The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Globalization End Game: How Localization Builds Resilient Communities & Economies with Helena Norberg-Hodge

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

Over the last few decades, humanity has globalized everything – from food production and supply chains to communication and information systems – making countries, businesses, and individuals more connected and reliant on each other than ever before. Yet, with this increased interconnectedness comes more complexity and fragility. What have we lost through the globalization process, and how might we fortify our communities by investing in local economies?  In this episode, Nate is joined by Helena Norberg-Hodge – a leading voice in the localization movement – to explore the deep systemic challenges posed by economic globalization. Together, they examine how the global growth model has fueled environmental degradation, social fragmentation, and cultural erosion, and why shifting toward localized economies might be one of the most effective (and overlooked) responses to our predicament. Drawing on decades of firsthand experience, Helena invites us to question the assumptions underpinning our globalized lives and imagine a future rooted in local reconnection. How might we rekindle a sense of enough in a world that constantly tells us we need more? As globalization begins to retreat, what small but meaningful steps can we take to relocalize our lives and reconnect with each other? And what kind of futures might be possible if we centered our communities around systems that regenerate the very places we call home? (Conversation recorded on May 7th, 2025)    About Helena Norberg-Hodge: Linguist, author and filmmaker, Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of the international non-profit organisation, Local Futures. She is also a pioneer of the new economy movement, the convenor of World Localization Day, and an expert in understanding the ecological, social, and psychological effects of the global economy on diverse cultures.  Additionally, Helena is the author of several books, including 'Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh', an eye-opening tale of tradition and change in Ladakh, or "Little Tibet". Together with a film of the same title, Ancient Futures has been translated into more than 40 languages, and sold half a million copies. Helena has continued to produce several other short films, including the award-winning documentary 'The Economics of Happiness'. Helena specialized in linguistics, including studies at the University of London and with Noam Chomsky at MIT. Her work, spanning almost half a century, has received the support of a wide range of international figures, including Jane Goodall, HH the Dalai Lama, HRH Prince Charles and Indira Gandhi.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   — Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

We must localize because in order to tend to this incredible diversity requires people to nurture back the trees, the bushes, the clean water, the grasslands that have been abused by blind, stupid chemicals and machines. We actually need more people on the land. We need to maintain wild spaces. But we need to be very careful of propaganda from the corporate world, is fundamentally about 100% urbanization. You're listening to The Great Simplification.

I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm joined by Helena Norberg Hodge, who is an expert in understanding the ecological, social, and psychological effects of the global economy on diverse cultures.

As a result, she's become a leading advocate for localizing economies as a counterpoint to the impacts of economic globalization. Helen is the founder and director of the international nonprofit organization Local Futures, as well as a pioneer for the new economy movement, and the convener of World Localization Day. She specialized in linguistics, including doctoral studies at the University of London, as well as with Noam Chonsky at MIT. She is the author of several books and the producer of the award-winning documentary, The Economics of Happiness.

Helena has helped to initiate localization movements on every continent, particularly in South Korea and in Japan. and she co-founded both the international forum on globalization and the global eco-village network. In this conversation, Helen and I dive into the broad overview of her decades of work, drilling down on the importance of localization for every facet of our lives, and in turn, creating stronger economies, communities, and ecologies. Helena also shares the wisdom she's learned from the indigenous people of Ladakh, as well as her decades of scholarship and collaboration with leading thinkers in this field.

Additionally, a quick note, The Great Simplification has a new design and updated website thanks to the excellent work of my team and the team at Fairground. All of our resources from episodes and detailed show notes to our nonprofit Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future's educational content are now consolidated at the Great Simplification.com. We hope this new format makes it easier to explore and share the ideas discussed on this platform. As always, thank you for helping being a part of this ongoing conversation. With that, please welcome Helena Norberg-Hodge. Helena Norberg-Hodge, welcome to the program.

Thank you. Very happy to be here. At long last. At long last. At long last, my viewers get to hear your wisdom and authoritative experience. of observing what's wrong with the world and what better direction we might be able to head towards. So for over four decades, you have been studying and championing the need for return to strong localized economies. Can you start by explaining, and this is kind of the centerpiece of

your work, but you work in a lot of different areas. Can you explain why strengthening local economies is important and how that is different from our conventional neoclassical economics mantra of strengthening the economy. Yes, it's diametrically opposed to the conventional path of strengthening economies, which actually means weakening economies around the world while strengthening the wealth creation of what is in effect a global empire of interlinked banks and corporations that have no rules, pay no taxes, and now are legally provided a red carpet to prevent governments from in any way protecting labor, protecting the environment. So we're in a totally mad situation where economic growth has actually meant increasing poverty, even at the level of

the nation state. and certainly for the majority of people. Can you unpack that briefly? So increasing growth has increased poverty? How is that? Well, you know, you were saying neoclassical, and people talk about neoliberal. But my experiences have led me to question the foundations

of the modern economy. So it's not just the neo. It's the actual principle of comparative. advantage, which was imposed on cultures after slavery and enclosures had driven people away from the land. And that meant not just driving them away from the deep knowledge, wisdom, and humility of being closely and with real experiential knowledge of the living economy on which we depend, which is Mother Earth, with this infinite complexity, layers of systems constantly trying to balance

themselves, but this remarkable diversity that we're only beginning to understand and a system constantly changing. Now, when people lived closer to that reality, to the water, to the trees, to the earthworms on which they depended, they were able to survive. from the living world without destroying it. Because, of course, the lived experience was that we are one and a part of that living world. And that was essentially the spiritual foundation of every indigenous culture. And I'm not trying to argue that every indigenous culture was perfect in every way, but I happened to have been thrown into a situation in 1975 of experiencing an indigenous culture

high on the Tibetan plateau called Ladakh, it's actually a little Tibet or West Tibet, part of Tibet that belongs politically to India. And this culture, which had been able to thrive and develop and change over thousands of years without having been forced to see itself as inferior and without having been overrun by Christianity and, the Western economic powers that emanated from Europe across the world. And so Christianity brought into these indigenous cultures,

going way back to the sort of 1300s, the idea that you're primitive and backward if you live close to the earth. The earth is dirty, the body is dirty, the senses are deeply dangerous, the pure white light up in the sky, this purity, essentially what they were bringing in, this dualistic worldview that rejects the earth and rejects the body.

