 There's been a few hundred years of a trajectory of change where a few elites, starting in Europe, dominated the rest of the world and then used technology to subjugate both nature and people. And as a minority group of people, these people were not more highly evolved. They were simply using a tool of very narrow focus, a type of science that was very narrowly linked to profit and to control. And that tool and those technologies that came from that are not part of an evolution. They're actually part of a particular group of people exploiting the majority of humanity. And our blindness to this, in part, is that we've been told, this is good for you, this is profit, this is evolution. Don't question it. Don't step back and say, wait a minute, maybe this is the wrong term. If we don't recognize that this is the wrong term, what are we saying? Are we really saying that we're gonna want to have a handful of men owning the entire world and the rest of humanity, no voice, nothing to say, no role to play, no creativity, no nothing. ["Inside Ideas"] Helena Norberg Hodge is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Helena is a pioneer of the new economy movement and recipient of the Alternative Noble Prize, the Arthur Morgan Award and the Goy Peace Prize for contributing to the revitalization of culture and biological diversity and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide. She is the author of the inspirational classic Ancient Futures and Local Is Our Future. I have that right here in my hands, I'm holding it up. Beautiful read and we're going to touch upon that and go into depth on many, many more things here today on this episode. She is the co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home from the Ground Up, which I have right here as well. Hard to find, so a little bit out there as well. Wonderful book and producer of the award-winning documentary, The Economics of Happiness. Helena is the founder and director of Local Futures and the International Alliance for Localization and a founding member of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Eco Village Network. One other book that I have here, she did together with her partner is From the Ground Up as well and Bringing the Food Economy's Home. So she is well acclaimed and I'm very excited to welcome her to the show today. Welcome, Helena, thank you so much for visiting with me again today. Really happy to be here. The last time we saw each other and had a special episode was for World Localization Day and it was actually almost a month long worth of events and talks and food, kind of bringing people together in communities and local economies around food and talking about the economics of happiness and many things. How did it go? Obviously, well, we were so inspired. I mean, we're so grateful to have been in a way forced to the grassroots. When I started this work, I would be invited to speak at Harvard and Oxford and that kind of thing and even at the World Bank and even at the IMF ones. But as globalization took off in the 80s, the message I had which was very critical of globalization became less and less popular in those power centers. So I ended up working grassroots more and more and with an extensive network around the world. I was a linguist. I spoke a lot of languages and was in contact actually with about 45 different language groups that had translated our books and materials. And this Worldwide Localization Day is something we decided to launch after COVID. So, you know, almost two years ago because we had been doing conferences in various regions of the world where people were coming together face to face to discuss these choices we have. Which paths do we want support into the future? And we had a very, you know, helpful, broad picture based on a lot of global experience and we're offering, you know, this clarity about we really need to choose whether we want to support the continued globalization which is the continued corporatization of our lives or our democracies of our world or whether we want to start bringing power back to the people, to a democratic process, to communities and that's what we're calling localization. So we built up quite a lot of alliances and networks and this year about 70 groups on every continent put on events to reinforce this message and to strengthen and build the movement. And, you know, very much from the bottom up but it's also beginning now to meet with a little bit less resistance from government particularly at local government levels. And then we also had a program of organizing local food feasts. So our work has been about localization in general but always with a strong focus on food. And, you know, trying to make everyone aware that there's nothing else that humans produce that we all need every single day. And we have this tragic situation where blindness has allowed, you know both the grassroots and at higher levels this process of separating us further and further from the sources of our food and building up a global food economy which is the biggest contributor to climate change, mountains of plastic, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides which in turn contribute to cancer, high food from corn syrup, processed food which are responsible for diabetes and on and on. So we had these local food feasts all over the world and they were, many of them were organized by people who sort of already had known about this and but we had this incredible gratitude for planting these ideas and seeds and it ended up being incredibly inspiring for us as well as for lots and lots of people around the world. And then we also had again for the second year we had Russell Brands support and this year also Naomi Klein joined us and we had again Brian Inno who had made a special little video last year make a statement of support and yeah, we've had managed to get a few well-known figures to come out and really support this movement. I noticed that for sure and I was gonna mention that Russell Brand and you've been in the past you've also worked with Nona Shiva you've had personal discussions with Noam Chomsky as well and Charles Eisenstein has been supportive and on having discussions with you as well. So a lot of our world's thought leaders who are really voicing and giving some influence for the movement, I really loved seeing that. I partake during the full month long as well followed and joined it thoroughly didn't have any food feast here in Hamburg but I created my own personal a little local food feast here at home and it was really, really nice to see everyone coming together in such great support. The special episode that we did had a nice reach. So just on podcast lessons alone we're already within that 30 day period we're well over 60,000 lessons for the podcast and then for the video portion was quite a bit. So it was absolutely nice that people were really rallying and I think there, and this really brings me to the first question of how all that went people seem to be a lot more in flux and ready because of what was going on around the world not just Black Lives Matters and Asian racism and the climate problems that we're facing but also the pandemic and COVID-19 and things that were people were really looking for some solid direction and some solid answers and they were filling this dis-ease at our world in some of the systems that we're seeing in our world and so they were really looking for things some new ways that might work better. And so you've been doing this for I think going on 45 years now, right? It is 45 years, yeah. Well, yeah, quite some time. And so I wanna know, one, how have you weathered this crazy time? But more importantly, has your model the economics of happiness, local economies? You know, World Localization Day you're really trying to bring the economies back home local to these community food webs and has it proven to be a better model for life? Has it proven to make you happier? Has it proven to help you weather these storms of craziness better? It definitely has, but the evidence is, you know in millions, literally millions of hands spread across the world without the funding and without the sort of centralized organizing bodies to do the research. I mean, we would be in a position to do that but we would need vastly more funding. You know, if we had a proper budget to do the research and to document more, that would be a huge help. And also what I'm seeing is that most of this work which is happening from the bottom up most of it led by women and often out of a sort of embodied deep knowing a deep connection to nature, a deep connection to community which makes these women say, I am, this is crazy. I'm not going along with it anymore. So they have been sort of the leaders and making all of that visible showing the statistics is happening and they are there, but we could do so much more if we had a