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Agrifood system globalization is increasing rapidly, driven by industrial world governments and multinational corporations. Globalization increases the distance between inputs and production and between production and consumption, creating food insecurity, malnutrition, and environmental degradation, including global warming. One popular response is the localization movement, often measured as food miles—the distance food travels from “field to fork.” Indicators like food miles are often conflated with goals like reducing greenhouse gas emissions or improving nutrition, although they are not necessarily linked, making localization vulnerable to self-deception and local washing. Effective localization would require changes in eaters’ and farmers’ values and behaviors, and community and government regulations. A case study in the United States demonstrates the importance of checking the validity of indicators like food miles.

This penultimate chapter addresses the ecological consequences of the British "large planet" diet. The first part of the chapter examines the rise of mined, imported, or manufactured fertilizers: coprolites, superphosphates, Chilean nitrates, guano, and synthetic nitrates. It then explores the ecologies of vast frontier monocultures and mechanized agriculture. The chapter addresses the global agrarian crisis of the 1930s, particularly the phenomenon of the global dustbowl, which seemed to many contemporaries to be a portent that agricultural intensification was damaging planetary ecosystems. It also explores the rise of novel, intensified, systems of factory farming involving chicken and pigs. The final part of the chapter looks at the development of a backlash to the British world food system, in the form of vegetarianism and organic agriculture.

We might not live in a sustainable age, but we’re living in the age of sustainability. The movement has gained a level of prominence in recent years that is difficult to dispute. The scholarly fields associated with sustainability have expanded dramatically; new tools and methods have appeared that help define, measure, and assess sustainability; and a broad range of organizations and communities have embraced the principles of sustainable living. Sustainability, in fact, has gone from marginal ecological idea to mainstream movement in a surprisingly short amount of time. We now see sustainability publicized at the supermarket, on university campuses, at the aquarium, in corporate headquarters, in government ministries, and in countless other places. A growing number of universities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations in the Western world possess an “office of sustainability”— replete with sustainability plans and guidebooks—but none have an “office of green radicalism” or an “office of the status quo.” In a sense, this environmental discourse has won out over rival conceptions of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. This chapter is an attempt to sketch out the different ways in which sustainability has gained a foothold in contemporary society. It is not meant to suggest that our world is sustainable. On the contrary, many barriers and entrenched interests have kept our world rather unsustainable, and Mathis Wackernagel has even argued that, since the 1990s, we have exceeded the Earth’s capacity to sustain us; we are now living in a state of global overshoot. The goal here, rather, is to show the ways in which our society has constructively responded to our ecological crisis—to demonstrate the growth and elaboration of the sustainability movement and describe some of the successes it has achieved in counteracting our bad habits. As the philosophy of sustainability has developed, so too has it expanded its scope. If we recall from earlier chapters, the concept of sustainability began in the eighteenth century as a method of managing forests, and by the 1960s and 1970s it had become a reaction to industrialism and the trend toward ecological overshoot.