A new social media site for "experiments in local living" has been launched called "Live Local" which should be of interest to those of you interested in relocalisation and related ideas like the Transition Towns movement.

The site aims to be "a place to share stories and ideas about improving your community", with the user generated ideas and stories being dubbed "experiments".

live local is a project which we’ve developed as a joint social venture with Piers Dawson-Damer. The website is a place to share stories about improving our communities. It makes it easy for local residents to document their experiences and adventures meeting neighbours, discovering neighbourhoods, supporting local economies, saving energy, water and much more.

At its heart the project encourages people to take more time to connect and engage with their community. I think its clear the alternative; working crazy hours to earn more money to more buy ’stuff’ while leaving us little time to get to know our neighbours and spend time with family and friends, has spectacularly failed. Many of us crave a smarter way of living; one that makes us happier.

As part of the launch of the site, they have issued the "live local challenge", which encourages people to "live local" for a week.

In honour of [the launch] we have a few exciting things happening. Perhaps most exciting of all (next to the launch itself, which is of course hyperactively exciting) is the live local challenge. Two fantastic Sydney-area ladies, Kate Carruthers and Rebecca Varidel, will be living local for seven straight days starting next Wednesday, and blogging and Twittering about it all the while.

You can follow their progress here, and also in real time by following them: @kcarruthers and @frombecca. (You can follow us, too: @livelocal)

Better still, take the challenge yourself and compare notes and experiences. Here's the brief:

Your challenge is to live local for a week – seven days – and to document your efforts to do so. You can do this anytime.

What is living local?

To live local is to make the most of your community.

* meeting your neighbours and the people who work in your community
* eating delicious food grown as close to where you live as possible
* minimising use of fossil fuels, especially for transport*

* This will be the hardest one for a lot of people. Walking, bicycles and public transit are good ways to reduce (and to keep you closer to your own neighbourhood!). But this challenge is about experimenting and being creative, not about absolutes. See rules #2 and #3 below. ...

I was somewhat surprised to get invited to the launch of the site (apparently I now count as "media", at least in green circles), which was held at a great little bar and restaurant in Surry Hills called "Table For 20" (with organic beer coming from the guys around the corner at Single Origin).

Most of the attendees really were inner eastern suburbs locals, but the restaurant did struggle a little to create a truly local meal, with some ingredients coming from more than 500 km away (it was great food, but 500 km+ probably doesn't count as part of the local "foodshed"), and was a good example of the difficulty of trying to apply relocalisation ideas to large metropolises like Sydney.

I was lucky enough to be sitting with a good group of people - Guy Rundle from Crikey (whom I've quoted here from time to time), Peter from Transition Sydney, Rod from New Matilda, Mickie from Channel 10's Guerilla Gardeners show, Dan Cass and the lovely Jess from Digital Eskimo and Friends of the Earth.

The live local project officially greets the world today. To our pre-launch members, thanks for all your help and experimentation. To our new members: Hey, very glad you're here. Make yourself at home.

To kick things off, we had a few people over for dinner last night, and we've got some details and photos after the jump.

Our launch dinner was held at Table for 20 in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. It's a wonderful space with a deliberately communal atmosphere and a commendable local focus. Everyone dines together at two long tables (each of which seats 20) and food is shared and passed around à la family dining table.

The dinner guests included gardeners, politicians, businesspeople, media personalities and behind-the-scenesters, sustainability experts, community organisers … and Chris Gaul and Jeremy Epstein, the designer and developer, respectively, of this site (who don't get nearly enough credit), and Kate Bedwell, who ran the event like a pro.

It all started with me doing my best impression of a talented MC. I then introduced Dave Gravina and Piers Dawson-Damer, who in turn introduced the project to the room.

Table for 20 owner Michael Fantuz then told us what we were eating. We had challenged him to make the meal as local as possible … which surely conflicted with his usual mandate to get the best food possible. So his description of the homemade food included the number of kilometres it had travelled to get to our tables. Michael wouldn't compromise on cheese – it travelled furthest, from Victoria (the closest place to get real buffalo mozzarella, it turns out); the tomatoes and basil came from Michael's father's garden, about 15 kilometres from Surry Hills. Not a bad effort, and a good learning experience.

