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Read the full transcript here.

Morag:

Hello, my name is Morag Gamble from the Permaculture Education Institute and welcome to the second part of this special four part series on Sense-making in a Changing World podcast with internationally acclaimed localization activist, Helena Norberg-Hodge. Helena is the founder and director of Local Futures, an international non-profit organization dedicated to renewing ecological and social wellbeing by strengthening communities and local economies worldwide. Helena’s first book, Ancient Futures, has been translated into 40 languages and sold over 1 million copies. She has been the subject of hundreds of articles and written many books, including her latest book, Local Is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, which accompanies her award winning documentary also called, The Economics of Happiness. Helena’s work spans almost five decades with support and collaboration with leading ecological thinkers. She’s been the recipient of a Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize and also the Goi Peace Prize. I first met Helena back in 1992 at Schumacher College and was absolutely inspired by the work that she was doing and subsequently volunteered with her in the dark or little Tibet. In the first part, we talked about the global economy. Here in part two, we dive in and discuss the food system. Re-localizing the food system is central to creating a shift in the global economy, restoring communities and regenerating landscapes. Regenerative food systems are locally adapted by diverse agro ecosystems deeply connected to place and community. Our third conversation will focus on community and ecology and in our fourth and final conversation, we’ll be taking a look at big picture activism and where to go from here. So grab your notebook, listen in with friends, follow up by watching Helena’s films and delving into her study group materials and localization action guide, and feel free to share this widely. This series is available both as an audio and video podcast and you can find the links in the show notes below, as well as the links to Helena’s materials. 

Before we begin, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in which I’m meeting with you today. I’m here on the unseeded land of the Gubbi Gubbi people and on the banks of the mockable river. So sit back and enjoy and thank you so much for being here as part of this series of conversations with Helena Norberg Hodge. 

So thank you so much for joining me again, today, Helena. Last time when we spoke, you were talking about the big picture, talking about global economic systems and so many different intersecting challenges that we’re facing and setting the scene for the need for relocalization. So in this series of conversations, this is the second of a four part series that we’re exploring, we’re going to talk about food and I know that this has been central to a lot of the conversations that you’ve had and actually, probably, one of the most tangible ways that you can explain the big picture of what’s going on because everyone can relate to food, everyone eats. So there’s a way that you can deeply connect with this and if we could just begin, one of the things that you talk about is you talk about how local food could save the world. What do you mean by that?

Helena:

When we really understand how this global economic system ended up, essentially destroying our health, our well being, and the health and well being of all of life. What we’ll see is that the way the system operated was to drive us away from our food production, from the land from which we got our food and if we were to restore local food economies worldwide, we would basically be talking about a world where the military industrial complex couldn’t exist. We talk about a very, very different world and I think that there is a very happy landing that is possible, which is that it doesn’t have to involve every single person on the planet who has suddenly started to grow their own food and in fact, what I discovered from traditional countries anyway, it was never a question of just individual families or individuals. It was always a community effort and made it possible. But even then, there would certainly be room for cities, for smaller towns, and villages to survive and if we were to envision the world, my dream world in 50 years, where we would see that half the population would be engaged in food and farming, we’re also talking about the production of fiber, and building materials, and fishing. So we’re talking about that primary production to meet our basic needs and I would estimate that we could happily and very enjoyably employ at least half the global population, in fact, much more than that if people wanted to. But I want to make it very clear that for a really healthy, thriving world, we need lots of people on the land, we actually need lots of highs and hands. So that we would probably want to be seeing in most societies, something like half of the people engaged in that way and I think right now, I also want to point out that we’ve just recently had news from England of serious shortages and big concern and when we look at this system that has been created through the global economy, the globalized food system, we are now beginning to see some of the insanities beyond that countries are importing and exporting the same product and so on. But just recently in the UK, it turns out that the shortage of CO2 is having a dramatic impact on the food economy and then we find out that the CO2 in Britain comes from two enormous chemical fertilizer factories cloned by a US corporation. So just the other day in England the radio interview was asking someone from the government, “So you’re now talking about spending millions 10s of millions of dollars to pay an American company to just keep this thing going for three weeks.” Now, this fertilizer company, as it turns out, doesn’t just make chemical fertilizer, which is part of destroying the soil, it’s not a healthy way to grow food. Whether producing the CO2 that’s used in the food industry, so as to keep things looking fresh. CO2, very important for this preservation, this artificial look of health and freshness.