fraction, but I mean like a million or even a one billionth of the funding of the dominant system, which the dominant system is supported by essentially fake wealth is supported by the notion that global financial institutions and banks are allowed to create money. I can see an air. You know, it has a long trajectory but that goes back to the beginnings of this sort of European expansion across the world. So already in the 1400s and so on, banking started shifting towards fractional reserve and became something that wasn't quite what people thought it was. They weren't keeping our money in their vaults the way we thought but they were making money out of our savings but this has reached a level of make-believe and of complete oblivion to what actually constitutes real wealth. So part of the picture is that, you know, we need to understand that the wealth creation that's going on now that makes, you know, Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Richard Branson, you know, put so much money in the hands of these individuals is connected to a corporate system that we need to understand as a system where money is being made literally out of thin air. Part of the process was the linking money from gold reserves and later on from the dollar. So it has absolutely no grounding. And it is really a question of us waking up to the fact that we must take control of that, that there must be a democratic process determining what the value of currency is, who creates the money, who gets to spend it. This is part of the picture. Anyway, at the moment, the top-down corporate structure has almost infinite amounts of money with which to put out a dominant narrative. And that narrative has always been to tell us that it's good for us to keep moving away from nature, to keep handing over power to centralize institutions, to move into bigger and bigger urban centers where we are completely removed from the land, from the resources and have almost no power over our lives. We're dependent on centralized institutions be they governments or business entities. So in that situation, the statistics we get that tell us, for instance, that the global food economy is necessary to feed the world. And what now the UN is going to be putting out at a summit in September. They're being very cagey about the exact date apparently because they know there's so much opposition that they'll be putting out the message that we need big centralized corporate structures and we need, you know, genetic engineering and now we need robots linked to drones, to monitor and capture carbon. This narrative is disastrous and it's going to be centralizing profits in fewer fewer hands and it's going to continue to decimate the land, the biodiversity, the living soil, the water, you know, the earthworms and the incredible richness of diversity that still exists on this planet. And all in the name of feeding the world when actually the big monocultures promoted through this path actually produce less per acre of land less per unit of water. The victory has been to destroy jobs and allow people to be pushed into cities and then claim that this is progress. So yes, we are proving, we are showing and worldwide locally, I'm sorry, such a long answer to the question. No, you're fine, that's perfect. Yeah. Well, so, you know, we are seeing all around the world the demonstration that small diversified funds and I'm really small. Many of them are like, you know, even two acres can be unbelievably productive and they are, you know, one of my favorites is a farm in Japan of about five acres where this farmer is proving that if Japan would localize it could feed itself easily. And he is producing, but you know, everything from grain to vegetables, animals, even using some own made biodiesel for the small machinery he uses and in this cyclical systemic way showing flourishing diversity. And we are, you know, we are now seeing more and more environmental groups. And of course, also we're beginning to see that social activists are beginning to realize that focusing on the food economy, on food justice, on food sovereignty, on the right of people, regions, even nations to feed themselves is a central issue from both social justice points of view and from environmental points of view. So there is real progress there and one of the most wonderful things that's also happening. And I'm seeing it from, you know, Ladakh and Bhutan, where I work for many years to California, to Africa, to, you know, many parts of Asia and in America that there are young people who now actually want to farm. And in many cases, they've grown up in the big cities very often been trained to sit in front of the computer screen and do something that felt meaningless and tedious and denied the need of our bodies and souls to be more connected, both connected to nature and connected to one another. And so there's this exodus, it's a mini trend for sure. It's not billions of people who are leaving the cities yet, but there's certainly a micro trend. And it's so encouraging also to see how many of these young people, if they are linked to the local food movement, so they understand the need to establish a market that is closer to the farm. Doesn't always have to be geographically closer, but it has to be a market, a group of consumers who want to support this type of healthy, diversified, community-based agriculture. And when they do that, the work is enjoyable, the relationship with the people who love the food, who appreciate them, who understand that farmers really should have the respect that doctors and lawyers and engineers have. Producing healthy food and actually by doing so, increasing the health of the soil and the environment, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the need for plastic. All of this is like this win, win, win. And we should be, all of us should be aware of this local food system movement, we should all be supporting it. And yes, it, those diversified farms can produce even 10 times more per unit of land, sometimes even more than that, but it sounds so unbelievable. You know, people can't believe it. What they do need is more loving hands and care. So they also create more jobs. According to economists, that's a minus. In a world where we have an overabundance of people and a lot of people in securing their livelihoods, a lot of unemployment, job-rich, productive, biodiverse, agroecological, localized food systems are just win, win, win, win. Absolutely. So I mean, there's a lot of things you touched upon there and I want to go even deeper. So first of all, I had another guest on my show, Professor Matthias Vakarnagel. He is the head of the Earth Overshoot Day and Ecological Footprint, wrote the book, The Ecological Footprint for about 35 years now. He is the one who every year he tells us what the Earth Overshoot Day is, which was July 29th. And he says, you know, we're running a big Ponzi scheme and that's really what, in essence, what you said is true. Our current extractive economies, our current capitalist system is a big Ponzi scheme. It's printing something out of nothing. There's nothing to back it up and it's pushing and pulling humanity in a very unnatural direction and a natural direction from the basic resources of humanity, of what human beings need to survive and thrive. And so it's sometimes for those who lived in cities or haven't been, had a big opportunity to see how food is made and produced or to be involved in that process. It seems like a foreign thing for us to be putting economies or talking about economic models or happiness in conjunction with food. But for me, it's really common sense. So the most basic measurement of energy our world has is a caloric unit, a measurement of energy as a calorie. And I don't want you to count calories. I could give a shitless about calorie counting and that, but I want to tell you the basic need of humanity is food, water, so that we can regulate our body temperature and run our motor, our battery, so to say, of our human body is driven on food and water and healthy, clean, natural food and water, not chemicals and pesticide-heavy products that are highly processed and unhealthy for us and unhealthy for our planet. And it would be like, I would never buy a cell phone and not know where I'm gonna charge the battery so that I can use it. I'd never buy a car and not know where I'm going to fuel it up in or charge the battery so that I can drive it. And the same with the food for my body, which is giving me my survival, I would not put that into the hands of anyone else to say, oh, I'll leave it to Monsanto or Bayer or to Unilever or Nestle or whoever the crazy company or organization is out there to provide me with my battery source, my food, my sustenance, which is my vital need to live. And so that's why we're talking about food because it's the world's oldest, longest running, most successful