Humes helps us understand the complexities and cost of food miles

The subtitle of Humes’ new book Door to Door is The magnificent, maddening, mysterious world of transportation. It was previously mentioned on TreeHugger in the context of a short excerpt about the role of the car, but that is only one very small part of the world of transportation. It is a complex world that even our grandparents would barely recognize; Humes notes in the introduction:

We live like no other civilization in history, embedding ever greater amounts of miles within our goods and lives as a means of making everyday products and services seemingly more efficient and affordable. In the past, distance meant the opposite: added cost, added risk, added uncertainty. It’s as if we are defying gravity. The logistics involved in just one day of global goods movement dwarfs the Normandy invasion and the Apollo moon missions combined.

Not only is it complex now, it is going to be changing even more rapidly in the future as self-driving vehicles change our cars and 3D printing changes our distribution. He ends the introduction with the warning “Buckle up” but could have added Bette Davis’s follow-up “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Read the Treehugger story - “Door to Door by Edward Humes: we deliver a book review.”