Morag:

Is that the same CO2 that gets used to make fizzy drinks?

Helena:

Yes.

Morag:

I was thinking about that the other day because I read the article and I was thinking, “Oh my gosh! Even if people are drinking their fizzy drinks, it’s supporting not only the whole sugar industry and the corporate drink companies, but the chemical companies and I don’t know whether that link was very obvious before and then thinking too about how they had to slaughter the pigs early because they were going to run out of the CO2 to actually kill them humanely.

Helena:

And I think in terms of talking about what people would like to do, then I would just love to be able to do a film about tracking the number of people involved in the global food industry, standing all day, perhaps studying animals with CO2 before they’re about to be killed doing nothing else. All day just snipping off the legs of chickens, sitting in trucks, now having to keep going with drugs, because again, they’re under so much pressure and they’re working 24/7, driving trucks all over the world. Part of the mining that goes into all of this, if we added up all those activities and we look at them carefully, we would see that those lucky few people who discover the joy of growing food in a more diversified small scale localized way, where they have contact with the soil, with the animals, with plants, and with the customers who love what they do. We’re talking about a different word and we’re tired of the word, but there’s no doubt that those people are happier. But we have a big marketing job to do, because the dominant pressure is that you are only important, you’re only someone, if you have left the land, you don’t have dirty fingernails, all that work is backward and primitive. You’ve got to be in the city and I guess we talked about that in the last session.

Morag:

There’s a lot of this story, though, that has been misinterpreted. We saw that story, if from one perspective, but on the other side it’s sort of saying, “Well, this food is cheaper. It’s more affordable, it’s more reliable. We can only feed the world’s people if we use this type of method.” And so all of these different narratives that are shared, making analysis, pastoral fantasy. Like when you buy boxes of eggs from the store, for example, and it’s got chickens dancing in the field on the front, where actually the reality is what you just described before, there’s this huge disconnect and all of these things can happen because of that disconnect.

Helena:

The disconnection is the way that this global economic system has been created and we have to remind people that it is done by force and so once people have been forced away from the land, literally enslaved or through enclosures, then this system was set up with his clients were able to deliver things at a lower price, already going back quite a few generations, they had this unfair advantage of being slave masters. But this is something that, of course, gets buried and forgotten and that’s why people have a very hard time understanding, how could it be that? This supposedly cheap food can actually be so expensive. How is this possible? Well, it was possible because we allow this accumulation of wealth and power in institutions, which then also became part of shaping our thinking, including in school, including the writing of history. So it is, in a way, a giant, big conspiracy. But most of the players who keep mouthing these mantras are the only way to feed the world and we’ve got to have genetic engineering. And not only that, now we have to have robots, and we won’t have more technology. 

So that sort of mantra is now being met by a lot of really good people who actually believe that it’s necessary. So I actually knew a colleague of mine was a geneticist, her name was Marty Crowd, she was at University of Indiana and she had been completely convinced that genetic engineering was needed to feed the world. She was really doing this out of idealistic concern and passion. She just happened to be on holiday in India and ended up talking to some local activists and farmers and just suddenly had her eyes open about what was actually going on there. By the time I met her, she had become a local food activist and luckily, she had tenure. So she wasn’t thrown out of university, but she certainly wasn’t supported. So there’s been this way that the whole system doesn’t want to hear another story and I think it’s important now to also mention that just a few days ago, there was a UN Food Summit and there, the FAO and other UN agencies are completely part and parcel of supporting a way forward, which is essentially one that favors the same system that’s giving billions to fewer and fewer people, but above all, the same system that allows global corporations to operate without any rules or restrictions. So it’s really traded and that allows them in turn to tell governments what to do. So now they are pushing robots and linking to satellites to monitor carbon and it’s all very frightening.