economy our world's ever seen. It's called an agrarian society. It's not only the most successful, longest running economy in the world, but it's also the one that has the biggest impact on our environment and our health and human suffering. And so if we get it wrong, we're going to get it really wrong. And if we get it right, we're really going to have a model that's going to sustain humanity indefinitely. And so that's kind of, I guess, why we're talking about it. But I mean, that also leads ties into this transition. So your first few books, obviously they're talking about, it's almost kind of like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It's talking about fossil fuels. It's talking about chemicals. It's talking about farming. It's talking about how almost this ancient economy that provides infrastructure and stability for humanity to thrive and flourish and develop and to grow has been corrupted and taken into a form of a commodity. And it's really coming back in many directions to bite not only our climate, our environment, but human health and our survival. And that's been a tie for these 45 years for you continually food, farming, agriculture, how we do it, where it comes from. It's in all of your books. Besides what I just touched upon as the basic need and battery, are there some other things of complexities, some other things in there that we might need to be aware of as well? How that ties into a long-term economics of happiness? Very good, yes. I mean, but also just wanna add to the food side of things that many people aren't aware that it's been part of the dominant narrative that farming was where we went wrong. So there's been this widespread idea that the minute we started farming, we started destroying ourselves. Because what we've seen is this cover up of how indigenous cultures function for sometimes like the Aboriginal communities in Australia, something like 60,000 years. And in parts of Asia, many tens of thousands of years, we have been told that human beings, the minute they started farming, everything went wrong. No, it was when the top-down structures and essentially a globalized system started shaping agriculture and on using force, slavery, genocide, forcing people away from producing a range of things for their needs in their own regions to produce on monocultures for export. So the giant cotton plantations, the sugar plantations, the coffee plantations through force, wealthy elites imposed that. And out of that through a system where global corporations could amass huge wealth by having on one side of the world cheap labor and on the other side of the world through the industrial process, creating a money system that allowed them to produce where labor was cheap and to sell where labor was paid better. So this is how giant global corporations became monopolistic even before the Second World War. And then after the Second World War, they came on the scene often with the help of socialist governments. Even like in Sweden, they brought in now lots of fossil fuels and machinery and basically using the same chemicals that had been used for the weapons to put onto the land. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fertilizers and driving off even more millions of people from the land replacing them with machinery and chemicals. So this unhealthy agriculture linked to unhealthy urbanization. That's what we have to start looking at and how it's become even worse in this latest era of globalization from about the mid 80s. So as we started waking up to environmental issues because of Rachel Carson, the whole world knew that we needed changes in science to become more holistic, to become more respectful of nature and nature's ways, nature's complexity. We couldn't just sit in a lab and produce some DDT that we thought was just nicely kill a few insects over here to suit our agricultural needs. But suddenly the world woke up to wow, we've killed the birds over here as other part of, even on the other side of the world. So there's this complexity and infinite diversity. We need to be more humble, we need to be more holistic. So there were many departments at different universities that set up departments that wanted to be more interdisciplinary, more holistic. I was connected to some of those also taught at one at the University of Berkeley but I saw how this initiative which came as a work from the people got more and more co-opted as big business getting more and more power. And my experience is that many of the people in big business who helped the process of essentially co-opting the environmental movement and co-opting the food and farming movement weren't doing so out of ill will. They actually were people often in positions of extreme power connected to the corporate system and they became seriously concerned about the environment. But the thing that they weren't going to be looking at was the economic trajectory that we're all the time now almost like a machine supporting the big to get bigger. We essentially had global monopolies gaining more and more power and they were doing that particularly from the Second World War on through trade treaties where they were pressuring governments to give them more freedom. So the free trade was freedom for big corporations to move in and out of every economy and basically do a state police. And now we're at a stage where those treaties have clauses that say to governments, if you do anything that hinders our profits in any way reduces our profit, we can take it to court and sue you. And these are kangaroo courts. I mean, it's crazy. Really the world needs to know about this because no self-respecting capitalist wants to support the hijacking by monopolies of the democratic process. It's not a free market. And yeah. So anyway, we are seeing that with COVID there has been a questioning of this globalizing process. There was a sense that, ooh, maybe it's a bit dangerous to be completely dependent on basic needs, the most basic being food. But we found with newspaper and other things that masks countries weren't able to produce their own vaccines enough. So I think we've seen a bit of an opening where even at the higher levels of power, there is a questioning of the continued globalization, but especially from the bottom up, we've seen just a huge interest in COVID, especially of people beginning to plant a bit of their own food in their gardens, to stop baking bread. And we also saw in COVID that it was the local farmers markets and often the local restaurants that converted themselves into food hubs that were actually providing food for people, often while the supermarket shelves were empty. So we were seeing the resilience, so-called, viability of more localized structures to provide for people's real needs. And we can see a huge increase in interest in localization. We see it also demonstrated by things like big business constantly trying to market itself as local. HSBC calls itself, you know, the world's local bank and supermarkets now call themselves, you know, the local supermarket. So there's no doubt that people are wanting this and what we need is to get out this systemic understanding. So people are clear about what they need to support and not to fall for the, you know, the marketing and the green washing, the local washing that's going on. I hope I answered your question. I think I might have said that as usual, but- You definitely did. And I think it's a multifaceted answer as well. And so it's just really neat to see the journey, but it's also important that those of our listeners who maybe might not be as well-versed that kind of get a deeper look inside to this way of thinking. You're going to be writing a contribution for my book, Menu B, there's about 42 plus other contributors and authors who are contributing to it as well. It's about global food systems, reformation and how we can bring local food webs back, which are really infrastructures, which are really key economies, key to fixing and helping places all over the world. Ken Meeder is also an author who's contributing. He wrote this book called Building Community Food Webs. And it's really something that you said as well that in some areas we're producing, let's take for example, potatoes. We're exporting these potatoes, but then the same amount of potatoes we're exporting, we're importing that same amount from thousands of kilometers across the world. We're doing that with beef and animal products. We're doing it with fruits and vegetables. We're doing it for bottled water for God's sake. And in Sweden and the Nordic regions, we're doing it sometimes with fish. We're taking fish and sending it somewhere else to be washed clean and cut and maybe frozen and then shipped right back to the place very close to where it was caught, to then be consumed. And these are systems that, or have a limit to growth. It's not a good business