What I am so happy, if I may monologue a bit longer about that, but I'm so happy. I have the next four hours for you. Thank you because I'm so happy to have realized that I have witnessed this, subjugation back in the 70s and my eyes were open to the fact that actually there has been a cultural turning, there's been a human rejection of this dualism that goes way back. I mean, certainly in the battle between Romantics and the Enlightenment was part of it, even preceding that. And today I see this huge cultural turning that is demonstrated. on every continent that people who have tasted the emptiness of the urban, competitive,

speedy, unnatural consumer culture develop a yearning, a hunger to reconnect to life, to become whole again, to be able to respect themselves as individuals, to be able to respect all of themselves, to become more embodied, to become entangled, to become deeply connected to life. and very importantly that means to others, a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a group is a fundamental human need. And we can see again and again playing out this shift where people who go into the emptiness of this culture that's been foisted on us start trying to make steps in the other direction.

So I feel extremely hopeful about the future in the long. long run, I feel life will prevail. Now, why I do work very hard and why I feel a sense of urgency is that we're at this crossroads right now, where the forces that started with that deeply racist, misogynist, anti-nature worldview that has a very clear genealogy. We can name some of the men who expressly stated, you know, these prejudices and this blind worldview, that has been pushing and growing and still is very much alive today in the form now of a mad race to leave the earth, to create something better. It's always been about creating something better than life itself.

It's always been about telling us. I said we're not good enough the way we are. It's always been telling us that life in the city is superior to life on the land, and those who still have their hands in the soil are inferior. So that narrative has been alive for a long time, and is still continuing and growing, and is still affecting a lot of land-based people. We have to be very clear now about a worldview that's being pushed on us

to continue taking us away from nature, So that's the sort of the crossroads we face is that we have an inhuman, ultimately man-made system that was always pushed by elites, global elites that benefited from slavery and the enclosures. And the truth is that the elites that now benefit, even in terms of wealth creation, are far less than 1% of humanity. So let's please wake up with clarity about who's running this show, where is it coming from, does anybody want it, and do even those blind men who continue to push this type of growth on humanity, do they know what they're doing? I don't think they do. And that's what we need to do today to avoid even further destruction and to allow these billions of people who are still on the land or who clearly should. show they want to get back home to NATO. Let's support that cultural turning. As you know, because you follow this show, I will say that I now have so many questions.

I have like 20 questions prepared for you, but now I'm going to go off in a different tangent. I have my own speculation on this, but I'd love to hear your articulation. What is the relationship between, historically, between the agricultural revolution, Christianity, colonialism, and my concept of the economic superorganism, which is combine humans with large amounts of exogenous energy, add time, and hierarchies and a metabolism naturally ensues? How do you fit all those things together? Well, you see, I have a slightly different interpretation there. So first of all, I've seen the demonization of agriculture by the elites that at the very outset imposed enclosures and monoculture, monocultural productions. So the slaves that were forced onto cotton plantations, tea plantations, coffee, plantation, and whole regions of the world became identified by the a single or a few products that they provided for the market.

And particularly, you know, what was set up was this beautiful system for traders, which was at the industrializing process, which was also a monetizing process that led to a type of industrial growth, you know, starting in Europe in particular, and then later on the whole power shifted to America. But that, along with a type of enslavement that continues then in a modern form through debt enslavement, allows for this perfect setup for global traders to be able to extract wealth and to continue amassing wealth. And it is important to remember that also the elites in the so-called poor countries benefited from that.

then what's called, and what happened is that this elite has been telling us the story that don't you realize that progress meant we moved away from the dying at 40, filth, illness, hardship, it was known as subsistence and it was horrible. And everybody wanted to get away from it. That's the myth we've been told. When you actually look back at records, that's not. true. Those same people have always told us that the minute we started farming, everything went downhill, not true. And we now have evidence, of course, we're in Australia of 40,000 years of farming.

And there's so much in Asia, you know, thousands of years of farming without destroying the environment. But certainly what we have to look at very critically is what happens with lots of fossil fuels when these same elites can drive even more people off the land more rapidly and then tell us we're producing much more food. It's so efficient. It was never more productive, never, not from the outset. What it did was to replace people. And a profit. Oh, and again, a profit extractant to the top. You know, so that in a, in a, in a, in a, way, you know, in a more decentralized, localized world, there can be much more exchange, and if you like, much more profit, but distributed to many more players.

