Locavores  

The peak oil world (and those criticising it) have been coming up with some great phrases lately - todays gem is "locavores", being used to describe those who eat food produced in the local area (or "foodshed").

Bart from Energy Bulletin even gets a mention in the article concerned (via Energy Bulletin, of course).

As World Environmental Day opens in San Francisco, with 100 mayors brainstorming about environmental problems worldwide, four Northern California women are viewing the issues through the prism of their own kitchens. Calling themselves the Locavores, the women - Lia McKinney, Jessica Prentice, Dede Sampson and Sage Van Wing - are passionate about eating locally and have devised a way to show others how to do that, too.

With San Francisco as the center, they have drawn a circle with a 100- mile radius from the city, and are urging people to buy, cook and eat from within that "foodshed" -- or their own foodshed, based on where they live -- in a monthlong challenge in August called "Celebrate Your Foodshed: Eat Locally." Eating within a foodshed, they say, is the best way to support the environment.

"Eating locally solves the major issues facing us," says Bart Anderson of Palo Alto, co-editor of Energy Bulletin, an online news portal.

On the topic of cool words, I quite like "terriblisma" as well, which WorldChanging resurrected again today in their post on the value of dystopian science fiction.

The Renaissance Italians had a term, "terriblisma," by which they meant the strange, gratified awe one feels when beholding dreadful disasters and acts of God from afar. The term may be six hundred years old, but the sentiment could not be more contemporary. In fact, terriblisma is a quite native 21st Century aesthetic.

We're somewhat ashamed of it, but the fact is, we're fascinated as well as alarmed by what's happening to our planet and its climate. We find ourselves riveted by strange occurances and ominous portents - like giant squid growing to montrous sizes in the warming greenhouse waters of our oceans, or the gigantic and ancient Larsen B Ice Shelf collapsing in Antarctica. Our televisions and computers bring us 24-hour-a-day weather porn of the unprecendented floods, massive fires, sudden ice storms, freak winds, and ever-stronger hurricanes and typhoons which have swept the planet over the last decade.

TreeHugger obligingly provided me with a new dystopian vision today - I now foresee that all cars powered by biodiesel will be devoured by bears.

A man from Winsted, Minnesota believes the sweet smell of the vegetable oil he uses to fuel his car attracted a bear who damaged the vehicle trying to get at the biodiesel. Larry Joy said the bear shattered a window on his 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit, and tipped the plastic fuel tank on its side and gnawed on car hoses. He said the evidence included muddy paw prints around the broken window and a pool of cooking oil on the rear floorboard.

The question that comes to mind is - if a bear eats a biodiesel fueled car from out of town, is it a locavore ? How about if the fodder that produced the biodiesel was grown locally ?

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