model. It's not a good capitalistic model that you can turn a food into a commodity and think that it's somehow cheaper to get a cucumber from thousands of miles away than the one right next door. And the minerals, the vitamins and the footprint is totally off on those. But yet you can buy that cucumber for 10 cents or 20 cents. But even though it traveled those thousands of miles, so there's this big factor missing in this whole equation. Total environmental cost as percentage of EBITDA, the true cost, the natural capital, so to say, but the one that has a big cost on human health, human suffering and also on environmental impact as far as the greenhouse gas emissions and many other things that go into our world. And so as we kind of, we're obviously going to keep coming back to food and the multifaceted complex food webs and food systems that are involved in this complexity because that's just how it is. Our world is complex, it's made up of systems and we need to embrace that. We're a multifaceted complex being an organism that can deal, we're adept to deal with this complexity. The minute we dumb it down and put it into a silo or linear thinking and say, no, we're only gonna address just this one aspect of the food system, then we failed and the system breaks, you know? And so I guess I want to go a little bit more into what does it mean to build these food webs, these local food economies, to build up an economy of happiness? What does that bring? What's the end result? Okay, well, okay, I'll get to that, but also get back to describing why there's so necessary, but what it brings is first of all, we're seeing this example after example of just remarkable healing. So first of all, healthy, nutritious food, fresh food is the best medicine and more and more people are realizing that. They're realizing that the highly processed dead food which comes from the other side of the world often and often at this artificially lower price is costing us our help. The creation of trans fats was completely linked to the transportability that allows giants to accumulate more and more wealth and sell their products across the world was heating up fats until they're actually toxic for our bodies. High fructose corn syrup, another corporate invention that has proven disastrous and created an epidemic of diabetes which is also what some people are calling the second pandemic. People in America now are going to be dying younger than their parent generation because of diabetes and heart disease and obesity, all linked to this food system of toxic addictive calories, food that has also been created not just as a commodity, but actually consciously to be addictive. So we're talking about something that has become quite toxic and evil in the sense that we're beginning to, we can uncover plans on the part of big corporations to make sure that people are no longer making their own soup for instance because Campbell's is gonna come in there and make the soups for them. And then again, putting additives in and that makes them far less healthy. And then you add to that that the tins are lined with plastic and now we're finding that plastic is disastrous for our health. All of that plastic in packaging and in the tins is there because of corporate need, not our health need. So once you start shortening the distances that food travels, once you start rebuilding these food webs, you're actually helping to create viable economic systems that are restoring our health and the health of the soil, the health of species, of seeds and animals that are adapted to a particular climate, to a particular region. And as you start producing diverse products on a given piece of land as a farmer, you're no longer in this total fear of losing everything. If there's a drought, if there's a hail storm, if there's wind, when you have diversity on the land you're not gonna be losing everything. But when you have monoculture, you're first of all creating something that's completely unnatural. So this again, the monocultures are structurally linked to the long-distance global corporate system. And those monocultures are in and of themselves toxic and unnatural. What we're also seeing, which is so wonderful is that as people start connecting to the farms, now sometimes it's just a group of consumers who go out and maybe help with harvesting maybe once a year or even just go and visit the farmer who they buy from in the local shop or at the farmer's market. But that connection is already incredibly healing. We're seeing examples of children loving to be connected in that way. We're seeing examples of torture victims, prisoners, depressed people, healed by engaging, not just with nature, but with the productive activity of producing something as vital and important as food. So I think there's an extra added element here that you're actually seeing the product of what you've done. You planted the seed and then some months later here is this big carrot or a whole head of lettuce and you often get the impression of getting something for nothing because you just planted this little seed and then you watered it a bit and then there you have this amazing gift from nature. But my take on it, having worked in indigenous culture is that this is also to do with recovering a way of being a humanity that is how we evolved. We actually evolved much more closely to the land, much more close to food production and to community. And in these local food economies now, that's what's being restored. And by the way, I had this wonderful conversation with Gabor Marte as part of World Localization Day. And I was just thrilled to see that he completely affirms this very important message that we shouldn't see the techno economic corporate path of progress as progress. We shouldn't see it as evolutionary. It's a really important thing that we step back and distinguish between cultural change and an evolutionary process that we can see as we look back, if human beings did evolve or did change in these fundamental ways, but when we look at the last sort of 50 years particularly, but even Gabor can go back further and see that there's been a few hundred years of a trajectory of change where a few elites starting in Europe dominated the rest of the world and then use technology to subjugate both nature and people. And as a minority group of people, these people were not more highly evolved. They were simply using a tool of very narrow focus, a type of science that was very narrowly linked to profit and to control. And that tool and those technologies that came from that are not part of an evolution. They're actually part of a particular group of people exploiting the majority of humanity. And our blindness to this in part is that we've been told, this is good for you, this is profit, this is evolution. Don't question it. Don't step back and say, wait a minute, maybe this is the wrong turn. If we don't recognize that this is the wrong turn, what are we saying? Are we really saying that we're gonna want to have a handful of men owning the entire world and the rest of humanity, no voice, nothing to say, no role to play, no creativity, no nothing. That's the direction of this exploitative system which benefits fewer and fewer and fewer and is to the detriment of the vast majority of humanity. That is not evolutionary. That is not progress. So Gabor Martin was very clear also about the vital importance of intergenerational community. And intergenerational community, what does that mean? Well, it means that the old and the young have more contact with each other, that we aren't so segregated into separate age groups. We aren't generally so segregated. And this was for me, one of the big lessons from indigenous culture. I lived in a country where the economy still allowed that to flourish. And I saw how when a tiny baby and the 80 year old are connected deeply, how it creates a completely different identity for the young and for the old. First of all, for the young, it meant that there were so many hands to carry the baby. No one got tired, no one got fed up. No one was exhausted because the baby might be a bit ill and need to be healthy entire time. In fact, it was just normal that the baby was on somebody's body the whole time. Now that is how we evolved. And I experienced living in a culture like that, that that created the happiest, healthiest people I had ever met. It created young people who had no need to prove themselves. They had all these eyes in the extended family and community, all knew their name, knew them as unique individuals, paradoxically in that community-based, extended family way, individualism thrived. You were allowed to be just the way you were. There was no pressure to be different. There was no pressure to follow some image of a good-looking film star, and a billionaire who's made all this money, and you too, if you really follow your passion, you too