Sense-Making in a Changing World

Community and Ecology with Helena Norberg-Hodge and Morag Gamble - World Localization Day Series Part 3 of 4

June 15, 2022 Morag Gamble: Permaculture Education Institute Season 4 Episode 3
Sense-Making in a Changing World
Community and Ecology with Helena Norberg-Hodge and Morag Gamble - World Localization Day Series Part 3 of 4
Sense-making in a Changing World with Morag Gamble
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Show Notes Transcript

In episode three of our four-part conversation for World Localisation Day, Morag Gamble talks with Helena Norberg-Hodge about the central role of community and ecology in our world. And, how localising both of these things can improve the health of people and the planet.

Helena is a filmmaker, author and founder and director of the international non-profit organisation, Local Futures. Helena and I first met in 1992, working on the Ladakh Project over the other side of the Himalayas in the Indus Valley. This time we spent together (and since) as well as her film, Ancient Futures, led Evan and me to work in Permaculture. Thirty years later, I’m still inspired and motivated by Helena’s wisdom and mission.

In this episode, Morag and Helena discuss:

  • How healthy communities nurture healthy happy children;
  • The pitfalls of modern education systems and consumer cultures that pit children (and adults) against each other;
  • The role of elders in communities;
  • How indigenous knowledge and rural living has been systematically depreciated;
  • The relationship between nature, animals and human happiness;
  • How we can reconnect with place, even when we live away from our ancestral lands;
  • What individualism looks like in modern cities and how we can break away from unhealthy lifestyles.

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This podcast is an initiative of the Permaculture Education Institute.

Our way of sharing our love for this planet and for life, is by teaching permaculture teachers who are locally adapting this around the world - finding ways to apply the planet care ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. We host global conversations and learning communities on 6 continents.

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We broadcast from a solar powered studio in the midst of a permaculture ecovillage food forest on beautiful Gubbi Gubbi country. I acknowledge this is and always will be Aboriginal land, pay my respects to elders past and present, and extend my respect to indigenous cultures and knowledge systems across the planet.

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Morag:

Hello everyone. My name is Morag Gamble from the Permaculture Education Institute and welcome to the third of this special four part localization series on Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast. I'm here with internationally acclaimed localization activist, Helena Norberg-Hodge. Helena is the founder and director of Local Futures, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to renewing ecological and social wellbeing by strengthening communities and local economies worldwide. Helena’s first book, Ancient Futures, which had a huge impact on me, has been translated into 40 languages and sold over 1 million copies. She has been the subject of hundreds of articles and written many books, including her latest book Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, which accompanies her award winning documentary also called The Economics of Happiness. Helena’s work spans almost five decades with support and collaboration with leading ecological thinkers. She has been the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize, and also the GOj Peace Prize. I first met Helena back in 1992 at Schumacher College in England and was absolutely inspired by the work that she was doing and subsequently volunteered with her in the dark or little Tibet. In the first two parts of this podcast series, we talked about the global economy and localizing our food system. Here in the third part, we're going to dive into a discussion about the central role of community and ecology. Creating the change we want and need to see in the world cannot be done alone. It's indeed a community based activity and drawing on her experience of working with indigenous communities around the world. Helen has shared with us the vital role of reconnecting with the community in ecology with people in place. Our first fourth and final conversation will focus on big picture activism and where to go from here. So grab your notebook again, listen in with friends, follow up by watching Helena’s films and reading her books and delving into her study group materials and localisation action guide and also feel free to share this widely. Remember, this series is available as both an audio and video podcast and you can find the links to the show notes and also all Helena’s materials below. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of land in which I'm meeting with you today. I'm here on the unseeded lands of the Gubbi Gubbi people on the banks of the  [inaudible] river and I'd like to pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging. So sit back and enjoy and thank you so much for being here as part of this special series of conversations with Elena Norburg-Hodge. 