But this has always been about extraction to the top. For most of us, we have seen this picture of Dickensian London, filth, pollution, huge gap between rich and poor, absolute miserable state, which then is improved. through modern technology and using energy to replace people, building houses that have a little bit of insulation for heating, indoor laboratories and so on. So that is painted as building on, but that's progress and that's what we've been fed. We've not been allowed to look at the social cohesion, the resource use, the relatively benevolent relationship with nature that preceded that forced urbanization. Well, when did this dynamic start? I would argue that it started once

we started storing surplus and that those, the people running that system outcompeted the people that were happy to just stay locally and farm. And then that turbocharge and accelerated. And then, like you say Christianity and colonialism and then fossil fuels and then digital currencies and now AI were each stacking on top of what came before. You know, when you say storing, you know, again I've seen, you know, particularly in the culture that I know so well in this part of Tibet, they were able to store some surplus. But you see, for me, the key is that when you're talking about storing surplus in the real world, when you're talking about storing surplus in the real world, when you're talking about grain or animals or fiber, you can only store so much. It's the financialization

of wealth that leads to the real breakdown. That's where it starts becoming more and more toxic. But even then, because of seeing the psychological manipulation and the sort of the modern global economy coming into Ladakh, I feel that the most important rupture, is really through industrialization. And as once we start getting so, we, again, I don't want to say we, I am saying we, but once the elites become greater and greater are able to manipulate more people, and then, so we're seeing an escalation that really goes back to a point of departure that I really think we have to take seriously is, as it were, the more indigenous state.

And so we're really talking about a gradual process, but the most important breaking point is, I would say, with fossil fuels, that it takes on another dimension. Yeah. I mean, you look at the population and GDP per capita. Our economy today is a thousand times bigger globally than it was in the year 1500. So let me tell you something I struggle with, and I expect it may mirror your experience. We could spend the entire podcast and some follow-ups critiquing the modern system and maybe persuading some others of the logic, underpinning what's wrong with our current system.

We could do that the rest of our lives. And the other objective is to build something more local, more lasting, more sustainable, more tethered to who we are as social primates in an interconnected world. How do you balance those two objectives in your work and in your mind slash heart? Well, thank you so much for that question because I am convinced that we need to try to do both.

And I've been able to persuade a few people in my little team in local futures that it is for our own well-being and for the well-being of everything, that lives, we need to try to slow down the juggernaut that blindly is still rushing ahead. And we have to be very careful that we don't end up only obsessing on that. And for me, I realized way back when that, well, I'm going to do everything I can from the outset to try to warn of this escalation in the wrong direction when there's so much

evidence that we don't want it. And so much of it is happening because of blindness, blindness from the top down to the victim, to the poor. So let's devote some of our time to that, but be sure that we ground ourselves in life itself and that we on a daily basis, I would say, ensure that we breathe and come into that space of affirming who we really are. And learn more and more about that. Learn to trust our bodies, learn to absolutely feel everything from how what we eat affects us. I've always been amazed by the gap between people who are concerned about what they eat,

but if we don't seem concerned about agriculture, or the people who are concerned about how we grow food, but who eat the supermarket synthetic food, You know, it's obviously all connected. And so that's partly, yeah, as we become more aware, and it's very much as my friend Ian McIlichrist is trying to raise awareness about allowing the right hemisphere of the brain some space and time. So we need to train that.

I used to call it practicing a type of creative schizophrenia that, you know, put on the left brain, And let's not say we're only going to lead by heart. We need head and heart and gut and hands, you know. So let's be really clear about what we don't want and where it comes from and what the language is. And let's develop the clarity that will make us more humble in the face of complexity and diversity. So I am a scientist. I have a PhD in Natural Resources.

I read scientific papers. I've written scientific papers. But increasingly, I get this sense that the universe is like I'm surrendering to things that are happening that are beyond my control. And I can't explain that. You are my friend. And Ian McGilchrist is my friend. And I had no idea that you two were friends.

Yeah. Yes. And it just seems like this conversation on how everything is connected is robust. And there's a constellation of ideas and personality. and a growth of a real conversation that is happening. So let me ask you this. You say that you travel and you witness this change in the zeitgeist. Can you give me some examples?

And how does the United States, I mean, you've talked about the elites and the 1%, does that also correspond to countries? Like, is outside of the United States, is there more of a consciousness shift? towards back to the land and towards a recognition that we are disconnected from who our ancestors could be and who we might be. What are your thoughts and just give me some examples? I ended up in California in the 70s and it was like paradise. It was like this, you know, left-leaning politics, Buddhism, ecology. And we ended up by taught at Berkeley in the department called Energy and Resources, which was one of the attempts to set up a more holistic

interdisciplinary department. And I was connected to some in Scandinavia and Germany. But I would say back in the 70s, California was like way ahead in terms of the ancient futures ahead that I'm talking about, ahead really deeply recognizing that nature is a home, nature is their only economy, every single thing we need comes from nature. Let's understand nature. Let's at least try to understand and work with her, you know, with Mother-Aid. And a great sophistication. And for many, many years, we ended up setting up an office in Berkeley,

so I was there every year. But I was also witnessing, I was going back to Ladakh every year. And what I had found in Berkeley in the 70s was particularly, you know, I would say Berkeley was like the, the biggest bubble of all. But all around Europe, I wasn't yet involved in Australia then until the end of the 90s, but I was also connected to people in, well, in Africa and South America and so on, so really globally connected. And there were these trends everywhere, but Berkeley was probably the strongest and biggest

center. But, and my theory back then was that, in fact, in America, the both the search for alternatives, if we want to call it that, you know, this coming back home to nature, was stronger than, say, in my native country of Sweden. And the resistance to what is actually a corporate superstructure, the resistance. the resistance to that and the awareness of it was also stronger in America than in Scandinavia. And my theory about that was that in Scandinavia we had governments that were relatively benevolent that had not allowed the same brutality of the corporate machine that had been allowed in America.