can become a billionaire. No need at all. You were just who you were. It took me years to get the language fluently, living with these people to realize that this is perhaps the biggest wealth of all. And this may be the most important thing in terms of happiness, is that the deep acceptance of self by people older than you as you're growing up so that the questioning, the self-doubt, the fear of not being loved, the fear of being rejected is just not there. So I had never, ever encountered people who were as deeply confident, so deeply confident that the self wasn't an issue. The self wasn't something you had to protect, then you had to prove that you're just as good as others or maybe even that you're better than others. No need. So that probably is the foundation stone of happiness. And that came to the more connected way of being. Now I'm seeing in the new locals, so that's the ancient indigenous local that I came to discover in Ladakh and also in Bhutan. These regions in the Himalayas that had not been colonized and not transformed either through Christian missionaries and people have been allowed to develop and to stay independent of this exploitative system. But now in the new local, which you will find all around the world. And there are areas, places like Portland and all sort of alternative areas in the US and you'll find them in every country. And in those pockets, as people are consciously leaving big city, big competitive, global, I'm gonna be important path to search for happiness, to search for meaning. In those usually smaller cities, you can find it also in pockets of big cities. People are consciously choosing meaning and happiness and that they are realizing more and more comes through connection, connection to others and connection to nature. And connection is built through the ability to be yourself, to be vulnerable, not to be perfect, not to pretend to be something other than what you are. It's that ability to start becoming more nakedly and it can be scary for Westerners to be that vulnerable. But people are discovering that and voices like that will matter very important in that discussion. And part of it is also supported through nature connection. I think the connection to others is more of greater fundamental importance for the development of a healthy sense of self in the young. But the connection to nature is of course vital too and that includes the animals, the plants. I saw in the traditional indigenous that when young boys, for instance, cared for their siblings, cared for young newborn goats or calves or animals, that was very much part of developing their humanity as well. And that was again part of that intergenerational taking responsibility for the younger, not being segregated into institutional camps. So I see the dominant Western path really almost like a prison in which we are forcefully segregated from one another and from nature. But in localization, in that whole movement, there is that conscious breaking down of those boundaries and breaking free to become human again, to regain what we all know deep inside what we all long for. And it's a spiritual connection we're talking about, meaning it goes beyond the material, it goes to our souls, to it nourishes something deep within us which can best be described as our spiritual needs. There are so many wisdoms that you've shared with us there and I have to agree with what you said as well as what Gabor was saying during World Localization Day and your discussions. In all reality, I think we've been misled in many respects. So first and foremost, we've been misled to believe that the oil, coal, and gas and automotive industry were the number one cause of human suffering and greenhouse gas emissions. Don't get me wrong, they're on the list, they're in the top 10, but the top five have to do with agriculture food and beverages, human health and are tied to the energy source of food because we have not had an evolution in agriculture and the food industry. We're actually still stuck in the middle ages in many respects, there have been, I can count them on one hand, probably five innovations in these industries and they've all been at an extreme detriment to human health and to our environment. We produce more food, yes, but at a much greater cost to human health and suffering into environmental destruction, we waste more land, we waste more resources than ever before just during the time of the pandemic and we went from wasting globally 30% of everything we produce in agriculture food and beverage industries and seafood industries to wasting close to 45% globally of everything that we touch. And what many people misunderstand is that it's not just a 45% waste, it's an exponential waste. So not only do we waste that 45% but we waste all the water, the resources, the time, the labor, the marketing, the transport, the emissions that went in to make that. And then the top three ways we dispose of our food waste in the world is by first burying them in a landfill with dirt or the next is by burning them and the last is by throwing them in our oceans and the number one way by burying them in a landfill whether it's in packaging or not is an exponential waste. It's a hugely exponential waste because when you bury something in packaging or not it aggregates, it ferments, it turns into methane and methane is 85 times more effective at trapping heat and creating heat than CO2. And so now you've got an exponential waste on a planet of finite resources. And a lot of people that's not clear. And so I mean what Gabor was saying as far as evolution in the food industry one of those five innovations haven't been that groundbreaking at all. One of them that most people might not understand was supposed to be a huge help for food waste and humanity was the microwave. It's created a ripple effect of people eating more than they should, eating worse food than they should it's created a nice vehicle for highly processed foods and frozen foods to even make that industry worse. And it hasn't brought in people more out into nature is actually put them more in front of the TV to consume more or to eat more. And it's been a real negative among the other four innovations but I truly believe that industry those all those industries are still stuck in the dark ages and I have this saying and I kind of wanna lead into a couple of things with this. It's not about the brands of the future or the products of the future that will stop human suffering in our environmental impact. It's how we produce anything whether it's food or agriculture or whether it's cars or computers or clothing it's how we produce those that will have the biggest impact on human health and our environment. And that means if we do it without chemicals and pesticides and fossil fuels without unfair wages and unfair labor and extortion of human beings and we stop using it as a control method for indigenous people or other people on our earth to use food which is a human basic right to control others or to manipulate the way they think or the way they act through food is just a horrific travesty in my opinion. I also just wanna come back to one thing you said well, yes, we produce more food but actually this is also a myth. You take any two bits of land a square meter or a square kilometer and with diversity you could always produce more over a year's time you could get more food out of that more biomass of course but you would get actually more food because once you try bringing together the animals, trees, plants, vegetables and so on you're creating a system which overall will be more productive. However, no place on earth has ever been helped to focus on that type of diversification. Indigenous cultures had plenty of land space they didn't need to focus on oh, how can we get more of the land? You know, we're too many people so they had an easy time and there was plenty there and in the modern era, their focus has been through force on this monocultural moving away from self-reliance to produce on bigger and bigger monocultures pushed by bigger and bigger corporate and other business structures also with the help of national governments. And so even in Scandinavia there was the belief that yes, modern agriculture wow, it's all this food with all this machinery and people won't have to do that work you have this great not realizing that that again, we have to come back to the fact that just as you were talking earlier you know, the energy for the battery you know, this is, you know the food we eat is who we are it's whether we have energy, vitality whether we're happy, whether we're healthy and strong whether we're depressed or not that has to do with the food we eat you know, it's food, it's exercise and it's peace of mind. You know, those are the medicine so once we get that right and it's being demonstrated that when we get it right we are healing depression