S1 Ep1: Helena Norberg-Hodge

Linguist, author, filmmaker, pioneer of the new economy movement, and founder/director of Local Futures.

Based on decades of experience in indigenous cultures, in particular Ladakh and Bhutan, Helena has been promoting a big picture understanding of the foundations of human, as well as ecological wellbeing.

Her work has gained her the Alternative Nobel prize, the Arthur Morgan Award and the Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.”

Helena is author of the inspirational classic Ancient Futures, and Local is Our Future and producer of the award-winning documentaries: The Economics of Happiness, Planet Local and Closer to Home.

Traditional storytelling at its best with wisdom and knowledge shared through the age-old art of conversation.

This is a CBF grant funded project in collaboration with BayFM Byron and Plantation Studios.

Executive producer Rasela Torise. 

Music www.purple-planet.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_07 0:00

First of all, it was racism, and then it was sexism, and now it's ageism. So I've got to fight three battlefronts.

SPEAKER_06 0:08

Wisdom's not something you can buy a book and learn. It's not something you can grab off Instagram. It's not something you can you can buy in a course.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

I needed that courage when I was being threatened, kidnapped, raped, almost murdered.

SPEAKER_05 0:28

As I'm speaking now, the tears just rolling down my cheeks. Tears of futility, stuff you can't change. So important.

SPEAKER_03 0:38

And the work is so much now is actually supporting your knowing, your womb wisdom. And in that, there's a possibility that the madness of the world will fall away.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

The most important activism right now is information for yourself and others. And that's why I'm so happy to be on a community radio initiative to raise the status of older women. Because older women in almost every community carry knowledge and gifts and experience that are of real value in the real world, in the economy, in the culture that we all care about.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Welcome to a new series, Wow, Wise Older Women, a CBF grant-funded project created to raise the profile and status of women aged 55 to 85. Across six episodes, we celebrate the profound value of older women and their essential role in society as wisdom keepers, culture carriers, and the voices of lived experience. Through intimate, thoughtful conversations, this series honours the knowledge that only time can teach. In our opening episode, we sit down with Helena Norberg Hodge, linguist, author, filmmaker, and a pioneer of the new economy movement. As the founder and director of local futures, Helena has spent decades immersed in Indigenous cultures, particularly in Ladakh and Bhutan, cultivating a rare big picture understanding of what truly supports human and ecological well-being. Her global impact has been recognized with the Alternative Nobel Prize, the Arthur Morgan Award, and the Goy Peace Prize for her work revitalizing cultural and biological diversity, strengthening local communities and economies worldwide. Helena is the author of the influential classic Ancient Futures and Local Is Our Future, and producer of the award-winning documentaries The Economics of Happiness, Planet Local, and Closer to Home. The series brings you traditional storytelling at its finest. Wisdom shared through the age-old art of conversation. Join us as we listen, learn, and celebrate the voices of women whose insight enriches us all.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

I'm Helena Norberg Hodge and I'm director of an international non-profit organization called Local Futures. It is hard to describe me because I've ended up moving so broadly into what you might call being an alternative economist. I've ended up critiquing the dominant economy with a very big picture about how we can regain physical health, emotional health, and cultural health while also healing the environment. So I'm coming with a very big picture, and broadly speaking, I sometimes call that the economics of happiness.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

How do you feel being part of a wise older women project? I love it.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

I think I am certainly older and I do think I'm quite wise. I have had a wealth of experience in many different cultures, and I think it's such an important project because, as we know, older women tend in this modern commercial global economic system, they tend to be dumped and become invisible.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

You are a champion for localization, but you have very international beginnings. Can you give us a little bit of background on where that all started and some of the cultures that you were exposed to and that you moved through in your younger years?

