Oil and Soil

Once you have begun to realize that local products are often superior to nationally or globally distributed ones, it becomes an ethical choice on multiple levels to use those local products.

Normally as consumers we adopt a non-ethical viewpoint, which we call "cost-economy" -- which is money-cost economy. Money-cost economics are deceptive economics because of Western industrial society's continuing habit of deferring debts into the indefinite future by the expedient of assigning zero monetary value to nonrenewable resources. The cost of "cheap" mass-farmed corn, for instance, is based not only on price-supports for the intensive use of petroleum products in the corn's growing, harvesting and distribution, with those price-supports helping raise at an ever-greater rate the real debt related to that dwindling resource -- but also on soil cost. In the U.S., the soil cannot be brought back to farmland from the Gulf of Mexico. Yet money-cost economics means that the sole sensible activity for the consumer is to buy the corn that is "cheapest."

Money-cost economics is the bedrock philosophy of our Age of the Masses. It has been a cheap age in many senses of the word.

Cheers ...