Notes Design

Yale 360 has a great interview with locavore Michael Pollan on the importance of shifting from environmentalism, which focuses on preservation, to sustainability, which focuses on a healthy relationship between industrial and biological systems. His argument for localizing food production also works for an argument to localize many other types of production:

One source of our sense of powerlessness and frustration around climate change is that we are so accustomed to outsourcing so much of our lives to specialists of one kind or another, that the idea that we could reinvent the way we live, change our lifestyles, is absolutely daunting to people. We don't know how to do it. We've lost the skills to do it . . . I think where climate change is taking us is to a point where many of us will need to take care of ourselves a little better than we do now. We will be less able to depend on distant experts and distant markets. We will need to re-localize economies all over the world because we won't be able to waste fossil fuel . . . These long supply chains are going to have to get shorter.

What do you think, designers? Is localized production possible? Comments please.

Pollan's garden-talk might not provide all the answers but it's sure got some good clues. Go ahead and read the full interview here