Helena Norberg-Hodge On The Drive For Local Economies

Author and filmmaker Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of Local Futures. A pioneer of the ‘new economy’ movement, she has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for more than thirty years.

She is the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness. She has authored several books, including the inspirational classic Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh and Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness (described by author David Korten as “a must read book for our time.”) She has given public lectures in seven languages, and has appeared in broadcast, print, and online media worldwide, including MSNBC, The London Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Guardian. She was honoured with the Right Livelihood Award (or ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) for her groundbreaking work in Ladakh, and received the 2012 Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalisation of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.”

Helena discusses her lifelong experience in local food economies, current issues with globalisation and how we can get back to thriving communities through systemic and conscious change.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Carlie Daly] - Helena, thank you very much for joining us. You have such an impressive bio, could you please share a bit more about your background and what led to your work with Local Futures?

[Helena Norberg-Hodge] - I think the significant thing about my background is that I was quite globalised already as a young person. My family was Swedish, but I had a German grandfather and an English grandmother on the other side, and I ended up studying and living in different countries, including America. Later on, I became very interested in languages and I've found that learning them, the best thing was to be in the country. So I lived for a while in France and Italy, in Mexico to learn Spanish. So, I've seen quite a lot of the world. And I think that's had a big impact on my thinking. But the biggest thing that crystallised it all was when I was invited to go to a place called Ladakh or Little Tibet, it's the Western most part of the Tibetan plateau, but it's a part of Tibet that belongs politically to India.

And in 1975 I was living in Paris and that was also as part of a German film to do an anthropological documentary about these people who had never been exposed to the Western culture, to the modern world, and they hadn't been colonised either. And missionaries who had tried to go there earlier, hundreds of years earlier hadn't had much of an impact on the cultures. So, it was a very fascinating opportunity to experience a culture that was still independent and free and where people were in charge of their own lives. And I just totally fell in love with the people and the place, and when the filming was finished, I ended up staying, and it was many years of working with the people, essentially to try to avoid that the community ecological and spiritual values of their Indigenous culture would be destroyed by modernity.

So I've had now actually 45 years of experience with that culture. And later on in the eighties I was invited to work in Pluton and I wrote a book called Ancient Futures as I think you mentioned. And it ended up along with the film being translated into more than 40 languages. And from that, I have contact with so many different groups around the world.

All of it ended up being a big, big lesson in why it is we need to strengthen community as a number one priority and how important it is that in order to do that, we shift away from an economy where everything has to get bigger and faster and more competitive and more global towards supporting more localised economies.

Or at least supporting a shift in direction or localising rather than continuing to globalise.

Yeah, totally. And I think on that, I listened to your Christchurch TEDx talk and you talk about that long distance drone economy, (I really liked that term), creating blindness, and I was wondering if you could explain a bit more about that? What is this blindness from your perspective?

Basically I'm seeing that whether you're a consumer or an investor or CEO of a big company, it's become impossible to really know the impact of your actions because of a process of continued support for global trade, which our governments have been engaged in really from the beginnings of the modern economy.

So, supporting global trade all the time has meant that people are involved in activities on the other side of the world where they have no idea of the impact.

You can be sitting in Australia and thinking that you're doing something really good helping micro-credit projects in India, but actually what that project often has done is to take people away from the land based self-reliant economy into borrowing money to start a business. And it's all been a process of urbanisation and destruction of essentially a more sustainable economy.

And so with long distances, they become blinder and blinder and when you're trying to do the right thing as a shopper, you could spend days in the supermarket trying to read everything on the label, but even then, you know you're not getting with your story.

So, what we found is that, particularly around food, it's incredibly important to start very actively and very urgently, to strengthen local food economies, because the global food economy right now means that the same products are being exported and imported.

So the US routine only imports about a billion tonnes of beef. And guess what? They export by the billion tonnes of beef. They export as much milk and butter as they import and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of tonnes and we are having, it's not hundreds of thousands, but right now Australia exports 20 tonnes of bottled water to the UK and the UK exports 20 tonnes of bottled water to Australia.

It's very interesting that these numbers are often sort of equal, but when you understand it better, you see it's because they end up supporting global traders to the detriment of local businesses. And if we all ate food from our country or region, no multinationals would make money.

But hundreds of millions or even billions of people would benefit by supporting smaller, more localised businesses that deliver in the region.

And you can actually see, in many cases in the food movement, you could visit the farm, you can see how things work with food. You really have full knowledge and full information.

It's becoming more and more urgent that we understand that better and which by the way, paradoxically it's leading to why we encourage people to really want to understand the state of the world today and wants to really do something. They actually encourage them to think of travelling particularly between the global North and global South, and not to travel as part of this mass tourism, which is so destructive, but to travel, to collaborate and learn. And we see this communication between the so-called undeveloped, more land-based rural communities, traditional practise, and the modern urban industrial world is more important than ever that we have more accurate information because we're getting all kinds of misleading messages that mean that we all end up on the wrong side of the issues.

We're eight years on from the your documentary The Economics of Happiness release. Are we any closer to what this Economy of Happiness looks like to you? Are we seeing the impact in the way that you hoped this documentary might bring about?

Yes. I would say that I'm very, very pleased with the impact the documentary has had. On a daily basis, I do get about as much good news in my inbox as I get bad news and it's because we help to catalyse or strengthen any of these localisation initiatives around the world, especially around local food. And that movement is growing and is growing really rapidly and there's nothing like enough. The huge need for much more awareness and for really massive mobilisation in this direction. We're very aware that we have crises now. We're aware of a place like Australia right now, of the urgency in terms of climate, that we get our information in such a way that we end up very often doing things like lobbying, that so-called poor governments shouldn't have to lower their emissions as rapidly as rich countries.