and addiction and all kinds of problems. So, but come back to very important fact that the monocultures do not produce more food giant supermarkets are not helping us to produce more food and to produce a diversity of food they may look that way because in the supermarket you can have a great diversity of food from around the world but they are part of the system where the scale and the global nature of it means that they are promoting more and more monocultures and that means every day different varieties of seeds of animals, you know, plants and animals of all kind the diversity is rapidly disappearing. So to put it simply, looking at the globalizing path and you know, particularly at the food side of it we're seeing that this path is anti-life because if you are destroying diversity you are destroying the fundamental principle of life and this is why we must shift towards the localizing path now localizing is not an absolute doesn't mean that, you know, everybody's going to live in some tiny village with 10 people and has to live in an extended family or something but it does mean that we've got to sort out those basics. When we sort out agriculture to restore and regenerate diversity, you know, bringing back productivity we saw we're bringing back health to the land we're reducing greenhouse gas emissions we're reducing toxic pesticides, fungicide, pesticides we are reducing the need for plastic we're reducing the need for transport and with that huge reduction in the need for energy when we do that we are also taking care of the water the water shortages and the imbalances we're also climate change are completely connected to what's happening in agriculture. Once we start looking at healthy agriculture we're also looking at the model for forestry and often the healthy agriculture is also linked to agroforestry and what we want in fishery, forestry and farming across the board is diversification and that means that we need more people instead of more machinery. We need to actually learn that we can harvest even in forest our only choice is not to bung up giant monocultures of trees and then come in the machinery to do clear cutting that type of forestry produces wood that's useless and again destroys the soil and you know, we must turn towards diversification and there too we must realize that the important export of identical products which is happening with wood and building materials as well once we start creating more cyclical diversified economies more localized economies we're restoring the healthy food, healthy building material healthy fiber for clothing so all basic needs can be start becoming part of productive healthy economies that also provide much more meaningful and fun employment and it's being demonstrated in the localization movement so I... I almost tend to think it's more than a movement I think it's a whole new economic model it's a whole new system and I think it's closely tied to ecological economics which is truly the only form of economics that will sustain our world and give us resilience for generations and decades to come that has the ability to get us back to that point of nature and I want to touch upon a couple of things which really tie into other things that you discuss in your economics of happiness and your localization and that is we have had more than 20 civilization frameworks in our world, Helena, early antiquity, Mesopotamia, Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, the Greeks, the Romans on and on, more than 20 and all but two of them collapsed and are no longer here because of environmental or ecological destruction and these were advanced civilizations with infrastructure and roads and innovations and all sorts of communication and networks and very complex systems going on there they're not here and so now we go to the Parthenon or somewhere on vacation and take a selfie behind in front of the ruins and we don't really realize that we're at the form or the verge of some kind of a collapse ourselves and there's this thing that you talk about a lot and that's kind of why I wanted to preset it up a little bit with these civilizations that are no longer here and I just don't think because we have electric vehicles or a smartphone and computer power that that's gonna save us from a potential collapse I just don't believe it that that technology has the power to do that to save us from that but there is another factor in there that we've been disconnected from nature which is something that you discuss about not only our biosphere, our biome, our biodiversity we've had this huge disconnect and it really occurred a long time ago where we got into this mode Huxley and even before of neoliberalism and neodarwinism that it is natural selection survival of the fittest, only the strong survive severe competition and that's the way our world works well that's bullshit that's not how our world works our world works exactly like Lynn Margolis who set the entire scientific community on their head and says we are a symbiotic planet we work with symbiogenesis and the symbiosis that we work in collaboration and cooperation with other organisms, microorganisms and our biome together for long-term survival that one organism's waste is another one's fuel and that we are helping each other in the cyclical circle of life and it is not only the strong survive and that neoliberalism, that neodarwinism is crept into capitalism it's crept into all our structures a lot of our structures and it is a model that is set up with a limit to growth that is gonna collapse if we don't get this connection and the reason we've been talking about food and harping about it and talking is because the way to connect ourselves is to realize that we are a part of this symbiotic earth and that we are not on the top of the chain and Daniel Christian Wall who you've spoken with and met many times he has this great saying seva to be in regenerative service to life to be an integral part of this symbiotic earth and connected and that's how we can regenerate and go far so I guess with that set up I wanna see your thoughts and feelings on that and maybe we should even tickle a little bit more on this neoliberalism and Darwinism and that. Yeah, well definitely the entire economic trajectory from the outset through slavery, genocide and later on colonialism and then now in the modern era neocolonialism globalization has been based on this belief first of all the survival of the fittest competition is the way we operate and those scientists who tried to demonstrate even going back Lamarck and so on who tried to demonstrate but actually there is more cooperation in nature than there is competition those were silenced and so the dominant part became more and more fundamentally the space and competition and this constant sort of propaganda that this path of progress was as I said earlier somehow naturally an evolutionary path that we couldn't question and all the time the message can this is good for you this is progress you're away from the land now in the city you're so much happier you're so much better off why are you complaining? You have everything you've got a modern house you've got why are you unhappy and I see a lot of that still in the West a lot of people feeling very guilty about its sense of deep loss deep sadness because they're told you have everything what are you complaining about and they haven't understood that no you've actually been robbed of those deep meaningful connections you've been robbed of time people are running faster and faster to keep up with this competitive machine and this sense that you're no good the way you are you've got to improve and you've got to be more beautiful you've got to be more successful you've got to be more wealthy and just running running to stay in place so people are told that this system is only there because they wanted it and they pushed for it I'm seeing something very different I'm seeing people pushed into it by an almost machine like Darwinian system that started in some ways you have to go back five hundred years to look at the beginnings of this particular civilization which is doomed to fail and by the way for my point of view civilization is part of the problem civilizations have generally been the ones we get to hear about and they were the expansionist groups that expanded beyond their own region to conquer others grab their resources amalgamate them from them and slave others and that path didn't work what has worked in many parts of the world and as we can see with many indigenous cultures for tens upon tens of thousands of years they were able to sustain themselves because they focused on caring for their resources they were not out there to conquer and to expand and keep growing and think that they could impose their way on diversity so the path forward is a humility is a respect for diversity is a respect for the