Helena Norberg-Hodge: Reorienting towards economics of happiness (ep364)
“There’s a lot of awareness about the direct lobbying of big money in politics. But that doesn’t take into account the much more dangerous way that big money is shaping the narrative through the media, even through funding in science and academia. That has led to this narrow fixation on carbon and an embrace of robots and satellites as the way to deal with climate change.”
In this episode, we revisit our past conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, a pioneer of the new economy movement and a leading proponent of “localization” (or decentralization). As the author of Ancient Futures and Local is Our Future, she also founded The International Alliance for Localization and Local Futures, which works to renew ecological, social and spiritual wellbeing by guiding communities towards a sustainable future of interconnected, localized economies.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include the limitations of using economic wealth as the indicator of a community’s quality of life, the false promises of “progress” and “development”, the role of economic globalization in driving an erosion of relationships and spiritual connection, and more.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Forest Veil
Episode references:
“The Economics of Happiness”, a film by Local Futures
Ancient Futures, a book by Helena Norberg-Hodge
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Helena Norberg-Hodge: I was lucky to grow up in Sweden where we had beautiful, wild nature and people tend to spend a lot of time outside. My fondest memories are outside with my parents, picking mushrooms in the autumn and by the sea in the summer. I was very privileged that way.
I became passionately involved in defending nature after I arrived in a place called Ladakh or Little Tibet, which had just been opened to outsiders after having been sealed off from the world forever. It was snowed in, and it was so remote up on the Tibetan plateau, the part of Tibet that belong to India. In the modern era, it was very sensitive strategically. There were armies on the border, and no one was allowed to go there. Then it was thrown open in the mid-70s and I came as a foreigner.
I was a linguist and I was going to help a film team and just stay there for six weeks. But I absolutely fell in love with the place and the people, and stayed on for us to do a dictionary and help to write down the spoken language for the first time.
As I was collecting folk stories and learning the language and going to this region, which is quite big but has a small population of about 100,000 people…
I realized that as it had been opened up to tourism, it had [also] been opened up to development.
There were all these changes coming in, all of them based on fossil fuels and glamorizing urban consumer culture. I ended up at first trying to counter that with renewable energy and with information about the West. That was the beginning of my becoming very actively and passionately involved in defending nature worldwide.
Kamea Chayne: Your film titled “The Economics of Happiness” starts off by saying that today not only do we have social, economic, and ecological issues, which we've become quite familiar with at this point, but it also says that we're facing a spiritual crisis. Can you walk us through what you see as our most prevalent big-picture issues today, as well as help us understand what you mean by us having a “spiritual” crisis?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: Yes. I came to see from this unusual vantage point of living inside an ancient, nature-based culture, essentially an Indigenous culture.
I came to see that the dominant economic system has brought a multitude of systemic problems. I saw it there in a very clear way where advertising, schooling, and certainly all images glamorized an urban consumer culture, made people [seem as if they were] stupid and backward, if they lived close to the land. And if they were farmers, they were nobody.
I saw that the whole system, in the modern era, by subsidizing global trade, destroyed the local economy and created this ever-increasing dependence on transported goods—especially food. Suddenly butter was arriving in the local market and selling for half the price of a local butter from a farm down the road, after having been transported for a week, over the Himalayas. [All this sudden] air pollution, plastic packaging, and refrigeration had a huge impact on the environment.
Suddenly, people [were being] pushed into the city, looking for artificially scarce employment, that had never existed before. There was plenty of work to do to provide your food, clothing, or shelter, but there had never been such a thing as unemployment. Now people were suddenly fighting for scarce jobs, which led to local friction and divisiveness.
I saw that the breakdown of the connections to nature and the connections to each other led to a deep spiritual crisis.
It's hard for us to see everything from climate change to the widening gap between rich and poor, and [to see] that we have a worldwide epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction, and even suicide among young people all around the world. Many people are not [even] aware that it's worldwide. The tragedy is that many people blame themselves. It's absolutely tragic, particularly for parents, if their child commits suicide—this self-blame and guilt are just horrendous.