Morag:

So maybe we could chat a little bit more about what’s going on at those summits and the food summits, because what you’re saying about the United Nations, I think there’s this sense that United Nations or global governance organization for the benefit of all people and has the SDGs and talking about Zero Hunger and all of these things. Can you give your perspective on all of that?

Helena:

Yes, it’s such a difficult thing to have to say. Because most people still are very idealistic about it and there have been so many idealistic people in the UN and people have joined positions there, because they were idealistic. But again, I would argue that the problem has been that. First of all, the UN consists of people who have been appointed by national governments around the world. So they’re just unelected appointees by the different governments we have and people are not so idealistic these days about their own national government. But certainly to keep that in mind. However, of course, as a united force, the UN has sometimes been more benevolent than, say, aggressive US governments and with their military excursions and sounds because it’s been a collection of nations. So it’s a bit understandable still that people would be favorably disposed to it. But unfortunately, there are pressures from these big corporations that again, remember, they come from national governments, the people there have been so great that intellectually, they seem to be suffering from the same blindness that I’ve found within governments, within mainstream economics, mainstream academia and that is that this system we have is the only possible way, there is no alternative. 

I spoke to people in high finance and Nobel Prize winning economists and when I addressed the whole issue of free trade and these treaties and how governments are actually subsidizing deregulating big business, why they punish small business and tax them heavily. So they’re very heavily regulated in their tax. So we must reverse that. Using those mechanisms that shape the direction of the economy, the response is, “Do you really think we could do that in a democracy?” Meaning that people are expecting us to grow the economy in this way, nearly leading, no one has forced them to sit down and look at the fact that what they’re actually doing is destroying jobs and creating this enormous gap between rich and poor. That’s becoming obvious in every country and in such an extreme and obscene way. Just as we know, in the last couple of years, it’s been a steady process for the same steady reset that the economy has been taking us in the same direction. So another tragedy in all of this was five or six years ago, there was a study that was actually commissioned by the UN and the World Bank, along with something like 53 countries joined in and it was called yesterday, it was the international assessment of agricultural science and technology for development. Yes, it was a three year study and it involved, I think, something like 400 experts. Midway, they had the word knowledge, because they realized that there was so much knowledge among traditional farmers so that actually science and the scientists weren’t the only ones who knew what we needed to do and when the results from the study came out, the head of the study allows us to work if we keep going in a certain direction, we are going to live on a planet that’s uninhabitable. [inaudible] was quashed, especially English allies, UK, US, Australia refused to ratify, refused to sign off reversely, made no noise in the media and this is the tragedy of what we’re facing now. This sort of systemic relationship between global media, global science, global corporations,

and squashing of this deep and vitally important knowledge that now, as this UN summit was going on, where brutes representing hundreds of millions of small farmers on every continent, one of the best known, we should be much better known as La Via Campesina. But there are other alliances, too, and La Via Campesina started in opposition to the trade treaties. Because small farmers around the world were the first to see just how destructive these trade treaties were. Because they would see how the opening up meant that food on the other side of the world was being dumped in their economy at a lower price than they were able to produce it. Because of all the time the benefits that have been given these giant corporations have included artificially cheap energy and subsidies for their technology. It’s really difficult today to have to say, not only do we need to be skeptical about the UN, but we have to be skeptical about the Green New Deal and to be skeptical about leaders now talking about renewable energy. Renewable energy is something we all wanted to work for and used and tried to put on our panels on our houses and I worked for 30  [inaudible] , promoting decentralized renewable energy and in Bhutan as well. So it’s so painful to see that now, we’re at a level where the big businesses have so much power, that their version of renewable energy is essentially a giant industrial. First of all giant industrial wind farms, but also plastering the land with solar panels and no bit of land should be used for that, every bit of land should be alive. Why on earth can we put solar panels on buildings? Also this industrial mega scale with the message: “Oh, yeah! We can feel the global economy with renewable energy.” And that’s now also including nuclear, and forms of hydrogen and other very high tech ways of generating renewables. It involves buying up enormous monocultural, essentially planted sugar cane to be biomass as part of this. So it’s in a way now with everything, you have to distinguish between the smaller scale, more human scale, slower ways of doing things that employ more people and be very skeptical about a high tech path and particularly one that well, we have to understand how famous the giant is.

