When I was a kid, my parents lived a frugal life, so when we got a Betamax player, it caused a sensation. We could watch movies in our home, and all it took was a walk down the street to the neighborhood video store. It was more than I could have ever imagined...
Until the day when Betamax went out of business and video stores no longer carried movies in that format.
The history of innovation has several such stories of competing technologies that eventually produce a winner and a loser, with the loser disappearing into oblivion. Anyone own a steam automobile? A recording cylinder? A Walkman?
From this, we need to learn that we gamble when we get too specific in our goals for the future. As a case in point, we have seen over the last five years a great acceleration of research, advocacy, and innovation around the idea of environmental sustainability. This realm includes topics from energy efficiency to renewable energy to urban agriculture. Although the research and innovation areas require skills and knowledge from varied fields, many of them overlap with several other areas, increasing the impact if one technology or strategy "succeeds".
Right now, we have two converging topics primed to have a "winner" and a "loser": local food and transportation. We have seen the market transformation of hybrid vehicles, and sit on the precipice of a wave of electric vehicle development and implementation. Within 15 to 20 years, the American vehicle fleet could easily consist of over 75% electric vehicles. Combined with developments in renewable energy generation, especially at the community scale, would mean that we have a real chance to eliminate harmful emissions from transportation. At the same time, we have a push for reduced transportation energy in our food system promoting more locally available products. This push seeks in part to reduce the environmental impact of our food system while maintaining health. If vehicle technology improves as predicted, or perhaps undergoes an even greater revolution because of forces we have yet to discover, in twenty years it may not matter whether I eat bananas that come from South America instead of apples from Michigan. Neither will contribute to harming the planet.
Local food advocates have other reasons for their work, so I do not seek to diminish the cause as a whole. For those that use carbon footprint and emissions as THE reason to push for local food, I would re-examine the need to put energy into that position. Even without a major technological shift, an electrified, minimal-carbon vehicle fleet will happen in our lifetimes; with a major shift, we may see something that performs even better. With this as the case, the time has come to forget about local food as a carbon mitigation strategy, and marshal our resources around food waste, nutrient-richness, or another food health issue.
Unless, of course, you're interested in buying some of my old Betamax movies.
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