And so with that brutality, more awareness had also grown. And that was why there were so many sophisticated. thinkers in America and such a strong rejection of that corporate system. But see, this was all in the 70s and until about the end of the 80s. By the end of the 80s, you have people in the corporate world waking up to the seriousness of the environmental crisis. And so I knew Morris Strong quite well, a self-made multimillionaire, petroleum, multimillionaire, from Canada. And his Danish wife was a friend of mine, and she influenced him quite a lot. And he himself

was an intelligent man, and he was beginning to see there were serious environmental problems. But as he then seeks out his CEO colleagues, including Al Gore, they now are suddenly framing the issues very differently from how the environmental movement had been seeing, what was going on. So fundamental to the environmental movement had been the wisdom of Rachel Carson, who already in the 60s, was warning about the over-specialized,

reductionist left-brain approach to science, saying, look, you know, we think we can poison these insects and we're actually poisoning the birds, poisoning ourselves, we need to pause and promote more holistic science. It actually wasn't, ecological movement there that then morphed into an environmental movement, which was a subset of

the economic system. Yeah. And that's exactly one way that you can differentiate it, although it called itself an environmental movement, even back in the 70s and 80s. And another equally important and completely connected fact was the need to question the growth economy head on end to argue for decentralization. So the call for decentralized renewable energy and generally for decentralization, including very importantly, small is beautiful. Schumacher later on Herman Daly, who was also a friend of mine, and who brought in, you know, some of that perspective. But what happened, and I think I saw it more clearly than a lot of my colleagues, because I was away every year.

I was away for half the year on the Tibetan Plateau, not subjected to the same discussion. And I think going in and out of different cultures, it's a little bit like the aunt who goes away when her nephew is 10 years old, comes back half a year later, and says, you've grown so much. And it's so, you know, the mother who has bought new shoes, new clothes,

and knows he's grown. It's not saying how you've grown, because again, you know, the changes are big, but they're gradual enough so you don't really see them. And I think this is what happened to so many of my colleagues. We were on the same page in the 70s, like Amy Lovins at that point, a passionate advocate for genuinely decentralized renewable energy. And then when is it by the 90s? Electric cars are the most important things.

in the whole world, and that's what's going to save us. No, you know, it had been this narrowing down and so many good people ending up falling for so dear environmental friends who thought it was wonderful that Monsanto had shifted from focusing on, you know, this nasty chemicals and Agent Orange and all, now all these wonderful people were going to be focusing on how to feed the world, sustainably. And when you come back from the other part of the world, you say, well, actually, we don't need an American corporation to feed the world. We need to let people have the power to feed themselves.

Yeah. And so Morris Strong organizes the big meeting in Rio in 92, and I see that as the real nadia. So by the late 80s, early 90s, things are going into this environmentalism. that is becoming more and more reductionist. And shallow, you could say in a way, it isn't necessarily shallow, but it's this focus on just the trees or just the whales or just the plastic and losing sight of the bigger picture. The bigger picture being profound rethinking of the direction of science

and real decentralization. And those are what we still need to look at today. The moral of the story is everyone should spend six months of the year in Ladakh and the Plains of Tibet to develop antibodies to our current economic superorganism. But is there any chance that people like the people you mentioned, the equivalent of those people today can notice and go towards the broader ecological perspective instead. of the reductionist responses to what we face? I do feel that now the extreme consequences of this system are leading to a deeper questioning and a willingness to look more fundamentally at system change. I mean, we see it everywhere, don't we?

People talking about system change. And that's where we have people like you and I have to try to really get people to look more carefully at what they mean by that. because I'm shocked by the number of discussions of system change, which doesn't address, you know, they don't address the global economic system as an entity. And I say that is the key. That's the key right now.

So you've mentioned local economies, the name of your organization is local futures, and you've also mentioned decentralization. Could you define decentralization, And how is that different or how does that interrelate with localization? Really, decentralization, I used to use that language myself before I had my eyes open to globalization. And so then I, like most people still today, tended to be looking at things more from within the nation state perspective. I wasn't so aware of the sort of shenanigans at the global level

until colleagues of mine from Malaysia alerted me to the trade treaties and how they were this process of handing over power from the nation state to global corporations, giving them the power to literally to sue governments if governments try to interfere with their profit-making. And so that this, So really, as I became aware of globalization, the truly systemic antidote was localization.

And then it turns out that we need to be looking at the fact that everywhere in the world, when we have serious problems with the species of plants that don't have any predators, and we start bringing in the pesticides and the glyphosate and so. it often was because of this far too hasty transport of species across the world. You know, even, there's so much that one could say about that. So the whole notion of more localized species, local languages,

and the sort of, yeah, the language of local lens itself much better to this more general, systemic direction back home to nature, back home to diversity. So it's a, it's a sort of, as I say, it comes from a more deeper understanding of the global system then leads to a deeper understanding of the need for systemic localization. You know, this is not just about us helping local businesses or local farmers. As you were saying earlier, a lot of the government attempt to help grow the local. is nothing more than just helping them to compete within a globalized system

where the rules favor energy, energy intensive, resource intensive, polluting practices, whereas employing people and working with the natural world is punished. Can we have local economies that are healthy and resilient and grow sufficient food with 8 billion people? Absolutely. With a billion people, we must localize because it's precisely the wonderful truth that in order to tend to this incredible diversity and to do so with compassion, with gentleness, with real care requires people to nurture back the trees, the bushes, the clean water, the grasslands that have been abused by blind, stupid chemicals. and machines. So we need that care,

and we actually need more people on the land. That doesn't mean, you know, dispersing the human population across every lost wilderness. We need to maintain wild spaces. But we need to be very careful of propaganda from the corporate world, which is fundamentally about 100% urbanization.

So they're marketing, the sort of five-minute city where we will be able to have our local, everything within walking distance. I think for many people would be a dream to live in a city where everything they need is within walking distance.

