An interview on living locally

by Chef Boy Ari

Bill McKibben’s writings trod the line between articulating some of the world’s scariest problems, and the many reasons for hope that persist undaunted in their shadows. His message is urgent, but hopeful. The first of his nine books, The End of Nature, (Random House, 1989) is widely regarded as the first in-depth treatment of global warming directed toward a general audience. One of my personal favorites of his, Hope, Human and Wild, chronicles some places in the world whose inhabitants, he argues, are living the dream – having created communities that are humane, light on the earth, healthy and content.

His most recent book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007) promotes a novel approach to economics where quality trumps quantity, bigger doesn’t mean better, and happiness and prosperity can be achieved through local-scale enterprise.

McKibben is also the mastermind behind stepitup07.org, which is working to organize rallies in hundreds of American cities and towns on April 14 to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050.

I caught up with him last week when he was in Berkeley, Calif., doing a presentation with Michael Pollan about, he explains, “local economies, and the chance they may give us to deal with the almost impossible problem of climate change driven by metastasizing consumption here and around the world.”

Bill was kind enough to answer a few questions, which follow:

Chef Boy Ari: Your new book, Deep Economy, discusses eating local food as a remedy for many of the ills of the global economy. How can eating locally help stave off global warming?

McKibben: By reducing transportation-related emissions, eating locally can reduce the energy embedded in your dinner by five to 14 times. Meanwhile, a farmers’ market is an essential part of rebuilding community. The shopper at a farmers’ market has 10 times more conversations than the supermarket shopper. So it’s the place where the momentum for public transit, or renewable energy, or the other things we need will slowly build.

Chef Boy Ari: Where do you draw the line, personally, in terms of what you will eat?

McKibben: I’m not a doctrinaire, nor does anybody need to be. When our family did a 10-month winter of eating entirely locally, we made the “Marco Polo Exception”—anything that could have come from the orient in a saddlebag, like spices, was OK. I don’t drink coffee, but if I did, I’d make sure it was locally roasted, sustainably and fairly raised. And we’ve given up orange juice forever in favor of locally pressed cider.

Bill McKibben

Chef Boy Ari: What do you eat in the dead of winter?

McKibben: Meat, cheese, bread, beer. Lots of root vegetables. Lots of stuff we froze or canned the summer before.

Chef Boy Ari: What’s your favorite local meal?

McKibben: Smoked butternut squash soup.

Chef Boy Ari: How are things shaping up for stepitup07?

McKibben: Unbelievably. We thought when we began we might get a hundred rallies, maybe 200, organized around the country for April 14. By now we’re over 950. It’s clearly going to be the biggest grassroots environmental protest since Earth Day 1970.

Chef Boy Ari: If we do nothing to curb carbon emissions, what will happen to our food?

McKibben: Agriculture is very vulnerable to changes in climate. We may, in certain places, for a little while, see longer growing seasons, but the data indicates it won’t be too long before we’re noticing horrible effects: long heat waves can reduce grain yield enormously and exacerbate water shortages. Warmer weather also facilitates the spread of pests. Our food supply worldwide is pretty finely balanced as it is, and this will make it much, much harder.

Chef Boy Ari: Suppose California’s central valley, which grows nearly half of the nation’s food, faced a massive agricultural crisis brought on by global warming. Should we worry about this, or do you think the world would be better off if Americans didn’t rely so much on food shipped thousands of miles from California?

McKibben: We all order takeout from 2,000 miles away every night of the year: California’s central valley, Chile, Mexico. This system is vulnerable to disruption not only from climate change, but also from the fact that the food arrives marinated in oil—crude oil. It takes 36 calories of fossil energy to grow and transport one calorie of California lettuce back East, which means that not just global warming but also the rising price and dwindling availability of oil poses a mammoth challenge to our current model. •