Well, thanks so much for joining me again, Helena. This is the third part of our conversation. We started talking about the big picture like the global economy, then we moved into food systems change and this session we're going to unpack ideas around community and place and then the last session is around looking at education, leadership, and activism. So I think starting this conversation around community, maybe we could just explore a little bit about what do you see community is? Where did you first become aware about the power of community? Did you grow up in a really strong community or is there a certain point we hang on to?


Helena:

Yes, I would say that I grew up in Sweden, but I also lived in America as a young woman and I remember reflecting on and trying to understand where they seem to be much more selling, much more violence and dissatisfaction, ambition, sort of negative societal traits in America and that did get me thinking about community in the sense of a more second existence. I remember then learning that the average American was in the 60s or 70s. The average American growing up was moving seven times and it was clear that this is rupturing the connection to grandparents, to cousins, to also to neighbors, to people who would be more of a constant support and community fabric. Later on, as we've talked about before, I went out to the dark or little Tibet and discovered the absolutely most radiantly happy people I've ever encountered. And over the years, in speaking their language fluently and living with them, I became aware of how fundamental this fabric of communities is. Now, what that means for me now is that when you have strong community, meaning strong connections between people who are not necessarily related, that has been part of a fabric of interdependence of human scale, interdependence, actually, to a great extent economic interdependence did, we'll have lived in ways where they depended on each other, they supported each other, we help each other out with harvest time, building houses and we often hear that it takes a village to raise a child and I discovered that it takes a village to do everything from building a house, to weeding, to harvesting, to growing children. What I also discovered was that the really healthy community fabric meant that within that, the extended family was an essential and vital component and that this function, again in a practical way, so I experienced the incredible benefit of mothers and parents generally having roughly 10 caretakers for every child 24/7 and that created this remarkable, relaxed sense of being heard, seen, and loved for the children. So it took me many years to really see this clearly, but I came to understand that this loving fabric, which wasn't, “Oh, I love you and you're so wonderful,” it was just that deeper. The baby who might be a bit ill or something, or even if not, was on somebody's body the whole time, just that alone, was helping to raise children that were very calm, not needy, because the need to be loved and accepted and cared for and carried, that's so fundamental, was met. 


So I would argue that one of the most important things we need to learn is that the dissolution, the fragmentation of the community fabric, which was essentially the local economy fabric of people interdependent with each other, was also the dissolution of this extended family and then that created the foundations of insecure, neurotic people who were easily manipulated by top down forces into an idea of a nationalist identity and we are better than they are, we're going to go to war over this, that breaks down the community fabric that has been fundamental to creating, as I say, insecure people who are then more easily manipulated, but also creating people who are so much less happy and who have this constant need to prove themselves and that proving has been created within the context of an economic system that basically pit us against one another. So from the advent of modern schooling, where children were suddenly put into the sort of factories to be segregated into modern culture, and so every child and their will the same age already is like a knife that cuts through collaborative framework. Can I stop for a second? I'm worried that I might have said all this before on this podcast. 



Morag:

No, because you've mentioned different aspects, but bringing it together. That was just really perfect.


Helena

Okay, so I haven't talked so much about that.


Morag:

I know it's hard when you talk about so many things that, “God did I say that” and also because it's all interconnected, isn't it? It's a really powerful insight into so many different things that are going wrong and so I guess maybe if I could pick up from there and ask you about the connectedness to place then. So you've talked about that interconnectedness between people and communities and the local economy and you talked, you mentioned before moving …


Helena:

If you don't mind, maybe I will say that later. I do want to say a bit more about …


Morag:

Okay, go ahead.


