Whether it's the purchasing policies of chain stores, a lack of local resources like egg graders, or the rules set up by marketing boards and other regulatory agencies, farmers around Sudbury, Ontario have found that the food distribution system is not set up for small farms and local production.

Like other American cities, San Francisco residents rely on distant sources of food that travel an average of 1,500 miles to get to their tables. But the city is surrounded by unique agricultural lands, with a mild Mediterranean climate capable of producing nearly every kind of food enjoyed in the Bay Area. The American Farmland Trust's San Francisco Foodshed Study is looking into whether San Francisco residents could feed themselves exclusively from sustainable farms located within 100 miles of the Golden Gate Bridge. The project will result in a strategy to maximize the potential for the city to feed itself locally, while protecting the farmland critical to the San Francisco foodshed.

The Oregon Legislature has approved a bill that funds the further development of the public schools' Farm to School and School Garden programs. Getting local produce into schools has benefits on many levels, not least in that it encourages development of the local food system.

Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement in the UK, "transition" being the term for a process of creating more resilient and self-reliant communities. The handbook is a good guide and motivator to making changes at the local level and includes a compelling argument that peak oil and climate change must be addressed together.

As transportation costs and wasted resources become more dear, greater attention to appropriate scales may well offer better solutions and prevent harmful ones. Post Carbon Cities staff Laurel Hoyt considers the problem of scale in producing two of our most basic needs: energy and food.

"You have to be careful with peak oil that you don't immediately leap to 'We're all doomed and our economy is doomed,'" says San Francisco Peak Oil Task Force Chairperson Jeanne Rosenmeier. "I think there is an intermediate phase, which is what we are being asked to address: the transition from business as usual." San Francisco was the first city to pass a resolution recognizing the problem of peak oil; its task force is hard at work putting together a plan to deal with that problem.

If our civilization is in trouble, how can planning codes help? In this article from Planning, Chris Duerksen describes ways in which development codes can be potent tools for dealing with major issues: energy, environment, health and social justice.

Many of the most vulnerable members of communities will feel high energy prices in rising food costs. Food banks are already challenged to keep up with demand for more boxes, but they stress that the boxes are just stopgaps; conquering hunger will require more robust and resilient local food systems. "The new era we're entering is a more ecological approach to food, so it's more a theme of sustainability in light of climate change and peak oil and the economic realities that those things are driving."

Inspired by Braungart and McDonough's 'cradle-to-cradle' philosophy and the dictum that 'waste equals food,' the Dutch town of Venlo is launching a number of sustainability projects, including one that will take advantage of the region's strong horticulture industry. The plan will convert carbon dioxide to biofuels, by way of greenhouses growing algae.

Biofuels are often put forward as a domestic alternative to petroleum; further development of our corn-based biofuel capacity is being actively promoted by the Bush administration. A recent report by the National Research Council highlights some potential drawbacks to this alternative, in the form of damage to the water supply caused by increasing U.S. production of corn.