The vibe in the room was superpositive, with 40 people who love communities sharing food and stories. Michael Mobbs, a sustainability consultant and (I'm assigning this title to him) community activist, gave a talk about his various projects in Chippendale; the rest of the room was wowed (and surely inspired) by his wry tales of local composting, stingless native bees, community gardening and more. The rest of the room was also probably scared by his contention that Australia will suffer food scarcity within the next 5 to 10 years.

After the most delicious pappardelle of my life (wow, there's some ironic distance between this paragraph and the previous one), I introduced Mickie Quick, an artist, designer and community activist who moonlights on Channel 10's Guerrilla Gardeners. He talked about the boundaries, both real and imagined, that hinder positive social change – communities have power to encourage creativity, but also to stifle it. Mickie's prescription for de-stifling, and for inspiring more vibrant communities in general, was to take risks. To try stuff. To experiment. Which is precisely what live local is about.

Finally, we introduced our first live local challengees, Rebecca Varidel and Kate Carruthers, who have embarked today on the first of seven straight days of trying to live locally.

George Monbiot has a column in The Guardian advocating alternative currencies (aka locabucks) , declaring "It bypasses greedy banks. It recharges local economies. It's time to think seriously about an alternative currency" - If the state can't save us, we need a licence to print our own money. Psst - George, its "Gesell", not "Gessell".

In Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker, the descendants of nuclear holocaust survivors seek amid the rubble the key to recovering their lost civilisation. They end up believing that the answer is to re-invent the atom bomb. I was reminded of this when I read the government's new plans to save us from the credit crunch. It intends - at gobsmacking public expense - to persuade the banks to start lending again, at levels similar to those of 2007. Isn't this what caused the problem in the first place? Are insane levels of lending really the solution to a crisis caused by insane levels of lending?

Yes, I know that without money there's no business, and without business there are no jobs. I also know that most of the money in circulation is issued, through fractional reserve banking, in the form of debt. This means that you can't solve one problem (a lack of money) without causing another (a mountain of debt). There must be a better way than this.

This isn't my subject and I am venturing way beyond my pay grade. But I want to introduce you to another way of negotiating a credit crunch, which requires no moral hazard, no hair of the dog and no public spending. I'm relying, in explaining it, on the former currency trader and central banker Bernard Lietaer.

In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out - as the government did yesterday - that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of "an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange". The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.

But the projects that have proved most effective were those inspired by the German economist Silvio Gessell, who became finance minister in Gustav Landauer's doomed Bavarian republic. He proposed that communities seeking to rescue themselves from economic collapse should issue their own currency. To discourage people from hoarding it, they should impose a fee (called demurrage), which has the same effect as negative interest. The back of each banknote would contain 12 boxes. For the note to remain valid, the owner had to buy a stamp every month and stick it in one of the boxes. It would be withdrawn from circulation after a year. Money of this kind is called stamp scrip: a privately issued currency that becomes less valuable the longer you hold on to it.

One of the first places to experiment with this scheme was the small German town of Schwanenkirchen. In 1923, hyperinflation had caused a credit crunch of a different kind. A Dr Hebecker, owner of a coalmine in Schwanenkirchen, told his workers that if they wouldn't accept the coal-backed stamp scrip he had invented - the Wara - he would have to close the mine. He promised to exchange it, in the first instance, for food. The scheme immediately took off. It saved both the mine and the town. It was soon adopted by 2,000 corporations across Germany. But in 1931, under pressure from the central bank, the ministry of finance closed the project down, with catastrophic consequences for the communities that had come to depend on it. Lietaer points out that the only remaining option for the German economy was ruthless centralised economic planning. Would Hitler have come to power if the Wara and similar schemes had been allowed to survive?

The Austrian town of Wörgl also tried out Gessell's idea, in 1932. Like most communities in Europe at the time, it suffered from mass unemployment and a shortage of money for public works. Instead of spending the town's meagre funds on new works, the mayor put them on deposit as a guarantee for the stamp scrip he issued. By paying workers in the new currency, he paved the streets, restored the water system and built a bridge, new houses and a ski jump. Because they would soon lose their value, Wörgl's own schillings circulated much faster than the official money, with the result that each unit of currency generated 12 to 14 times more employment. Scores of other towns sought to copy the scheme, at which point - in 1933 - the central bank stamped it out. Wörgl's workers were thrown out of work again.