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Yes, well I happened to have parents who were both Swedish, but my mother was half German, half Swedish. She actually never learned to speak German and didn't live in Germany, but her father was German and my father was English Swedish. So I had cousins and families and grandparents in all three cultures. And I also, before I went to university, had lived in America, and when I went to university I actually went to Germany and Austria, where I learned to speak fluent German. Later on I studied French in France and I became interested in different languages because of already quite an international background. And I became really fascinated by these different worldviews and different cultures. Just the difference in Sweden and England was quite big. In Sweden we tended to be much more direct and we tended to be less, I would say less repressed, more in our bodies. It was quite common for us as children to be swimming naked with our parents. It's not like we had this sort of wild free love or anything. But really when I look at it now, I realize it had to do with Sweden having much higher status for women and the feminine, and not having lost its more indigenous roots that were very close to nature. As I then later on lived in America, I found it interesting that in America the status of women was higher than it was in England. And all of this had led to me ending up studying languages and linguistics and really looking in a sort of introspective way, interested in psychology and the sort of inner world and what made people tick and particularly what made people happier and what seemed to be working better. And in actual fact, even though Sweden had this quite good history of deep connection to nature and respect for women and great care from the social welfare state, for mothers, children and fathers having time off to look after children, there was still quite a lot of depression and alcoholism in Sweden, which later on I came to understand better. But until I had this groundbreaking and very eye-opening experience of going to Ladakh or Little Tibet, all of these things were interesting, but I they didn't sort of make sense in terms of a bigger picture where I could now see oh aha. Now I understand why people in Sweden do have depression, why even I could suffer from depression. It wasn't at all by chance that I found that when I felt depressed, if I could just get the energy to get up and go out and walk in the mountains. This was particularly true when I was studying as a university student in Innsbruck in Austria, and often feeling, you know, sitting inside and studying and beginning to question what was the meaning of life. And I found that when I just got out and walked into the mountains, suddenly my spirits lifted. And later on, when I got to know nature-embedded indigenous culture high up in the Himalayas, everything fell into place much more.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

So you mentioned two things that I think go hand in hand. One is a groundbreaking experience in your life, and the other was learning language which enabled you to understand different worldviews. Those two go hand in hand when you went to Ladakh. Give us a little bit of your background in Little Tibet, how that experience came to you and exactly how groundbreaking that was, not just for you but for the community as well.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Yeah, I had ended up living in Paris as a linguist, and I was asked to go out as part of a German documentary film team. To this place I had never heard of, and by the way, a lot of people still haven't heard of it. It's called Ladakh, and it's actually the westernmost part of Tibet that is a part of Tibet that belongs politically to India, and it has belonged to India since the 1800s. This was an area that had been sealed off for political reasons. All the borders were very sensitive, and no one was allowed to go there. So it was an amazing situation to go into this region that in the entire modern era had not been affected by the media, by development, by modern changes. And because I was a linguist, I learned to speak the language very quickly, and that gave me an insight into the worldview of people who were allowed to still feel totally self-respecting, who just didn't feel they needed to prove that they weren't inferior, that they weren't poor and backward. They just were so deeply self-accepting that the self wasn't an issue. I realized over a longer period when I ended up staying when the film was finished that this deep self-acceptance was such an important part of being tolerant, of being open, of being very accepting of difference. And then I also witnessed how modernity, how modern education and the modern media were actually creating a sense of inferiority and basically labeling people like them as backward farmers. And that led to my taking up the project of working with them to try to do everything possible to make it clear to them that they weren't stupid and backward. I always say that if I had had one-tenth of the budget that the forces had who were coming in with a type of propaganda, which included modern schooling, it included advertising, film, and later on television also came. And these modern tools of propaganda, I don't think most people have understood what a rupture that was with previous historical development. We now know that the printing press did lead to centralized control and much more top-down centralization of power, but I think we really need to understand better the impact of the media and how that is a tool for the demagogues, for the fascists, what helped Hitler and what helped the rise of a very centralized totalitarian state. What I saw was that in Ladac the imagery essentially again and again reinforced the idea that only if you are in the city and living a consumer lifestyle with a nice car, and in the early days you also had to look exactly like Barbie and Rambo, who literally were coming in through toy shops, through films, polarizing gender roles, and in the beginning it was all blonde, blue eyed, white skinned. So I used to talk about this back in the 70s and eighties, but then of course I witnessed how the dominant propaganda machine promoting urban consumer lifestyles allowed people of color to come in. So you could have dark skin, you could be oriental. It's even now become very trendy, but tragically the basic message is still there that you are nobody if you don't belong to a glamorous, wealthy urban elite making use of all the gadgets and the tools that essentially global corporations and commercial interest want you to believe that you need in order to have the respect of other people. One of many key issues facing us today is the issue of understanding that it was a commercial man-made system that spread globally to conquer the world in a way that the colonial powers and even later on with the tools of development including tanks and wars and invasions didn't conquer people's hearts and minds as totally as a propaganda machine that was able to use screens to tell children that if you want to be loved, if you want to be seen, heard and respected, you need to be wearing this label, you need to be having this iPad, you need to belong to this consumer culture. We need to understand that this means the need for every child to feel loved and respected was perverted by commercial interests, and those commercial interests were being allowed to expand through treaties that governments were making with global corporations. I really so hope that anybody listening will be interested in pursuing this further because it helps us to understand much better why we've got so many crises today and why we have also now an even more exacerbated problem as young people are taking on the tools for propaganda through their iPhones to now send out a message to their friends I'm having a better time than you are, and here we are having a good party, and aren't we looking sexy and aren't we cool? And leaving everybody feeling empty and left behind and fearful of being left behind and being isolated. Because all of this leads to a sense of disconnection, of essentially not feeling that we belong, that we are loved, that we are connected. This is not coming from the devil, this is not coming from Russia being spread into America, this has nothing to do with left or right, it's got nothing to do with some innate human tendency to always want to control or to be greedy by nature. Nothing. It's to do with us allowing commercial forces to manipulate us and particularly our children. It's something that can change, and I'm sure it will change, that the sooner the better.