But they need to be aware that their marketing from the corporate world for this five-minute city will mean, yeah, you'll be able to walk to McDonald's. you'll be able to walk to a giant supermarket chamber, you won't be able to walk to the sort of market and the sort of restaurant

or this sort of art or culture that you really want. Here's where my thinking has changed from 10 years ago because I thought I've been thinking about all this for 20 years. I no longer think the system can be changed, like tweaked with policies and better incentives because we are not only an echololing, overshoot, but we are in social overshoot and financial overshoot. So once we slow down sufficiently, that next step is a dozy, is a big step down as we have cascading systems that were built

on cheap credit, cheap energy to get the comparative advantage dynamic going globally, and letters of credit and six-continent supply chain, which you have done a lot of work on. that that is incredibly brittle and fragile. And so do we build out local futures right now as a strategy to act as a buffer for when that starts happening? Or are you thinking that we can actually change the system now to gradually move towards more local futures? Well, I'm thinking, you know, as I did from the outset,

that change in that bigger system is a big ask. So therefore, encourage people to build the foundations of that more robust, what we might call resilient, you know, systems that are adapted to diversity and that allow for many more players, that allow again for left-right brain balance in how we interact with one another and the other. Build those from the bottom up.

as much as possible, but also address, first of all, to understand the dominant system and where it's fooled us. And for instance, you know, there are such clever ways of undermining any intelligence, for instance, that the choice is either between science and, you know, or superstition. And also the continued, you know, lies about how, We're either going to die at 40 or we're going to continue with big pharma. And the biggest of all is big ag, that we're too many people now. We can't go back to the land. We've got to be in the big cities.

And it's the big supermarkets and the big farms that feed us. The truth is that we already have so much evidence that diversified, smaller scale agriculture, is vastly more productive. Productive defined by calories per acre? Well, much more, not just calories, but literally producing food, fiber, everything we need is more productive. And it's both more productive. It's more resilient. You know, even now the wood does grow.

But the trade-off is less profits for the top 1%. Okay, but that's not a trade-off. That's the win-win. The win-win is that it distributes wealth better. So the extractive system concentrates the profit in the hands of fewer and fewer billionaires, diversifying and localizing, spreads the profit much more. But if we have the same amount or more profit and it's distributed more equally in a similar economic system where we can order things than have trucks deliver them, it will be a big,

consumption in the world on finite resources if wealth is distributed that way, yes? No way. Absolutely not. No, no. That's a myth. That's a myth. And this is one that they've used a lot. And that's included things like when we started pushing local in the early 90s in England. There were these studies that came out talking about, oh, well, it makes so much more sense to buy lamb from New Zealand because in New Zealand the energy is all green and in England it's all brown, you know, just completely, you know, never actually contrasting farms in England or didn't use brown energy, only limited and small amounts of renewable. But, yeah, and also this idea that the distribution would be so much more energy intensive. Absolutely rubbish.

You know, and the centralization in this global system has also meant even back at the time of Schumacher, you know, talking about sending biscuits from southern England to northern England and sending them back again. I mean, the amount of energy that's being used for this transport and distribution, sandwich is made in one place in England and then distributed across the whole country. no way if you were to make the sandwiches in a decentralized way would you be using more energy. And by the way, another one that they also use is, oh yeah, don't complain about flying shrimp to Thailand to be peeled there and then flying them back again. Because if we were to peel the shrimp in England, we'd all use machines whereas in Thailand they do it by hand. It's just absolute rubbish.

So this whole energy story and the false statistics that have now been used very, very consciously to undermine the natural response, which is local. Well, my point was a different one, which is if we have $100 trillion of GDP globally, give or take, and instead of that being funneled to the top, it's equally distributed, but we still have, the same economic system, then we're just going to buy more things. Maybe you could describe to me what you have in mind, let's just use a hypothetical date of 2050. 25 years from now, what type of local economy do you see as, can you unpack what that might look like, what the consumption throughput might be relative to today? And does everyone have biscuits and sandwiches and land? and shrimp, or are some of those things no longer available?

Yeah, well, also just to say that there are examples of localization that show the huge benefits, essentially what happens when people come together to think we instead of I. And so one of the bigger ones is this community on the edge of Seoul in South Korea called Sung-visan. And when I visited them about eight years ago, probably eight, maybe ten, there were 20,000 people involved in this. It was so interesting because it had started with a few families who'd come together to prevent a development of the last hill with some trees,

natural world around them on the edge of the city. They came together and prevented that from being developed. And that grew into more and more collaboration. And when I visited them, the boundary between who is in Sungbisan and who isn't was this jagged line because, well, this business isn't and that home isn't, but this one is. So it was essentially a mindset of about 20,000 people that belonged to a smaller unit that had more control over their life. And that understood the importance of the natural world and protecting it, which is how it has started.

So that meant they already had an alternative school. They were already sending children out into the countryside to learn about farming, to learn about where the food comes from, to learn also about planting trees, which, of course, they had already started on that little hill, which they rescued from development. They didn't want McDonald's food. They didn't want Coca-Cola. they were in touch with what was healthy for them and healthy for the environment. That immediately meant less wasteful use of resources. That immediately meant both a lower consumption level and a higher quality of life,

a higher, both better health, literally physically health, but then of course what it also meant for the emotional health to feel part of something where you belong to, a more meaningful way of collaborating. So they had community centers, they also had cultural events that again express these. Essentially, you know, it's about community and nature, really, is what it comes down to. It's about the reconnection between people and between people and the living world.

And that reduces these artificial needs which have been foisted on us. So to build on that, you know, I can imagine that by 2050 it would be physically possible, first of all, to have enough of a linking up between the various initiatives that are at the local level, and there are very few that are as big as Sung-me-san, but there are countless examples of the benefits of people working together for a more natural and a more community way of doing things. So if by 2050 we are trying very hard and others to connect more of the people who are involved in this, because very often they have no idea that this is also happening on the other side of the world.

