Have you ever taken a drive through the countryside in Mid-Missouri and were amazed at the vast lawns that people spend hours mowing, which otherwise could be used as arable land? Have you ever thought about the possibilities of “farming your yard,” even a small patch of land in a nice sunny spot on your front lawn? Did you know that most of the food that we enjoy invariably comes at a high fuel cost?

Each Earth Day we reflect on many different perspectives for how climate change can be mitigated. Some believe that producing a chemical cloud across the planet, thus reducing the heat of the sun, would be a good thing. Others feel that drastic policy measures on a global scale must be made. The Kyoto and Paris Accords, for instance, are a great examples of monolithic recommendations that would happen on a unfathomably large policy scale. However, what if the climate problems aren’t merely so fixable by pure policy? Perhaps they are also fixable though our attitudes toward human existence itself. Some thinkers believe that many of our environmentally destructive behaviors are actually created by globalism, manic consumerism and unfettered technological advances. Many writers, some of them quite obscure, others lost in the mists of time, have called for something slightly less futuristic to combat climate change: a return to localism. Continue reading “Earth Day and Localism”