We are working very hard to try to get people to look [at] the big picture and to see something going on here beyond “me”. We need to work together to change a system that creates so much competition, such a sense of loneliness and isolation, such deep insecurity and loss of self-esteem. This is coming from a system—ultimately an economic system.
There's a lot more to say. Part of it is also that this system is pushing us all to run faster and faster and faster, and actually to work much harder than we used to in really ancient, Native-based cultures. The speed leads to superficiality. [So] the course of our encounters are fleeting and very short. The superficial becomes important. It becomes important whether you have a fancy car or whether you're very pretty and qualities of being kind or intelligent or having a sense of humor or being good at something, all of that becomes less important. We don't see that we're known for who we really are.
We don't feel that we have the deep connection that we evolved with, and that creates a deep sense of belonging [poverty] and spiritual poverty.
Kamea Chayne: I feel like because we have a broken and misvalued economic model, we really have to question the idea of wealth and poverty.
When we speak of poverty, to me, that's a sweeping statement that doesn't actually reveal how the people in that community are doing, because I think when we have a community that has a localized economy, people can be considered “poor”, relative to the global economy, but still be living in ways that are self-sufficient and even abundant with their own standards.
Where I personally see issues arise is when we have people living in poverty while being dependent on the national or global economy, where their relative lack of financial wealth leads to their oppression and marginalization. You touched on this earlier and I believe you illustrated this point in your book Ancient Futures as well, where you spoke to your experience witnessing the transformation that happened to little Tibet, going from being self-reliant to them being influenced by the outside markets and Western idea of progress, where they then became vulnerable to social and environmental injustice entering the context of that global economy.
Can you expand more on this challenging of our persistent idea of relative wealth, [wealth that abstracts from real] community welfare?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: Yes, and it's also a little more complicated than that, because...
In the modern economy, it has been assumed that self-reliance, which is defined as subsistence, is the enemy, that it's the most horrible, backbreaking, and terrible existence.
We've had hundreds of years of support for what we call progress and growth. [Through witnessing] this very rapid change, I got a very dramatic picture of it. You could see very clearly that traditionally, people had learned that if they had a house, they had clothing, they had fresh food, and they didn't have to pay a penny for it. It was local trade. It was regional trade. There was even global trade. But most of the global trade was for luxuries, not for everyday needs.
The picture that's being painted [now] is that people who live that way—people who do not have hunger, are well-fed, and are really not suffering… that's defined as zero. [And] when they move into the city and earn 50 cents a day, that's calculated as “progress”. On the charts, it looks as though millions, billions of people were moved out of poverty in China and India in the last 20 years or so. It's really not true. You look at the reality on the ground and [see that] when you're more “self-reliant” in that way, you have really a genuine wealth that we have lost, in the West.
[It’s] the wealth of having access to really fresh, uncontaminated food. The wealth of having so much time. This issue of time is perhaps one of the most important. I really worry that the current system is pushing us forward to run so fast just to survive. Even as activists trying to raise awareness or protect the forests or protect something, we're all running faster and faster. It prevents us from looking at the bigger picture and just stopping and seeing how is it that there are so many problems.
What are really the causes of climate change? How can it be that we only hear about us changing our light bulb and driving a different car, and never talking about industry and what happens when industry all moves to the so-called developing world or the poor countries and thereby massively increases emissions? Almost everything we need is produced in China. Everything is transported much further, and packaged much more extensively. Yet we don't hear about industry changing. We just hear about us not using single-use, plastic and so on. It's very unfortunate that we're not getting the big picture.
To come back to the poverty thing, there are also studies that will show that if you live side by side with people that are much better off than you are, it creates more problems. In cultures that are more egalitarian, there have been studies that show that people are generally a bit more contented. But that's different from the issues that we're trying to raise awareness about, which is this fundamental shift of pushing people into mega-urban centers and destroying rural society.
We urgently need to understand the link between the globalizing corporate economy and mega-urbanization.
If it continues, we are walking straight into the arms of drones and satellites and 3D printing—a high-tech digital economy where the human is being dumped and where the capacity for human beings to feel that they have meaningful work and that they're relating to each other in a meaningful way will be decimated. We've got to understand there's this other path that we can already see, if we look more closely around the world; that there is another path being built from the bottom up… that we call localization.