Helena:

So in this school, suddenly everybody's exactly the same age. What happens is that a child who can't run as fast as another child feels inadequate, feels inferior. A child, let's say one or two years old, in kindergarten, can't even think of reaching out a hand to help another child, it's physically impossible. So in this sort of prison like segregation into monoculture, we're breeding unhealthy relationships that are based on competition, insecurity, and feeling left behind and I came to realize, as I would go back and forth between Ladakh and the West, how refigured was to do this to children while you simultaneously put in the message that if you want to feel loved and connected, you got to have the best running shoes, you've got to be looking like this, to be very beautiful and later on in life you've got to have that fancy car, you've got to be important. So we have basically an economic system that has been dividing us and seeing the opposite of that, seeing how people function when they live in this truly more collaborative human scale way. I also came to realize that, of course, their lives had not been so shaped by technologies that, in many cases, have actually started to separate us, because again they've been introduced into this competitive way of living and so people are running faster and faster, competing with each other. When you have a situation where neither the economic forces nor the technology nor the ideas about who's supposed to be, were present, I have come to see that people naturally enjoy living in a way that is more collaborative. It is so obviously a way of living that goes with the grain, the grain of what children. Now, it turns out that equally important is the grain of what we need as we age. 


So there was just this beautiful symbiosis between the oldest and the youngest and I suppose, more than anything for me that is tested all that as you're at 90. So you are so appreciated, you are so needed, because it's a constant present for the youngsters and what it means for the parents who, usually as the really active in the economic sphere, this case was mainly farming, but it's also building houses and some people were doctors and some were musicians and so we sort of active to have the elegance doing so much of the childcare and being the constant presence for the youngest was such a gift and, of course, all of it operated at a pace that I would call an ecological pace. A pace of nature, a pace of life and what I'm arguing is that it takes time to love, it takes time to know the child and to know the elder well enough to have a genuine love and care and to feel loved and cared for. Just as it takes time to understand that that particular tree in your garden hasn't grown as fast as the one that's right next to it might have had a little more sunshine, but it's a bit of a mystery how each and every living thing is unique and different. So what I'm working on is sort of purely for us to wake up to the multiple gifts of slowing down and scaling down and how all of us would benefit so much in terms of our happiness, in terms of our health, and the health of everything that lives, the health of the planet.


Morag:

I wonder if you could just share a little bit about your experience and what you heard the women say. Because I know you organized reality tours where women from the dark, you took them to various places in the West and what did they say when they saw old old people's homes and the separation that you are describing?


Helena:

Yes, I should also explain that these reality tours were done in order to help these people to see that this advertised consumer culture, that urban culture that looks so amazing, wasn't actually that amazing and again it was so important for them to know that they didn't develop that sense of inferiority, which is what was happening. That people were thinking that we’re backward. We're nobody, and particularly the youngsters. So bringing people to the west to see with their own eyes that these people were actually striving to find a way of life that was more community based. They actually were beginning to appreciate getting their hands dirty, working with growing food, and farming was a big, big method and equally to see all people's homes, to realize that people lived in a way like even an apartment, or give a lid on top of each other. They didn't know each other's names, they did say hello and so when they went back, to let down, things spread word that this way of life that looks so amazing, actually, people are lonely, actually much less happy than we are and they will even comment on things like we stay with people and just a few people are going to come and stay the night in such a big Alaba. We have enough houses that people come to visit us, it happens all the time. It's not a big deal and they commented, also, the lack of time, the time pressures and basically the message was we shouldn't think of ourselves as poor backward. In many ways people in the West actually emulate or try to emulate and look up to so many of the things that we do.


Morag:

So you were there in Ladakh in a time where there were massive changes happening and you probably saw things like the introduction of television and all these consumer forces and so this exposure, was that the direct part of the unraveling? Or when there were, I guess many things, like the introduction of consumer society, the change in the economic system, but what did you see were the key points that unraveled that fabric? How did it unravel when it was so strong?

