Green Options

We live in a “global” world now. Corporate globalization is prevalent nearly everywhere. Travel is more common than ever before. We get news in our homes about anyplace in the world seconds after it happens. The internet allows us to connect with people all over the world. It allows us to stay in touch with people as we move all over the world as well — (a friend of mine is in Antarctica and he keeps in touch with people through Facebook everyday). We even have an international language! English is spoken (by at least some portions of the population) nearly everywhere you go.

BUT, what does it mean to be a “global citizen”?

While an overwhelming amount of media attention has been focused (rightfully so) on the past week’s financial meltdown on Wall Street and beyond, another looming crisis is getting center-stage focus this week in Sacramento, California: peak oil.

A slew of speakers and experts in everything from geology and energy to finance and business is meeting through tomorrow to address what could one day make the Lehman Brothers collapse look like a picnic in the park: declining oil production coupled with rising demand and prices on a global scale. The 2008 Sacramento Peak Oil Conference kicked off yesterday.

On September 30th, six years after Congress originally passed the law, the United States will implement a country of origin labeling program for supermarket foods.

At first glance, the elimination of tariffs for goods and services that protect the environment and fight climate change sounds like a good idea to spur a green economy, but what about the social and environmental consequences of free trade?

As you may know, blogging on ecolocalizer.com is relatively new for me. Its been fun, but hey I think it could be better with a little more back and forth. So I thought I’d introduce myself one post at a time as I talk about localization here in the Bay Area. And I invite you to ask questions, make comments, and tell me what you think needs to be covered. If you’ve got a localization project in the Bay Area and you want folks to know, post a comment or send me an email at daveroom (at) gmail dot com. I aim to please.

Without further adieu… My name is Dave Room (and that’s my daughter in the photo). I have been working on localization for the past four years. Sometimes it has felt like I am swimming upstream. Actually it still feels like that - the difference is that now the current is not quite as strong. As the financial underpinnings of our society unravel, as food prices soar, as oil prices regularly hit new highs - it seems like I am living a prophecy. Everything that is happening now has been more or less accurately predicted by a large International community of people who have been following our oil predicament. Another name for our oil predicament is peak oil, but its really all about the oil depletion and the coming imbalance between supply and demand. Sometimes I call these folks “the depletionista”.

Maybe we really have reached our limits. David Korten, author, lecturer, and founder of Yes magazine, believes we have. He believes that climate change, peak oil, and the meltdown of the U.S. dollar are all symptoms of the impending fall of our modern, globalized way of life. And he has a point. The stock market is crashing, gas and food prices are skyrocketing, and our economy is faltering. Of course, if you are an optimist, you might say, well, we will survive, as we have before. Except for one thing: what will we eat?

When I take stock, I realize I can do without most of the things I buy. Yesterday I bought gas, printer cartridges, and mad libs for my daughter. Food was the only necessity I spent money on. But if David Korten is onto something, access to most of that food is in danger.

Consider: by most estimates, 98% of the food consumed by Americans comes from the industrial food system.

Globalization brings with it many threats to endemic island species.

Certainly, as an example, food air miles often makes the news, with consumers urged to buy locally, in a bid to cut down trade reliant on kerosene and its resultant CO2 emissions.

But importing foreign foods brings with it additional risks and uncertainties. One can never know for sure what else is being imported along with their food.

I use this, I stress, as merely a clue as to what may have caused the varroa mite, which carries a number of viruses and which has wreaked havoc on UK bee colonies.

As I noted in Thursday’s post, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott’s “Company of the Future” speech to executives and store managers contained some intriguing visions for moves that Wal-Mart could make on helping its customers conserve energy. As I expected, several commenters expressed concern about other areas, particularly product sourcing. Conventional business thinking has heralded the efficiency of the company’s supply chain; activists, on the other hand, have noted that Wal-Mart (along with most major retailers) has benefited from more open global trade policies that, generally, have placed little or no emphasis on workers’ rights, occupational safety, or environmental impact.

Numerous companies have taken a beating for problems with factory conditions in the developing world, while the retail sector in general has had to face both PR and legal nightmares related to the movement of American operations to “cheaper foreign markets” (yeah, I’m paraphrasing Lou Dobbs here). Combine that with recent revelations that some goods from Chinese factories have been tainted with everything from lead to antifreeze, one might wonder why more multinationals aren’t racing back to the US and other more regulated markets. But that’s a different post…

Suppliers

Supply chain issues took up roughly a third of Scott’s speech last week, and, again, the CEO presented some bold concepts for how Wal-Mart might address problems raised by sourcing products from the developing world. The first concerned the company’s relationships with its suppliers:

Starbucks announced yesterday that it has reached a licensing agreement with the Ethiopian government regarding the marketing use of Ethiopia's well-known coffee producing regions, most notably Sidamo, Yirgacheffe and Harar.

This is the resolution to a row that Starbucks began last year when the Ethiopian government filed applications to trademark its most famous coffee names. Securing the rights to these names would enable Ethiopia to capture more value from trade, by controlling

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