Morag:

What you’re saying is that it’s not necessarily renewable energy, that’s the issue. It’s the scale, it’s who’s managing it, where it’s poured, how it’s managed. and that’s the same with the food system, too. I actually wanted to rewind a little bit because you said something about Mexicans. I’m assuming it was Mexico, the cheap food coming in that it was cheaper for them to buy this from overseas and was to produce themselves that this is a really important part of how the whole thing is breaking. Can you just describe that process that it becomes cheaper for people to buy dumped food than it is to like work? How does it become? Can you just describe that? Because there’s like, for you, it’s just like a nice natural flow, but I think some listeners might be going, “Hang on, how did that happen? How is that possible?”

Helena?

Well, I tell you, that in order to understand that, people really should read my book, Ancient Futures, because it goes so deep that, again, when you understand that it started with slavery and that allowed global traders to have so much wealth and power in their hands, they were able to go back in generations to even artificially lower prices when they needed to. Even today, this is something that big businesses do. When a Walmart or a big supermarket wants to come into an area where there are other competitors, they will often artificially lower their prices, till they destroy the competition. That’s one way. But to really see what’s going on, I sort of got this bird’s eye view in Ladakh, where I saw that the whole driver of the development was to take people away from the land and then push them and pushing into cities. The mechanism for doing that combined education upon schooling. So the schooling literally lifted children, whether it be Mexico or Canada, or Ladakh, or right out in Australia. Out of any knowledge about local climate, local soils, local materials and for their entire schooling. They never learned anything about how to grow food, how to build a house, how to make clothing, nothing that had to do with providing for our needs. By the time they are going into college, they might choose to become an engineer, or they might go into agricultural science, or they might go into medicine. They will learn in a supposedly universal knowledge. So the whole educational process started with the process of industrialization and accelerated with the use of fossil fuels and what we were then talking about was fossil fuel based medicine, fossil fuel based architecture, fossil fuel based farming, and demanding specialization to fit into that system. It meant that you started promoting worldwide, literally the same, since the same species of animals is that almost, regardless of climate or anything, obviously, with some adaptation necessary, but not in that process of creating that specialized skill and those people who fit into a corporate system, what you’re also doing was splitting them into a system that was based on giving more wealth to do over corporations. Now, if it were possible tomorrow, for people all around the world in every country to eat food from their region, then no global corporation would be making money. What will be happening is that local, regional, national, there might be national trade, whatever that is, first to understand the structure of why this global has been so distracted and always linked to this unfair pricing.

It’s a very, very big pitch that we must understand to then understand why going in right now, to find colleagues and partners to build local systems is the most important thing we can do for all of us. I also just want to remind people who may not know this, that on a daily basis, food has been imported and exported, the same product. Beef in, beef out, milk in, milk out, right here in Australia or into Southern California and bought while oranges are on the tree here and we’ve had a situation where the processing of food has been again a global project and the global food system and I might have mentioned before, but in Sweden, I discovered there was trending potatoes to Italy to be washed and waxed and then taken back again by rode in the 70s and then I’ve seen how over the 70s for now these last 45 years escalating the quantities and flying to the other side of the world. So from Norway from the US and Australia fish were flown to China just to be the bot so back again. 