Helena:

That's a really good question. As so many people are saying, when people had this strong bond, who were so happy, quite healthy, there was no unemployment and why would they abandon it and most Westerners take that to mean that he wasn't actually that good and that's part of your lesson because most Westerners have never experienced a relatively small scale community that was happy, because most of us will be gone to sort of backwater of a small town and rural area where people find. What we're seeing is people being left behind, who've been told they're stupid and backward, because everything has gone to the city and it's the smart and the clever people and even within the West, people who are living closer to the land, are seen as backward and stupid. So now that psychological pressure has engendered a situation because people aren't very happy and don't have much self respect and so they're also often quite intolerant and in some ways, small minded. I don't want to say always, but that's very often the experience that people have had and so then by contrast, they see in the big cities the multiculturalism they see, not only less prejudice, but really embracing people of different nationalities and religions. That's where most of the art and the culture and the power is the money. Even if you're an activist, you sort of need to be in the center of things to raise the money and to be visible and so the rural and the small have been left behind. 


What I saw back in terms of what unraveled what was actually very strong fabric was, I would say, the key mechanisms were schooling, brilliant schools, essentially taught people that their language, knowledge, their history, their clothing, everything about them was backward. So even in the school books, children will be reading. We must do everything we can to get these illiterate farmers out to the villages, they'll be reading things that, in black and white said that, they were left behind and stupid. Then you had the advent of advertising, even before television came, there were already big effects and they were through advertising on the radio and some of it in writing and also government, policy and government experts, the experts coming up on the radio every day telling them that their form of agriculture was just not good enough, they needed to have chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides in DDT, that had been outlawed elsewhere was being brought in and then you had medical experts coming up and telling people you have no health care, even though they did have a health system that was actually a mixture of Chinese and Indian. They even had medical books that went back more than 1000 years and it's not to say that it was perfect, but it's certainly to say that it was a medical system and they had a lot of valuable knowledge and particularly knowledge of what herbs and remedies can be used in this particular climate with the particular illnesses that people got there. So that location specific knowledge was completely ignored and new hospitals brought in, the experts will also tell you, “Women, you must give birth at home.” No, you have to be very careful with your hips being so narrow, you need to have this area and the truth is that it was very rare that women died in childbirth. 


So these are some of the ideas that came in, and then tourism supported this because you'd have tourists coming in and then one day, they would spend something like what I used to talk about Martians might do thing landed suddenly in America or Sweden and flying in every day, spending $100 and $100 in the Ladakhi economy was roughly the equivalent of Martians coming to the west and spending $100,000 a day. So no wonder the young people in Ladakh started thinking what my parents are telling me I should be out there in the field getting my hands dirty. These people, they don't work, they just sit at a desk and push a few buttons and then they have 100,000 a year. This is 100,000 a day to spend. So this is ridiculous to bother and then, of course, later on television came. But those were all very strong influences on the minds, particularly of the young, and I saw that in and by the age of four or five, that input had a very strong effect.


Morag:

It's such a powerful thing, isn't it? And once you get it in your mind at that young age, that is something to leave behind and this is something to go forward. It's such a powerful narrative. So I guess the question is really about how do we start to weave a new narrative around this? And a lot of what you're talking about with relocalization and bringing the economy back home and slowing down. Where do you think the key points of this new story is that will bring people back into an awareness of this?


Helena:

Well, I guess I've always felt that one of the strongest points could be Happiness. That's why the name of our film is the Economics of Happiness, and testimonies from people like me that in turn we're linking also to some of the latest discoveries about what makes us happy and people like Johann Hari, who wrote the book Lost connections. Someone who reported a lifetime of suffering from depression and being put on all these drugs and discovering that actually it was the separation from others that was so fundamental. Now, what I discovered in Ladakh and what’s being discovered in the West is that the connection to others is absolutely fundamental, particularly, if we are children, the number one thing. But equally important is the connection to place, to nature, to life, is that deep ongoing connection to the plants, to the animals, and particularly when those are the plants and the animals on which you depend. So there's actually a reciprocal relationship. You're good to the animals, you’re good to the plants, and in turn you benefit from it. So that reciprocity with the land is very important and I like to stress that I'm a great believer in farm animals. Domesticated farm animals have been a really important part of us, developing those deep relationships with other species that I believe are fundamental for wellbeing, and for the wisdom of respecting all of life and I think it's also as fundamental in creating lack of the fear of death, which I often describe as the fear of life. Because we've ended up so shifted from the living world that we have bought into a world view of permanence of static separate entities that relate to each other in this separate competitive way and this fear of change is actually a fear of life. When you're living closely connected to life and so for young children to actually see animals dying, even animals being slaughtered, and seeing them growing up and helping to look after them, coming in contact with the cold turning of life and death, I see, is fundamental in creating fearless secure people who are able to live in the here and now. 


