For years we've heard, "go local" as a cry to champion local businesses over big box retail stores that have often outcompeted smaller stores. In some ways, 'go local' became coopted by hipsters as a way to feel trendy and superior - not exactly a motivating factor to support this in spirit.

These days, businesses and consumers are rethinking outsourcing as a feasible means of doing business. With supply chains experiencing massive disruption (gone to a grocery store recently or tried to buy TP?) manufacturing for lower costs in other countries doesn't seem as appealing.

This approach has pretty much destroyed British manufacturing jobs.

For years we've heard about human rights violations in 3rd world countries whose factories create the Nike shoes and JC Penny apparel. The factories that make our toilet seats and fishing rods and lead-based children's toys have very little incentive to treat workers humanely other than eliminate the bottom line.

It's about creating the cheapest product possible, regardless of quality or the blood, sweat and tears of the underpaid workers whose backs American luxury is built upon.

After watching a documentary called the High Cost of Low Prices back when I first entered college, as part of a research paper due in my Composition 1 class, I refused to shop at Walmart on principle. Walmart deducts rent out of their employees' paychecks in China regardless of if these people want to live in Walmart or not.

So most made the fiscally conservative decision to just live at Walmart.

They live in the upper floors of the department store (similar to the movie Sorry to Bother You depicts in a fictional context only, this is real).

But please excuse me, and let me step off the soap box. It isn't about whether this is right or wrong in the aftermath of this corona debacle. It's about survival of the planet and this is something to consider: the values of a business model along with the supply chain's geographical distance to retailers. Health and safety, when neglected have economic costs, as we are seeing today.

Patrick Geddes, one of the most influential city planners to exist, advocated neotechnics, and regional planning. Geddes proposed that physical geography, market economics and anthropology connected social life together.

He felt that physical geography should determine how buildings were built to facilitate social interactions. This was done by first surveying the environment and instead of building grid cities using the scientific method and civic surveys to create a series of self-sufficient cities interconnected but not wholly reliant on each other to survive.

Right now, we live in a world where much depends on the health and vitality (and political maneuverings) of cities, countries, far from where we live, across oceans. When calamity strikes, we are at the mercy of how capable foreign governments are at dealing with emergencies.

Their mistakes have ripple effects, globally felt.

"Go local" isn't just a catch phrase right now.

It's something that needs to be revisited strategically, for economic sustainability. What will the world look like, when we've overcome the covid19 epidemic? I hope we learn from this, how to work together in the market, similar to a Geddes self-sufficient city, connected to, but not dependent on other cities.

Our survival depends on learning the lessons history has taught us, we just need to pay attention to them and take action to course-correct.

So go local, pay attention to supply chains, let's support each other.