 there is a way that the global population can feed itself in a far more sustainable and healthy way by going local and that actually continuing in the direction that industrial agribusiness in the global food system is taking us is deadly and it's becoming more and more dangerous, more toxic. Helena Norberg Hodge is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, a very special episode for World Localization Day brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Helena is a pioneer of the new economy movement, a recipient of the Alternative Noble Prize, the Arthur Morgan Award, and the Goy Peace Prize for contributing to the revitalization of cultural 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 in 2019. She is co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up and Producer of the award-winning documentary, The Economics of Happiness. Helena is the founder, 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. I could go on for days because she has been in this arena talking about these things for a long time and has done wonderful things. She's an author, a filmmaker, on and on. Helena, welcome to the episode. It's so nice to have you. Thank you. Very happy to be here. We really are doing a special edition in honor of World Localization Day and kind of to promote, raise awareness for you to draw as many listeners and viewers to come out and participate. Officially, it starts May 15th, not just a couple of days from now, goes till June 20th I hear. And then is the official World Localization Day on June 20th or June 21st this year? It's actually this year 20th because that's a Sunday. But we have nominated the 21st, the summer solstice, that's a perfect day to celebrate localization because it's about, among other things, that reconnection to nature that we would hope when people are out of COVID and so on that they can celebrate outside together. It's beautiful and it's combined with not only great speakers, great philosophers, kind of food events, wonderful guests and personalities who have deep thoughts, farmers, food producers, and just those who are really concerned about our earth and connecting as communities and building these local futures. Your book, Local Is Our Future, I've got it right here holding it up in the camera, is a wonderful book and I want to touch upon that and maybe another podcast and go deeper as well as some more things of the happiness economy. I enjoyed your films, your documentaries or films that you've done, as well as your thoughts on local economies, the economics of happiness and really Local Is Our Future, I've been promoting it and talking about it to my friends and fans and listeners for a while. It came out in 2019 and there's really a lot of tools that if you go to localfutures.org to empower people with reading films and reports that can be downloaded where they can understand that. Do we want to get into this movement? How do we understand what's the whole verbiage around it? But what I'm really trying to frame is you've been doing this for four decades at least, 35 plus years maybe going on 40 for a while, and we've just experienced, we're still experiencing it to some respects, coming out of the pandemic hopefully. A lot of craziness, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic, the inauguration, the racist against Asians, and on and on I could go, has any of that work prior that you've done, that experience and what you've written and done filmmaking, helped you to weather this crazy time any better as it's proven to be a more resilient model for life? Well, absolutely, and I think it's helped so much to know that despite enormous pressures from the top down, essentially national governments taking their marching orders now from global banks of corporations, they're trying to pull the whole planet, pull the people of the planet in a completely unnatural direction. It's fundamentally about taking us further away from nature, by taking us away from any connection with the natural world where we live, is taking us into an ever more urban environment where we are crowded together on top of each other, but we don't know each other, because community has been broken down, we don't even look each other in the eye when we're in the big city, we're in a smaller town or community, we do, and there's usually a bit more interdependence. Now, doesn't mean that in the big cities we couldn't revitalize a fabric of interdependent community, but it requires an economic shift, because this economic path pushed by global businesses that is taking us further and further away from any sense of dependence on human beings. We're becoming more and more locked in a system where we can't even talk to a human being. In our government, in our healthcare system, in our education system, we are being pushed towards this large-scale, steady, competitive, anonymous world. What it's doing is creating terrible epidemics of depression, anxiety, and fear, and of course with COVID, you know, that fear was reinforced and we were sort of locked down in our homes, very bleak picture, but for me, why I feel fundamentally optimistic is that I see even under those pressured conditions, all the evidence I need to know that human beings actually long for connection, they prefer to be collaborative. Just remember that, that we're doing not to believe that most human beings, if they could live in a more collaborative way, they would prefer that. They don't want to be struggling and elbowing their way to the top and worrying constantly about how they're going to put food on the table and have a roof