Similar projects took off at the same time in dozens of countries. Almost all of them were closed down (just one, Switzerland's WIR system, still exists) as the central banks panicked about losing their monopoly over the control of money. Roosevelt prohibited complementary currencies by executive decree, though they might have offered a faster, cheaper and more effective means of pulling the US out of the Depression than his New Deal.

No one is suggesting that we replace official currencies with local scrip: this is a complementary system, not an alternative. Nor does Lietaer propose this as a solution to all economic ills. But even before you consider how it could be improved through modern information technology, several features of Gessell's system grab your attention. We need not wait for the government or the central bank to save us: we can set this system up ourselves. It costs taxpayers nothing. It bypasses the greedy banks. It recharges local economies and gives local businesses an advantage over multinationals. It can be tailored to the needs of the community. It does not require - as Eddie George, the former governor of the Bank of England, insisted - that one part of the country be squeezed so that another can prosper.

Perhaps most importantly, a demurrage system reverses the ecological problem of discount rates. If you have to pay to keep your money, the later you receive your income, the more valuable it will be. So it makes economic sense, under this system, to invest long term. As resources in the ground are a better store of value than money in the bank, the system encourages their conservation.

I make no claim to expertise. I'm not qualified to identify the flaws in this scheme, nor am I confident that I have made the best case for it. All I ask is that, if you haven't come across it before, you don't dismiss it before learning more. As we confront the failure of the government's first bailout and the astonishing costs of the second, isn't it time we considered the alternatives?

2012 has always had a lot of significance for various fringe types (thanks primarily to Terrence McKenna's popularisation of Mayan legends I think) and the date seems to be getting lumbered with all sorts of plans and targets as it looms ever closer. Brosi Johnson has an odd (and not particularly ambitious) target for 2012 - creating 2012 vegetable gardens in order to boost the amount of locally grown food in the city - Boris Johnson unveils plan to create 2,012 new vegetable gardens in London.

Londoners will be encouraged to turn flat roofs into vegetable plots as part of a scheme to grow food on 2012 patches of land across the capital by 2012, Boris Johnson said today.

The "Capital Growth" project is the first initiative delivered by Rosie Boycott since she was appointed chair of London Food by the London mayor over the summer.

The former newspaper editor wants councils, schools, hospitals, housing estates, and utility companies to identify derelict land that can be turned into vegetable gardens by green-fingered Londoners keen to grow their own spuds rather than buy transported produce from the supermarket.

Boycott also envisages that spare pieces of land can be found on canal banks, banks of reservoirs, and disused railway yards.

Boycott said: "London has a good deal of green spaces – some derelict or underused - but not being used as well as they could be. We also have a veritable host of enthusiastic gardeners who are well equipped to turning derelict or underused spaces into thriving oases offering healthy food and a fantastic focus for the community.

"Capital Growth will identify spaces across the capital – often in surprising places such as roof gardens – and help London's communities grow their own food."

Boycott said in an interview in yesterday's Times that it was hoped that the 2012 makeshift plots could be found in time for the Olympics so that some of the homegrown food could be provided to athletes.

The demand for allotments has rocketed over recent years as environmental awareness has increased.

But a survey conducted by the London assembly two years ago found Londoners in some parts of the capital were waiting up to 10 years for an allotment, due to a dramatic decline in the number of available plots caused by owners wanting to put the land to other uses.

The London mayor wants to turn back the tide to promote locally grown food in the face of rising food prices and the challenge to protect the environment.

Londoners will receive both financial and practical support to grow their own, such as gardening tools and compost.

Launching the project at a vegetable and herb garden run by a charity for disabled people in Battersea Park, Johnson said: "Linking up currently unloved patches of land with people who want to discover the wonders of growing their own food, delivers massive benefits. It will help to make London a greener, more pleasant place to live while providing healthy and affordable food.

"This will aid people to reconnect with where their fruit and veg comes from and cut the congestion and carbon emissions associated with the transportation of food from miles away. Capital Growth is a win-win scheme - good for our communities and good for our environment."