Morag:

One of the things I was watching in one of your little films was about local food. You’ve got some great shots and in one of those you were talking about how even bottled water is getting flying between countries and so can you just just describe that a little bit? What are the forces behind that? We have, obviously, enough beef here or enough oranges here and enough water here. What is that exact thing that’s causing that to happen and why does it continue? Even though we have a climate? We understand what’s going on in the climate, we understand the need to move away from fossil fuels. Why is it that this is still continuing and it’s so entrenched?

Helena:

Well, again, I would say that the reason it’s happening is that no one has been charged with sitting back and studying the global economy, no one. What we’ve had is a lot of people trained into believing that global trade is essential to grow the national economy and GDP is a legitimate measure and so a lot of people have been trained into the assumption that this is essential and one of the assumptions too is that there is an economies of scale that’s operating here. So many people accept this as, “Oh, yeah! Well, this via cooperation from the other side of the world is now selling food here and it costs less than local food.” It’s absolutely not true. That’s not what’s happening. It’s a whole range of ways that governments have used subsidies and taxes and regulations to support global trade. They spend vastly more money on global infrastructure. So the UN is that even at a time when the government was more involved, also universities, they will be helping the research. For some, I think we gave an example of the Senate book we wrote in, originally in 83, where we were trying to promote local and we talked about tomato harvesting machines. That was the research going on at universities funded by the government at that time and of course the end result was that this giant machine that could harvest tomatoes, could only be used by a big farm or big business and then as they got that machine with the artificially low price for energy, they are able to destroy X number of jobs and increase pollution by X amount and yet, the tracking of this, from the environmental movement, even from the climate movement, has been stifled because the same corporate structures are operating at the level of universities and really operational in all this specialization. 

So no one has been asked to say, “Wait a minute, we need to add this up. We’re actually having our tax money used to support a technology that’s going to destroy jobs and increase pollution at a time of unemployment and climate change.” Does this make sense? Those studies haven’t existed. I also try to understand why I end up so insistent on this and why I was up so alone. I think that one of the main reasons is that Ladakh had been so attached to so late, so I was able to actually experience a functioning local economy. There was no poverty and hunger when I came there, that absolutely was no hunger and nothing that we could call sort of poverty seen in America and Africa later. That then led to my coming against trying to help prevent the creation of poverty, they also led to see that the whole process of schooling and so on that most people see as beneficial in Ladakh clearly was part of the path to unemployment, and so on. So then I went back to the west and then came back to the dark. I feel that partly what was happening in the West was that in the 70s, most of my colleagues and the environmental movement completely agreed about the need for decentralization, smallest beautiful. Food and farming are important. Renewable energy, decentralized, renewable, all of that was there. But then I will be six months in this other world and come back and I became aware that the thinking was changing. So by the 80s, the focus had become more now, by 92 was more strong to organize the big meeting and really, the whole message was now all the third world must have development. If you question that and you talk about the environment, then you are an eco fascist, and so on. Now, in the climate debate, we must let them increase CO2 emissions, because otherwise we will be fascist we created the problem they did, not understanding that our factories have gone over there to produce for us. So it’s our dirty laundry over there that was also creating real poverty and factory type work. That was horrible. I would say the real reason is that there just has not been either, of course, from the elites and the top and people who thrive and do well, as leaders, economic leaders, business leaders, political leaders, they don’t have much interest or much time to sit back to say, “Oh, we need to really question that” And tragically at the grassroots, most people have just been engaged in trying to protect their forests, protect these jobs, deal with racism, deal with all the various problems that have been arising as a consequence of the economy. 

Morag:

I was just going to bring you straight back to it. Because this is something that I think with food comes so beautifully into this conversation, because focusing on local food gives you a chance to be able to really, easily talk about all of those things that you just mentioned. From hunger, to climate, to biodiversity loss, to forest restoration, all of those things you can talk through food and that’s what I’ve spent my lifetime focusing on food because seeing that and the way that you described it, then and understanding that systemic approach that coming back to food and how we approach local food systems, I think is probably one of the most tangible ways that people can get this big picture that you’re describing.

