Localvore is a new “buzz word” if you will, that was coined as a term for people who try to eat food that grown or raised close by to where they live. They see it as being good for the environment because there is no longer a truck driving possibly thousands of miles to bring apples to your grocery store from Washington or Oregon. The other side of this is that buying into your local economy helps raise up the community as your dollars spent in the community are going into a community member’s wallet. Unlike shopping at a Wal-Mart where the cash you spend goes to a multi-national corporation that most likely won’t reinvest it back into your community. So let’s take a look at the facts behind these two ideas.

The biosphere, our living world, is in crisis. Our hyper-successful species is running out of room and resources on our finite world and humanity faces grave hardship in the near future if we do not achieve a sustainable balance with our home.  Scientists are scrambling to define the limits of comfortable living on our world so that we can better understand what we can and must do to sustain favourable conditions and avert disaster.

A global homogenization of plants and animals has been occurring over the last few centuries as civilizations, societies, cultures, and peoples have increasingly met, mingled, traded, colonized, and migrated. This great biotic exchange brought about by people purposively or accidentally moving plants and animals from one region or continent to another has resulted in great benefits (for example, coffee, chocolate, potatoes, horses, and chili peppers) and also a suite of negative consequences for human societies and natural ecosystems.

The respiratory system is unique such that it is directly linked to the external environment. Because of this, it is particularly susceptible to injury caused by inhaled toxicants including environmental ozone. In the environment, ozone is generated through a series of complex photochemical reactions and perpetuated cyclically by three main reaction mechanisms: photoactivation (solar radiation at wavelengths between 295 and 430 nm), photodecomposition and free radical chain reactions [1].