SPEAKER_02 14:53

How about the children in Ladakh? Where were they at back then in that time?

SPEAKER_01 14:58

This was the amazing thing was I saw these people who both as children and adults had such deep calm self-acceptance that the self wasn't an issue, and this incredible openness to outside, to differences. In fact, the majority, as part of this Tibetan culture, were Buddhist. But about five hundred years earlier, Muslim traders had come in. They were now in some regions, almost half the population, and they were living more in the city as traders. And the city traders and the Buddhist farmers had had peaceful relationships for 500 years, but it was this modern system that pushed them psychologically to feel inferior and that pushed everybody into the city to look for jobs. Because this modern economy that was promoting this idea you need to be an urban consumer, a very important part of that was you were not a farmer. Farmers had no look in. I saw people pushed into the city and literally conflict between Buddhists and Muslims arising out of that. Within a decade, tensions built up and there was even violent conflict. I also just want to say I saw the same process in Bhutan, a kingdom in the Himalayas with a very similar culture, and there it was conflict between Hindus and Buddhists. People often say to me, Well, there's no way that you can go around telling people you should stay a farmer, you should stay as you are and tell them what to do. Our work in Ladakh was never about that, because we understood the psychology and we understood that the way that this propaganda machine worked was to make people believe that in America, you know, particularly in New York, there was this paradise where people had everything that they had, plenty of time, time for singing and dancing together, for theatre, for lots of exercise, healthy food, fresh air, clean water, and they didn't need to do any work, they just pushed a few buttons. So our work was about telling people you don't have any need to feel ashamed at all. In America, there are actually these people who are saying that they don't really like that city life. They're actually feeling they're working too hard, they don't have community, there's no connection between grandchildren and grandparents. There's something called depression that I have to say it took me a long time to explain to people what that was. They could not understand it. When I told them we actually had doctors who were not concerned about the physical health but the mental health, it was very hard for them to understand. But our work was basically about bringing in the reality of what was going on in the rest of the world, and that included inviting people from the West to come and share their stories of how they were working hard to find a way of just rebuilding more community, more connection to the land. There were people who wanted to go back to the land and actually wanted to do farming. People liked to hear that they didn't need to feel ashamed. They liked to hear that actually there were other people in other parts of the world who wanted to live the way they did, and who were interested in them and who were becoming fascinated by indigenous culture, who were trying to learn about what it was like to be in a culture where women had higher status, where every mother had a minimum of five caretakers for every child. So this deeper dialogue was very welcomed on both sides, but it was with a very limited budget. That was the constraint.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

This did gather a lot of international attention. Where did this mainly come from?

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Interestingly enough, in the early days in Ladakh, which was this part of Tibet, there were authors and filmmakers and anthropologists, particularly from Germany and France, because in the non-Anglo world there has been more continuous interest in non-Western cultures. Later on, also English Americans and maybe Australians also came later on, but it ended up being the case that we would give talks to tourists to try to encourage them to be more conscious about their impact. We also had films and we would also give talks. So we had this quite international audience that then went back to their countries and then often they would invite me to come and speak in their countries or teach at a university. So we ended up with this very global outreach very early on.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

And in 1983 you founded Local Futures. Was that a work in progress? So when did that begin?