over their head. That brings the worst out in human beings and human beings do become more fearful and greedy in those conditions, but what's happening in this localization movement that we are trying to make more visible and that we're trying to strengthen is that once people recognize some fundamental truths about the way we live now and about the opportunity to right now, wherever we are, choose to reconnect in human scale ways with independent businesses, with linking producers and consumers, especially farmers and consumers, once we start reconnecting in that way in terms of human scale interdependence, what we're witnessing is essentially a restoration of humanity, what it is to be human. We are seeing that particularly starting with the most fundamental issue of all, the most fundamentally important sector, which is how we produce our food, what we're seeing all around the world now is a growing local food movement. It doesn't recognize itself necessarily as part of the global movement, but you were saying I've been at this for almost four decades. I'm afraid to tell you it's actually 45 years now and because I've been at it for so long and I was from New York to Los Angeles and Portland and Vancouver and then Paris and London and Stockholm and also in Eastern Europe and Japan, South Korea, China, India, working with colleagues in South America and Africa, so very, very global experience. And I've been witnessing firsthand the growth of this movement. I've helped to pioneer it in many places, including America, and it's just so wonderful to know that despite the fact that we are swimming in a sea where the pressures are driving us apart and where heavy subsidies for old food from far away make this food artificially cheap, people are making the effort to heal their own bodies to want and understand the need for healthier food and for a healthier environment. And it's a magical formula. When you shorten the distance between the farmer and the consumer, you're creating a structure where the market pressures for diversified production. Now this is a formula for naturally creating organic production. The unnatural fossil fuel based industrial food economy has been a disaster from beginning to end. It came in, particularly after the Second World War, with this supposedly cheap oil, which of course cost us wars and millions of lives and still continues to be a reason for violent conflict around the world. But this oil, which had been used for the war machinery, was turned on the land. And even in countries like Sweden, my native country, you saw people pushed off the land, replaced by big machinery using lots of oil and on bigger, bigger monocultures. The people themselves were shoved into cities, into high-rise apartments, again using lots of fossil fuels for the cement and for the heating and air conditioning and all of that. In these unnatural conditions, the land was basically destroyed. Monoculture is deadly. Nowhere in the natural world do you find monoculture. It's a human creation. And I should say in human creation, because it comes from a system that most individual human beings are not even looking at. But as part of a big wheel, they become little cogs in a machine turning in the wrong direction. That's how I see it. And so in these unnatural conditions, when you create monocultures, you have to use chemical fertilizers. You end up having to use pesticides, herbicides, fungicide, because it's so unnatural and you get all kinds of imbalances. When you add monoculture, you're also much more threatened by a particular pest or some hail or some wind or too much rain. You can lose everything. So the fear drives the farmer then to try to protect themselves with more and more chemicals. We already created dust bowls in that way. In America, it was very clear. And yet huge subsidies and pressure because it favored big business. This pressure continued to push us in the wrong direction. Now, what we're seeing is that when people turn that formula around, so it's exactly the opposite direction towards smaller farms with more people on the farm, less energy, less technology and more diversity. Just unbelievable healing happens. In many cases, we're talking about increasing the yields, the productivity of food production, sometimes by a factor of 10, sometimes even more. But more important, well, I don't say more importantly, but just as importantly as seeing that there is a way that the global population can feed itself in a far more sustainable and healthy way by going local and that actually continuing in the direction that industrial agribusiness in the global food system is taking us is deadly. And it's becoming more and more dangerous, more and more toxic. In that global system, most people don't know food is being imported and exported. At the same time, the US exports about a billion and a half times of, yeah, it's a billion and a half times of beef every year. They total around an import about a billion and a half times of beef. England exports as much milk and butter as it imports. Australia exports wheat to the UK and imports wheat from France. You have an insanity going on where countries are routinely importing and exporting the same product. Why? It's entirely because our governments have believed that GDP will grow through more global trade. Now, we also have in the global food system, food flow routinely to the other side of the world to be processed or to be washed. I discovered this first in Sweden when I came back from many years in the Himalayas and I found that in 1977, I think it was, in Sweden, they were