Helena Norberg-Hodge: Local Solutions for a Connected World

For the last episode of SystemShift Season 2, we are joined by Helena Norberg-Hodge, a pioneer of the new economy movement who witnessed firsthand how the intrusion of the modern economy and consumer culture brought with it unemployment, abject poverty, environmental decline, and epidemics of depression and social divisiveness.

Through her experiences in the remote Himalayan plateau of Ladakh in Northern India, Helena describes the erosion of traditional values and community cohesion in the face of modernisation and consumerism. She advocates for a movement towards localisation, stressing the importance of decentralised, community-driven initiatives for environmental sustainability and overall wellbeing.

From critiquing economic theories rooted in colonisation to proposing actionable solutions for a more interconnected, relationship-based economy, Helena explores the complexities and drawbacks of the modern economic model and the imperative for systemic transformation.

Thank you for sharing this journey with us. Word of mouth is everything, so please continue to share SystemShift with anyone you think might be interested.

Voiceover 1: Yeah, there’s times when I feel powerless of like… Okay, so people talk about get an electric car that’ll be good for the environment. But when electric cars are coming out like £40,000, £50,000, £60,000 and then you know, if you have kids and maybe you’re talking like a seven-seater, so you’re talking like £80,000 to £120,000 Nobody has that. So, it’s like, well actually maybe then I’ll just I’ll just carry on my diesel seven-seater. And I have made a compromise out of my own position that I feel powerless to change.

Voiceover 2: It’s like with social media people can’t live without their phones. It’s like, I’ve got to see what this, and this and this is because I can’t think for myself anymore. No one talks anymore. That’s the thing, no one has a conversation about, oh, you know, like good ideas and stuff like that. Everything is look at that, look at that. Everyone is scrolling and it should be this and it should be that. Like, you know what? I don’t want any of that anymore. Let’s start from scratch. It’s got to that with me now. 

Voiceover 3: It’s very overwhelming for me. Because you want to help the planet, but also, you want to help your wallet because you don’t have that kind of, economic power to buy better things. Yeah, you can go to the farmers market, but obviously that is a bit more pricey. It’s worth it yes, but do you have that power? So, it’s really complicated. I do not know how to work with that.

Carl Schlyter:
In our daily lives, we often find ourselves ensnared within the web of consumer culture, navigating its enticing promises and grappling with its hidden costs. The stories of everyday people striving to live in harmony with their surroundings while advocating for change in their own spheres, are the threads that weave the fabric of systemic transformation. Welcome to the last episode of SystemShift Season 2, where we unearth the truth underlying our failing economic system, driving our planet beyond its limits, and chart a course towards a future defined by collective well-being and sufficiency. Today, for our final episode, we are joined by Helena Norberg-Hodge, a pioneer of the New Economy movement who for decades has encouraged social and environmental activists to move beyond treating symptoms and to focus on the need for fundamental change to the economy. Helena’s story is itself a transformative and remarkable one. Initially specializing in linguistics and studying under Noam Chomsky at MIT, she found herself, as we will hear, in the remote region of Ladakh, northern India. As a linguist joining a film team, she witnessed at first-hand how the intrusion of the modern economy and consumer culture brought with it unemployment, abject poverty, environmental decline and epidemics of depression and social divisiveness. In 1978, Helena established a Ladakh project dedicated to strengthening traditional organic agriculture and pioneering renewable energy alternatives, earning international recognition for its impact. She founded the international non-profit organisation Local Futures, which has been pivotal in sparking localisation movements in every continent. In this episode, Helena draws on a lifetime of expertise to unpack the hidden costs of our hyper globalised world. Her words are not just visionary, but deeply practical. Guiding us through a roadmap for reclaiming our sense of self that will bring us closer to reshaping our economies for the collective well-being of all. So, without further ado, a warm welcome to you Helena.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Thank you very much, very happy to be here.

Carl Schlyter:
Yeah, I’m actually especially happy to you as a guest, because I’ve been working for so many years about localisation. And one of the first things I read on this subject was something a paper you wrote on local food economy and made a huge impact on me in how to find solutions, so I’m still grateful for that, even if it was decades ago. 

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
It’s so nice to hear that. Really nice to hear that, localisation is so important, and it’s so urgent for people to start understanding the difference between blindly supporting a globalising path instead of actively supporting a more localised path. 

Carl Schlyter:
If you ask a neoliberal theorist or a neoclassical economist or any guy in the agribusiness sector, they would always say, well, that’s inefficient. It’s much more efficient to have these huge monocultures, you can produce much more per hectare and it’s much more profitable. What would you say to them?

