Former writer for The New Yorker and celebrated environmental scholar, Bill McKibben is the author of several books, essays and articles that examine such topics as global warming and alternative energy. (Photo © Mark Godfrey/TNC)

Hope comes in small packages, the smaller the better.

After decades of making everything larger, we’re finally starting to realize our folly. Take food, for instance. The average bite we eat has been grown on a vast farm tended by giant machinery; it’s traveled 1,500 miles before it reaches our lips. It has, in other words, been marinated in crude oil from the moment of conception to the moment of consumption. A calorie of iceberg lettuce grown in California and shipped back east took something like 90 calories of fossil energy to grow and transport.

Which is why it’s such good news that the number of farmers markets in America has double in the last decade. There are small markets and huge ones—25,000 people thronging the streets around the Wisconsin state capitol building every Saturday morning. There are yuppie markets, and markets in housing projects. Every one of those markets breeds new farmers, and every one of them breeds something even more important: a new sense of community, a sense of where you live.

That sense—the exact opposite of the placeless disconnectedness of big box stores—is the prerequisite for creating communities that can conserve energy: communities full of people who can actually ride a bus together, communities that don’t sprawl into endless wasteful subdivisions. It’s also the prerequisite for building communities strong enough to survive some of the challenges (global warming, peak oil) headed our way.

But it’s also something lovely in its own right: a red tomato, a handshake. Some reality for a change.