Helena:

Yes, I think it’s absolutely the best way to understand it and in a concrete way, to look at it.  It’s also, for us, without a doubt, the most important simulation to focus on to reduce emissions, to reduce plastic, to increase human and ecological well being, even in terms of wildlife at every level. Understanding first of all, that the global food system is the biggest polluter and that it is localized and it is very important that we keep the language of the global large monocultures versus the smaller, diversified localized systems. It’s very important that we encourage people, not just to talk about production. Am I organic? Am I biodynamic? Is it permaculture? But no, are we part of the food system? From the seed and the soil to the table that is healthy and there the distances must shorten compared to what’s happening. But we don’t need to start with this absolute, we’re all gonna eat local. What does that mean? Local is a relative term and it’s so important in relation to the fact that our governments are blindly pushing for bigger and bigger distances supporting bigger legal cooperation and as I say, I don’t know any exception and it’s both left and right alright now in Britain, for instance, there’s been so much propaganda for it. The whole Brexit discussion was where we’re going to get a better trade deal. I mean, there’s gonna be better with America. That was years of propaganda that was just implied modern culture builds that. 

Morag:

What about the new agriculture bill that’s meant to be shifting some of those subsidies in focus from chemical to more ecological. What do you know about that?

Helena:

I know a lot. Because it’s basically been created by Zac Goldsmith who used to, it’s almost like the sun and he’s bringing in those policies in the government and very sincerely and working hard. But I think they’re threatened by the overview economic agenda, as in so many places that can be good people in the government really focused on biodiversity and on climate. But if the economic policies don’t shift, when those policies have so rapidly taken us in the wrong direction and again, now with the UK policy, if at least the language now could be more clearly, but small and local, but not because the business doesn’t want that and because the economic agenda is the opposite. 

Morag:

So we can become more local. So you and I and people listening to this can think about re-localizing their food system and I hear that really clearly that it’s from the farm to the table, it’s what you do in your community, what you do in your own place, it’s thinking about bringing everything as close as as possible, as much as possible. What about beyond that? Like, what is that? What is political activism? How do you see those big players, the big corporations, government decisions being influenced? Is it simply just a matter of going, “Well, we’re not playing that game. We’re going to play another game” Or is there something actively that you recommend that we should be doing?

Helena:

Yes, I definitely recommend everyone who understands the importance of healthy localized food systems to, first of all, not think about that only in terms of what can I do, but thinking times, what can we do in our community and try to identify initiatives and projects that are a part of that system. So it’s not just about you shopping locally or growing food yourself. But even if you don’t have any extra time, you could donate a few dollars to help these things get off the ground and I love to also press to talk a little bit about how those systems are helping handicapped people, prisoners, traumatized, depressed people. So there’s a type of healing that is so important and even just ordinary people in community gardens, it’s intergenerational, and it’s healing for people who are not necessarily mentally ill or depressed, but who are not doing as well as we all need to. It’s a part of GNU and thriving. But having done that, I would urge everyone to also try to identify or to support the big picture activism, which is helping to do what you’re doing to have some kind of podcast or a vlog or supporting one that is getting out of the picture that demands policy change. But it’s not a question of the way we are today, the situation we’re in today, it’s very clear, that is not really about sending a letter to our representative. We need to wake up to the fact that our representatives are not our representatives and that they are often strapped lately by blindness and following the mainstream, so we need to be totally to each other. 