sending potatoes to Italy by road to be washed, put in plastic bags and then sent back again. Now this type of thing is happening by air and apples flown from the UK to South Africa to be washed, fish flown from the US, from Norway, from Australia to China to be deboned and flown back again. Now, most people don't know about this so I do believe that if we can do everything possible to circumvent a corporate media that doesn't want us to look at the truth of this unbelievable inefficiency and waste and pollution from the global food system especially, that is from the global economy generally. If we can get this message out, I have no doubt that we could see a turning towards both social and ecological healing quite rapidly because we're talking about working with the needs of people and with the needs of nature. I'm monologuing you so much but I'd like to just add that part of this picture is so important for us to see that this same turning towards more localized economies, not just around food but food is the central most important area to shift for environmental reasons. But for social reasons, if we shift away from the globalizing path towards the localizing path, supporting not just local food but independent businesses, start working with those organizations that are developing local finance strategies, providing local energy systems, providing more localized and by that we mean more preventative healthcare. It's more localized because people are more actively involved in learning about how to keep themselves healthy. A lot of that has to do with healthy food, nutritious food, it has to do with exercise, it has to do with peace of mind. These recipes are all part of this localization movement. Very importantly, it is very important, it's the recognition that this turning is essential to avoid a even further leap to the right politically because what's happening is that this same system that wastes so much energy, creates mountains of plastic, uses all that energy, creates climate change. That same system is creating huge financial insecurity for the majority of the world's population. The financial insecurity now is extending to the middle classes. There is a fear of being able to provide for one's children, even a roof over one's head, some kind of future, some kind of education that's going to provide for the children. As people become more and more fearful, they become more and more reluctant to take environmental issues seriously and they are very vulnerable to the demagogues who stand up and say, we're going to grow the economy for you, we're growing it for you, we're going to make your country great. Forget about this climate nonsense, forget about the Amazon, just follow this growth agenda. That growth agenda is structurally linked, every country structurally linked to making fewer and fewer people richer and richer and more and more people poorer and poorer in real terms. This clarity about the basic structures of the global economy are vital to strengthen the localizing economy movement and where it's happening, we see the benefits. So I'll stop there in case you have some questions. You're absolutely fine. So we're both very much systems thinker, so I really appreciate you going deep and giving us kind of that bigger view, that step back of and making sure we understand that we need to get into that. I not only have you receive reviews, but on your board of one of your organizations, Fritz Hof Capra is there, I'm an alumni of Capra courses and systems view of life as well. So I appreciate you giving us that big perspective and understanding of that because it's so important to really see what's going on locally, even though we have this global view, so this global local or this world view of the problems we're facing. And some people probably find that difficult because we're talking about local economies, local futures and how we can better build infrastructures, different infrastructures for those local communities, community food webs, community infrastructure to make those strong, especially in times of pandemics, especially in times of climate crisis. And so I love that you address that. I want to go back to the question, but before we do, I want to just touch on a couple of things. So most people really don't understand that economics are the current economic models that we're seeing around the world are all failing. They have bubbles and then they burst and then we go right back to the same economic model that burst or had a problem. But our world's oldest, longest running and most successful economy is an agrarian society and what you touched upon as being the basic fundament. It's not only one that's the oldest, longest running, most successful, it's also the dual edged sword because it's the one that affects human health and environment the most. And it's the one that's been not just bastardized, but it's really been manipulated on this global scale where we're shipping potatoes out and shipping potatoes in to be sold and many other products as you touched upon. It's also the largest employer of women and girls. It's the least paid, it's the least educated, the least digitized and there's some issues in that model that a lot of people don't realize until we hit a pandemic or until we hit some hard times how basic of a not just system of an economy that is and important it is for us. It's the basic needs of humanity, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the physiological needs, breathing, food and water, that's our basic source and it's also the basic measure of the basic resource of human energy. So