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Just imagine two pieces of land and on one of them you plant trees and bushes and vegetables and you have some animals, and the animal poo goes on the land. And things ripen at different times. And you have the possibility of having far greater productivity than you ever can with just monoculture. If you plant just one thing, you will not be able to get as much out of that land as you would with diversity. And again, remember what’s happened. You know, in these big industrial farms, you have a big pig factory on one side of the country, and on the other side we might have some vegetables growing. People have to import fertiliser, and the fertiliser waste on the animal farms become toxic pollutants. So, it’s an insanity with what’s happened with modern industrial agriculture. The efficiency that we need to understand that was real, if you think of it as efficiency, was that you were able to produce more food with fewer people. But people are not a scarce resource. And so, this is a really important wakeup call right now that we need to realize that we have an over abundant renewable resource of human beings on this planet. And what is killing us on this planet is at a fundamental level about the fact that, particularly with the advent of fossil fuels, that is started even before that, the modern economy was pushing people away from the land into resource intensive cities and big machines using lots of oil. And because they were producing on big monocultures, they needed lots of chemicals, the chemical fertilisers, the chemical pesticides, the fungicides. And you end up with a system that actually produces less food per unit of land and creates massive pollution and is now responsible. The main cause of cancer, really, when you look at it honestly, is the unbelievable proliferation now of chemicals. Many of them, it would absolutely not be necessary if we just shifted policies in the same direction towards supporting more localised, more diversified food system. And we’re talking also about making it a priority and a human right for people around the world have the right to fresh, healthy, organic food as a priority. We really need to start carrying that flag, work with La Vía Campesina which is one of the biggest social movements in the world. But many people haven’t heard of it. It’s about 300 million small farmers who have been trying to wake up the Western world, the urban majority, to really understand what’s happening to the food economy. I mean, there’s so much more to say. but, you know, this efficiency is now also responsible for trans fats, high fructose corn sirup, etc., etc., which is now recognised to be responsible for an epidemic of diabetes, obesity and heart disease and that this generation is going to die younger than their parents’ generation because of this. So, you have toxic land with chemicals causing cancer. You’ve got toxic food that’s creating all these health problems. And in the meanwhile, people have been driven off the land into the cities on the whole, struggling to put food on the table and a decent roof over their head. We really must look at the reality on the ground, and recognise that particularly since the 80s, when this new era of globalisation took off and the argument was that it was lifting all boats, and that people in India and China, that we’re going to be so much better off if you actually now go and look at people’s health and their wellbeing, generally, their happiness, you will find the truth is that people are worse off and struggling. And as they struggle, we also see that friction increases between different groups. 

Carl Schlyter:
So, if you, rather than looking only at one single parameter without the costs and you start checking, well, what does the net profit per hectare for a farmer with a diversified or organic production, and including then the chance for a reduced food waste because the local consumer will buy the carrot independent it fits the general global export criteria and so on.

So, you mean that in net benefit for humankind perspective, this is better and that economists had been sub-optimising for the wrong things because now the lack is not human labour, but rather natural resources and healthy land and water.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Absolutely. And we really must look at the fact that this type of agriculture started with the birth of the modern economy. We need to go back to the roots to get a clear picture of the fact that the ideal comparative advantage, which is a fundamental principle in the modern economy, is that we are going to be better off in your region or your country if you specialise for export and then import whatever else you need. It is so important that we remember that these theories come off the back of enclosures, slavery and genocide. And if we look back at the sort of forefathers of this economy, and that’s why it is fair to call it patriarchal, although I don’t find that very helpful today, but it’s very important that to see that this white man from Europe, particularly England, formulated ideas where they explicitly expressed the misogyny, their disrespect for any other race. You know, it’s not that long ago that people were even hunting Aboriginal people in Australia. I think it was as late as the 60s and the values were also very explicitly anti nature, that these people benefited enormously from driving people away from producing a range of products for themselves to produce the tea, the coffee, the whatever it might have been for export. And, you know, if there’s anything in my thinking that could lead to a big wake up today, it would be to look at that trajectory and to realise that we’re talking about global traders, starting the ball rolling and being part of formulating these economic theories, and that today we have a system where we talk about this toxic global food system, we’ve got to remember that it also is based on import and export of identical food products. It’s based on sending fish from Norway, from Australia, from America to China to be processed on a daily basis. Our basic needs are being flown and crisscrossing the world, and those emissions are not mentioned in the climate negotiation, not allowed to be managed. And once we realise that this is the root cause of most of our social and environmental problems, I think we’re going to see a very, very powerful movement for change.

Carl Schlyter:
Why don’t we just change recipes with each other? I think this approach is interesting, but the whole theory and comparative advantage, I think it was, Ricardo, a British economist in the 19th century. So, it’s an old theory. It was like based on the colonial logic already then. But what has been aggravating since then, there’s also the financialization of it. So local farmers selling on the global market now needs to sell their crop when it’s harvested. But because of the extreme fluctuation of prices linked to financial speculation that, for example, more than half of the wheat the week after Ukraine invasion, it was banks who created contracts that had no link to reality. They just thought the wheat price will go up because Ukraine is a big exporter now, they can’t export. So, we will just speculate on wheat without no intention of ever selling or buying it. But it inflated the price and created inflation and aggravated the global crisis. This is then added to it because of course, the profits of these fluctuations will land in the banks rather than in the farmers hands. So, this is making this theory even worse than when he invented it. I think that’s also an important thing.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah. Very important. And I do think once we go back to those roots and we look at the role of the global players, we’ll see that banking also started changing as Europeans moved out from Europe to conquer other people, to steal their resources, often committing, you know, genocide and so on. At the same time, the banking systems changed, shifting towards fractional reserve, towards dealing with money in a way that most people didn’t understand, they didn’t realize. 

