A tasty post from Kerry Howley (of Reason but on her own blog) about the move from fair trade to localism as the foundation of ethical eating and caffeine consumption.
Of course, buying local goes beyond food. Local Ann Arbor businesses often promote buying local which has always seemed to me a bit odd for a left-wing sort of town. Shouldn't the left view be that we should drive into Detroit to buy from poor people? Of course, that would increase our carbon footprint. And, of course, both buying local and buying from poor people in Detroit do nothing to help the really poor people in the third world.
Having mutually incompatible values is hard and I suppose is what leads to this sort of normative cycling. Normative cycling is also useful because it allows people to signal that they are politically with it. You need the "right thing" in "doing the right thing" to change with some frequency otherwise everyone would eventually catch up and then "doing the right thing" would lose its value as a signal of hipness.
Whew.
7 years ago
