I think this is the best thing to come down the pike since Oatmeal. Congratulations to the authors, and I'll be recommending their book to the subscribers of my little paper, Gadfly.
--Jack Foster

Sounds like an interesting and important book.  My one criticism would be my concern with approving local meat, dairy and eggs. Even if it's local, it's still an inefficient way to get protein.  And also, cows still emmit greenhouse gases such as methane and ammonia, even if they're free range.  They emmit less on grass-fed diets, true, but a significant amount of methane is still coming out of them.  The UN estimates that 18% of greenhouse gases comes from livestock.  So I would argue that it is more sustainable and climate-friendly to eat beans, nuts and other plant-based sources of protein that may have come from further away than it is to have local meat. And of course you have the whole slaughter issue...

I'm lucky peanuts are local to me!

Hey, all:

Wow, I wish I had known about this book before Earth Day!  I harp on sustainability ALL the time, including at Earth Day, including sustainable agriculture.  Pointing out the principles described in the book would have helped.  

It appears there are many motives for anyone deciding to eat local, but it has mostly to do with sustainability, and not the ethics of meat vs. vegetarianism.  One can eat nothing but either extreme and still do it sustainably if the means are present.  And one can be a vegan and still be horrendously wasteful from the embodied energy viewpoint.  E.g., if you HAVE to have saffron from Iran, know you are adding previously sequestered carbon to the atmosphere at a frightening rate.  

The quandary of chickens and their feed can ultimately be overcome by ensuring that over time we get the chickens (and everything else) on the same 100-mile regimen!  Sometimes it can't all happen in the blink of an eye.  

This sounds like a very useful book.  Thanks!

David

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!  

Even if it's local, it's still an inefficient way to get protein.  And also, cows still emmit greenhouse gases such as methane and ammonia, even if they're free range.

Isn't one of the keys to biodynamic agriculture keeping foraging animals on-site to provide more rapid nutrient cycling and other ecosystem services? Isn't biodynamic agriculture the only truly local agriculture?

Also, from an ecosystem science standpoint, isn't the carbon being "emitted" by grazing cows simply carbon that is already more-or-less present in the pool of cycling carbon? Little, if any "fossil" fuels were used in the local production of grass to feed the cattle, especially when compared with industrial feedlot systems that must import most, if not all of their feed, which represents a much larger fossil fuel footprint. Most especially grains, which generally require big tractors and lots of petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticide inputs. It seems to me that growing livestock on local forage, which requires very little in fossil fuel inputs, is unlikely to add much net carbon to the global carbon cycle. If anything, when conducted properly, grazing husbandry should result in more sequestered carbon due to soil building.

Any ecosystem ecologists care to chime in?

Hey, GMunger:

Yes, you are correct, of course.  The farms of the rather recent human past were far more self-contained, self-sufficient, Carbon-neutral, and reflect the local approach we should strive for.  

The big item is the distraction created by the junk-science, anthropogenic climate change denier  flacks--namely that cattle are to blame for green house gases.  On that basis, I am surprised some revisionist historian hasn't claimed this is why the buffalo were wiped out.  As a related distraction, there were ads in the 90s proclaiming that increasing atmospheric CO2 would be a huge benefit to a host of activities.   Such is the nature of a factoid, manufactured by politicians, bidnessmen, and marketing types.    

As I alluded, sequestered Carbon is really the only permanent driver in climate change, and fossil fuels are THE source of the very long term trend of which we are seeing the start.   The terrestrial Carbon cycle shifts over long periods of time, but it is the net addition of previously sequestered Carbon that is doing us in.  Sustainable agriculture is one of the most critical changes, and it overlaps greatly with two other critical areas, energy and transportation.

I do imagine that over time, there is little net change in sequestering of Carbon with cattle grazing, rather soil-building is more a product of vegetative growth, which exists with or without grazers in many terrestrial ecosystems.

The overriding fact remains, we cannot continue to transport cold water in the form of fruits, vegetables, and meats halfway around the world sustainably.  Just a simple examination of the emergy involved clearly and adundantly reveals this.  Local is vastly better on many counts. I look forward to reading the book.  