Carl Schlyter:
And for those who don’t understand the term fractional reserve banking, I can recommend the first season episode with Ann Pettifor, where we explain how money is created today.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, and it basically means that we think that we put the money in the bank. The bank keeps it. No, they change the rules so that they could just use most of our money to invest and to expand, then to grow their wealth, not our wealth. So, I think it’s really, really helpful to be able to look back and to see the roots of this system. And as you say, to realize that things have escalated in a way that is truly mad. And I, I really believe that most people would absolutely not support these policies. But this is the tragedy, is that both left and right, politically and even the Greens haven’t done their job focusing on really explaining what this economic theory is all about, and particularly not looked at this process of deregulating global banks and businesses, which started after the Second World War, when the IMF and the World Bank was set up. At the same time, they set up something called the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. And this was actually a process of allowing corporations and banks to have the freedom to go in and out of every country. So, they were pressuring governments to go along with this. And there were lots of good intentions in that.

People were superficially thinking, this is how we prevent another world war. This is how we prevent another depression. These are all interlinked economically. We will be so interdependent that we are not going to fight each other. Well of course, interdependence was actually not an interdependence between people. It was people from Uruguay to Sweden to America becoming dependent on global corporations of banks that were becoming richer and richer and richer. And in the 80s, there was a new push for this process to continue and to be more forcefully imposed on governments, and that it came with something called the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was originally the name that was brought in at the Bretton Woods Hall when the IMF and the world Bank were set up. But now this is this new oracle around the GATT. Anyway, I became alerted to this by Malaysian colleagues, and when I learned about this, which was in the 80s, I was so relieved because now I suddenly understood that we didn’t have to fight this system on every corner. And we often every saving, every forest, every river, you know, fighting for the poor, because here was essential trajectory that was so clearly destructive. So free trade was freedom for Monsanto, for Coca-Cola to go into countries and destroy the local economy, usually also subsidized by their governments. They could bring in products from the other side of the world at a lower price than products that were produced a five-minute walk away. And, you know, I witnessed this in Ladakh or Little Tibet, which is where my eyes were open to all of this.

Carl Schlyter:
Your experience in Ladakh is really interesting in the way that if you have a problem now to imagine how a world without the current neoliberal capitalist logic of economy is based, I think if you tell a little bit about the way people lived in Ladakh when you first arrived, there could be the help to guide you to have a different mindset rather than competition can be replaced with cooperation. If you would be so kind to tell a little bit about that.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, so this was definitely where my eyes were open very, very wide. I was living in Paris. I was a linguist. I’m Swedish. Both my parents are Swedish, but also English and German. I had lived in all three countries, learned quite a lot of languages, and had also studied and lived in France and in other countries, also in America. And I thought that I had I, you know, learned about lots of different cultures. But when I arrived in Ladakh, I actually arrived in a culture that had not been colonized. And later on, I understand that it was also very important that the Christian missionaries who had come out had not succeeded in converting anybody except a few orphans. So, there was a tiny minority of Christians that other people had not been influenced. But I realised more recently that in so many cultures, the Christian missionaries already brought this message that you were inferior. You’re backward. And look, you know, in Europe we had these amazing tools and technologies. And of course, they were also forerunners often to for this sort of rape of resources back to Europe. But anyway, I discovered then a culture that had not been affected by the missionaries, not colonised and not developed because it’s a part of Tibet. That belongs politically to India, the westernmost part of Tibet, and it had been sealed off by Indian Army as the Chinese had started coming in to Central Tibet. And because it was so remote, it had been protected. By 12,000 ft where people live, that’s 3500m, and surrounded by high Himalayan mountains. So, it was a very arduous journey to get there before there were airplanes. And I arrived there as it’s just been opened up by the Indian government for outside visitors. And I had been asked to go as a part of the German film team, to help make a documentary by picking up a little bit of the language of these people. I thought I’d be there for six weeks, but I was absolutely astounded by the beauty of the place and the people, by the joy, by the incredible vitality and laughter. So, I just I fell in love immediately when the filming was finished. I had already picked up quite a lot of the language, and I started working on the thesis, thinking I was going to do the PhD on language. But as that process developed, I became more and more involved in working with the local people to try to find a way of meeting the modern world that wasn’t quite going to destroy the local economy and the bubble, not destroy the self-respect, as I saw how the media that came in, the schooling that was coming in all, created this sense that these people are stupid and backward. 