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Actually, because at the very beginning, you know, I was out there for two years, mainly with the idea that I was gonna stay on after the film was finished, but as a sort of good westerner, I don't know that I would have said, Well, I'm just gonna give up my job in Paris and just stay here because I love it. But instead I was told by a professor from the University of London who was out there that I could do a PhD on the language because I had already learned a lot of it. So at first I was going through the region, I was collecting folk stories. There were about a hundred villages in quite a big region about the size of Austria, and then I did a rudimentary Ladaki English dictionary working with a local monk, all of this with the idea of doing a degree on the language. But very quickly my constant message to the local people was this sort of ambassadorship of explaining. Don't you let them make you feel stupid and backward. Don't think that you're poor. Yes, the tourists are coming in and they're spending back in that time in the 70s, it was a bit like a Martian coming to New York and spending every day about a hundred thousand dollars. In Ladakh, people were coming spending maybe a hundred dollars a day, and that was the amount of money a whole family might have used over a year. And so it gave this completely false impression of wealth and what was real. They had their health care, they had their food, they had their water, they had their houses, they had their support, their culture, all of it without money. The work of actually turning this sort of ambassadorship into something more concrete started happening when the government was basing everything on fossil fuels, and Ladakh had 300 days of sunshine a year, people were living up at 12,000 feet, and it was so clear that a lot of this coal and diesel that was brought in could actually be replaced by solar energy, particularly passive solar energy for house heating and water heating. And later on we also introduced solar cookers and later on some solar panels, small scale hydroelectricity, and that work became one of the biggest appropriate technology products in the world. And we did get a lot of interest from around the world because back then the idea that we needed renewable energy was coming from a genuinely environmental concern about the need for decentralization, avoiding nuclear power. I just want to warn the listener that today so much of this renewable energy is being pushed as part of a big top-down agenda that is about the plastering of solar panels across the Sahara to export energy to northern Europe. It's massive and it's to support global corporations and their unbelievably wasteful use of energy. So we now have to really distinguish between the sort of renewables that humanity needs and the sort of energy consumption that corporations need because they're importing and exporting identical products across the world. The renewable energy project that we had was called at that point the Ladakh Project. We had funding from various countries, actually even from government agencies, very small quantities, but enough to carry out a very significant project. And then we were invited to work in Bhutan and we started thinking, well, we need to have a different name, and then we became the International Society for Ecology and Culture to show that we were more global, because we'd also had invitations to Nepal and to other parts of India, so there was this interest in the work both around renewable energy but also in terms of the cultural self-respect work, which to a great extent consisted of what I called counter development. Once we understood that the development trajectory was based on destroying cultural self-esteem and destroying self-reliance. And then later on by 1983, we didn't like that long fancy name of International Society for Ecology and Culture, so we just turned it into local futures because what we were doing everywhere was trying to support local self-respect, more self-reliance, and that was all about strengthening the local community fabric, the local economy, local knowledge, and the empowerment of local people everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 24:31

Local futures back then, that's what you're aiming towards, a more sustainable future. What's happening there now? Has it had an impact in those areas and and those countries?

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Well, yes, in the end we helped to create a strong group in Ladakh that became a local government, and that was a great achievement in many ways because we were viewed with terrible suspicion and often accused of being CIA agents. But despite all of those pressures, we managed to win over, you know, the local population in a major way, and we helped to set up several nonprofit organizations and then they led to the formation of a local government. However, the pressures at the global level have continued to increase and to pressure local economies and local governments everywhere in the wrong direction. So the flourishing of the sort of projects that we had in the early days has often been overshadowed by mass tourism. The Indian government has been doing everything it can to market Little Tibet and there's an invasion, and so there's pressures in Ladakh that now mean that it's more or less like everywhere, that there are people at the grassroots working in exactly the opposite direction, which includes young people who have gone out to study and realize they actually want to support farming, and they have projects to try to raise awareness about the importance of farming and the importance of local healthy food for physical health and for the health of the environment, but it's not managed to maintain Ladakh as this model that we would have hoped for.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

You also in 1986 won an award, the alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize. Can you tell me a little bit about the Right Livelihood Award and who you won that with?