other is an understanding that nurturing and supporting many small is what can allow for the strength and life of the biosphere is that respect for diversity human, cultural, individual human as well as cultural diversity and as well as the diversity of everything that lives this is it's about slowing down it's about scaling down and in so doing recognizing the richness we discover the path of the competition the fast pace that getting ever bigger and this type of growth leaves everything at a superficial level as we rush through life and we don't get to know one another deeply what becomes important is what you look like what kind of a degree you have what kind of a car you drive not who you are so it's only as we slow down and get to know each other that we come to appreciate each other for who we are and we are then met and that need that we have to be loved for who we are on the inside is met so this again comes back to a deep fundamental human need for deeper connection and as I said to feel appreciated for who we are not what kind of car we drive not what kind of PhD we might have or you know how big our house is so something else I wanted to say yeah go ahead I have a real because we're running close on time but I have four more questions for you that I'm sure will help spark what else you wanted to say as well for those who are have been shaken awake or are now at a point in their lives where they can listen and their can sense that they need it they're looking for something they're looking for answers World Localization Day localization movement and the economics of happiness is working your organization is working on a few tools and things there's gonna be a new seven minute local documentary out called local I guess and some action guides but what would you say are the biggest tools that you know somebody knew who is like boy this is new to me or I didn't know I was trapped into some kind of system or I'm looking for some answers and it seems overwhelming seems very complex seems like a lot of systems seems big I'm just a small person What is your advice what are the tools that you've provided and what we have to look for to coming on the horizon that you can give us as a little bit support and as there are some communities some organizations like yours that we can go and give some support and have some discussions get into conversations with people about more Yeah I think this is first of all is the number one thing that we recommend is that you try to identify a few like-minded people in the area where you live and if right now in COVID you can't get out there and meet personally try to meet online but ideally with the idea of people that are within reach so that you will be able to meet face to face we're trying to encourage people to do that as number one priority so that's the first step is connect with some like-minded people anything from two to three to up to maybe 20 to form a bit of a group with whom you then explore more deeply this avenue of personal connection but also you then start a process of what we're calling rethinking we need to be rethinking some basic assumptions as I've been saying about progress about what are our deeper needs what makes us happy why are things going so wrong why are we surrounded by this one crisis after another where did this pandemic come from is it linked to a corporate system that has been for a long time trashing our health and the environment and is there a way out of this that doesn't have to demonize any particular individuals any particular businesses any particular anything but really it's about a systemic shift and thank you also for saying this is not just about a localization movement it's a localization system it's a systems new of how can we operate in tune with the mandate of life and that's the deep mandate in our own hearts as human beings in our own bodies in our own guts and as someone like Zach Bush the doctor will point out you know we're talking about the biome in our gut and the soil this is now scientific fact that you know the microorganisms the viruses and bacterias that we need in the soil in our gut are being killed off of the same monocultural system how do we rebuild those how do we restore them that's what localization is about so it is it's a system about coming in tune with life including our life so rethink together as a group and as you do that try to deepen that more vulnerable open-hearted exchange with others so they can feel a deep connection as people do that they start gaining more joy energy and faith in life they start gaining more hope they start gaining a sense that no human beings aren't these greedy nasty people who are destroying everything it is not coming from human beings it's coming from an inhuman machine like grinding system that we have blindly supported so the rethinking is that waking up so we don't support that anymore and then we we've used the term resist and renew once you're clear about the need to resist further globalizing extermination of life basically and you want to affirm the localizing renewal of life what are the things you want to resist and renew and there are we are putting out an action guide and we already on our website have lots of examples we have a Planet Local series we have examples of what's happening around the world we have inspiring talks by the leaders in this movement because we have been the pioneers of this and we've been the only ones promoting localization from a global perspective and promoting it globally interacting with groups around the world so our website is full of materials and the final words we say connect, rethink, resist renew and celebrate and the celebration is very much this awakening to the richness and the joys of nature to life and that we also urge people to include the singing, dancing and making music that indigenous cultures most of them enjoyed as part of daily life and the key in all of that too was that it was a connected celebration it wasn't spectator and stars global stars and the rest just passive spectators it was a community joint participatory celebration so these are part of the sort of the sort of the systemic localizing part that we have been promoting for a long time has of course been very much informed by entirely informed by really deep experience in a very healthy functioning indigenous society and I just want to add to that too that another part of this of course is that this systemic shift is also about respect for women and the feminine and maybe more important than women is the feminine the feminine aspect the nurturing aspect the caring aspect the again that deeply connecting aspect so that again is you know one of the reasons why it brings with it much joy and health because men have been encouraged to you know disown their feminine side you know women have been told that they were imperfect and inferior for their femininity and this whole systemic shift we're talking about affirms that both in men and women and also recognizes that there are fundamental differences in in men and women that again in our history because we weren't polarizing the caricatures so we sort of ramble barbidol world those those polar opposites weren't exaggerated we contained some of each in both so there was a balance there that we're regaining and a lot more to say about that you know we could do a whole podcast on gender particularly in the world today but I think discussing that informed by experience in healthy indigenous cultures it is very valuable but yeah I mean I really believe that there's a not only as agriculture seafood food and beverage industry is the biggest impact on human suffering and our environment like you touched upon it this feminism this empowering of women and girls and not only the he for she but the connection of what has been lost or what really this unrealized potential that is creating huge amounts of suffering are in our world and if we we could have multiple podcasts on this because it's such an important fix and such an important way to also draw down or repair fix a lot of the problems that we're having yeah it's a I'm in total alignment with you there the hardest question I have for you today is really as short as possible as you can give me the answer and I know that's always hard what does a world that works for everyone look like for you well it's a multipolar world where cultural diversity flourishes and it flourishes because of a much deeper dialogue between the centers of the western industrialized world and the billions of people who are still in what's called the global south you know in the in Africa Asia and India and there this deeper dialogue now is so urgently needed because there's yeah huge miscommunication and misinformation and what constitutes poverty and what doesn't how can we work together so we're very much talking about the need for global collaboration and