Carl Schlyter:
In your book, I think there is a rather interesting episode where you describe a man on a bus, and some tourists ask him to do a lot of things for them, and he does it without being servile, and he does it keeping with his dignity, and he doesn’t even get angry. Another man who is taunted all the time when he’s walking on the street, he doesn’t really care. This sense of inner security that makes you, you know, above the competition-based taunting and bullying we have in our societies. Where does that come from you think?

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Well, thanks so much, such good questions, and I’m glad you remember that from my book Ancient Futures, you know, about the traditional culture and the changes I witnessed there. Yeah, I think I really became an expert in understanding where that deep, deep self esteem and security came and it became over the years so clear that it was connected to having a very extended family, so that every mother had about 5 to 10 caretakers for every baby. So, for every child, there were all these welcoming arms. And particularly beautiful was said than in every household, you know, the extended family was such that the eldest, you know, the 80-year-old uncle walking hand in hand with a one-year-old child. They were the best friends, you know, they were both very slow. They could barely walk; they could barely chew. They were both toothless, hairless and moved very slowly. They were made for each other. Now that security that came from that it wasn’t all, you know, every eye focus on the child. But it was this calm and complete and sort of forever sense of belonging and being cared for. And part of that, I came to realise, led to also a greater sense of individualism because people were accepted as they were, because they had not yet been, you know, had the imposition of Christianity or later development with the idea that you are so imperfect and, you know, we all have to be on this path of improvement because we’re all basically, I need to reject our bodies, our senses. We’re all striving for a type of progress. Because there was instead that deep acceptance of what is an acceptance of the here and now. That also meant that deep acceptance of the child and later on, or, you know, adults to so you actually were able to, in a relaxed way to be yourself. And then I witnessed how with development suddenly images came in and pressures, including the Western schooling, advertising, and now suddenly the message was, you are nobody unless you come into the city and you got the latest Nike shoes and you’re drinking the right Coca-Cola because this is a superior culture and you’re backward. And essentially the schooling also taught that sometimes very explicitly. Sometimes the lessons, you know, for children would actually say, we’ve got to do everything we can to get these illiterate farmers into the city so that they can, you know, become essentially become more human. So, it was this onslaught that I saw led to insecurity in both little girls and little boys, particularly in the early stages. It was so clear how vulnerable children are. But over the years, even adults were affected by this. And the end result was also in the 80s, literally toy shops coming in and adverts where it was Rambo for boys and Barbie dolls for girls, and interestingly enough, my husband and I had lived, my husband had joined me after three years when I had been out there doing work. He’d been trained as a barrister, but had gone to South America for a break before he started working, and he’d come back to London very interested in indigenous cultures, and I met him then. He then joined me, and we had lived in Ladakh for half of the year, and it was very hard then to live in a sort of typical modern city. So, we sought out one of the most remote parts of Spain in Andalusia and bought land there, and we’re thinking of living more in that eco community way, in community close to the land which, you know, Ladakh really inspired, and which is also why I’ve been part of the global eco-village network and so on. But we saw in those Spanish villages so much later than Ladakh, you know, these villages had been through the Inquisition. They had had Muslim invasions where women, you know, often dressed in black, not that incredible, joyous openness that we found in predominantly Buddhist Ladakh, but they still had intergenerational community, much more than, say, in Scandinavia or England. They would still be singing flamenco together. And you would find in this sort of disco late at night a 90-year-old granny and the little baby together with the whole family. And you also found that people were still producing a lot of their food. They had citrus, they were making cheese. You would know where the cows that the milk came from or where the goats were on the hills. They had jamón you know, the ham production from their little black pigs that used to graze in the forest. And we would witness there to the imposition of the outside economy, destroying the local food production. And bringing in gradually, you know, at first the small supermarket after that a bit bigger. And it was it was amazing to see how much was still intact in Spain as late as the 80s. And it was tragic to see that in the 80s, when this new form of globalisation took off, that had such a big impact there, too. In fact, I just want to add that if we look back over change in these last 40 years, we’ll see that almost every corner of the planet we have seen more environmental breakdown, more social breakdown, and it’s been concomitant with a rise in emissions, a rise in pollution and very serious environmental consequences. 