In fact, that's what I'm finding most of the time. And too often they're caught into a national narrative that keeps them locked in supporting the bad guys and the bad path and not being strong enough and and hopeful enough to maintain the energy that it takes to do these things. So I fully agree with the social capital, the community and the connection to nature, that if we had those things, I wouldn't need or someone wouldn't need all the gadgets and traveling and distractions. But just tell me, I mean, roughly, the average.

person in the United States uses a hundred times more energy in our exosomatic footprint than we eat in our bodies and calories. So if we did have local futures around the world by 2050, what would be the footprint relative to today, give or take? We need desperately to have more funding to do research, to demonstrate some of these things. For instance, when I came to a people weren't talking local. And I was able to introduce the idea and to help get lots of farmers' markets started. And these flourishing farmers' market in a place like Australia are such a beautiful example of creating an economic incentive for diversified production.

You're actually creating a market which encourages. farmers to diversify. And you're creating a market, which means far less energy and distribution. They're talking about a market that doesn't need any plastic. You're talking about a market that would be a thousand times stronger if the corporate world weren't so alert that is lobbying governments to bring in regulations that prevent these things from going stronger. So they bring in all kinds to bogus regulations that prevent, for instance, the use of glass bottles or even, I don't know if you've ever been to India, but they had these beautiful clay pots for yogurt and for tea band, you know, more or less. Now, yeah, as far as I'm concerned, everything I've seen is that

you're talking about an exponential reduction in resource use and an exponential increase in the quality of life. Now, and also, it would mean that for those. who really crave strawberries in the winter, living in, where are you, in Michigan or in Minnesota, they could have them. But those strawberries would cost the true price of that transport. And when farmers are encouraged to do what is happening, which is to diversify to a much greater extent,

and to bring back the infrastructure, the local infrastructure, you would be amazed at how much you can produce even in a few greenhouses to have some of the things that people would like to have fresh in the winter. Yeah. So let's talk about that. So the listeners of this show are a captive audience for the things that you're saying. So many people currently live in communities where there's very little awareness of the value or the potential of localization. So what have you found to be the best first steps for individuals, families, groups of humans to help move their economies, their communities, towards local and regional resilience?

I have, I mean, I would like to find a much better ways. But certainly we do get very positive feedback from the films we made, like the economics of happiness and so on. and where farmers and permaculture activists and so on and said to it, oh, you made me realize how important it is what we're doing. And even though it's hard, you know, we're going to continue. So it's both explaining and showing clearly what the global path means for your health, for your happiness, and for the well-being of everything that lives,

and showing that this other part, which, you know, yeah, the multiple benefits. What we also have to realize is we have so much experience in this that we're not recommending local currencies. We found they don't work. At this stage, we would urge people not to think of that again and again. They've been started. We have helped to start them.

But with local food initiatives, which at the same time as local currencies, as we started, they almost without exception live on, even though they're difficult, they live on and multiply and grow. That that means using the national currency at this stage, not trying some over-idealistic way of dealing with. So it's actually building the new within the old system using the national currency. I've always found that local currencies don't really work, but they, allow people to meet each other and they develop relationships that we don't know how the long-term

benefits that. But to your other point, do you have a model where if in a county where people are listening to this and there's a bunch of listeners of this show that are listening to you right now, that people want to, there are certain people that want to grow a surplus of locally grown healthy food outside of the industrialist fossil intensive system. And a lot of people want to buy locally. How do you pair those people up on the supply and demand side? Is there a model or software or some protocol that you've found to be useful? There are people who have developed them and who have run with them. And yet the thing that really work, is the much more localized and smaller.

And so I have to say I love the community-initiated smaller-scale systems, which do include farmers, markets, box schemes, various forms of connecting growers and consumers. And when that does really well and what's really wonderful is that there are also people developing infrastructure, you know, understanding because it's been killed off. You know, the government has killed off the infrastructure that we need. So that's including the storage and thinking more about the most effective transport. But again, it's adapted to specific situations. And it's very hard for us to learn to think in systems and process.

Remember, this is what we were saying with Buddhism, is their understanding that everything is interlinked and changing. And so seeing things more in the systemic and process-oriented way would mean also that people don't start, for instance, the market by saying, well, we're only going to have things from half an hour's drive away. Instead, they would say, oh, well, right now, you know, the beef is coming from Argentina and the apples have been, you know, apple juice has been, it comes from five different countries.

Honestly, it does, you know. So now we're going to be getting it from maybe 200 miles away, maybe even from a neighboring country. It's the process of shortening the distances and the diversification. And it's what's wonderful about this, particularly around local food, and I want to remind people listening that this is then also about wood for building materials, even for heating.

You know, we believe that wood fires, are not the problem they're painted. And it means fiber. So for all basic needs, part of this whole process also includes natural building. And it's recognizing that the more labor-intensive way in community is actually profoundly enjoyable.

And where you see this is in very grassroots movements, the permaculture movement, the eco-villus movement, the ecovercity's movement. And so there people get to experience this. And we have lots of examples of even in Vietnam, in Thailand, you know, groups where the people who've been pulled into a city are already developing a hunger and an interest in this more natural way. And they can't just jump off and suddenly from one day to the next leave their corporate job, have no money and now, you know, what am I going to do?