SPEAKER_01 26:34

It was started by someone who was Swedish German and whose grandfather had won the Nobel Prize, and he suggested to the Nobel Committee, which is based in Sweden, that they should have a prize for people who are really trying to improve the state of the world, particularly also for non-Western people, not just Western scientists. And they didn't accept his suggestion, so he sold his scam collection and started this prize that became known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. And officially it was the Right Livelihood Award, taken very much from Gandhi's thinking. It was a great honor to be offered that for the work in Ladakh, and with my Ladakh colleagues, we won the prize along with some beautiful women that became heroines of mine, Alice Stewart and Rosalie Bertell, who were already about seventy, I think, at that time. And Alice's story I think is so important. She really became interested in childhood cancer because that was something quite new at that time. The statistics were showing that children who died of leukemia and other forms of cancer had been X-rayed in uterus far more frequently than others. So that created a suspicion that should have been followed up. That no, it was Alice alone without funding, who sat in a little tiny office in Oxford for many years studying the data and eventually became recognized for reducing that risk of childhood cancer by finally getting it acknowledged that mothers should not be X-rayed. And Rosalie Bertell was a nun from Canada who'd also been looking at the effects of radiation, particularly of nuclear radiation, and who was aware that the testing was inadequate, that models were being used that did not take into account the difference for a woman to be subjected to radiation or a child, and who was a great voice for trying to warn us about nuclear power. They were gonna open the door to global trade, which meant opening their doors to Coca-Cola, to Monsanto, to big global banks, and not restrict them in any way. And I ended up studying this process, I ended up taking the initiative to get funding, and we had people from around the world, about forty people studying this, and it became obvious that everywhere in America as well as in Bhutan or in Sweden or Australia, this process was destroying local economies because these global corporations were able to bring in products from the other side of the world at artificially low prices, and this was particularly disastrous when it came to food, something that every person needs about three times a day, and ideally it should be fresh. Ideally it should not be processed or triple packaged in plastic. And so the destruction of local food economies along with the destruction of local farmers was so obviously destructive, and so very early on, by the late 70s, we were trying to alert people to this fact and to support the creation of local farmers markets or farm shops, shortening the distances between farmers and consumers. Part of how this became so obvious was when I had seen in Ladakh that butter that had been transported for two weeks over the Himalayas came in and sold for half the price of local butter. Then I realized when I went back to Sweden, when I went back to England, like in England, Devon and Cornwall are famous for their butter. And I realized that butter from New Zealand was cheaper in England than butter from the farm next door. And then I saw it in Mongolia, in Kenya, literally everywhere I went. So this artificial perversion of pricing was happening because governments were favoring global trade. And I just want to say that in recent times that has led to the fact that in climate negotiations there is no mention of the emissions from global trade. So that when you buy fruit from the supermarket, it will have been packaged in Chile and there'll be fruit from five countries. When fish from Norway, from Australia, from America, from virtually every country you can mention get sent to China to be deboned and processed and sent back again. Think about those emissions. They are not mentioned. So we are getting a completely false narrative around climate change, which doesn't mean that there's no climate change, but we're not talking about the cause of it. And the tragedy above all tragedies with this is that the environmental movement has often just not been aware of the global picture. So they've gone along with an agenda that suits the global corporations, and that is that you and I are to blame. You and I are these greedy people who don't care. We are still driving our cars, we still want to go on holiday in an airplane, and we just don't care. So the message has become humanity is to blame. Humanity is innately greedy. When actually what the problem is is not humanity, thank God. It's actually an inhuman system. Inhuman because it's actually powered by ignorance, including from the activists who don't see what's really causing climate change and instead blame us. So this lack of awareness is actually why I feel so motivated because I know that from the grassroots to our government, the majority of ministers in government are not aware of this bigger picture. And the narrow focus linked to large scale, that's not humanity, it's an inhuman scale. I so want people to know that there is a movement out there, it's a global movement towards localization. What does that mean? It's a movement that consists of literally billions of people engaged in either protecting or rebuilding closer relationships between humans and nature and closer community connections. Everything from the initiatives where women will start a process of community hospice care or more natural birth or a community initiative to support herbal remedies instead of expensive pharmaceuticals. These things are happening all around the world, but we don't get to see them as a collective picture. We don't get to hear about them in the media because we basically don't have a big picture that connects the dots. And the main message is there is a movement out there. Please join us at localfutures.org to find out more about it and to see what you can do to join it. The most important activism right now is information for yourself and others. And that's why I'm so happy to be on a community radio initiative to raise the status of older women. Because older women in almost every community carry knowledge and gifts and experience that are of real value in the real world, in the economy, in the culture that we all care about. We all want our children to feel loved. We want cleaner water, we want healthier food. I think there are going to be very few people who will say they don't want that, but we need to raise awareness about what it is that's taking the human right away to fresh healthy food from their region, whether they're in Kenya, Australia or Sweden, what is it that's driving a force to separate us? And how is it that this propaganda machine has now been inserted into the minds of five-year-old children who are destroying themselves and others by using their mobile phones inside a framework that is disastrous for their well-being.