When I first lived in London in the early 1990's I was amazed to see rows of allotments stretching alongside the railway tracks, usually sprinkled with old guys pottering around tending their vegie patches.

While they seem to have been in decline in recent years, they do have a long tradition behind the, as this NPR report explains -
London's Gardens: Allotments for the People.

London's allotment gardens are an unusual and vibrant system of community gardens that grow across the city. Tended by immigrants, retirees, chefs and fans of fresh food, the allotments make up a kitchen community like no other.

"Allotments" were not a world we knew until we went to Dublin and London to do Kitchen Sister workshops and began to sniff out hidden kitchens in that part of the world.

Wedged between buildings, planted in abandoned open spaces and carved into hillsides, these community plots of open space began to be reserved for neighborhood cultivation with the industrialization of England in the 1860s, when rural people poured into the city.

The allotments started to flourish with Britain's "Dig for Victory" movement of World War II, an effort to feed the starving population of London during the war. They are exploding today with the organic gardening and "good food" movements, and efforts to food self-sufficiency sweeping the country.

Claire Ptak, whose organic and beautiful cupcakes are sold at the Violet stall at Broadway Market in London Fields, first told us about the allotment movement in London. And we just had to see for ourselves.

Bachelors, Artists, Immigrants, Foodies

For about 20 years, retiree Charlie Gregory has been cultivating his plot at Fitzroy Park Allotment in Hampstead Heath, next to hipster artists and an immigrant couple with three Yorkies. There are apple trees, black currant bushes, blueberries, onions and shallots.

"Everybody knows everybody," Gregory said. "I'm a bachelor myself. I'm 78 now, and I'm keeping on the go. It's not expensive. For 27 pounds a year, you've got the space of land, you know, and this beautiful spot. You want to keep fit and live to a good old age? Get an allotment!"

London chef Oliver Rowe gets almost all his food from farmers and producers working within the radius of the city's train system. In the kitchen of Konstam at the Prince Albert, his restaurant in Kings Cross, Rowe's bread is made of wheat that is grown, milled and baked within 20 miles. The walls of his café are lined with jars of Dartford broad beans, sloe gin berries and sweet squash that he canned last year.

"Anywhere where there's a bit of unused green space has the potential to be turned into an allotment," Oliver said. "On the edge of a railroad seating or squeezed in a patch of disused land ... If you go to an allotment in east London, you may have a group of Bangladeshi women who grow all the things they can't buy here, because it's not available or too expensive.

"And you'll find old men, puttering around down there, getting away from the wife, sitting in a chaise reading the newspaper, getting some exercise, bringing home some nice food."

Jo MacDonald, a woman we met selling vintage clothing, has an allotment of her own. "I think it was the thing that kept me sane when my marriage was breaking up," she said. "I used to just go and wallow about in the allotment."

A Long Tradition

John Kelly, publisher of Prospect magazine, says he once had a plot in north London. He said allotments started in the 19th century and were sparked by philanthropy and health concerns.

"So as people fled from agrarian poverty into working in factories, land was given to the city in perpetuity for people to cultivate vegetables," Kelly said. "The allotment boom really happened in 1940s, 1950s."

London has also taken to the guerilla gardening trend with some enthusiasm, according to the Washington Post.

At a few minutes to 11 on a recent balmy night in East London, a black Ford crawled along the dimly lighted street. The suspicious driver rolled down his window to quiz a young woman by the curb. "What are you doing here?" he asked. The reply came quickly, cheerfully. "Gardening."

She was one of two dozen men and women gathered at a long-neglected public flower bed about 20 feet long and 10 feet wide. Under flickering street lamps in the bleak urban landscape, they spent the next four hours transforming the block with pitchforks and spades, fresh soil and plants.

These are London's Guerrilla Gardeners, a fast-growing force of renegades who are breathing life into neglected and timeworn pockets of open land across this vast metropolis.

Similar grass-roots movements are long established in New York, Philadelphia and, on a smaller scale, Washington. But the idea is relatively new to Britain, where people are more likely to wait politely, if vainly, for their municipalities to fix up the public open land.

What makes the British version particularly odd, though, is that it is done under cover of darkness, reinforcing the idea that this is rebellious and illicit. The guerrillas work at night to avoid run-ins with authorities, some of whom may not take kindly to trespassers working on land that is not their own.

