications satellites into orbit). High mobility means oil.
California is no stranger to the oil business, and the state serves as a useful case study for what’s happening more broadly in the petroleum world. In the early 20th century, rows of oil derricks dotted Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Huntington Beach. Indeed, in the 1920s Standard Oil Company of California was the largest individual producer of crude oil in the United States, supplying fuel throughout the Americas.
While petroleum was California’s main export throughout most of the last century, production peaked in 1985 and slowly declined. Today a pump jack still quietly sips crude behind a fence on South Mountain View Avenue in Los Angeles, while colorfully camouflaged drilling rigs bore downward on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. More drilling and production rigs are visible to drivers on Interstate 5 near Bakersfield, and on Highway 101 north of Santa Barbara. The industry still extracts half a million barrels of oil per day from beneath California’s soil, but the state’s current production level is less than half of what it was 30 years ago.
This is a common problem in the petroleum world: most oil-producing countries are past their prime. The ongoing depletion of giant legacy oilfields compels companies to explore in hazardous regions (such as the Arctic) or in deep water (the Gulf of Mexico), and they must rely increasingly on unconventional resources like Canada’s tar sands and on technologies like hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and horizontal drilling.
North Dakota and Texas are epicenters of the new tight oil fracking boom, but deposits amenable to fracking are present in California, too. Indeed, in 2011 the US Government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated the Monterey shale formation, which underlies more than 1,700 square miles in the southern part of the state, to contain more than 15 billion barrels of “technically recoverable” oil—twice the reserves reputed for North Dakota and Texas combined.
When geoscientist David Hughes, my colleague at Post Carbon Institute, examined drilling data for California’s Monterey formation in 2013, he found that initial production rates of wells are only about one-half to one-quarter those assumed by the US Government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), and total lifetime oil production per well is likely to average one-third or less of the EIA estimates. Further, the geology is far more complex and forbidding than in tight oil plays in North Dakota and Texas. The EIA’s estimate of 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Monterey was wildly overblown (indeed, the EIA drastically cut the Monterey forecast to six hundred million barrels in 2014).2
For the oil industry, big production estimates boost stock values; governments likewise thrive on economic optimism. But drill down, and the evidence suggests the current fracking boom, in California and elsewhere, is actually symptomatic of quickly diminishing returns throughout the oil sector. As such, it may be the last, brief hurrah, not just for a few overly leveraged drilling companies but for our entire petroleum-fueled, globalized way of life.
So Can We Continue Globalization Some Other Way?
We are depleting the world’s naturally occurring petroleum reservoirs over a period of roughly two centuries—an eye blink in human history, but a relatively long interval in terms of most people’s subjective sense of time. There is still a lot of oil left to extract and in all likelihood the world supply of transport fuel faces not a sudden shutoff but a decades-long tapering (though with ever-rising costs). Most people assume we’ll just gradually shift to different sources of energy to power transport. But what’s there to shift to that will give us the same level of mobility?
The petroleum industry proposes using natural gas more widely as a transport fuel, since shale gas (produced, like tight oil, via fracking) is currently plentiful and cheap. However, shale gas resources suffer from the same problems as tight oil—rapid per-well decline rates and limited numbers of profitable drilling sites. Touted as a bridge fuel, natural gas may in reality be a bridge to nowhere.
Electricity can power some transport, and there are more electric cars on the road today than ever before. But where will added electricity come from to keep electrified transport growing through midcentury?
The global nuclear industry is moribund. High investment costs and revised post-Fukushima risk assessments have led some nations to abandon nuclear altogether; others have scaled back plans for expansion.
Some energy analysts favor the increased use of coal, using carbon capture and storage technology (CCS, often labeled “clean coal”). Yet everywhere it has been proposed, CCS is being rejected as too costly. Without CCS, dealing with the climate crisis will require reducing global coal consumption nearly to zero by midcentury. Even if the world refuses to take climate protection seriously, there is good evidence that economically minable world coal reserves have been substantially overestimated, so coal may not be able to keep the party going much longer anyway.
Wind and solar would help solve the climate crisis, and they’re renewable (though the machines used to capture energy from wind and sunlight are made from nonrenewable materials). But solar and wind have energy characteristics different from those of fossil fuels: they are intermittent and seasonal, a problem that can be solved only with major investment in energy storage or long-distance transmission. While a few analysts claim that renewables alone can power America,3 grid operators in Germany and Spain have reported problems integrating increasing amounts of solar and wind electricity input.4
Electricity is not a complete transport solution even if we have enough of it. Electric airliners would be too heavy to fly even with a 40-fold increase in battery efficiency. The US military and Virgin Airlines have experimented with sophisticated aviation biofuels, but cost projections are astronomical.
