b'environment for all, but the end to this silly political angerthat colors everything blue or red instead of a lovely productive green. 14Dont be fooled by the folksiness of this vision. As imperfect and frag-mented as the local food movement is, as upscale as many of its early adopters are, and as extremely unsilly as political anger has become, conviviality and civility are precious and potent and awfully hard to come by in other public arenas. The local food movement is uniquely able to reconnect us to one another and to the places where we live, and to do so in relatively non-ideological ways. There is a curious tension in all of thishyperlocal dots of reconnec-tion emerging around the country but without linkages to one another, often not reflecting in the social sphere the diversity to which they are so fundamentally committed in the biological sphere, and not organized readily into a collective political voice. This tension leads some to dismiss local food as an agent of change. At the same time, this tension is what I and many others find so profoundly creative. Confronting systemic problems at the local level, up close and personal, we are building a foundation upon which ever-widening circles of food communities can be built. In 2015, the Ecological Society of America published a study that mapped the potential of local foodsheds to feed the American popu-lace, analyzing key variables of cropland area, crop productivity, food waste, diet and population distribution. Their findings: 90% of Ameri-cans could be fed from within 50 to 100 miles of where they live. Our results indicate that the current foodshed potential of most U.S. cities 14 Letter to a Young Farmer, pp. 46-4728'