I have thought (and talked) a lot recently about localism, specifically people’s growing interest in locally produced food. But in the near future this will transition from farmer’s markets, community supported agriculture, and the like, to a full-blown resurgence of local artisanal production of all sorts of goods.

We will see increased interest in local food (I expect local revolutions as people in communities like Reston VA begin to break local ordinances by growing vegetables in their front yards and keeping chickens in the back), a resurgence in artisanal production (more than just food, as the cost of oil and awareness of ecological impacts lead people to buy locally made clothes, furnishings, and other goods), and local, collective distribution systems that sidestep the multinationals.

There will be an increased interest in local solutions to local problems, which could shift the shape of politics, but not in the conventional sense. I expect that we will see bottom-up approaches to local issues: for example, imagine a collective of artists and freelancers buying a group of buildings and converting it to a live/work community, with it’s own cafe/restaurant/bar, school, and daycare center (for both children and old people), operating more or less as a de facto microcommunity within the physical local government. Neotribalism is the future.

Networks of people interested in localism will grow interesting relationships: people making clothes locally will seek locally produced wool and cloth, those making cheese will lead to local people making paper to wrap the cheese in, and boxes to carry the cheese to market. All working at smaller, more human-intensive scale, and avoiding industrial economies and distribution. These networks will tie people together in ways that shopping at Safeway or Home Depot does not.

In John Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath, a novel of the great depression, when farmers were wrenched from the land and scattered across the country like leaves blown before the wind, he wrote that no group of people were more than three meals away from revolution. It could be that by shifting our patterns so that our three meals a day come from local food we will have realized a revolution from the bottom up.