global deep discussion what I was you know talking about earlier connecting at the local level is vital for our health and our strength but we also need to be reaching out to have these global conversations in order to understand how can we jointly create a multipolar world that is genuinely more more decentralized which means again where localized structures are allowed to flourish and these so that's that's the that world would be one in which the languages that are almost extinct would actually be revitalized to the extent they can be a multipolar world where most people learn more than one language but there isn't one dominant language the the flourishing of diversity that we're seeing already through the movement of localization is so clearly how we have to go as I say that that is life itself and cultural diversity was a reflection of that biological diversity so it is that multipolar more decentralized localized world I love that what should young innovators in your field be thinking about to look for ways to make a real impact let's say that they're already in this movement and and they're kind of new but they want they really want to do something they want to leave their mark they want to have they want to help they want to change what they're seeing around them what can they do well right now in covid and so on there they're going to get the most mileage out of doing things locally and there there's so much innovation and potential it's already happening because as I said before there's never ever been a cultural attempt to diversify as much as possible you know within a context where monoculture has been imposed so the revitalization of diversity which extends not just to food but to building material to fiber and even to how do we bring back the ceremonies the celebration the cultural ways that restore that that joyous celebration of life these things are happening but very often people are a bit lost you know do we go back to trying to emulate both there earlier do we try to borrow from another culture well it's probably going to be a mix but what is there are key elements in that and and they come back to being far more natural far more participatory far more about connection and collaboration rather than competition so there's certain principles so they can join a very exciting movement and experiment locally but also inform themselves what's going on globally so again come back to our website localfutures.org great and I also say another one more thing that I I do want to stress is that part of the crucial work in this sort of rethinking area it's what I call big picture activism there's been a a way in which through the help of again big business we've been told to tell very narrow personal stories we keep hearing it's through storytelling that people learn they don't learn through information actually we desperately need a type of information big picture information understanding better what's going on in terms of the whole trajectory of what's happening globally so we need to sort of step back take a deep breath be willing to look at this global system from a global point of view so we don't end up trapped in the theater of the type of left right politics that isn't helping us at all but instead start looking at this systemic shift so big picture activism requires quite a lot of holistic learning you know gathering of information and disseminating that information in a holistic way for this huge scope for creativity you know if you're if you're a songwriter or if you like to write poetry or whatever you can still link it to contributing to meaningful change in the world but there is this tendency for people to you know first of all to believe you know people don't want to learn from information and we need to tell stories about particular people but to be really really careful that we don't narrow down too much so we don't see the big picture and the information we're talking about most people just haven't got and then the other thing is that there's a tendency to say oh we don't need any more talking we you know we're just gonna get on with the action with the examples no we actually do need more talking exactly as you and I are talking we actually need far more big picture activism in other words that's sort of education as activism and we need to put a lot more energy how we can get that out creatively since we have the media that is corporate owned corporate run and that doesn't want us to question in this big picture way I love that you said that and that's so important there's this tent this tendency to give us the elevator pitch the quick pitch the TED talk the short version the story synopsis and that doesn't solve the world's problems it doesn't solve human suffering it doesn't give us there we need this this big history this big picture this holistic this overview effect this cosmic perspective of how all the systems are interacting and working together um and no we don't need to be a complete expert on that but we need to have enough of that view with that big cosmic perspective that big history perspective so that we can sorry to say it call bullshit on some of these quick pitch linear lateral quick solutions that are actually getting it could get us into some some bigger bigger traps down the road or interest to more problems and and um yeah I and I think part of that too yeah another part of that is to be very careful to question the corporate green new deal the the top down green new deal which is trying to plaster the land with solar panels and and windmill farms to try to fuel this global economy where we're importing and exporting the same product why does the us export 1.4 billion tons of beef and then turn around input 1.4 billion tons of beef if they didn't do that you'll be massively reducing emissions and energy use so we've got to be really careful of a green new deal that's trying to increase yes renewable energy but on a massive scale to keep fueling this inordinately wasteful system and this now applies to trying to use robots and drones and so on in agriculture and that's why this you and food system coming up the a big summit is being boycotted by hundreds of millions of people around the world so stay tuned for that as well and we in local futures will be collaborating in those alternative summits where the people from around the world grounded and speaking from experience are showing that there is a way forward there is a way forward that works with nature and that works with the needs of people the last question is is really what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start you say boy had I known that 45 years ago would be much further along today it's a little bit different but I I was tempted when I wrote my book ancient futures which it did get out you know in some countries like in South Korea I was the best seller and so on but in the English speaking world it didn't get out because I was too critical of this dominant western part and I was sort of aware that if I hadn't done that because I had the biggest publisher national geographic all very excited about my knowledge about Ladakh and so on so I might have gone ahead with their encouragement to just talk about the amazing beauty and wonder of Ladakh in traditional culture without critiquing the western model it would have given me more of a platform I knew it would but I just felt you know convinced and as I am still today that if we don't understand that dominant system you know we're doomed so I don't know if I would have done differently I sometimes think maybe I should have done but but that's other than that I I was convinced in the beginning of the potential for more collaborative and happier ways of doing things you know because of the Ladakh experience and that hasn't changed I just I just see all around the evidence of that and I see also evidence that when people are trapped in the dominant system there is deep deep unhappiness so I'm more motivated than ever to just try to get this message out Elena thank you so much for letting me inside of your ideas and my listeners it's been a sheer pleasure we could talk literary for hours the subject matter that we have needs to we need to go into the depth and substance we need to make sense and because it is complex but we have the abilities and and I really thank you for your time and and and to get getting us deeper so that we can kind of get the solutions to to get on the right side of history so that we can have that cosmic perspective to really create those desirable futures where it is a world that works for everyone yeah you know we should do is let's do another one with the action guide comes up we'll have an action guide with about 500 actions people can take and then we could go deeper into those I would love that I would love that thank you so much Elena have a wonderful day you take care thank you bye bye