humanity's energy sources is a caloric unit which is a measurement of energy. I don't want you to count calories, but that measurement of energy is food at what regulates our body temperature, what keeps us going and doing that and we're getting less health, more issues, more problems in our world regarding this caloric intake and food because of these global systems, because of high process and because of the nutrient loss in our soils. And so I love that you're touching upon that as the foundation of where we need to go and how we can start to fix and repair this problem. We've seen this unique time for the past 12 months or more of the pandemic and that's what I wanted to go back to. Have you seen not only from your work before, now that there's more doubling down or more awareness, more people approaching you saying, now I get it. You've been talking about it for 45 years. Now I'm connecting this web of complexity that I've actually been participating in a system that's hurting me in the long run, that's actually limits to growth, that's going to end sometime if we don't fix it and get this stability on the local level. And so if you have any stories or anything you can share of what you've seen, some experiences are people who've reached out to you and said, boy, we want more information or we see this occurring. Now is the time that this movement's even growing more. Yeah, we're absolutely seeing. We've seen a very clear increase since 2008 with the financial crisis, but particularly after COVID. There's just no doubt that all around the world people realized the vital importance of their food. And there were many instances of the supermarkets, the mainstream system, not functioning, running out items, and the local systems provided an increase their productivity. And it was wonderful to also hear from local farmers that are now in farmers markets I helped to start and that they were able to actually triple their production because they were working with local people who were happy to do some extra work so that their community could eat. And I love the fact that most of them didn't increase the prices at all, even though it was such a high demand and they could easily have done so. It was wonderful to see all kinds of different businesses and individuals turn around to start getting engaged in the food economy. I mean, as a woman here as a choir, she started delivering food to people and it became a small business. There were many restaurants around the world that suddenly became food hubs where food could be delivered and then from the grower and then delivered to the consumers. And as part of that whole awakening of the importance of food, there was also this awakening to the joy of growing food and producing some food. So there's a shortage everywhere, buying little chickens because people wanted to keep chickens as a shortage of seedlings. There was a shortage of also things like yeast because people started baking bread at home and it was really a very clear awakening, not only to the importance of but the joy of more localized food systems and a community. There were so many examples of people reaching out even in COVID lockdown through the internet to make sure that the people in their neighborhood were looked after, the elderly and the frail. And of course we've also heard that there was more domestic abuse and there were many people who were frustrated and depressed and angered but in that very difficult situation which shines through it is how in crisis so many people responded very positively and very responsibly. And by the way I'd like to recommend the book Humankind if you haven't heard of it. It's a very important book and I'm thrilled that it's got out and reached a relatively wide audience because it's substantiating what I've been saying you know again for these four and a half decades that by nature we prefer to collaborate when we don't enjoy competing and fighting to survive. It's not you know every child is born is asking to be valued to be nurtured to be loved and and when children will see that care of love generally they learn how to become loving and caring people. That's so beautiful you know Carl Sagan said it very nicely the astronomer he said there's this growing collective consciousness that sees the earth as one organism and an organism divided amongst itself or fighting against itself is doomed and it is so true what you just said we are so connected to the biome of our earth we are all earthlings we're all on the same spaceship earth moving in the same direction distant cousins so to say kin and if we're fighting against each other we're doing we really need to realize that not just that we're all in the same spaceship earth but these local communities to reconnect with each other and to cooperate and collaborate and I this could go deep and I and I don't want to we'll save that for our next podcast but you know there's a lot of neoliberalism neo-darlinism which is really survival of the fittest natural selection only the strong survive and severe competition and that's not how our world works our world works like Lynn Martin Lynn Margolis said who is Carl Sagan's first wife she said we're on a symbiotic earth and and like she worked with James Lovelock as well the there is we're connected to that biome that microorganism and it's a symbiotic earth in collaboration and cooperation that that we're all working in harmony as a almost as homo symbios and so I really love that you make those connections and you you speak about that and that that's really this is a beautiful time for us now because