Carl Schlyter:
I think it was really interesting when you mentioned the form of individualism that you found in Ladakh based on inner sense of security and identity. I mean, in our culture, individualism is praised as something very good, but still, it’s also failing in a sense that many people feel really insecure on who they are and why they’re here on this planet. And they tried to replace this insecurity with buying the security of having the brands who have spent billions of dollars to create an image about who you are if you buy this brand. So, it’s interesting to see that even if we have a culture of, you know, praising individualism, we are failing to feel deep inside us and have this inner security that gives you community and content and a base in society.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, and especially that gives you the confidence to be yourself. So, we have to realise that exactly the opposite is happening. The message to the child is only if you have the right car, the right clothes, the right exterior, and even, you know, if you have a PhD and you’re important, only then will you be loved. And so, it’s truly evil to see this happening to young children. The message is, if you go down this path of consumerism, you’ll get the love and sense of belonging that all of us longed for. Instead, what it does is to create evil and creates competition and insecurity. So, it is truly an evil system that does that to our identity, and to our sense of being. It’s very paradoxical in a way, I suppose, but what we’re seeing is not individualism. What’s being touted is that, you know, we’re free and individual, but actually, we’re living in fear and angst about conforming in a way that would give us the love we need. And that was projected by the media, and then got worse with television. And of course, now in social media, it’s got even worse. And you have six-year-old girls who are afraid to even go off their mobile phone for a few minutes because they’re afraid of being left behind. And they take images of themselves constantly to show what a great time they’re having, and then sending that image out. All of it building more insecurity and more fear and more disconnection and, you know, no sense of real connection because to feel really connected, we need to know that people know who we are. They need to know what’s better. They need to know also that we’re not perfect, that we have problems. I mean, this I think this combination of a deep insight into how this corporate global economy affects our inner well-being, the relationship that long distance between my inner well-being, how do I feel about myself and what’s happening out there in that global economy? That is really what our work is about in Local Futures, trying to open people’s eyes to that. I feel we have a very powerful message for helping to build a much, much stronger movement for change than what we’re seeing, you know, particularly again in these last 30, 40 years, there’s been a pressure on the environmental movement to move in the direction of treating symptoms, a narrow focus, and all the time painting a picture where the individual is to blame. So, I feel you know, this great sadness for people, particularly in the West, who are being made to feel that they’re responsible for the planet dying, they’re responsible for poverty in the third world, they’re responsible for not doing anything about climate change. And it’s because they’re so selfish and greedy and they don’t care. And that message is so wrong. And my experience is that a lot of people do care and they’re trying really hard to make change, but they’re being pinned in a corner by government policy that systematically subsidises and supports global corporations and their wealth accumulation, subsidises and supports big global banks. That, by the way, are also making money out of thin air and at the same time, are squeezing and taxing the individual and local placed-based, regional, even national businesses, they’re being squeezed with regulations and taxes. Those global subsidised multinationals have no rules, no rules. That’s what free trade is about. The treaties are about giving them more freedom, no constraints. And I do think we really need to get people to look at the ISDS clauses in those trade treaties. That stands for investor state dispute settlement, where governments are signing in black and white to big corporations. We won’t do anything that might reduce your profit. If we do, you can take us to court. 

Carl Schlyter:
And that’s exactly also why we explain that a little bit more in our episode with Janoo.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Oh, very good, very good. I am so convinced that left, right, green people concerned with social issues, including the epidemic of depression now, you know, we’re just talking about this impact of social media and this pressure on young people. It is in every country that I know about, including now in the Ladakh leading to epidemics of depression among young people and ever-increasing rates of suicide. And in Ladakh, suicide is something that might have happened in a generation and certainly never young people. Now it will be at least one a month, and young people. 

Carl Schlyter:
That’s all over the world, actually, because in the latest W.H.O., they declared loneliness as the main cause of psychological illness in the world today. And that’s also a consequence of this economic system you’re describing. It doesn’t only pressure people from the outside, you’re pressured from the inside. And it forces you to go against what you know is good for your well-being. Spending time on relations and cooperating rather competing and pressing and, you know, making people lonely, making people alone. Also, internally. And then you just follow the race, because that’s the only way to show that you are someone and get some love from the society. So, this is actually breaking down these relationships that we all know makes is happier. Research backs that up. 

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
And it’s so interesting to reflect on the fact that in all the big cities that I have ever been to in the world, I’ve been to a lot. I’ve worked in so many different countries and in the big city, we don’t look each other in the eye. We don’t say hello. We pass each other in this really unnatural way. In smaller towns and villages, people look each other in the eye and say hello, even if they don’t know each other personally. What I’ve come to realise is that also, this more land-based way of life was based on us being interdependent. We depended on each other and that’s part of what we’re seeing now in the new localisation movement, as we were talking about in the farmers market, that they’re starting to build these bonds of interdependence that are mutually supportive, like the consumer with the farmer and the small shop that, you know, the person who runs it. So, traditionally that’s how we evolved interdependent and very importantly, in a multigenerational relationship, not segregated into monocultures. So, this is also connected to that for the extractive global economy, technology has been the tool for bringing more wealth to the top. And it was already with that industrial agriculture. It helped extract more wealth for big business. And even when governments thought that there was subsidising wheat, with wheat farmers, they weren’t actually supporting the farmers, they were supporting Kellogg’s and the big giants that process that and sold it to the consumer. Once you start looking at that difference between people being made depend on distant, essentially global or giant corporations and bank versus being interdependent with one another, you see a different picture from what we normally think about. But then you add to that, that the technologies were responsible for speeding life up, so they speeded up production. So that big machine that harvested, you know, could do it a lot faster then, you know, if you had lots of humans doing it in the field, which, by the way, is also why many people didn’t question modern agriculture, because also what preceded it were colonial relationships where people were working like slaves standing all day in a cotton-field, you know, just picking cotton like a machine. Horrible. So then to bring in a machine looks like real progress. That’s again, the key in localisation is to understand the deeper roots and to go back more to indigenous culture, to find examples of what really works. But then the thing that’s key is for us to really look at how speed is a just an evil, evil way of destroying relationships, a relational way of being to care for and for those parents to see their child and to be present. You know, they need not to be pushed all the time to worry about earning a living and putting food on the table, paying the rent, paying the mortgage, and the speed leads to superficiality. So, I also wrote about that in my book Ancient Futures, about Ladakh because I saw so clearly how it changed human relationships and the superficiality and turn the speed, lazy superficiality, the superficiality needs to this feeling of emptiness, because you’re basically seen for what you look like on the outside, not who you are on the inside. And you only get those relationships of deeper connection when you have more time to know each other, to care for each other and the same thing for the animals, the plants, the waterways that we depend on. 