So the number one audience is all those wonderful people who are privileged enough to have time to do something to make the world a better place and there are a lot of people like that still, amazingly, because more and more middle class people are being marginalized and pushed into this struggle to put food on the table, keep a roof over their head, price of housing is becoming obscene. So there are fewer and fewer, but there’s still enough around that if those are now focused just on climate, just on plastic, just on democracy, just on depression, just on handicaps, just on women, just on people of color, just indigenous people, all the issues that all need support. But if all those people could see that if together we link our arguments to the economic shift and demand that we cannot have our lives ruled by a consumer culture created by global corporations, global media, global banks, that don’t have any rules whatsoever. Those global entities form a type of empire that are giving governments their marching orders, their rules and they are often getting them to regulate their national and local businesses, in the name of climate, in the name of  [inaudible] , in the name of all kinds of things. But in the mid were these giants can pollute on a scale and take particularly where it links to the collaboration between the military high tech and finance in that collaboration that was taking us also towards Mars to compete over scarce minerals. So we need to have a clean elected voice and I am convinced that if all those people are still engaged, even if it’s just trying to help their school because they care about their own children, they want to have a better gymnasium, or a better music, school or whatever it might be, if they have that ability to devote their time or money to make the world a better place. Those are the people we need to try to reach and I think if we were to think like that, rather than either thinking, “What can I do as a consumer? Should I be writing a letter to my so-called representative?” So it means moving beyond the trap that we’ve been led into by a corporate educational system and media where we’ve been trapped in this situation where the average Westerner, especially the average middle class Westerner, is made to feel like the scourge of the earth, made to feel, first of all, if you have white skin, there’s something very wrong with you, you must be racist. If you’re a man, no matter where you are, you’re absolutely the enemy and on top of that, all these people have been led to believe it’s because they kept driving their car and they wouldn’t listen to all these messages about climate because of their greed and then wanting to hold on to the things that we have this climate crisis. It’s a completely false narrative. But that creates feelings of guilt, self blame disempowerment, depression, or it’s also creating a right wing response which says, “We get about this freeze in this climate, digital time, it is not even a problem solving a conspiracy from our government” and they will vote for for leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro.

Morag:

You’ve kind of smashed two kinds of big myths there in a way one was. One is about guilt and what that does, the other one is about what to do with how often I feel criticized for within this movement around singing to the choir. Whereas actually, what you said quite a little bit while ago was about actually, that’s where a lot of this strength needs, like singing to the choir strengthens the movement as a whole and it’s bringing more people into the choir in a way rather than trying to go out and do battles in one on one. I think strengthening the whole and being as all as part of this.

Helena:

My message might be slightly different from yours because I feel that it’s with the economic analysis, the global local or systemic, that we can argue that if you’re concerned about democracy, this is the reason it’s happening. If you’re concerned about the rise of the right way. We’ve been talking about viruses. We can make a case that would mean that everyone will see the issues. Either the problem would disappear if the economic shift occurs, or there will be funding and support and concern from a societal level for that issue in a meaningful way. So it’s with that economic argument and when I say economic, I want to stress that we’re talking about a consumer culture being imposed on us on our identity, our sense of self, on our way of thinking, on our interpretation of the past. Because we’ve been fed all the time that as we’ve been pushed into bigger and bigger cities and as poverty is created, we’ve been told all the time that this was progress. Right now poverty is being created in Kenya, India, or any part of China, we’re taught, “Oh, look at the statistics. They’re all doing so much better because they’re earning, even if they’re just on $1 a day.” The statistics might show  [inaudible]  won’t even earn anything because they were independent, they were growing their own food, they weren’t employed. So we have a real reality check. That’s so important. 

Morag: 

I want to touch base with you a little bit around the conversation of refugees, because the number of refugees in the world is growing and when we think about food for refugees, that starts to become extremely challenging. There’s some people who’ve been refugees for a decade in an inner place and so therefore, actually growing local food is one way that they can survive, but just generally, how do we address this issue when we’re talking about feeding the world’s people and when we’re thinking about feeding refugees or refugees feeding themselves?