It's about rebuilding more local human, face-to-face relationships, more real human interdependence, and a clearer relationship between what we use, what we eat, what building materials we have, the resources we use, and the land from which it comes. It's about shortening distances wherever possible. In this new localization movement, you have a more intergenerational community; people have longer, more meaningful relationships; people enjoy their lives more.
Kamea Chayne: It's almost as if in our pursuit of modernization and our perceived view of luxury, we're losing sight of what is truly meaningful and important to our holistic well-being. Localization, in part, can help to bring us closer to the things that really matter to us.
Helena Norberg-Hodge: Absolutely. We need to also remember that this training for us to be looking at consumerism and so on as a way forward is already in schools. There are all types of structural ways [in which] we're being encouraged to go down a path of competition, artificial scarcity, and losing sight of the living people on which we ultimately depend. We are now being made to depend on them through a vast, complicated techno-economic global structure.
We're not being given the choice of what we would rather subsidize: fresh untainted food (and thereby supporting local farmers) or transport, fossil fuels, plastics, refrigeration, and monocultures. The large ecosystem depends on monoculture in the land for food, forestry, fishery, and larger-scale machinery that can't deal with diversity.
At the same time, we're having a global consumer culture that these days allows different racial characteristics to be seen. It used to be totally white-skinned. Now, you can see people with different racial characteristics, but they all share the glamor of urban consumer culture and that's being imposed.
What we have to recognize is we have a system that in its techno-economic global structures cannot really tolerate life. Because it can't tolerate the fact that every single blade of grass, every single cell in our bodies, every single one of us is unique and changing.
In order for us to live lives where we can respect that richness and diversity of life, we must scale down and slow down. That's what localization is really about.
Kamea Chayne: Not only do we have a globalized economy that puts everybody in competition with one another, but we also have globalized politics where instead of governments focusing on serving their people's needs, they may also be making decisions based on what can give them a leg up in the international community, that may not necessarily always be the best for their own people.
What are some ways you see globalized politics having impacted the lives of everyday citizens around the world?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: What I'm seeing from my native country of Sweden to America where I've lived, to India and Ladakh, China, and Korea where we also work—we're very unusual because we're a very small organization, but we work really globally at the grassroots—is that when politicians seek connection, they're talking to the citizens who are voting for them and they talk about our needs and they talk about the environment, [and yet] ministers in power seem to be listening to other voices. Voices that come from the very large sums of deregulated finance in the global marketplace.
The news is about: what does the market think of this? How are the markets responding? What is “the market”? That market is essentially ruled now by algorithms. These huge flows of money that are being created by deregulated financial institutions and banks deregulated—even though in 2008 the whole world knew that we needed to regulate the banks. It was so clear that in their blind trading they were ignorant of the damage they were creating to society.
We were told: “Oh, the banks are too big to fail. We can't allow them to fail.” Of course, there could be a policy path whereby we don't have to make these institutions fail, we just have to intellectually get our head around what's going on in this deregulated marketplace, meaning…
There are global treaties, global conventions, and even climate conventions that are now being shaped by enormous corporations and deregulated money. They are continuing to further the wealth of a smaller and smaller minority of people through these giant corporations, creating in every single country an obscenely wide gap between rich and poor and all the time, promoting a path that uses more energy, more technology, and leaves more people behind, with unemployment and poverty increasing in every country.
Global politics really is national governments responding to the pressure of the deregulated global market.
The deregulation is particularly through trade and finance treaties. But even in the climate conventions, tragically, it's big business that's setting the agenda. That, among other things, is why we don't hear about the business side of things. We just keep hearing about the individuals. I feel so sorry, especially for people in the West, who are being made to feel that it's your fault. You are destroying the climate. You're taking us towards extinction and it's only because you are so greedy and you just want to hold on to your lifestyle.
It's a completely misleading narrative.
The understanding of how our governments responding to the global market are selling us and the planet down the tube, and [they’re] able to do so because they are too specialized. They're allowed to tell a story about growth and progress, and are allowed to tell us and themselves that they have to keep growing their global trade and global corporations, in order to provide jobs, in order to keep the world turning around.