SPEAKER_02 35:54

You also have the award-winning documentary, The Economics of Happiness. Tell us a little bit about the creation of that and its place in the world.

SPEAKER_01 36:04

Yeah, that was after quite a long time of having given quite a lot of lectures and so on around the world. And we try to put together the bigger picture that unfortunately our governments, and remember this is nothing to do with left or right. Both left and right political leaders across the world have supported that globalizing path of giving global corporations and banks more and more support. So those guys are not taxed and they're not regulated, whereas everybody else, you and I, small businesses, even nationally based businesses, taxed and regulated. So we have a completely unfair playing field. The film The Economics of Happiness, wherever we launched it and on every continent, we had an amazing response, just such a hunger for it. And it's been used and is still used in something like 25 languages, and some people have watched it many times. I remember a professor in America saying, I've seen it 35 times because I show it to my graduate students every year, and every time I learn something new, I'm proud of how we managed to put it together so that overall it opens hearts and gives people inspiration and hope. By the way, on our website we also have shorter films. One of them is Going Local, the solution multiplier, and that's an animation that's only two and a half minutes. Then we have a film called Local Food Can Save the World. And honestly, if local food economies were able to provide for our basic needs, it's not about eliminating trade. It's just about doing the most that we can of diversified, healthy organic production in local regions around the world, and then trading where it makes sense, not to make billionaires richer, but to actually make our communities and economies richer and better off. Now that film Local Food Can Save the World is only about three and a half minutes. Then we have another film called Local, a Story of Hope, and that was made together with the Australian filmmaker Damon Gamot, and that's about seven and a half minutes long. We also have a film called Planet Local, a Quiet Revolution, and that's about this emerging localization movement, and we have voices like Noam Chomsky, Russell Brand, Jane Goodall in that film. They have ended up supporting a program we run called World Localization Day, June 21st. But throughout the month of June, various groups around the world organize something to celebrate localization. And I hope some of you might want to do something like that. If you look again at our website, there's a special site on World Localization Day. We do have the other film to Ancient Futures Learning from Ladakh, and that was made in the early 90s. And for those of you who are interested in the multiple lessons we can learn from indigenous culture, please also watch that one.

SPEAKER_02 39:18

Helene, you've been counted amongst one of the ten most interesting environmentalists by Earth Journal. What do you think represents you being an interesting environmentalist as opposed to another environmentalist?

SPEAKER_01 39:32

This is an American journal, and I think what they found interesting was that I was so globalized, so international, and probably that I was carrying such a broad message, you know, everything from the role of women, how our inner spiritual health is connected to the health of people around us. There is no separation between the health of ecosystems and the health of people. That's been quite a radical message all along because sadly the environmental movement ended up trapped often in making it feel like either you are gonna have a good job and a good livelihood or the environment's gonna flourish. So there's always this sense that, oh, okay, if I care about the environment I have to pay more for my food, then maybe I don't feel I can afford that right now. Or, you know, if I care about the environment, I've got to buy that more expensive electric car. So all the time engendering guilt. And the funny thing is, you know, we now have a huge cultural turning where virtually throughout the world people are developing a hunger for deeper connection to nature. If you just look at the interest in animals, whether it's just looking at videos of animals or wanting to have contact with a horse, with a dog, with a cat, we're seeing all these projects where people heal when they have that connection to life, to some form of nature. You're seeing a rise of vision quests everywhere you look, and yet the message, the clear message, what is good for us is good for the environment. And therefore, any economic trajectory is gonna have to be representing our health and the health of the environment. And that when you really study it, means localization. That means a perspective that does not separate us from nature. As it turns out, my great learning from Indigenous culture was separating old from young is another fundamental destructive tool of this consumer culture that enriches the few at the expense of the many. So once you start stepping back and looking at it, it's like there is this win win win win when our mind reconnects the dots and when we're looking at a systemic part that is connecting the dots, so that we're doing something that's simultaneously going to reduce emissions, reduce plastic packaging, reduce the need for toxic chemicals, reduce the need for radiation of our food, reduce the need for genetic modification of any kind. You're seeing there's a way forward that is such an amazing win-win win, and really the big task is how can we quickly make that as broadly available as possible, while also explaining that until now our governments are locked into the opposite, and now algorithms are used to speed up the destruction, it's completely linked to widening the gap between rich and poor. In every country, people need to know, please look at the bigger picture and realize that if in every country the gap between rich and poor is widening in an obscene way, there must be something else going on here. There's something global going on. And please also remember that that is not happening because of some global government. No, it's happening because our national governments are allowed to pretend that they are creating jobs for us, to pretend that they're actually doing something about their climate. Now it's up to us to get the truth out, to then build a movement that will change policy. It's already happening as part of the movement. Policies are changing, not enough at all, but it's happening. We can give you examples. So please help to get the word out and use the tools that we offer for free, all of it for free on our website.

