Travis should not have gotten this started...

It was he, after all, who started us down the path to sustainability and localism by giving out copies of Deep Economy. After that came Omnivore's Dilemma and now I just finished The Small-Mart Revolution. Now I cannot sleep at night. When I do I dream about what we could do to awaken Glasgow so that everyone can experience this epiphany. There are so many things that need doing. We need to study where money leaks out of our economy. We need to help everyone understand those leaks. We need a database of truly local businesses. We need a way to make sure everyone knows about them. We need to help everyone understand why we should be bending over backwards to patronize those businesses. We need to form a database of businesses that we need to plug the money leaking out. We need, we need, we need. This is really more than we can expect Stephen Biggers to take on by himself.

In fact, the more I think about it. I don't know how many people it would take to really start making a dent in all of this. Want to get together and tilt at windmills?

It Aint Just in South Africa

Check out this link
to a story from the LA Times. This is not just an interesting little bit about something happening a world away. There is another utility whose sales of energy far outstrip their capacity to produce. This utility is a bit more local, but they too have allowed low energy costs to send an incorrect signal to the public which resulted in sales leaping far ahead of where they should. The name of that utility is TVA. These are the folks who also serve Glasgow. Everything in that story could be written about our region of the US within a couple of years. Is that relaxing?