So, it's really up to us who are feeling the pain at the grassroots, at the level of poverty and the ecocide that's going on, to have greater ecological as well as economic literacy and spell out much more clearly these connections so that politicians will now be listening to civic society. We will have representatives who actually are speaking the truth or addressing the need for, first of all, a genuine democracy, which means that you do not have global media determining the debate, shaping the discourse you actually have. We will have sources of information that are provided through civic society’s consent, so you don't have big money funding the big ideas you have.
There's a lot of awareness about the direct lobbying of big money in politics. But that does not take into account the much more dangerous way that big money is shaping the discourse and the narrative through the media, even through funding in science and academia.
That has led to this narrow fixation on carbon and essentially an embrace of robots and satellites as the way to deal with climate change.
Countries are going to be forced to calculate things through high-tech sensors. Agriculture is going to be with robots and satellites. They're even talking in the FAA about the gamification of agriculture. That though people don't want to farm, young people love playing games on the screen, and [so] now they'll be able to do that. You can sit on a screen and manipulate [things] so that 2000 miles away, the harvest or the watering or whatever will take place. I can tell you that is absolute ecocide. Suicide is completely wrapped up in violence, in terms of selling patented seeds and genetic modification. Now the climate emergency is being used as an excuse to impose this on countries.
Kamea Chayne: I don't like where this is going.
Helena Norberg-Hodge: I know. I would just like to say I just hope the listeners will not hear this only as depressing, but hear it as an opportunity to, in a strategic way, raise awareness about the key elements of a system that is imposing a systemic crisis. There is a way of really seeing a thread, a way that we can deal with multiple problems in a single focus. And this doesn't mean that all activists around the world are suddenly going to link into one homogenous organization.
But I think if people who are concerned about poverty, people concerned about climate, people concerned about the epidemic of depression, the loss of democracy, and on and on can see that all of us must focus on this economic transition... It's an economic transition that is about regaining genuine democracy. It's something I believe that [if you look at] the big picture, could, in a relatively short time, lead to the most powerful, the biggest people's movement we've ever had. Until now, most movements have been focused more narrowly; they've not been touching on elements that really affect every human being.
Kamea Chayne: Seeing as though we're on a projected path to continually globalize, are there positives that come from this trend? If so, how can we move forward to take the good parts of globalization while localizing our economy and politics?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: Well, I think we need to understand that...
It's the globalization of the economy that is problematic, and that is essentially because our governments have been rolling out the red carpet for global business.
Multinational organizations can, as they do, threaten national governments by saying, “If you don't do as we say, we'll go elsewhere.” They have been building up a legal structure that says, “If you don't do as we say, we will sue you and we want you to sign in black and white right here that you will not do anything that could reduce our profit-making potential.”
What's being created is a global government that is profitable for the few at the expense of the many. Most people in this world, I believe, wouldn’t go along with this if they knew about it, if they understood it, and if it could be spelled out in a simple, clear language for people. The biggest problem we have is that too few people are actually looking at those bigger connections globally.
Rather than talk about taking the good parts of globalization, I would prefer that we talk about how we can ensure that we have more intercultural dialogue, exchange, deep dialogue, and collaboration. We need much better ways of really knowing what's going on in the rest of the world. We actively have to look for sources of information about what's going on to have a better sense.
We need to be collaborating, and, particularly, destroying the multiple myths that separate the Global North from the Global South, the so-called developed from the so-called developing countries. That's partly what we have done in our work—respond to people from the so-called “Third World,” and come to the West to engage with people here who are trying to change things here because they know that it's not working for us either socially, ecologically, or democratically. That's a very important reality check for people who are led to believe that in America, the streets are paved with gold.
Reality checks going both ways are very important.
Kamea Chayne: Seeing that our current multinational corporations already have so much power and influence and also that we have an economic system set up to continually benefit those at the very top, how do we work with this going forward and what do we need most to be able to localize our economy? Can we do this as individuals? What do we need most to be able to go against the grain of how our society currently functions?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: My experience is that the number one thing we should try to do is link up with some like-minded individuals, ideally close to where we live, but otherwise identify some sources from some websites and magazines, something so that you're engaging with people who are more or less on the same page. To try to imagine what can I do as a single individual, it's still far too daunting. But the minute you change it into a “we,” suddenly that's deeply socially empowering.
