on the importance of local

Let’s break it down.

When it comes to economies and cultural spaces, there is a human inclination to gravitate towards that which is known, the subconsciously familiar. Starbucks is known. Target is known. Fast and Furious is known. There is this psychological ‘hit’ of dopamine when we see one of these logos as our brain says “ah yes, I know what this is all about!”

This evolutionarily stems from the hunter/gatherer days when our human ancestors would be searching brambles for a fruit that they could eat for lunch - would they be more likely to gravitate towards that which they know won’t kill them, or something new that *might* be delicious? Guess what happened to the ones that tried the new berry… they aren’t our ancestors, they’re dead. Tragic, really. Social scientists are aware of this hard wiring, as are the corporations who play and profit off of it.

This has been leveraged to a point where successful organizations and corporations have conglomerated and leveraged their growing economic weight to saturate and inundate an expanding number of communities. Where once there was a diverse array of shops for any need, be it food, banking, or clothes, a decreasingly oligarchical options are left, with most being owned by the same handful of holding companies. Local coffee shops have ceded to Starbucks. Clothing stores have made way for Target or one of LVMH’s many brands. Chase, US Bank, Wells Fargo, and Citibank hold assets that far exceed those of most governments. Amazon now ships out over 100,000 packages a minute. The scale is astounding and powerful. That which is known is increasingly in each one of our communities.

The situation that we are in now, however, is that this is no longer evolutionarily or ethically astute. There are three primary reasons for this:

1. Economic
2. Equality via transparency
3. Ecology
   

The three E’s, accidentally.

Economically, think of each economic exchange as feeding a loop of cash money. The coffee shop owner gets $5 for a drink, which sees $1.75 go to the coffee roaster/grower, $1.75 go to the dairy farm, and $1 go to the person making your drink. The remaining 50 cents goes toward the management and upkeep of the organization. This is the way that local companies operate. The management and upkeep happens..plot twist, locally. Each of those recipients then takes those dollars, combined with the rest that they earn, and spends them on a new shirt, the mortgage, and fun, flirty toys for the bedroom.

In an ideal situation, those dollars would circumnavigate the microeconomic loop so that the success of the coffee shop would then become the success of a neighboring shirt company and the other communal organizations. However, what happens when non-local organizations are receiving even a small portion of these economic bank notes via conglomeration and globalism, as exists in reality?

Economically, the money spent at a non-local organization equates to investing only cents into one’s community, and dollars into the global economy of wealth acquisition.

Different from the trade of our forebears where value would be sent elsewhere in exchange for value being returned in a different format, this is a one way street. Globalization has expanded the economic rotation to include all communities across the country/globe at once. As this money circle is traversed again and again, each revolution sees a percentage siphoned out of the equation by those who hold and leverage the funds for additional economic growth and power.

The more the economy heats up and inflates, the more they are able to skim off the top - out of our communities and into their holding accounts. It's a race to the bottom.

Equality, via Transparency

The disappearance of transparency that has accompanied globalism is equally worrisome. In an ideal world, each of us would know the individuals responsible for the major aspects of our life | acknowledgement of who we are tacitly associated with. We all know who the president of our country is, most of us the governor, and a few of us the mayor. Yet whose paycheck are you writing every time you buy a pair of pants or an avocado?

Choosing to purchase local does not mean AUTOMATICALLY going with the company that is based closest to home. Rather, what a local economy allows is for the transparency of investing - through one’s purchasing power - in the organization that best reflects the type of future you’d like to see embodied. There are two types of knowing. There is surface level knowledge, which we as modern consumers are more comfortable with - the chain restaurant, the familiarity of branding despite being in a new town, etc. This is juxtaposed with the deeper sense of knowledge that we might seek to attain, of taking the time to go beyond the search engine and learning about the organizations that surround us and create the edifice that we ourselves are a living part of.

Knowing through personal networks that the vice president of the local plumbing company is a good genuine person reassures, whereas a history of racist tirades should steer people clear. In local situations, that is possible. When the vice president of a company is five states over and shielded by a corner office, their actions go without the accountability that society needs from those in power. Seriously, a lot of people in power are pieces of sh*t - shouldn’t we know which companies employ them and adjust our spending to be channeled elsewhere? At least having that option is a step in the right direction. We evolutionarily seek to know, but to truly know we cannot fall back onto laziness.

When an organization is local, there can be those conversations of what is/isn’t working and appreciated. The direct connection that comes from telling the operator of an organization something that you find detrimental or uplifting for your community can actually provide some results, however the massive scale that most businesses in a community are operating within allow for a complete lack of conversation. The operators of these organizations are not interested in what is best for the communities they’re “serving” but they rather hold a fiduciary and selfish duty to the shareholders and economic interests of a regional/global empire. This can come from the angle of something as small as sourcing and offerings, to the substantial actions of pushing the legal limits, such as a landlord/management group angling ever increasing fees on a small business.

This surfaces as an issue of equality when the conglomeration and oligopolization of an industry creates hierarchical power structures. With industries increasingly cornered and no truly free markets for pricing expectations, there is little to no access for those who come from less enfranchised backgrounds to enter the scene and add their voice to the communal conversation. The separate points of a national web of franchises can survive an economic downturn, but a lone and impassioned organization operating solely for the good of its community cannot. The lack of investment might eliminate these companies from being an option, furthering the concentration, leaving communities at the whim and mercy of corporations now ‘too big to fail’.

Ecology

When it comes to the environmental impact of humanity, so much emphasis has historically been placed on the individual: take shorter showers, recycle your bottles, and dispose of batteries in a safe way. It is absolutely incredible how this has been marketed as truth.

The key benefactors of destruction are the corporate conglomerates. The huge majority of water is used by commercial, industrial, and farming organizations. The waste that goes into running a company dwarfs anything that individuals experience. Everything arrives in boxes, surrounded by either packing peanuts or mini balloons. Each item is oftentimes singularly wrapped in petroleum based plastics. Synthetic chemicals are used to clean and sanitize. Ingredients and inputs coalesce from around the world. The opportunities for ecological degradation are nearly endless.

There are two reasons that local organizations are preferable on this front. Firstly, almost all companies that span multiple counties, states, or countries have centralized preparation facilities. What this means is that *every* item in that shop has been shipped from site to site across thousands of miles. Each time with fresh packaging. The cardboard (most of which won’t get truly recycled, let alone reused), plastic wrap, and gasoline required to accomplish this is rather minute economically, but can add up quickly to be rather costly from the perspective of the survivability of humanity. With localized organizations, there are less shipments and therefore a fraction of the pollution is required.

Secondly, a tie in with transparency. Word travels fast in a small town (this sounds like the tagline of a movie with a 5.4 rating on IMDB), which allows conversations to be had about which companies are genuinely taking the steps to decrease their footprint while still serving their communities. Those companies can be rewarded and there can be a direct feedback loop, versus the organizations that are scaled so largely that the only response they are taking into account are overall economic metrics: lower costs via ecologically suspect means means a higher net income. For shareholders, that’s a win. For the survival of humanity and the species that we share the biosphere with, that’s a hard loss.

Our purchases hold power, arguably more power than any electoral vote or signed petition. These decisions can dictate the present that we live in, if we choose, more than the arrangements made by those topping the hierarchy. This can only happen by making the effort to support locally centered organizations that embody the reality which is most desirable.

In history, those who lived safe lives were able to survive, but those who lived in ways that sought out the new + better allowed humanity to flourish + thrive. I hope you’ll use your purchasing power to elect evolving towards a reality based on equality, sustainability, and transparency.