Carl Schlyter:
I think when you talk about relational economy as compared to transactional economy, it’s really interesting because of course it has an impact on people. If you hide the consequences of production in a transaction, every dollar that buy something is a fair transaction according to modern economic theory. But it hides the relational cost and the distancing from consumers, producers and people and people. And this, of course, has an internal and external cost I would say.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Absolutely. And remember, also, the hiding happens when these distances are so long that you are sitting in your work investing in something in Malaysia, and you have no experiential knowledge. You rely on numbers. You’re told it’s all nicely taken care of; the labour isn’t abused and as a consumer you’re going to the supermarket, we have no idea who produced the food, how many chemicals, and more and more. You know you can’t trust a lot of the information. So, this is again the beauty of the local. Then you start getting the shorter distances. You have more experiential knowledge. And this is a key, here I’m talking more about structures than I am about values. I’m seeing that when people are more structurally interdependent and in a more human scale, slower, smaller situations which can be created in the city, you know, they’re all examples of people coming together in big cities start creating the interdependence there and building bonds, that then allow for much more accountability that also you can see that sense of belonging, that sense of being known, that sense of being appreciated for what you do. And we all need that. We all need to be seen and heard and to feel that we belong. Basically, it comes down to having a need to be loved. 

Carl Schlyter:
I find it funny in a way, because a neoclassical economist would say, oh, but you are not realistic. You hate the market and this is not working. But if you go back to Adam Smith’s original theory about market and based on full information of the things you are buying, your model is actually coming much closer to the original market theories based on full information and feedback loops of information and so on. So, it’s kind of ironic that the modern version of living in the market is actually destroying it with global monopolies and lack of information among each other.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Exactly. But also, do keep in mind, as I say, the early stages of this were global traders. You know, in the slave trade, the cotton, the tea, the coffee. It’s so important, I think, that we learned to think about the global system as an almost sort of empire that’s behind the scene is running thing. And we needed to do that without getting caught up in conspiracy theories where we think, you know, oh, it’s just the Freemasons or just you know, particular groups, but really looking at the structures of that. So again, if you get people to look at governments, or taxing, subsidising and regulating to shape the direction of the economy moving forward, to shape the future, and they are now continuing to deregulate these giant global corporations that, you know, most people are aware they are too big; they are too powerful. But very few people are talking about the fact that governments are continuing to roll out the red carpet and that actually, they’re taking their marching orders from Global Corporation. And I think that what’s needed is the people’s movement that insists on clarity and honesty about this. And let’s start the process of international collaboration, international negotiations. We’re starting this journey where those businesses are going to be forced to belong to democratically accountable unit. They’re no longer going to have this carte blanche to do as they like and to give our countries a marching order. That would be a way of massively reducing emissions, for instance. I mean, one of the first things that would be implemented is that, sorry, we’re not going to keep importing oranges. we have our own oranges, we’re not going to keep importing milk, we’ve got our own milk. If that redundant, what we call insane trade would be within a year prevented the damage, the social disruption so it would be minimal to society. It would be a great improvement for the environment. What would be affected would be the profits of those corporations. But that in and of itself is something that needs to happen. 

Carl Schlyter:
The global trade of course, a large share of it is also made for internal tax reasons among companies rather than actual practical needs.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, I see if we can get the bigger picture out and the message is please don’t blame yourself. Please instead, wake up to the economic trajectory, to the economic system. Join a movement for curtailing this exploitation, for shifting the direction of the economy. Let’s realise that stopping the import and export of the same products. And it’s not just food. I mean, food is the most dramatically ridiculous, but it’s happening with plastic waste. It’s happening with batteries, uranium, old-growth forest logs, import and export. That stopping that with massively reduce emissions systemically. So, we have seductions there, but we need to come together to create the political momentum and the honest discussion of that. It’s beginning to happen. I’m very pleased now that the sort of corruption at these COP meetings is beginning to be explored. More sustainable, ethical investment is also being exposed more for what it is. So again, without demonising particular people, particular businesses, just clarity. You know, we have a message that can help people feel less bad about themselves. And then what we’re recommending is starting right now, the journey of localisation. And that’s the journey of reconnection. So, we’re saying that if you come together in the area where you live with like-minded people, and you start exploring a journey that is both about personal well-being but also healing the planet by understanding the big picture, we have a very positive vision to offer people. And our big problem is it’s very difficult to get into the media. 