David

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

These 2 are very inspirational. I am curious to know if they looked beyond cultivated produce/food.  There is a veritable bounty of native/wild edible perennial foods everywhere in natural ecosystems.  And you can re-create these types of ecosystems in your own space following the ideas of agroforestry and some good guide books.  
Still reminiscing on the delights of a colt's foot saute.

Big deal -- 100 miles from Vancouver there's nothing but open spaces and farms!

Try doing it from LA or New York where it's all oil refineries and tract housing!

First, amc89 I think you raise a very good point - that local beef may have a greater impact than well traveled beans.  As folks are discussing, many factors could swing the equation in one direction or the other: are the beans from 400 or 4000 miles away?  How is the cow fed/feed grown & transported?  And so on.  

I want to chime in on methane's role in this balance, which SustainableGreen began to address.  The figures I cite below are from John Houghton's "Global Warming: The Complete Briefing" 3rd ed. (highly recommended)  Houghton is former chairman of the IPCC's Scientific Assessment Working Group.  Junk science is a significant impediment to mainstream understanding, yet here's what Houghton has to say about methane:

Atmospheric methane concentration has more than doubled since 1800.

The concentration of methane (CH4) is far less than that of CO2: just under 2 ppm vs. 370 ppm respectively, yet...

CH4 is still a factor because each molecule has 8 x the heat-trapping effect of a CO2 molecule.  The good news is that they degrade in 12 years, much quicker than CO2.

Lastly back to the cows: on p.43 he estimates that cattle's annual CH4 contribution is 90 million tons, whereas the entire coal, natural gas, and petroleum industry emits 100 million tons CH4 (not CO2).

So cow farts are no joke.  CO2 is the main culprit, but  methane can't be dismissed.  I might feel good about occasionally eating cow IF it were from a small scale farm, thoroughly local, and organic, but most cows have significant CO2 hoofprints as well.

As for solutions, I LOVE that the authors planted their own beans!  Gardening is rewarding, sustainable, radical, and fun.  We should stop mowing our lawns and sow gardens in their place.  I look forward to the book, the rest of the discussion, and to trying out the 100 mile diet this summer!

The 100-mile diet concept is intriguing. If it provokes thought about pros and cons of following similar practice, then it manages to raise awareness, which is a kind of success. I like the points that DTW makes. Its not always necessarily better for the environment to buy everything local. It makes sense to look closer at details an make informed more choices.

What hasn't been mentioned with the whole livestock issue is that, in addition to livestock farming creating a lot of GHGs, it also uses up a lot of resources (land - clearing of forests etc, water). It is just not possible for everyone on this planet to have a diet incorporating 'sustainable', locally grown livestock products (meat, dairy etc) at a level currently enjoyed in the West - hence the ideal is unsustainable! One of the reason for the initial industrialisation of livestock farming was to meet the growing demand for its products, by producing them in a more efficient way.

What is needed, in addition to local food is a big jump back down the foodchain to a more plant based diet.

It is important to note that significant proportions of the Earth System need to be left alone by us, in order for the system to be able to self-regulate (google Gaia Theory). What is needed is for a reduction in the amount of land currently used for farming globally (especially in sensitive areas such as the tropical forests) - this requires a reduction in livestock. However, as with GHGs, this will be no easy task - livestock production is currently set to double by 2050, much in the same manner that GHG emissions are.

They're not alone. I would commend to you Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan (NY: Norton, 2002), who spent a year eating local foods from an even smaller radius in the Arizona desert, and limited himself to food items that are native to Arizona. Or This Organic Life by Joan Dye Gussow (Chelsea Green, 2001), who grows close to 100% of her own produce in upstate New York, and no, she doesn't live in the country, but in town. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family just came out with a new book about eating locally and being as self-sufficient foodwise as possible (they make their own pasta, cheese, and yogurt). The message we need to carry away from all these inspiring stories is it's really not that hard. Like every other kind of sustainable choice, if we each did as much as we can (and revise that upward periodically), the changes could be very dramatic, in our lives, those of our communities, and for the planet.

The comment by David, (or SustainableGreen, if you prefer), brought up a question that has been in my mind for some time.  Namely, how does the population of cattle, (and other domesticated ruminants), in the U.S. today compare with the population of bison, (and other wild ruminants ), in this country before 1860?  As a follow-up, how do the methane emissions of domesticated ruminants compare to those of their wild cousins?  Does anybody have any data on this?