of world local localization day which is June 21st but for May 15th to June 20th you will have events and speakers and food events all over the world going on and I kind of want to go back to last year what was experienced but basically just to explain to the listeners it's a day to inspire awareness about how localizing economies can strengthen communities and lead to greater ecological health human prosperity key participants in the past and last year were Russell Brand Jane Goodall my god Jane Goodall Brian Enno, Noam Chomsky and I could go on Vandina Shiva Fritzl Capra, Daniel Wall Christian, Daniel Christian Wall and many many superstars or wonderful people who I feel are wonderful and doing good things for the planet and they're bringing not only their philosophies their feelings on where maybe this new social framework is going for humanity and how we embrace that locally but there's no one better to speak about that than you about what maybe we could look forward to this year and maybe what surprises if you could tease us and help us a little bit more to understand yeah but this year we have decided to in a way decentralize so that our colleagues around the world are organizing events in their own languages now on six continents you know and working from you know Tokyo to Benin or Kenya, Peru, Mexico so all around the world people are organizing events in their own languages starting May 15 and until mid mid June and then we'll have a taster of some of that in a program that we're running from the 15th of June to the 20th and we're trying to reach every time zone with some of these programs some of which will report back from around the world and others will be events that we create this year Russell and his wife Laura Brand will join us he quoted me quite a lot in his book revolution and he's really a very important figure because he understands both the political need for decentralization or localization and you know it's it can also be called anarcho syndicalism but really localization is what he meant he also has become very aware of the central importance of an embodied grounded spirituality and that's as I see it that's a shift towards really deeply learning from more feminine deeply embedded ecological indigenous societies and that's where all my knowledge comes from and my teachings work from having had that deep experience for many years as well as living in Sweden and America and Germany and learning to speak a lot of languages so I've had the opportunity both to go very deep into indigenous culture and very broad global experience but so this you know me client is also joining us and we have the main thing about having some people with well-known names is that we're really really wanting to raise the status of and to show the many cross routes to efforts that are so significant they're so systemic they really demonstrate what we call the economics of happiness which is really the economics of localization but it's so difficult to get them into the media you know the corporate media doesn't want a systemic path of solutions it's happily encouraging us to view everything as a separate issue and it's particularly dangerous as we can see now through the social dilemma and so on algorithms really it's not really about people it's the systems we built where we've wedded technology to money we've wedded this system to an extraction that really benefits almost no one but in material terms and money terms we can see this obscene you know um you know situation where a few individuals even in covid earning billions and trillions of dollars now so we've got to really step back to look at that bigger picture and as I say once we do when we put on lenses we contrast the localizing path with the globalizing path we'll see that one of them is about competitive pressures and speed taking us further and further away from nature and from human beings from human control the other one is subsuming economic essentially economic transactions the creation of money the regulation of interest and and the mechanisms through which society is in charge of the economy rather than the economy shaping society that's what localizing is about it's a process it's not about reducing everything down to some village level it's not about only doing things in some tiny villages it's happening as much from big cities as it is well more from big cities actually than it is from tiny villages but this process has a very clear and very concrete trajectory whereby people start supporting independent local businesses they start seeing that when you're supporting those players in your community the benefits come back to you so I I feel very privileged that I can tell people that if you want to get involved with localization you're actually looking for a path for your own inner psychological and spiritual healing as well as for social healing as well as for ecological healing and we want you as part of world localization day to spread that so that these initiatives can happen all over the world some people think it sounds contradictory it have world localization day no this is not about some isolated selfish thing I'm just going to look after myself this is about a paradigm shift and a structural path that is beneficial to the human population to mother Gaia and also I want to add that in terms of the social healing what we are seeing is that when people start relating to people who have a face and a name whom they know so it might be you know John who's running that shop down the street it might be Mary who's the the health worker it might be might be you know