Carl Schlyter:
I think that’s a really nice way to think about it, because we need both inner development of people, the creation of local cooperation among people. But we also definitely need to do something about that the farmer taking his or her truck to the market is going to pay more fuel taxes than the executive flying his private jet from New York to London, or the boat with produce from bananas to Brazil to Europe. They’re going to pay less taxes and fuel taxes on that trip than the farmer going to the local market. So, this shows that the system is rigged.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, yeah. 

Carl Schlyter:
The system is rigged for the global economy, not for the local economy. And that’s destroying our planet and creating unnecessary emissions that are easily abated.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Exactly. But then again, you know what I became aware of as I had my eyes open to a lot of this in the Ladakh, and by the way, you know, one of the first things was seeing butter that had been transported over the Himalayas and transported for a couple of weeks comes in and sells for half the price of butter that’s been produced a five-minute walk away, exactly as you were saying. 

Carl Schlyter:
Why was it so that half the price, what made it the production of it so cheap in monetary terms, how come? How could they produce it so cheap? 

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
This is where it gets very tricky because what I try to spell out in my book, in the Ancient Futures, is that I saw the systemic levers whereby the education for urbanisation, for urban jobs, the crowding together. And in the city, they’re destroying the local production, just structurally became part of this systemic build up, creating more dependence on far away. You have to look at the really big picture to look at the roots of, you have to see, you know, not just, the education alone, but then the subsidies for energy already starting, you know, right at the beginning of this development. So that energy subsidised for those trucks, just as you were saying, to come for weeks away, all the Himalayan mountains creating massive clouds of pollution, etc., etc. So, it’s I mean, it’s amazing how big the win, win, win is of localising. But I also just want to add here because I think very important point about localisation that people don’t understand is we’re talking here about economic localisation. We’re talking about economic globalisation and is particularly important that we distinguish between economic globalisation and international collaboration. So economic globalisation has been this process of allowing corporations to move as they like to have no rules and also, not to bear any taxes. Completely unfair, playing field, but what we really need to recognise is that this process has been going on, you know, people are blind to it. Most economists are not looking at the consequences of it, they’re not being forced to look at, oh, what’s happened this year to create this unemployment, to create the discontent, to create the pollution. There has not been a big picture analysis of this.

Carl Schlyter:
What was the unemployment rate in Ladakh when you first arrived there?

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
It never existed, you know, for thousands of years no such thing as unemployment, no such thing as real poverty. But also, what I wanted to say is that international collaboration is more important than ever today. So many people confuse the two and think that globalisation is about collaboration. They become quite anti localisation because they think it’s some kind of selfish retreat and some kind of nasty protectionism. 

Carl Schlyter:
I think we can take the butter as a good example there that you talked about, why is it economically half the price? Well, of course because the feed for the giant cattle farms, industry farms, it’s imported from somewhere else without paying the taxes, without paying the cost of deforestation for its feed production, without giving the workers reasonable working conditions or salaries. It’s based on externalising all the costs of the production of that butter. That’s why it’s cheaper. So, it’s only cheaper in monetary terms when you buy it, the cost for society and the environment. And then necessary climate and environmental adaptations. That’s going to be paid by the taxpayer of future generations. So, it’s fake cheap butter. That’s important to remember. I think.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, I want to say that it’s also really important to remember that when you have more small-scale economies, the externalities are obvious. If you had a town, even a town of say, you know, 10,000, there’s no way that they could cut all the trees down and call that progress. They wouldn’t be able to have an insanity like GDP. They wouldn’t be able to have all these externalities. Because the whole point is that when you’re dealing yourself from that land around you that is visible, it’s experiential knowledge. You also know that you won’t have enough water for it and, you know, could it be wasting it on luxuries when you know that you need it for your well-being and for producing the things, you really need? So, key again, is the scale. So, the scale of the global economic activity has automatically created this blindness, so-called externalities.

Carl Schlyter:
I think that’s really interesting. Like if you would have a psychopathic company leader in that town destroying the streams water quality, where all the children of the town are swimming, that would not be considered a successful leader. It will be hated by the whole society.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Exactly, and partly that hate, that disapproval. And on the other side, the approval. Because don’t forget, so many people are driven by wanting to be admired. And so, we see a lot of these billionaires not showing off with their yachts and this and that, because actually this is what’s driving people. But one thing I also want to say very importantly about localisation is that we are not advocating for a world where you couldn’t have bigger businesses and would they would be stopped from collaborating with other businesses in other countries. So many people today believe that we couldn’t have even the telephone, or the airplane or the car or any of these modern technologies without globalisation. So, let’s remind our listeners; no globalisation, saying that big businesses don’t have to have any rules, not even any real accountability in terms of how much pollution they emit and how many toxic chemicals. That is not something that most people would approve of. So global collaboration either between business would be fine. However, what is not fine is that those global corporations move around without any rules and impose on our government. Their needs are to extract more profit from us. 