Helena:

Well, I would say, first of all, with the whole refugee issue, again, the whole build with local analysis, would be looking very much at how and why people’s local economies and their cultures are being destroyed by the system. When we look honestly at what’s been going on in Afghanistan. It has been about the battle between US and Russia for their resources and bragging pipelines through it. It’s really everything and we know that this was what also included creating fundamentalism to see off the Russians, and so on. So it’s been a very, very evil game and I’ve seen in many countries where it wasn’t so overtly evil and obvious that this battle for resources and this battle for an ideology of western style schooling. Everybody is speaking English is all part of the spread of a consumer mon- culture, which then sometimes leads to a backlash, which can be pretty unpleasant fundamentalism and I’m not saying that not all the world was a paradise before this economic system. But we could show if we have the time and the resources to do so, we could document very clearly the rise of this economic system. Its impact has been around the world and particularly, very dramatically in the last 30 years, and probably more dramatic in the last 40 or 50 years. But the number of people around the world who will tell you that 30 or 40 years ago, we could leave the doors open, we had much more community, we had much less crime, we had a much better connection between old and young, we were healthier, we were happier. Those reports you can get from virtually every part of the world. So what is it that’s gone so wrong? That’s what we really need to understand and so with refugees, it’s tragic.Then often to see the focus only very narrowly on. Of course, we have to welcome every refugee into our region or our country; the refugees or in Scotland. I’m a right wing, white person who believes that anyone with a different skin color is inferior. So I sort of just polarized. That’s terrible. And very often the right wing reaction, conceived clearly in countries like Spain, comes from people whose economic welfare has been threatened by the refugees, as they’ve been brought in to do many of the jobs that they were doing and that’s how the whole system operates is to suck in poor people from the periphery and I saw this in Bhutan and Ladakh, as well. And I saw the rise of prejudice and hatred in a very few short years as a consequence of this. So if we imagine that this economic trajectory could be implemented and we’d be focusing on genuinely rebuilding local economies and that means greater self determination, that means people choose it if they want to. They have their own languages, their main language in their schools, which means allowing them to maintain their own species of animals and seeds and building materials and of course not forbidding change or exchange and no change of ideas. It’s about ending a type of corporate tyranny, really.

Morag:

I realized that we’re coming to the end of our era and I just want to ask you then, if there were no limits on your capacity to do the work that you wanted to do, what would it be that you would step up to do? 

Helena:

If there were no limit, I will be running a giant research organization, which would be then documenting in from a global point of view, the impacts of this system and it would not only be documenting that but also documenting the way, the evidence, that all around the world, people are wanting to reconnect, want community, need community, everywhere in the world, their personal relationships, family and community is number one issue. On their deathbeds, it’s the number one issue. Then there is that deep hunger for connection to animals, to plants, to nature, the rise in other religious fervor for healthy wild nature, as people see most of the living world destroyed, particularly in the West, there’s just this natural growth and love of nature and the natural. So all of that document actually includes what people want and then showing clearly how relatively easy it would be to get a path that would answer those needs and how difficult it is to keep the system going that keeps washing people’s keep destroy their livelihoods, destroying their self respect, it just inevitably creates more crisis becomes very expensive, very difficult to manage. So what I would want in addition to this research institute and I could happily employ, I don’t know how many people would be an equally big Institute to turn this into film books, narratives, podcast, to be disseminated in particularly in the sort of main European languages which have colonized the world, because those people would be the first to be rich. This is what I said in Ancient Futures and I felt that what was urgently needed was a global education campaign for us to understand that what was happening in the name of development, economic growth and progress, was actually working against us and so that’s what I now call big picture activism.

Morag:

Thank you, Helena. Go forward to speaking to you next time when we dive into more of the issues around the community and there’s lots of threads that we talked about just now that I’d love to pick up on then. So thank you so much.

Helena:

Thank you, Morag. I really love talking to you and love your work. Thank you.

Morag:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Sense-making in a Changing World; the second part of our four part series celebrating and exploring localization with Helena Norberg-Hodge of Local Futures. Remember, you can find loads of links in the show notes below. So come back next week for part three and explore the vital importance of focusing on regenerating community and ecology and doing this work together.