So partly what we're trying to get deeper to understand is that there's so much you can do by liberating yourself intellectually and time-wise to explore other ways and to develop and to have a gradual process of, you know, liberating yourself more and more. But don't jump off. don't try to set up a community where, you know, you could have all put your money in one box and live happily ever after. It takes a certain sophistication and it takes learning from indigenous culture. And there I sometimes get so frustrated,

but I say learning from indigenous culture. I mean, most people haven't had access to that knowledge, so I can't blame them. But what's happened in a lot of the sort of eco-community and eco-village movement is that because people haven't looked at the global system at all, they constantly blame human nature for the problem. They constantly blame themselves, their own culture, and focus on non-violent communication, on sociocracy, and so some of that can be very helpful. but I think it would be a lot more helpful to be more literate about the forces that keep separating us and that keep us insecure and the simpler ways of connecting. And one of them, can I just say about that so I don't forget, very important.

One of the simpler ways of connecting is to come together to sing and make music together. And not about showing off, not about being perfect, but it's actually an architecture. typical, spiritual, if you like, connecting technology. I hate to, I don't want to use the word technology, but it's a practice that virtually every pre-modern society knew about. And it's so enriching and rewarding. What else have you learned with your time and indigenous communities that you can share with the listeners?

Well, again, so much. I mean, you know, one of them is for the children to be using their bodies. to see the traditional situation where children want to emulate the elders. And when you allow children to grow up in a more intergenerational context, the four-year-old happily emulates the six-year-old. And they want to emulate the adults. They actually want to become productive members of society, to use their hands to help milk the animals,

to help even in the harvest, It's remarkable how modern education has just cut off any of that knowledge and by segregating children into monocultures. They have created a knife that cuts through collaborative and kind relationship. The monocultural breeding of children is one of the most cruel things we do. And so I'm a great fan of the Steiner schools. for me, you know, not perfect, but unfortunately many of them are losing their, you know, adherence to trying to keep the age groups together and also losing some of the sort of strict

thinking about technology. But some of that's coming back as the awareness now of the impact of the screen on young children is growing. But so to see in Ladakh, this black and white change, the traditional, incredible, beautiful relationship between the oldest and the youngest and everybody in between. And then to see the segregation and the separation, to see people who couldn't even understand what depression meant, and suicide didn't exist, basically, maybe an old person in a generation, to now have suicides among young people once a month. you know, the change of the traditional way of life and the impact of the global economy is so black and white, and so instructive and so much positive learning from that.

Among others, you know, try to avoid children playing with just children of their own age group to exactly the opposite, help them develop as many significant others as possible to relate to, and ideally of different ages. helping to connect to the more than human world, particularly to animals. And that's where domesticated animals are actually very important, because we should not connect deeply to the wild. You know, I feel a bit guilty. I love feeding some of the birds. But, you know, we shouldn't really be interfering that way with the wild.

But to see in these traditional cultures, and I have experienced, you know, many more than just La Dac, even in rural, of Spain, where my husband and I lived in the 80s, the connection to the domesticated pigs and goats and cows was very, very important for learning the language and the communication between humans and animals and so important for the children. And all the time, developing hand, you know, and eye coordination and moving their bodies to this. Then see what happens when you take like five-year-old, six-year-old boys and make them sit still all day in front of a screen and you feed them sugar. And it's a recipe for violence.

And that's what we get. And it wouldn't be that difficult for us to bring fundamental changes to the school to prevent this. But they didn't need to run, you know, and they could run up, you know, mountains and stuff. thousand feet and back down again and just full of energy, you know, using their bodies, their muscles. And yeah. So there's just, this is such a huge story. You've worked for 50 years on these issues. And like the people listening now, like more broadly than your work, you're aware of what we face.

So what can someone listening to this episode do? facing the great simplification, the economic superorganism, climate change, inequality, the machine that you've described, what can they do right now to help address these issues, or is it all up to politicians and leaders? So first of all, I want people to remember that the inequality, the epidemic of depression, which, by the way, we haven't spoken enough about, because I'm really hoping that that can be an avenue for waking people up, that young people around the world in every culture I know, the depression, anxiety and mental disorder is escalating very rapidly. People need to know that that's connected

to the rising emissions, that is connected to the political instability, that is connected to the complete failure now of the political left and right, because the political left and right have been pursuing the same globalizing policy. So the sort of corporate empire lies behind all of these crises. So one of the first things we want people to remember is that they are connected. And that's why the big system picture is essential. Then we can still focus on just reducing plastic or just on the plight of Wales or childhood depression or political instability, but link it to that same system so that we then become a chorus of voices to demand policy change.

And what would that policy change look like? It would mean it would need international collaboration, which is why we're trying to build up an international movement for the shift from global to local. in part to build up that collective voice for the change that needs to happen at the global level, where governments are now forced by the voting citizens to take back the power from that empire, bring it back down so that there is democratic oversight for business. Now, it's very difficult to persuade business people of the need for democratic oversight,

because all around the world, businesses are being squeezed by heavier and bigger and more outrageous bureaucracy, this heavy weight, which makes, of course, businessmen hate government. And that hatred of government was translating into a swing to the right. As ordinary people also are incensed by a lot of the red tape regulation, they're being squeezed both in terms of bureaucracy and financially. And they only see the state, they see the government, because there isn't enough of discussion of the global empire behind the nation's say. So that then leads to this swing for laissez-faire government

and the demand for the meleys and the Trumps and so on. Sweden is swinging to the right, Germany is swinging to the right. Now in Australia, it's a really, really, clear pattern when you look at it globally. And so we need to not focus on Trump, not focus just on the swing to the right, but on the same that that is a consequence of not addressing what's happening at the global level. Once we do that, we have the potential for the most remarkable coming together, very strong unity around what everybody would want. I mean, I really believe almost without exception.