someone from a different culture from a different race but they are people they are not labels they are not those nasty immigrants or those Muslims or those people who are inferior because they have dark skin no these are people you know so what I'm seeing is that as you become more interdependent with people as you know them it's the prejudice starts falling away you can't have this general label for the individual you know the distances and the fear that's what produces the prejudice and even the violence and the rise of some very nasty neo-nazi sentiments and so on it's the fear and the separation and being actually manipulated by this inhuman system and remember that those algorithms that are polarizing us in social media are algorithms that are polarizing the whole world distorting the crisis of everything in the marketplace because we are allowing a casino the trade in money through algorithms that second by second are searching to amass as much wealth as possible into fewer and fewer hands and what's profitable is destruction health connection love are not profitable but ill health is and this is also just crazy that we measure GDP in a way that really literally means that we are on a path of destruction if you stay healthy it's not good for GDP you need chemotherapy year after year you need pharmaceutical drugs year after year GDP goes up you stop buying them GDP goes down it's all about commercialization so it can sound maybe very challenging to change that big system but i keep hammering on about it to try to get people to listen to the message that when you reduce all that to a scale where you live in your community in your city and you start engaging with localization you're actually on a path that takes you in exactly the opposite direction i think you know the statistics also are that right now in the food economies of the world the smallholder farms actually are home to 95 percent of agricultural biodiversity the giant monocultures are destroying it systematically and as i said before increasing time at emissions and toxic pesticides genetic engineering life is safe the the farmers markets are markets where the farmer can get about 80 percent of what you spend for your food in the supermarket they get if they're lucky 10 percent so you're starting to see a win-win strategy for healing the economy and healing the earth yeah there's been a big huge issue around turning food into a commodity and we really saw a big push in that in 2008 where all during the financial crisis were all big investments shifted to anything to do with the food system and during an economic downturn and during the pandemic we see time over time it's growing trillions of dollars every year regardless of whatever downturns because it is a basic sustenance but on the flip side of that is companies and investors are turning that into commodity and they don't have any idea of how to produce food and so they they've been in essence cheapen food and when you cheapen food and turn it into an investment you've cheapened life and you're investing against yourself in the long term and that's just a it's a horrific down downward spiral that needs to be changed and fixed and i i appreciate you addressing that and speaking about that i i i've love i mean you've had depot chopra you've had dr zack bush um who talks about the microbiome and many other wonderful things i i've had on the podcast before maria rhodale who wrote the organic manifesto of rhodale institute and and that and talking about regenerative organics and or organic farming and different methods but in 2015 the united nations came out and said we have in essence 70 harvests left at traditional industrial agriculture high industrial agriculture 70 harvests well the new number now just kind of on the tail end hopefully of the pandemic is now less than 45 harvests left on traditional industrial agriculture is ruining our farms it's we're doing our our waterways and many many other horrific things and as you said it so correctly the small holder farmers and those who implement regenerative organic practices agro forestry agro ecology new methods of healing the soils but also fixing our waterways and not using pesticides and those things are really those who are not only turning into carbon farmers and and kind of healing our soils and capturing carbon but they're also giving us better food there's higher yields and there's much more return on that and even those who are stuck in in these concrete jungles in the urban cities growing your own food or even if it's a victory garden or in your kitchen or on your terrace is like printing your own money it's it's a way of freedom it brings you joy and it can connect you again to how vital even if it's just sprouting that just that process can take a shift in your life to connect you back on the right path to where you need to go and so i love everything you're talking about and what you're doing i want to encourage all my listeners to go and and and view your website of world localization day i'll put the links in the show notes descriptions and just participate take part of it be empowered in a new movement in an old movement actually but one that maybe they haven't heard of hopefully will reach a lot of people who haven't heard of it but are ripe to to hear the message now that they've experienced all sorts of craziness in the world and saying these old systems aren't working for us anymore we need something that really works for us and now that goes back to my first question for you it's really i see that all those 45 years of work and what you've talked