Carl Schlyter:
That’s so true. And it’s ironic that it’s called deregulation. So, it’s like it’s not even the terminology deregulation is true. It’s re-regulating everything to favour the biggest, the strongest in the financial sector. That’s important to remember. 

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Again, you know, one could write a book about it because it is, as I say, a driver of people rejecting and resenting government interference. That is because no one has spelled out to them that what governments are implementing is actually the wishes of these global corporations and banks that they become subservient to them. 

Carl Schlyter:
But I think you should see that the root cause is like often the greenies or lefties are accused of wanting more regulation, but people fail to see. The root cause is that we have deregulated global corporations. We have taken away relationship-based economy with a transaction-based economy where you lose the trust in each other. So, if you have a society with no trust, then you need to regulate more in order to avoid people exploiting the lack of regulation because there’s no trust keeping people in control. 

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
I’m so hoping that in the next few years we will see the new economy movement growing and growing so that when they talk about systems change, they really do take on the more clearly and honestly at the global economic system. I’m quite fed up with hearing a lot about systems change, that very little about a truly honest analysis and study of how the global economic system operates, how it is literally the same corporations and banks having an impact on virtually every corner of the world having an impact on life itself. And I think people are rightly calling it a death economy because it is now so full of toxic ways of dealing, you know, human destruction, environmental destruction. I think that building that movement, perhaps the most important thing right now would be to study the impact of the global economy and look at its impact on people in terms of pushing them to run faster and faster, to just put food on the table and a roof over their head. Remember, the calculations are not very helpful if they simply look at, oh, how many dollars are they earning now as opposed to ten years ago? The way to show the crime that’s happening would be to look at how many hours are you working to just meet that basic need of food and shelter? The middle class in virtually every country is getting poorer and poorer. And you know, I was talking earlier about time and it’s so scary because it also takes time for people to just look up and be willing to think about where things are heading as they’re being pushed more and more to just deal with those basic needs. It’s very hard for them to take the time to do that. 

Carl Schlyter:
And then adding all the unnecessary, not beneficial forced choices of the neoliberal economy takes even more time away from people.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Absolutely. 

Carl Schlyter:
Let’s say you would then have the power to change laws and regulations and financial system. Where would you start? 

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Well, I mean, really it would be if I were Emperor of the world, I would call together the social and environmental movement. And, you know, once it was a wake up, we would be insisting on sitting around the table with governments to start regulating the global and look at creative decentralisation or localisation, which would involve a certain amount of deregulation of the local, of the things that prevent eco villages, for instance, that prevent healthy farming, often in the name of preventing sprawl and so on. A lot of it is nonsense. So, it would be a question of that process or regulating the global, which, as I say, could almost overnight bring huge benefits and prevent that import and export of identical products and also ensure that those giants are starting to pay tax. But the goal would be to move in the direction where over a few years they have to choose a place and they are going to be there and they’re going to be accountable to that society. And probably what would need to remain would be something like a WEF, you know, World Environmental Forum instead of a World Trade Organisation or World Economic Forum. So, the World Environmental and Social Forum that through international collaboration with the vigilance of people closer to the ground, people actually in a more decentralised, localised ways, with eyes open, providing information to the centre, which is not an easy task that is also not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible to provide that information in the local area and the region. And we already seeing in the localisation movement the benefits of that. And we really are seeing particularly the worldwide local food movement demonstrating these multiple benefits, you know, reducing emissions in transport, reducing plastic packaging, reducing the need for the chemicals, and preservatives you know, encouraging more diversified, genuine organic production, rebuilding community. And very importantly, as people connect over soil and seed, we are seeing a spiritual healing, a psychological healing that is so inspiring. You know, I’ve seen prisoners, I’ve seen torture victims, I’ve seen depressed people who have deeply benefited from that reconnection of building the community and building the deep connection to nature, and including that the production of something that everybody needs and wants and values, which is tasty, healthy food.

Carl Schlyter:
Oh, thank you so much for this Helena, I think it’s kind of an interesting, mind opening thing here that for people who really want deregulation, you need to switch from the current economy to a trust and relationship built one where you can deregulate because the community would step in and do the reasonable and necessary measures to make sure you are within the line of the community. I think, if you show all neoliberals and right-wing people who want this deregulation, the reason why you get so much regulation is because we have deregulated in favour of giant corporations and the society fights back against the negative impact. So, if you want a real deregulation, start fighting for decentralisation, trust-based economy, relationship-based economy, then you would have a bigger chance of getting that. That’s my final call, I think. Thank you so much for opening my eyes for that.

Helena Norberg-Hodge:
And thank you. Thanks so much for doing this podcast and hope to be in touch again.