Listening to all the arguments for and against environmental controls and sustainability of resources I was struck by the fact that so much of our food supply is energy dependent not only for its production but also transportation storage and ultimately consumed by our population.
So I propose an experiment:
Suppose we all take this spring to grow the following items:
10 pounds tomatoes (that's about one plant)
10 pounds of potatoes (that's about 2 plants)
10 heads of lettuce. (that's always 10 plants)
Assuming that there is a ~31 million of us up here in Lotus land that means that the transportation for 10 pounds of tomatoes to each of us would amount to a cargo of 310,000,000 pounds the same for the potatoes at about the same for lettuce. That works out to about 1,000,000,000(Billion) pounds of produce that have to be grown somewhere else and brought to your local store in refrigerated trucks and railcars then transported home by whatever you use to shop.
Try to put your mind around the amount of energy required to disperse that billion pounds of rather innocuous vegetables to 31 million people.
So while we're running around turning the lights off and trying to use a push scooter to go to work in the morning I suggest that we begin looking at what we can do locally to offset the carbon footprint that we have the option of not using.
This is just one idea I'm sure you all have several of your own but often said charity starts at home.You could also try buying these three products from local suppliers but somehow they haven't been able to calculate in that reasonable discount that people should expect from not having to truck the products from the deep South all the way up our little town.
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