So that's the building up of hope for real systemic change, policy change. But in the meanwhile, at the local level, you can start taking steps. And we in local futures, we sort of basically, we offer you a, well, I shouldn't say a promise, but we offer you what we see as answering the question of what can I do right now. to feel better, to support myself and my own well-being, while simultaneously working on change in the world at large. So in local futures, we offer materials that can help you move in that direction that will be beneficial to you right now

and help you to start looking through this mess of one crisis after the other way. You just don't know where to look, and it just seems like people are in overwhelm. You're in overwhelm as long as you're seeing these crises are separate, but you're also in overwhelm if you don't recognize what this machine is doing to you. And so part of the journey that we would like to take you on is where you see more clearly how you too are being affected by this barrage of propaganda that make you feel inferior that blame you for the climate crisis, blame you for what's going on, blames humanity, blames human nature, points to everything under the sun except the real cause.

So this part that we're recommending, we try to leave people with five words to try to sort of, you know, have a schemata of what you would be doing. you would be, as a first step, reconnecting, then you'd be rethinking, and then you'd be willing to do resistance and renewal. So resisting and renewing and rejoicing on a daily basis. So these five hours,

and the reconnection is a reconnection to others as primary and simultaneously, and often together a deeper reconnection to nature. The reconnection to others and to nature, which is also spiritual, it's not just practical, it's profoundly spiritual. It's drawing on the teachings of all the wisdom tradition and of indigenous culture. We sort of, the reconnection to others does not get enough airtime now. So many of my indigenous colleagues are constantly reminding people of their connection to nature.

But what I experienced in Ladakh showed me so clearly how that fundamental need, of course, every child that's born, needs to be held, needs to feel cared for, needs to belong. And we in the Western world were deprived of that as we were enclosed and pushed in and cut off. And from Freud onwards, no one ever studied healthy people. They were studying people who were traumatized by that rupture, because the rupture from nature was concomitant with a rupture from one another, the intergenerational fabric, so thrown into a little nuclear family, afraid and traumatized. So what I had the experience of living with was truly,

healthy, deeply self-respecting people because they had that sense of belonging from the beginning. In the West, A.A., Alcoholics Anonymous is a wonderful example of how the most entrenched addictions can be healed very rapidly through that deep community building. It's the we, we are healing together, we see each other. I can love and respect you, even though you have these deep problems. that knowledge is what we need. And if we can do that with heroin addiction, we should surely be able to do it

to get over our fear, anxiety, and trauma of today. And A.A. link that to a spiritual journey, which in the beginning was Christian, but now they're including and liberating that to also a nature's spirituality. And so I would urge people to think of together doing vision quests, the biggest poverty now is time poverty. But if you're a group, if you start this journey by identifying two or three, maybe up to 20 people whom you'll

work together with, and ideally you'll be living near each other. You can meet in each other's homes. And then you can plan how one person will look out for where would be the best place to go out as a group of families for a type of vision quest and we can modify it so that the children are there and they're not just playing football, they're also learning to feel the wind on their skin and to learn the beauty of the stars, the reconnection and then the rethinking of this, you know, everything I've been talking about. I'm curious, Helena, what do you care about most in the world? What I care about most right now is just praying and hoping that there'll be this big wake-up,

because I think we're just trapped in a blind support for a system that no one wants, not even the people at the top. Very, very few psychopaths, actually. There's just this blind rush and fear and the beliefs that we can't do. They say, what I care about more than anything is, oh, can I contribute to wake up? will I be able to see before I die a bit of that wake-up which will bring us together? And of course there's going to be, there would be difficulties. Everything will be roses overnight.

But, oh, just such a sigh of relief that people aren't being so duped by the assumption that we can't change it or that there is no other way, et cetera, et cetera. Well, there is a wake-up happening? It's just a question, is it 1% of the population or 10? I think you would agree that we would like to see 10% or more. So if you, I ask this question of all my guess, as you're probably aware, if you could wave a magic wand and there were no personal recourse to you or your status or your security, what is one thing you would do to help change human and planetary futures for the better? It would be, the magic wand would probably be billions of dollars that would get out the big picture.

And I don't think the wake up yet includes understanding how this global economic system came about and how it's responsible in the last 35, 40 years for the polycrisis. So that link is not yet being articulated very much. And there's almost no discussion of the ISDS clauses that have this upgrade. ISDS. That's the investor state disputes that. clauses in trade treaties where governments are signing in black and white, you can do whatever you like, we won't interfere with your profit. If we do, you can sue us. So uranium mining

companies, right now in Australian uranium mining companies suing Greenland for 13 billion, because through democratic process, they decided they don't want more uranium mining. And you see, the madness of this system is this Australian uranium mining company is not going to be bringing uranium to Australia, it's just part of this web of craziness and trade in the global system. And so that the disempowerment of the nation state and the nation state having sold out to that empire without any discussion, so both left and right have been selling out for the last 35 years, and it's exactly in that period that these crises have escalated to such enormous proportions. So how can people find out more about your list of the five hours and what to do and understand more about your work?

Yeah, please come to our website, localfutors.org, and you'll find a whole array of films, of animations, books, reports, and conferences. We've been doing a series of conferences called Economics of Happiness conferences and a localization action guide, which gives lots of examples. in various fields and examples of what's going on that you can follow. And you can learn more about the five hours. And we're trying to connect sort of local hubs around the world that can also stimulate each other. So there's a lot of positive material. And I think, as I said, this is a journey of restoring your own well-being

in the midst of this craziness. in a very focused way and at the same time looking at what you can do to improve the well-being of everything that lives. Helen Norber Hodge, thank you so much for your time today and for your five decades of work on these issues. You have been fighting the good fight, my friend. Well, I'm so honored to be with you and love what you're doing and look forward to talking again. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform.

You can also visit ThegreatSimplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media and produced by Misty Stee. in it, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.