Consumption gap

Most people now live in cities where the commodities and products consumed come from all over the world. Especially evident with food; what we eat in our homes, at work, at restaurants or from vendors often comes from across the world. The gap between where we consume and where those goods and their constituents were taken from the earth has grown to the extent that we aren't able to gauge our direct impact on the environment. The natural mechanisms for us to respond to our environments have been dulled. The environment which supports an individual is now a global web of places rather than their immediate environment. Perhaps relying on environments from which we are detached is one of the drivers of the over consumption and inefficient use of resources we see all over the world today.

Working on a tree plantation or paper mill would give someone a good idea of what our consumption of paper requires. The same for a cattle farmer and understanding what our consumption of beef costs the world, but most people live in towns or cities that are only the end of the line for consumables. Someone in NYC may eat an apple from Chile, and drink a bottle of water which was bottled in another state, using plastic from Canada which was made from raw material imported from Asia. So really in NYC this person is only finishing the consumption of the apple which began in Chile and the same with the bottle of water.

Much of the global large scale farming, manufacturing and trading that takes place today is a result of people and firms seeking economies of scale from mass production which lowers unit costs to achieve greater revenues and profits. Modern logistics also plays its part in the shape our world has taken. Cities will always need to import certain things and draw on distant resources but perhaps we can find a more efficient balance.

Reducing the distance between where an apple is grown and where it is eaten (possibly with approaches like vertical farming) wont only reduce the resources needed for the apple to travel but could also re-sensitise us to the real cost of our consumption. Producing more of what we need in our own environments opposed to consuming from such a vast global web of places would not only make populations more self sufficient and sustainable but would partially close the gap that hides our over consumption.

Dealing with our waste closer to home too would cycle our resources, creating micro ecologies which would be easier to manage and read compared to the global complex ecological systems that we are currently failing to manage. Households and communities that produce some of their own food and deal with some of their own waste could become micro ecologies that form the building blocks of more efficient and sustainable global ecologies and populations.