If you live in Iowa, the average carrot must travel 1,600 miles to reach your plate. According to research by IBM’s Smarter Planet Campaign, if you eat carrots, you’re a polluter. The truth is, that if you eat anything from your local grocery store, even the organic section, it has traveled a long distance. Only 1 to 2 percent of all food consumed in the U.S. is locally produced.

Food issues such as quality, cost and healthiness all stem from the distance food must travel to reach our tables. As demonstrated by a 2009 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) study, most food retailers are unable to identify a product’s origin. In a typical food supply chain, the perishable goods are passed between six hands including storage facilities, processing plants, transportation and retail establishments. Considering that every year there are 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses in the U.S., tractability is important.

The impact of multi-faceted supply chains on costs is obvious, especially when fuel is expensive. The direct, environmental impact is unknown but presumably significant.

Since jet set foods must keep for long periods of time, they are more likely to contain preservatives that contribute to expanding wastelines. Researchers at MIT propose local foodsheds as a way to combat obesity. Dr. Tenley Albright, director of MIT’s Collaborative Initiatives program, says that about 90 percent American food is processed.  Albright is leading the initiative to create an Integrated Regional Foodshed system that strategically places foodsheds near high-demand areas.

There are existing local options: farmers. They make up 2 percent of the U.S. labor force. Local Harvest is a website that connects people to local farms where they can purchase produce and meat. And many farms offer co-ops where customers “invest” and are provided with groceries for an entire season.

To kick things off let me tell you why we started Clean Economies. We have a lot of problems. We have problems because new variables such as population increase, environmental strain, and urbanization have not been accounted for in the structures we use to make society work. But we didn’t start Clean Economies because we have problems; we started it because we have solutions. There are a lot of people out there with really good ideas. Better than my ideas. Better than your ideas. Better than Einstein’s ideas. And we need them to socialize their ideas and build off them. Entrepreneurs need to take these ideas and turn them into solutions.

Clean Economies was founded on the belief that capitalist ventures can save the world. Entrepreneurs with ideas can fix your squeaky breaks, your pneumonia, or your government.

Humans are limited. We need motivation. Understanding the scope of a problem is easy; doing something about it requires a giant risk that the average person is unwilling to take. What we need is a nudge to see beyond short-term risk to the enormous opportunity for social, economic and environmental change. We believe this nudge comes in the form of the self-fulfillment, financial gain, and recognition embodied by entrepreneurship.

Clean Economies isn’t just about businesses that decrease our impact on the environment. Its about companies and ideas that can solve some of our biggest social, economic, political and environmental problems.

So with that, lets build something really cool together.

alexandrahastings:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sustainable communities. Not sustainable in the sense that they have a low carbon footprint (although this is an important aspect to creating an economically sustainable community), but in the sense that people want to live there.

Among other things, a sustainable community is facilitated by an infrastructure that encourages interaction and cooperation among its occupants. It leverages human nature to ensure positive outcomes. For example, more outdoor common areas are incorporated into sustainable communities. This results in more interaction between occupants, fulfilling an innate human desire which in turn lowers crime rates and encourages the collective maintenance of common areas. Everyone wants to live in a welcoming, clean neighborhood.

Let’s take low-income housing developments as an example. Instead of forcing  underprivileged families into sprawling projects outside of high-rent urban areas, what if cities invested in environments where families actually wanted to live? How would that change the ethos of communities challenged by crime and cyclical poverty? It would be economically beneficial to the city on many levels.

I want to share this PBS program with you because I think it defines sustainable communities quite well. Its 30 minutes long, but i encourage you to set aside the time.