For the last couple of decades, energy futurists have touted the “hydrogen economy.” Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger liked being photographed driving his hydrogen-powered Hummer and championed the “hydrogen highway,” a chain of hydrogen-equipped filling stations to service H2-powered cars. Toyota plans to bring out a hydrogen car next year and promises to help build support infrastructure in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Yet, as of 2014, California has only nine publicly accessible hydrogen filling stations, compared to nearly ten thousand gas and diesel stations.
My state has done more than nearly any other to develop renewable energy sources and hydrogen (which, like electricity, is not an energy source in the strict sense, but an energy carrier). But the renewable energy transition is not happening remotely fast enough even here—let alone in the nation as a whole—to significantly limit climate impacts or forestall the economic consequences of oil depletion.
If we are in peril of not having enough energy to maintain transport systems at current scale, then we should urgently shift transport modes so as to maximize per-ton, per-mile fuel efficiency. Ships are the most energy-efficient haulers, then trains; trucks are much less so, while airplanes are usually the least energy-efficient means of moving people and freight. From an energy efficiency perspective, trucking—which moves the majority of US freight from factories, shipping terminals, and warehouses to stores and homes—is the weakest link in our current transport chain. We could increase transport efficiency by replacing trucks with trains in many instances, but America’s rail network is incapable of taking on significant new capacity and little is being done to expand it.
Here in Santa Rosa, a city of 170,000, train tracks run through the center of town but there has been no freight or passenger service for years. The tracks are being refurbished for a diesel-powered Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) passenger train, which will whisk commuters along a 70-mile corridor from Cloverdale in the north to Larkspur in the south. Limited freight service is also envisioned, using the same tracks, and there is hope for the eventual electrification of SMART, which begins service in 2016.
Meanwhile the county, with a couple of billion dollars in state and federal funding, has spent the past three years widening US Highway 101 (which bisects Santa Rosa) to six lanes, and enlarging Sonoma County Airport. In all, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that my city, county, state, and nation have bet their futures mostly on cars, trucks, airplanes, highways, and runways—and therefore, in effect, on oil. It appears to be a losing bet.
Local Dystopia, Local Utopia
The worst-case scenario for our energy and transport future is gloomy indeed: broken supply chains and a failing economy. Yet since shipping is our most fuel-efficient transport mode, globalization won’t go away anytime soon just because moving product-filled containers from Guangzhou to Oakland by slow boat has gotten more expensive. High fuel prices will first impact aspects of the economy more directly dependent on cars, trucks, and airplanes. Companies will likely try to offset rising oil costs by cutting other expenses—reducing salaries and laying off workers. Economists will observe that demand for products of all kinds is falling and blame the resulting economic contraction on demographic trends, financial bubbles, deregulation, or too much regulation—anything but unaffordable oil.
We got a taste of exactly that scenario in 2008. As oil prices soared, the global financial system crumbled for apparently unrelated reasons. Trade levels plunged. Governments and central banks leapt to the rescue, boosting overall demand with deficit spending while keeping interest rates low via quantitative easing. Economic inequality increased alarmingly, but crisis was kept at bay. It’s not clear how long these strategies will maintain a semblance of normalcy, as oil depletion continues inexorably to undermine the energetic basis of our global economy.
Meanwhile, climate change could nudge localization into overdrive. Imagine the following sequence of events in a not-too-distant year: During summer, severe drought hammers the Midwest; then, in early autumn, a massive hurricane devastates areas of the Gulf coast. As winter descends, epic rains flood California’s Central Valley and coastal cities, rendering a million people stranded and homeless. A Republican-dominated Congress, suffering from disaster fatigue and reluctant to run up the Federal deficit, refuses to approve relief money for California. The takeaway message: continent-spanning supply chains are a terrific investment during boom years, but if and when maintenance costs mount . . .you’re on your own.
For “doomers” and “preppers” who lie awake at night worrying about climate change and resource depletion, the failure of complex national and global provisioning systems amounts to nothing but collapse and calamity. But other futurists tell a happier predictive story about localization, and it begins with renewable energy.
Solar and wind may not be able to replicate all the payoffs of fossil fuels—which are concentrated, available on demand, and ideal for fueling centralized grid systems and vehicles of all kinds. But what if society were to play to the strengths of these new energy sources rather than trying to force-fit them into systems designed for oil, coal, and gas? The result would likely be an energy economy that is distributed, decentralized, and under local control.
The trend may already be quietly beginning: because conventional utilities have a hard time accommodating high levels of intermittent input, some are starting to penalize grid-tied rooftop solar homes. For solar homeowners, a way to avoid these financial disincentives is to go off-grid. While the required initial investment is high, renewable generating systems are cheap to run because there is no fuel cost. If off-gridding were to become widespread, the ultimate outcome would be much lower overall energy consumption levels within a national energy system that is highly diverse, localized, and even anarchic by present standards, with electricity use primarily occurring when intermittent energy is available.