The movement was started two years ago by Richard Reynolds, 28, a freelance advertising executive and passionate gardener who first tackled the wasteland around his high-rise apartment in the Elephant and Castle neighborhood in south London. He tells of setting his alarm for the middle of the night and attacking the littered flower bed on his block. He planted vibrant red cyclamens and cordylines, the latter chosen because they were "evergreen, strikingly sculptural, and they echoed the pattern of the spiky metal burglar-preventing fence at the top of the wall."

Soon he was enlisting the help of friends to mount more ambitious raids and, thanks to regular blogs on his Web site ( http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ ) and interest from the British media, Reynolds found he was welcoming more people on every dig.

Today, the Guerrilla Gardeners number more than 1,000 and counting. Reynolds continues to fund most of the plantings himself, but also receives donations from supporters. He tends towards hardy, drought-resistant plants because they won't need much maintenance. A favorite choice is lavender: "It's wind-resistant, drought-resistant, sweet-smelling, floral, honey-bee attracting." Two or three times a month Reynolds sends a group e-mail informing his troops of the next dig's secret location. A select group of the guerrillas comes armed with tools, and sometimes plants, but Reynolds is always at the vanguard, handing out gloves and trowels and directing operations.

Tom Philpott at Grist has an interesting post on efforts to revitalise local economies in Vermont by localising the food sector - A new vision of 'credit crunch'.

The effort to revive global credit markets has devolved into farce. Every day, U.S. authorities announce some earth-shaking new measure -- a $700 billion bailout, the Fed's extraordinary move into the commercial-paper business, a coordinated global set of rate cuts -- and every day, investors continue acting as tweaky as meth heads when the dope has run out.

Why should this matter to anyone who doesn't have a pile invested in the stock market? Because we're in what's known as a credit crunch. When banks stop lending for a long period, economic activity slows to a crawl, and the economy craters. The jobs that evaporate could include your own.

But are there not other forms of credit, other visions for how economies could function? Hasn't the Wall Street model of finance -- wherein multimillionaire b-school wizards "innovate" such wondrous "risk-spreading" instruments as mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps -- gone, well, bankrupt?

The front and business sections of Wednesday's New York Times brought plenty of alarming financial news. For an unexpected bit of financial cheer, dig back to -- of all places -- the Dining In/Dining Out section. There, you'll find a great piece by Marian Burros on the small, once-depressed Vermont town of Hardwick, where people are working together to build a thriving economy around food.

Like many towns in rural America, Hardwick -- once a granite-mining center -- had fallen on hard times.

Usually in such cases, food cultures wither. Restaurants and diners shutter, farms consolidate in search of larger, far-away markets, and food expenditures become a sieve draining any remaining wealth out of the community and into the pockets of distant shareholders in fast-food chains and retailers like Wal-Mart.

Something different is now happening in Hardwick. ...

Continuing on the locavore / locastore theme of the night, WorldChanging has a post on "locavolts" (aka distributed generation - which needs to be supplemented with building scale energy storage and smart grids to be truly effective) - The Locavolt Movement: Pushing For Energy Independence.

Peter Asmus at the San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday on the "locavolt" movement. The growing trend is catching on in communities nationwide, where residents seek freedom from the energy grid through reliance on local generation points like solar panels, small wind turbines and even electric cars that can feed excess power back into the owner's system.

Bay-Area government is considering a plan that would allow its residents more freedom to choose options beyond those offered by giant provider Pacific Gas and Electric Co. As Asmus reports:

Within the next year or so, the Bay Area may bolster its locavolt credentials with a California program that allows local governments to choose power supplies for their constituents. San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Marin County are all investigating a plan that would allow them to stay with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for billing, distribution and repair service, but allow local elected officials to choose more locally produced green power. In Marin County, for example, the long-term goal is 100 percent renewable energy.

The locavolt movement still faces numerous stumbling blocks, notably the hiccups and even long downtimes in naturally generated power that occur with changing seasons and weather conditions. And, as Asmus notes, there are bureaucratic challenges as well, including legal restrictions preventing residents who generate their own power from provide power to their neighbors. These types of policies, which serve the interest of major power companies, stand in the path of would-be community energy innovators.