And this was a hugely sponsored message from big business because in the last 30 years, the huge industries have moved to poor countries because they're so cheap, labour is available and they were putting the factories there that are making our shoes, that are factory farming, growing our food and there they needed to use lots of fossil fuels and dramatically pollute countries like China and India. So we really need to be very well informed right now of the bigger picture so we can immediately get on these genuine systemic solutions.

I want to stress that, I wouldn't worry at all about the state of the world if it weren't for the fact that in the support for global trade, our governments are supporting giant corporations and supermarkets in this insane trade. This includes routinely not just importing and exporting the same thing, but sending apples to be washed on the other side of the world and flying them back again, or for instance, Tasmania flying scallops to be treated in China, before flying them back again.

Norway flies fish to be de boned in China, before flying them back again. This is going on a massive scale, and yet we’re not talking about it. It's not a secret, it is not a bunch of bad people sitting in a dark room plotting to destroy the world.

Our economic system has become so big and global that almost no one is looking at the contours and the workings of that system.

So that's really, really urgent. And part of that deregulation for global trade has included deregulating finance so that now we have private financial institutions as a bench essentially driving a casino economy in which they create more money out of thin air, through hedge fund speculation, and every day people around the world buy their bread, buy their food, their currency, their lives are being profoundly affected by this casino. But unfortunately, again, most people aren't looking at it.

For that reason, I've seen a real sense of urgency, because that casino's still continuing. Very often as we look for solutions, we look too much just at the individual, at the ‘we must not drive our car, we must recycle our plastic’, and we're not looking at the systemic ways that we really could make a difference, as communities and at the policy level.

So, because that casino is still continuing, I feel a sense of urgency. But I see this spontaneous, really very heartening way in which people are waking up and starting these localisation initiatives. It's quite a spontaneous thing.

Even when they don't know about the global economy, there is such a longing for community and connection to nature to recover that sense of being spiritually deeply connected.

And so that's happening. It's just that we urgently need to clarify, stand out and we need what I'd call big picture activism very urgently.

It's like people are waking up, but a little bit too slowly I guess. So then what is your advice to people that want to be part of their systemic change but they don't know where to start?

Well, I guess my message is, please look at organisations like mine. There are others, we're part of networks, but we are still a relatively small group of organisations that are trying to get people to look beyond these individual solutions, which by the way have been promoted by big business and not only have these solutions been promoted by big business, but there is a huge dominant narrative out there that is so misleading. It's basically saying, "Ah, it's people. They were told about climate change, they were told not to drive their car, they were told not to get in an aeroplane and to recycle their plastic, but why have they not listened? What's wrong with these people? They're in denial, aren't they? Let's spend a lot of time looking at the psychology of these people because there is something wrong with them, they're just not changing their individual behaviour.”

And I'm afraid this narrative is being incorporated by many environmental organisations that aren't seeing the big picture. So the end result is pointing the finger at individuals, trapped in the system where the taxes are used to subsidise the global trade, subsidise this situation, where it's extremely difficult for them to get out of their car.
It's subsidising not only the use of the car and the advertising and the promotion, but making public transport more and more inconvenient, etc.

So, these poor people are feeling self-pity and self-blame at the same time as they're feeling this sense of urgency and panic, so I want to ask people who hear this podcast, please look at this differently.

Listen to voices like ours that can show you how this focus on the individual is very counterproductive. Of course, when you can, do what you can as an individual, but we need to SEE the big picture to see we need systemic change.

How would you as an individual create systemic change? Well, you can try it by linking up at the local level to start creating those local community systems that can start bringing the economy home.

It can happen much more rapidly than you think. I'm amazed at how much has been accomplished by a community in the local food initiative and thank God there are some local governments and even some regional governments now that are beginning to support this. But until now, no national governments.

So that's another area we have to look at, not the conventional politics, we need to go beyond this focus on the individual and the theatre of politics, to understanding the big picture, which is the real power. The real political power has now moved outside of the national boundaries. It's in the hands of the globalised media, in the hands of the globalised casino, globalised food economies, and we need to be understanding that, and getting the word out as quickly as we can.

Let's get on with building a people’s movement that is so awake and so aware that it demands the change.

We’ve got to mobilise people. But remember that what you're going to be mobilising them for, is to do something that you would start doing right now and you can feel so much more empowered and see the impact of what you do if you joined a systemic movement towards localised economies, community-based economies.

Localisation-Helena-Norburg-Hodge-Research

As a speaker at Newkind Conference in Marion Bay, Tasmania in January, what are you most excited about?

I'm most excited about the community that's building around Newkind. I'm very impressed with the people I met there last year. People who joined that, joined a big picture approach to activism, very much involving the community building and a deeper, broader understanding of what's going on in the world.

And you know [after Newkind], people may go back and stay in a normal job, but they have contact with like-minded people and they're able to do things even on a volunteer basis, or perhaps starting to do part time work inside the local economy movement. But it’s just the meaningful volunteerism that people just feel really energised and happier.

Yeah, it's definitely the energy I think that people take away this renewed sense of purpose. So, on that, do you have some social enterprises that you know of that you think are doing a great job tackling social, cultural or environmental problems?

Well, I guess I have to say that most of the ones that I love have been civic society initiatives, like setting up new farmer's markets, setting up community supported agriculture schemes and most of them actually end up being economically beneficial to a very large number of people. In the social enterprise movement, there are also some good things in many ways, once we start localising economies, We're talking about calling it de-commercialisation.

To finish off, you are an author yourself and we'd love to know what books or resources you would recommend to our listeners.

Well, I would so recommend that they come to our website, because we have lots of things, we have blogs, we have book lists, we have all sorts of tool kits to get started on this thinking. And our film itself is a big and really good educational tool. We have books and articles by other people so I think that's where people should go.