In a way, the localization is the practical structural way of implementing the wisdom teaching about living in the here and now living in the present and not allowing our left brain to be so preoccupied with the future and to be so fearful of change that we then end up constantly searching, constantly unhappy and so that connection to nature is ultimately a vital importance. But I do want to stress that I feel that in the west today, there is not enough emphasis on interpersonal relationships and as we become more ecologically aware and even as we become interested in indigenous culture, we should be striving to learn from those indigenous cultures when they were functioning and healthy. In many cases, we have to go back to colonialism. But there are plenty of books that would substantiate what I'm saying. There is evidence out there. Interestingly enough, often those books were written by the white explorers, but there were many of them and many of them lived long enough in this indigenous culture to develop deep respect and love for them. In fact, I would like to tell you that in Ladakh, where I arrived in the mid 70s, the anthropologists who were coming in after that period too. They used to criticize heavily for romanticizing traditional life and they would say, “The status of women is not that high and these people are not that happy.” They do reciprocate, but they have this pressure towards reciprocating and so it's not really all that good and it was very interesting to me that the people who were substantive, what I would say, were missionaries, even missionaries who had been out there 100 years earlier will come up with the explicit goal of improving these dirty backward people who were clearly primitively needed Christianity and these missionaries, who wrote books about Ladakh, they didn't change their thinking that they needed to be Christian. But they certainly, in elaborate detail, describe the happiest people that ever encountered the most peaceful, the highest status of women, how honest people were, on and on. So it's very frightening that in the modern era, first of all, there's been so much change in the world. So that made it more difficult to have clarity about the issues I'm trying to share. That also, that even people who came almost at the same point that I did, they often didn't speak the language. They didn't live there long enough. But also, what I realized was many of them would come out as tourists, they would fall in love with Ladakh, they just loved it and they would go back and develop the opportunity to do this with this online app or to come out as architects or whatever to do so because they loved it so much. Then it was the process of study that meant that they were putting on these lenses where they were actually contrasting what they saw in Ladakh with some kind of abstract idea and they never specifically said that, but in effect, where they ended up doing was making it look inferior to the western model. Because the western model, which was spreading all across the world, needed to be questioned and we needed to help protect people from the onslaught of most of these anthropologists into them.


Morag:

So we talked just a moment ago about connecting to land and connecting to nature. One thing that I like a little bit more nuanced is that, I wonder, how much is this connection with not just any nature that you find around, but actually your place? I know that it's really important for Indigenous Australians. It's their own country and deeply from a place. So part of this community narrative of re-localizing, how do we tackle that question when we are mostly so displaced from our original place of origin? Do you have any thoughts on that? 


Helena:

Well, definitely and I do also want to say that sometimes using the language of place allows people to emphasize the sort of fossil fuel based city place and to relegate that to the same status as major. So a lot of the emphasis in the localization movement on places often supporting a more corporate propaganda, which right now, by the way, we should all be aware that after COVID, in particular, there's a lot of propaganda saying that we're all going to be living in these local cities will have everything we need, walking distance, and it will be AI that's going to make it possible. Lots of renewable energy, rewilding around the city, and then robots doing the farm. So we've got to all be very alert too. I may have said this before, but it's really worth repeating that we've got to be alert to understanding a type of propaganda that almost comes out of algorithms to support a fundamentally urbanizing direction that is linked to global corporations that are creating dependence worldwide on them, so that they don't want us dependent on our own country, on our own resources, because then they want to extract all that well and it's not even as I say conscious, I think algorithms are helping. But yes, to come back to place as you mean it that we're not just talking about need to in some big way that we're talking about the place where you live, the place that is land that supports you, that is in the case of Ladakh. I mean people's names were connected to the house and land that they belong to. So they were basically named by that place, that's how you identify them and then things went out in concentric circles. So you were known as the house with the apricot tree or whatever the name might be of the house. The house of the apes and this is Sonam, from the house with apricot trees, that would be within the village and region. But then outside from there, they are known as Sonam, from the village that has many apricot trees. There actually is a village color and when you're outside, even if you'd be outside of Ladakh then you're known as Ladakhi. 