Another technological development possibly leading to a happy local future is 3-D printing. Jet printers that spray particles of metal or plastic resin instead of ink, piling up layers to produce a useful object, are still relatively uncommon. But printers are evolving quickly and their price is plummeting. As applications of the technology expand, more products will be manufactured at their point of purchase or use. While per-unit production costs may be higher, reduced shipping and inventory expenditures will more than compensate. Supply chains of raw materials—from mines to printers—would be needed, and some environmentalists have legitimate concerns about the waste and toxics produced by these machines; still, studies suggest that overall materials and energy consumption would be less than is the case with our current centralized, globalized systems of production and distribution.
A complementary bit of hopeful news from the technology world comes from farmer-physicist Marcin Jacubowski and colleagues, who have spent the past few years inventing the Global Village Construction Set—open-source blueprints that enable fabrication (from locally available recycled materials) of 50 key industrial machines, including tractors, wind turbines, bioplastic extruders, and 3-D printers. Jacubowski’s goal is to provide every community with access to the basic technology needed to maintain a comfortable, sustainable, locally self-sufficient existence. So far, only a few of the modular machines have been fully designed and prototyped, but Jacubowski’s project has attracted both investors and eager interns.
For solution-oriented localists, these hopeful developments coalesce into a vision of a nation of small producers living in thriving cities, towns, and villages, with chickens in every backyard, solar panels on every roof, a 3-D printer on every desktop, and an open-sourced set of productive machinery in every neighborhood. In such a future, globalized communication (and hence cultural exchange) might persist, but without job losses and export of pollution.
Which will it be—local dystopia or utopia? In all likelihood, our real future will hold a bit of both. The relative mixture of the two probably depends on what we do now.
All Politics Is Local. . .Is Global. . .Is Local
Among environmentalists, the most common critique of localism is that climate change—an existential planetary threat—requires a global response. It is useless for individuals or communities to reduce CO2 output if overall emissions from power plants and cars continue growing. If we can’t achieve an international agreement to cut carbon, we’re all toast—even if we’re proud to be locally made, whole-grain toast.
Though I haven’t conducted a proper survey, it’s my impression that most localists strongly support a global climate treaty. But 20 years of efforts to hammer out a meaningful global emissions-reduction regime have so far failed. The reason is plain: slowing climate change means pouring sand in the gears of the fossil-fueled economic growth machine. Yes, coffee tables of environmental nonprofits groan under the weight of well-meaning books and reports striving to show how carbon offsets, carbon trading, and green technology could keep economies growing even as greenhouse gas emissions wane. But most such rhetoric is, in the end, politically motivated and unintentionally misleading. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson of the UK-based Tyndall Centre displays refreshing honesty in his call for planned economic recession. Anderson figures that industrial nations need to cut carbon emissions by ten percent per year to avert catastrophe, and it’s pretty obvious that such rapid reduction would be, in his words, “incompatible with economic growth.”5 Ergo, let’s engineer a depression.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, Beijing, and London, virtually all policy makers cling to the belief that growth is the only thing that matters. President Obama explained his priorities plainly in a news conference in November 2012: “If the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody’s going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”6
In effect, we environmentalists are stuck with two strategies, neither of which is working very well: the first is to double down on grand energy transition plans that promise more jobs and growth (while ignoring real economic costs); the second is to call for national policies to shrink economic throughput, knowing that no high-level policy maker is likely to sign on.
Localism offers a third approach that does not directly conflict with either of these. Simply: Let’s do what we can locally to reduce consumption, thereby lessening the global carbon burden while building personal and community resilience so we can better respond to the now-unavoidable climatic and economic impacts. Typically, it’s easier to change personal behavior or local ordinances than to enact national or international policies—so why not start small?
Most of the good news with regard to climate mitigation efforts is coming from small countries, states, counties, and towns anyway. Here in Sonoma County, a nonprofit called the Climate Protection Campaign has signed regional cities onto the most ambitious carbon reduction goals in the nation. Transition Network, which promotes “small-scale local responses to the global challenges of climate change, economic hardship, and shrinking supplies of cheap energy,” boasts thousands of projects in 44 countries—including five in Sonoma County.7 Many more examples could be cited.
Since localization efforts often target reducing consumption as one of their subsidiary goals, policy makers actually have a disincentive to support such efforts. After all, if everyone were to reduce spending the economy would contract and tax revenues would shrink.
Just as some policy makers have better climate scorecards than others, we can expect that some will be more (or less) supportive of localization. State, county, and city officials need to be reminded that money spent in local businesses tends to stay in local communities and gets recycled three times more than money spent at chain stores.8
The path to a more localized future holds both promise and peril. There are lots of clues and opportunities we can grasp now to help us realize promise and minimize peril later on. We’re more likely to recognize those clues and opportunities as we begin to pay better attention to our neighbors, our regional history, and our local ecology. Our sustenance and survival will increasingly depend on relationships with the people and natural systems around us; as we nourish and protect them, they will have greater capacity to do the same for us.
— IN PRESS