SPEAKER_02 43:47

You talk about the bigger picture. Are there many other women that you've stood beside or that have stood beside you throughout this?

SPEAKER_01 43:55

Yes, I mean I do want to mention historically also that's so important. Was Rachel Carson, an American scientist who already in the 60s stood alone and often abused in saying we must change the direction of science. We have produced D D thinking that we can kill a few insects over here, but now we have to face the fact that we're killing birds on the other side of the country or even on the other side of the world. We must have more holistic science. So when I started this work fifty years ago, most environmentalists were lobbying for changes in science. There was also very clear recognition that we needed to decentralize, along with that. Decentralize the economy, question the way that growth was being measured, the way it was being created. And around the same time actually there was a woman named Maria Gimbutas. She was from Eastern Europe, but she was at Harvard and she was saying I as an archaeologist have found evidence that in prehistoric Europe there were many goddess centered, peaceful, matriarchal cultures, and we need to recognise that we need to learn from them. She was ridiculed and it's only after her death that DNA studies have proven her completely right, so that now in archaeology this is recognized. So these two women are incredibly important, and I'm so grateful that I've had women friends in Scandinavia, in America, in many countries who followed in those footsteps, but unfortunately most of them are now dead also. So now as I look at the younger women surrounding me, I'm particularly grateful to Mika Tsutsumi, who is a writer and is getting the big picture out in Japan. Camila Moreno, who's an amazing triple PhD, I think, activist from Brazil, who's been at every climate convention and is speaking the truth about what's going on there. And that means talking about carbon colonialism and talking about the need to look at the fact that we're not going to be eating computer chips, that more and more technology is not the way forward. Another one is Jyoti Fernandez, who has been leading in England a really healthy farmers' movement towards agroecology and local food systems. And more recently I'm working with a young actress named Natalie Kelly. She's a beautiful articulate spokesperson who also happens to be indigenous. Her mother and grandmother are from the Quechua tribe in Peru, and she's been, you know, a Hollywood actress and has a big voice getting another perspective out. And then I also want to mention Anja Lundbeck, Anja Light, Sally Cusak, and women who are working with me in local futures.

SPEAKER_02 47:02

Have you come across any ageism in your travels, in your adventures, in your life path?

SPEAKER_01 47:10

I can't remember when it was very, very clear how old I was. I suddenly noticed that I'd be asking for information in a shop or on the road or whatever, and I noticed I was being treated so differently, sort of ignored. And I hadn't been used to that. You know, I was fairly good looking and just as a younger woman, I would get the attention of men who would be happily offering me advice or information. So I very definitely noticed this becoming invisible. It is really something that we should try to understand as this sign of a culture that is rejecting the most important things in life. On the other side, I saw in Mongolia and in Tibet teenage boys singing these beautiful songs in reverence to their mothers and grandmothers, totally unself-conscious, cuddling a baby like a granny would. What that all represents is a deep respect for the feminine, a respect for the nurturing, for the caring, for the absolutely essential ingredient in any society if we're going to be raising happy, healthy people.

SPEAKER_02 48:41

What do you think defines an elder? Do you think it's somebody that is just of age, or do you think it's someone that is a knowledge and wisdom holder or both?