So you have these sort of concentric circles of identity related to place, related to the place you came from. Now, I worry about when I say that for Westerners this could sound like some kind of precept like you can never leave and if you belong to that house with every country, forever condemned to live there. But it's often like that and in the modern world, there is no need at all, what we should think of as a place based ways of living and particularly, again, place based economies as being some kind of prisoners so if you imagine that people all around the world would have the right to live that way and the main thing preventing it is our idea of what money is, it's our ideas that prevent us from seeing that we're all being ripped off, we’re all being pushed to run faster and faster just to stay in place or even go backward. Look now after COVID, with homelessness and housing crisis, why is this happening? Why is there unemployment in the housing prices? Highly, because we're going along with edicts of economic policies implemented by left and right. What I'm laying out when I talk about global to local is a clarity of how and why this is happening. The tragedy is that people are still locked into left or right. So they think the only choices are that you have a government that is a bit more benevolent and that will hand out some dole money out to people who just somehow can't work properly or you have this machine like growth. Well, no, this is understanding the economic drivers from a deeper perspective and understanding human needs from a deeper perspective. So once you see that, it becomes so clear that the planet, even as crowded as it is, could almost certainly provide. It could certainly provide better for the entire global population than it is. It could potentially provide for every single person or nearly 8 billion in a really elegant, beautiful way, with adequate food, more than adequate food, beautiful shelter, and healthy food and meaningful, productive work.




Morag:

I think you touched on something that I think is a real limitation to why people aren't choosing what you just described and that is this notion of freedom and independence to choose and that by being in the city and having the opportunities, you're not trapped. There’s this word of being trapped. So I think in our minds we have this sense that that kind of community is a limitation on our individuality. I wonder whether that's something that you've explored.


Helena:

Well, absolutely. I'm afraid I've explored everything. Because that was so striking, again, when children grow up in a situation where people are there to see them for who they are and where they clearly have that love and support. They are genuinely individual, they are able to be themselves and still feel loved and the scary thing in the modern system now is that we are, I would argue, I don't think I know a single westerner who hasn't been damaged by this system. We're all feeling neurotically afraid that we won't be loved for who we really are and that we behave in a certain way in the nuclear family. But that's the only place people really know us when we really are out and we have a type of perfection and our children never have tantrums and we don't argue and we don't have any eating disorders or any depression or any anxiety. You're not allowed to show them most of us because of the system are suffering in a multitude of ways and have hang ups that we will all benefit from basically being coming together to share our deepest fears I did for societies and that's also I meant to say earlier, also with your own  [inaudible] and sort of world now, where depression and anxiety are just absolute epidemics of that the clear therapies that work or we're coming together in circle and sharing stories from a deep, honest way, and it needs to be helped and needs to be with people who are really willing to do so and willing to share that from their side. Either it's curated through therapists, or if it's done just in, among friends, it needs to be done with like minded people who are mature enough to hold that truth and be respectful of it. But it's really, I just see again and again, most Westerners are so afraid and this is because we do not have genuine individualism, because we do not have the sense that we're going to be loved for who we really are as unique individuals. So it's tragic that a typical sort of urban scene seems to offer us that freedom, when actually in the typical urban scene, people feel more lonely than anywhere else. I know I certainly did. 