Still, those who are determined to achieve energy independence are pushing forward, despite the frustrations of trial-and-error, and the high costs of investment in new technologies. As Asmus concludes:

If truth be known, the technology is now available to secure up to 40 percent of our electricity from local, distributed renewable energy sources like wind and sun, if we stay connected and get creative with storage from batteries, cars and maybe fuel cells. Something tells me the locavolts are on to something big.

Kiashu has weighed in on the great relocalisation / reversabaility debate with his own views on the likelihood of a localised future. As I noted in "Fat Man", I think this is still an "optimistic" view of the likelihood of a return to smaller scale farming - I suspect we'll see more GMO, more (electrified) mechanisation of farming and more biofuel / bioenergy production onsite, processing waste streams into energy used for farming. Unless there is a large scale culture shift towards demanding a diet that comprises more locally produced organic food (which I wouldn't rate as highly likely). Kyle also has a look at global grain production and warns us all to beware of graphs.

A lot of peak oil and climate change discussion is about food; see for example my own article on The Shape of Food to Come. This focus is quite natural. At the moment, something like 2% of the West's energy goes to its farms, and another 10% to transporting the food around, and yet another 5% or so to storing the food. So it's natural to say, "well, if the oil runs short, what then? Do we all starve?"

Some greenish types argue that no, we won't starve, because food production will be "relocalised". Suburban football fields will grow potatoes, backyard gardens will grow tomatoes, and so on. Cuba and WWII "Victory Gardens" are often mentioned in this regard. The others often respond with calculations and graphs intending to show that the required number of calories can't be got without machines, and so it goes.

An example of how it goes around is Stuart Staniford's rather long, rambling and unfocused article The Fallacy of Reversability. He begins by making up a new word, "reversalists" - by which he means "poopyheads!" - and using it to put down people who think food production might become more localised; he imagines they all want to live like the Amish. He then goes on to say that industrialised agriculture is so mind-bogglingly efficient and profitable that it can never possibly end.

Sharon Astyk responds with the even longer, more rambling and less focused Is Relocalization Doomed?. (I don't expect you to plough through the rather heavy and stony furrows of either article, I link them only for completeness.) She argues that in fact many countries have relocalised agriculture; some permanently (like Cuba), and some for a decade or so (like the Eastern bloc countries and Argentina). All of those had in common that they ran short of fossil fuels. Since it's happened in the past, it's likely to happen in the future. ...

Both are missing the important fact that modern agriculture is not entirely broadscale farming with heavy fossil fuel inputs and little labour, far from cities, but is also market gardens with relatively few fossil fuel inputs and lots of labour, close to cities.

As fossil fuel prices rise and/or availability declines, the price of food from industrialised agriculture will go up; market gardens will have a commercial advantage over them. So that people will be eating just as much food overall, but more fruit, vegetables and legumes, and less grains, meat, dairy and sugar. Relatively smaller farms closer to cities will have an economic advantage over large farms far from cities. If meat becomes too expensive, high-protein legumes are likely to become more popular and be grown more often in those market gardens.

This does not mean that these smaller farms will be fossil fuel free, still less that they'll all be organic polycultures. But they will probably be smaller, with less fossil fuel inputs, and closer to cities. And people will grow more of their own food. If tomatoes are $30/kg, having a pot or two on your balcony may seem worth the effort.

This trend may be altered by public subsidies for either kind of farm. If for example the government guarantees low prices for fossil fuel inputs for large farms, obviously their advantage will continue. ...

And so my take on the issue is simply that given the decline of fossil fuels, the decline of industrialised agriculture and the localisation of agriculture is inevitable, though not as quick as you might think, as is a change to a diet with less grains, meat and sugar, and more fruit, vegetables and legumes; but it's not inevitable that these smaller and more local farms will be organic polycultures like the barefoot hippies dream.

P.S. Geoff [at Flood Street Farmlet] has an interesting post on how relocalisation may work. He looks at relocalisation from the demand-side rather than the supply-side. It's what I was groping at when I talked about high fuel prices making the less-industrial market gardens have an advantage over the distant more industrialised farms, but I didn't express it as clearly as he did.