SPEAKER_01 48:50

For me, what makes me so happy is that I saw very clearly in the indigenous culture of Ladakh to start with, and then in many others, that of course they're the eldest were respected because they had more knowledge about everything that was being done from growing food, building houses, caring for children. But what was happening in the West was that technology was given this supernatural status as some magical evolutionary progress and people were blindly accepting that any new technology meant improvement. Often a six-year-old boy would be able to say more about a new handset for the television than a grandmother or a grandfather. So the inversion that's led to this disrespect for the elderly, and particularly for women, has very much to do with the reverence for technology. And right now there could be no more important, no more central issue than starting to look more critically and objectively at technology. And I'm now working with allies around the world, also professors who are beginning to speak clearly about how dangerous it is for us not to be included in the discussion. People need to be informed about the technological choices going forward. And that again we need to start spelling that out and demanding that that happens. I guess the most important learning of all from Ladako Little Tibet for me was about how we have been, without realizing it, led down a path of thinking of ourselves as an I, and that meant as an individual consumer, we were supposed to change the world by showing that we care about the world, and that meant spending more money and more time, and at the same time we were being robbed of time. We're running faster and faster than ever before just to put food on the table, just put a roof over our head. And when I then talk about let's change the eye to a we, don't think that I'm saying that we're now going to start putting on our political hat where the I of an individual voter writes to the individual member of parliament. No. The key lesson is how do we change the I to a we? And the best step of doing that is to connect with some like-minded people, ideally near where you live, because in rebuilding the fabric of a society that works, we need to be more connected again. And it can sound like hard work, but I can almost guarantee that if you join this we in the form that is taking in the localization movement, that you will see that you will actually be contributing to your own happiness. You can do this in a way that will also contribute to saving some time because you may be connecting to a group where you're sharing the childcare, where you can actually have a little more extra time to do the things you need to look after yourself, but you're doing that by re weaving the fabric of community, of society. And that's not by becoming a nationalist and feeling yes, yes, I'm a proud flag holder. It is about the rebuilding of the fabric that we evolved with. We would not have survived this great evolution on Earth if we had not been interconnected groups of people who supported one another practically and emotionally. The nuclear family was the consequence of tearing apart the more connected fabric between old and young. It created an artificial little structure that is not working and more and more people are living alone, more and more people, as I said before across the world, are suffering from loneliness and depression. I feel so happy to be able to share a message that if you follow the thinking and learning about the real examples of localization, you'll see that we're inviting you to a way forward that is both about increasing your happiness and health and that of the planet. And you're not going to change the whole world overnight, but almost overnight you could feel a joy and a sense of power and a sense of faith in humanity and faith in nature. And that is a prerequisite for the strength and the health that we all long for.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Thank you for joining us for this rich conversation with Helena Norberg Hodge in our CBF grant-funded series, Wow, Wise Older Women. These stories remind us of the depth, resilience, and wisdom carried by women aged 55 to 85. Women whose lived experience enriches our communities and strengthens the cultural fabric of this country. Join us for the next episode as we continue honouring the voices, insights, and life journeys of extraordinary women. This is a Plantation Studios production, executive producer Rasella Torres, and music from Purple Planet Music.

SPEAKER_04 54:06

We are drenched in ageism in our culture, drenched in it. I believe we are in an extraordinarily ageist culture. We haven't even begun to talk about ageism.

SPEAKER_01 54:21

So I very definitely noticed this becoming invisible. It is really something that we should try to understand as this sign of a culture that is rejecting the most important things in life.

SPEAKER_00 54:38

So I sometimes notice that judgment of like you're just an old lady, but then I'm a lot pushier than I used to be. So I don't mind kind of playing the old lady card. I think you just gotta work it so you have fun with it, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 54:54

I haven't felt discriminated. Maybe it's been sometimes dismissed, but I think it's been more undervaluing, and I have undervalued myself.

SPEAKER_07 55:07

The more I experience it, the more I like fighting back. I'll show you your bugger. I'll show you. You think I'm useless? I'll show you that I'm not. I don't know if it's a Mexican, Italian in me, a Yank in me, I don't know what it is, but I don't let anybody put me down or ignore me.

SPEAKER_06 55:25

When we let go and just acknowledge the stage of life we're at, and keep shining in the knowledge that we're in this new phase of beauty and that it doesn't matter what age you are, things are beautiful in you, and just keep cultivating every day the beauty of who you are, that never changes.