I was living in Paris as a young woman. I loved the city and everything, but I remembered back after in Ladakh, that how nervous I was if I didn't have social things and engagements for the weekend and how lonely it could feel when your life wasn't full of these rather transient and brief social encounters and that we should think about the traverse city are being crowded on top of each other in city and not even looking at each other in the eye and saying along. Whereas in smaller communities, at a slower pace, people do look each other in the eye and say, “Hello!” and the more secure they are, the more play space they are, the more likely they are to do that. There's a lot more that could be said about it.


Morag:

I feel it because I grew up in the city. I grew up in the suburbs, but I grew up in a part of a suburb that was a community and of itself. I knew everyone up and down the street, there were no fences, we would run from backyard to backyard and now I live in an ecovillage and I'm watching my children raised in this way so that they know everyone, that there's a sense of freedom here, that they feel safe and even when we go to the local town, that we can go up and down the street. People know who they are and when I take them to the city, they're still looking people in the eye and smiling at people and that person didn't smile at me. But we've tried to still maintain that level of contact and openness. But I guess, the question that I was wanting to ask here is that ,when we have a situation where we have most of the people in countries like Australia, for example, where we both are living in urban areas, how do we transition to this? Like we can do it, you and me, we're in rural areas that's regional.


Helena:

But I think it's interesting also when you say cities in Australia, they are quite unusual because you have the suburbs that are relatively green and whether I'm glad and our friend David Holmgren is providing very good advice about what you could do in those suburbs by essentially turning away from the the pressures that we've all been on it. To go along with being dependent on this centralized, top down, fossil fuel based, global economic structure to turn to each other and to the land and just essentially to localize even within those cities. Now, particularly in Australia, where so many of them are suburbs, whether it's land available and so on, it's actually relatively easy. There are also things happening even in cities where there's not very much land available. But even there, when people start to do cohousing, or start projects they are very conscious about reconnecting with local people and not just by going out standing in the streets and a lot every anonymous person comes apart, but actually building human care, interdependent relationships where we support one another. 


So in the cities, to the extent that we help to influence and sort of pioneer the localization movement, we have helped many people to join in groups with the goal of finding greater wellbeing for themselves and for the planet and they're from the cities. In deeply connecting to each other there is that healing, that I'm talking about the very vital psychological healing is re-constituting humanity's, like what it is to be human. And that is that we do need one another, we are social animals, and we need to be loving each other and we need to be physically connected. So the locals are fundamental, but then once you understand the vital importance of food and understand this is the building block of any kind of healthy life and economy, people in the cities are turning to the region around them to rebuild that reciprocal relationship between city and country. Many of the cities are far too big. So we will be seeing a migration out of them. COVID has precipitated that. But this is again which part are we going to support as we move forward? Are we going to go along with the propaganda from takedown into mega cities or are we going to help to support a movement in the opposite direction towards revitalizing smaller towns and cities and always ensuring that those cities start taking responsibility for their waste, for their consumption, so shipping it off to China, when it comes back to haunt us in the form of artisan plastic and climate change.


Morag:

What you were saying before about food being a central part of rebuilding community. I mean, you've talked a lot before about farmers markets and I've been involved for decades now with setting up community gardens and city farms and school gardens in urban centers, which do exactly what you said. It's that deep reconnection and the stories that I have of changing individuals and changing communities is profound, absolutely profound. But I do want to ask you about places - so that’s Australia, but what about places like Seoul? You have a lot of community connections with people in Korea and I've been there many times too and I am always so confounded by the scale of the cities and what to do when you're confronted with that level of urbanization?