about have been telling us about a model that could have worked this whole time and now we're seeing it emerge as something that's actually more resilient and has the ability to heal our world in many different ways and connect humanity one to another and so i really thank you for that is there anything else about world localization day that you would like us to know or it's important to for us to watch out for i guess i i guess i'd like to just stress that we see it as a process and that it's not about blaming people who aren't eating 100 local food in most parts of the world you can't you might be eating cotton or tobacco or something if you eat local it's it's a relative term it's about the shift in direction and it's about joining that movement with people in your community so urging people to think of you know two quite different strategies one of them is to right now look around where you live and see if you can find some localization initiatives ideally starting with food it's the biggest healer but there are many others their business alliances finance and so on as i said also help us with what we call big picture activism and that's getting this bigger picture out a lot of people are talking about systems but they don't have access to an analysis of the global economic system which has become this massive man-made system a lot of people talk about this patriarchal racist misogynist and and it was from the beginning but a lot of people are now running it who are in government pushing a continued deregulation of global business and finance while they're over regulating local business and while they're squeezing local and national businesses for taxes and with regulations they're removing the regulations of the global monopolies that don't pay tax now so we would like big picture activism to also help get out this message so we do build a moment for policy change now that isn't going to happen overnight but i think we could have a big aha wake up and that will mean understanding that both democrats and republicans have been pursuing fundamentally the same economic policies it will mean waking up to the fact that what we call growth is not actually growth for the nation or its people nations are actually getting poorer vis a vis this floating empire in this casino economy and these global giants they don't belong to any place that's the whole point about localization so i think what we have to offer is almost like you know a phd in localization if you become interested in that you should come to our website because we have materials that range from the grassroots initiative we're coming out with a local action guide also with all kinds of examples of what you can do at the local level but we are also addressing that bigger picture that is about building up a momentum for genuine policy change which will for my point you only come once the social and environmental movements sing from the same hymn sheet and we really need to really need to understand that the welfare of the planet and the welfare of people are completely linked and it's tragic that we're getting hurted often by corporate think tanks into maintaining a narrow view of a particular issue and that keeps us separated and fragmented so there's a huge opportunity for very meaningful change at the policy level and there's already all these examples at the local level which you can join right now one thing you could do is to organize what we're calling a local food feast this is something we're aiming to have about a thousand of these around the world it can be anything from you if you're in covid lockdown deciding to cook a meal maybe for yourself and family maybe have a zoom dinner with a friend maybe on the other side of the world discussing the importance of local food cooking a meal that's primarily from local ingredients no fundamentalism but thinking about where the food comes from if there is a farmers market in your area maybe you could buy it there and and it's anything from that small individual thing to people closing down whole streets and having hundreds of people in a sort of potluck shared local food meal it's some restaurants are putting on a special celebration of world localization day and even you know having some music and entertainment and talks about the vital importance of strengthening local food economy so you could go to our website and sign up to do one of those local food fees to support this worldwide movement that would be really wonderful we'll put all the links in the show notes description for sure absolutely and the website is worldlocalizationday.org and you can reserve your place you can also sign up to do the food feast and have a have a nice event there as well as it's really nice it's kind of pay as you as you can system that you have set up which is very nice and fair that it's to each and everybody's needs to join I will definitely be there listening in and I hope that our our listeners and those who we promote it to will join as well because it'll be a wonderful event I really thank you and hope that we can take a deeper dive very soon after things calm down after the 20th 21st and and that we will go deeper into your book and some other things on talking about economics in general and moving a little bit into some deeper dive discussions on what you've been doing with for 45 years and why we haven't jumped on the boat yet to figure it out and and how that movement's going because I have tons of questions there I'm sure some of them will be answered in the world localization day thank you so much thank you thank you so much bye