Helena:

Well, actually one of my favorite examples is actually from Seoul which in many ways is one of the most solar cities in the world because there was a ribbon of land with the help of the US to become a high tech producer in this high rise, high tech world, as also in Japan and in Seoul, at the sort of edge of the city. We're still in the city, there was a development that was going to come along and destroy the last bit of just a tiny pocket little hill with well what would it have been? Just 100 meters across somebody, very small. The community got together to protect this bit of land and out of that group, more and more initiatives where they started turning into each other and they started developing an alternative school, they started connecting to each other, to build more community minded businesses and by the time I met them, there were 20,000 people involved and the way it operated, it was really sort of interesting, because it was like this whole part of the city on all along that edge where that initial development has started and it's sort of spread out so that even you're on one street, this business, that house might not be part of it, but the one next door might be sort of fanned out, even within, if you were to draw a line around the area, there'll be some people who didn't really belong to some -  Nissan was the name of the community - but at the core, the whole thing, 20,000 people, and they started an alternative school and they were sending children out to learn about farming, countryside and then I heard just a couple of years ago, that now, some of the community that they set up their own school in the country and now some of the community are moving out there. 


So it's sort of a beautiful story of some of this city peeling off to go and live in a community closer to the land and that's what's happening anyway, like my friend who started the global ecovillage network, that she herself started and so a lot of a lot of people who have lived the city life and tasted that emptiness, they develop an appetite for this. It's quite a natural process and I wouldn't worry at all about the future of humanity or the future of life in the world, for the fact that the Juggernaut global economies still allow it to continue expanding and I think whether that's creating COVID or potentially another world war or driving this mad way that our government support going to Mars and deep sea to look for war minerals, in the name of a [inaudible], in the name of more minerals for renewable technology, but to fuel the consumer culture and corporate expansion and remember the corporate expansion is still reducing the number of winners. In America, three men in more than half of the American population, that's the model that Sweden, Australia, all are following. One is to make sure that we have fewer and fewer winners and with this obscene visible injustice of wealth accumulation, we have more and more homeless people. I just think, unfortunately, that Juggernaut is still destroyed so much that I feel a sense of urgency. If it weren't for that, I would say this, you just push the pause button on that there'll be a natural evolution. Yes, we'll call it evolution, but it is a deep instinctual need to reconnect, because that's how we want. That's what made us human, connected in intergenerational groups, connected to nature, that is the economy, that is what's important. So we instinctively went there. But that's why I feel we also need to raise awareness about the Global Juggernaut and do what we're doing now, sort of an educational process so that we not only focus on billionaires' local examples.


Morag:

I think that it's both simultaneously, isn't it? We need to have people that are doing this and sharing the story about that. So to explain that it is a beautiful alternative and to create invitations for people to come and have a look and see it and to share that otherwise. I think it's a little bit nerve wracking, like a lot of people talk to me and say, Oh, I'd like to do what you're doing. But I'd have to give up this or the education that my children are having. I'm worried about where I would live and so here where I live I can have an opportunity to open it up and show people what life is like in a different way that's based on these principles, but at the same time trying to talk out loud. So unplugging, but staying firmly plugged in simultaneously is what I'm trying to do.


Helena:

Well, you're staying firmly plugged in, because you are plugged in. But other people need to also work on that process of getting plugged in and absolutely that's what our work is all about is encouraging us to be able to see that doing both of these things actually reinforce each other in a very meaningful way and that the work at the local level and the community building becomes even more meaningful when you realize how it fits into the bigger picture and then sharing that as a way of putting a dent into the dominant direction. Just even sharing that information about those examples is important. But also understanding why this juggernaut is still continuing, why and how.


Morag:

That's a perfect way to maybe close our conversation today and leads directly into the topic for the next conversation, which is about what is that type of education or opportunities to see a different way, how can we become deeply activist in this space and become leaders in the full sense of the word whichever, wherever you are to be stepping up into being a leader in this space. So thank you, Helena. It's been lovely to talk with you again.


Helena:

Thank you.


Morag:

Thank you for listening in to this episode of Sense-making in a Changing World, the third of our special four part series celebrating and exploring localization with Helena Norberg-Hodge of Local Futures. Remember, you can find loads of links in the show notes below and come back next week for our final part of this four part series exploring big picture activism, acting locally and globally simultaneously and talking about where we go from here.