Ideally, we also understand that we need a two-track thing where we start building economic lifeboats right now. These lifeboats, what's so wonderful about them is that we can simultaneously increase the quality of our life, the health of our food, the health in our homes in terms of building materials, and building a deep community.
Taking steps to localize where you live can be in the city, can be the country. There are millions of initiatives going on.
There's so much more going on that is genuinely healing, that is genuinely taking us in exactly the opposite direction of the path that big business and government are trying to take. I rejoice every day at getting as much good news virtually in my inbox as I get bad news. I'm amazed at how much is happening when there's so much pressure on us. Time pressure, taxes, subsidies, and regulations are all working in the opposite direction. People-power and the power of nature just shine through. We long for something else. It's how we evolved.
We are a part of nature and we do need to feel connected to other people. We've been told that “No, no, no, you should be proud of not meeting anyone and proud of being able to be alone.” All of us know we evolved in groups. We need to start taking those steps to rebuild at a deep level these more community-based, ecologically-based [connections]. And again, ecologically-based can be right in the city. It can improve our physical as well as spiritual well-being.
But we also try to encourage people to pursue the second track, which is to—also, ideally as a group—pursue activities to educate ourselves more and to help get the word out about the bigger picture and how we have to rethink politics and the economy. That is how we put pressure to start shifting taxes, subsidies, and regulations to support more human-scale, bio-regional, and even national businesses, as opposed to global, unaccountable, and often invisible corporations.
This has to do with a whole series of things that have to do with banking. Who makes money, meaning literally who has the right to print money? Where is the world going to go if we move away from it? If we move to a cashless society? It's actually a very dangerous step. I'm worried that there are so many idealists who think that blockchain could work for us.
Everything we're seeing is that it's actually part of the direction that the corporate system wants us to go. It's completely dependent on these digital robotized systems.
Now, there's a big push to make carbon the currency. Carbon will be measured with sensors in ways that ordinary humans can't. It means reliance on patented, expensive technology and a type of enslavement through this very expensive technology that's completely linked to the military as well, so it's a very frightening, [un-human] path that is being promoted.
I've been just recently at meetings, and the head of the IMF was there, and I had time to talk to her at length. I got to speak on a panel with the head of finance in the EU and someone from Unilever and so on. It's so clear that they don't have the big picture, so they can happily mouth mantras about “growth” and the big defense they've been having for decades now. They said, “Well, yes, the global economy hasn't worked very well in the West, but don’t anyone try to tell us that it hasn't benefited billions of Chinese and Indians.”
It's not true, in a real sense. When a place like Delhi has gone from a city where people could survive to one where now they regularly have alarms that you can't let children out [because] the air is so polluted, when you have the gap between rich and poor growing the way it is, when you have fundamentalism and factions and racism growing as it is.
We really do have to wake up [and acknowledge the] fundamentalism, the politics of identity, where the whole system encourages a narrow focus on very narrow special interests, instead of [encouraging us to look] at the bigger picture where we can link hands for a change—[which] would benefit all of us.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication or book that you've read?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: Resurgence Magazine from England.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay positive and inspired?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: To be grateful for the beauty and the joy that's still around me and alive. I've tried to flood myself with that feeling of gratitude, and also to feel grateful for the fact that I have very meaningful work that keeps me going.
Kamea Chayne: What's one thing you're working on right now for your health?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: Making sure that I get enough exercise every day, trying to walk a minimum of an hour a day, and trying to spend more time meditating.
Kamea Chayne: What's one thing you're working on right now to live more sustainably and regenerative?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: I'm trying to do more writing about liberating people from the guilt—feelings of not living “the green life,” which is, for most people, too expensive. My husband and I can actually afford to buy local organic food, and that's what we do. But I do not believe that we should be telling people they must do this, or otherwise, you're not pure enough. There's a whole discussion there about changing our individual lifestyles that I want to write more about.
Kamea Chayne: What makes you most hopeful for our planet at the moment?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: My absolute conviction is that people all around the world want a deeper connection with each other and with nature. They're showing it in a million ways. They look at the pattern of wealthy people who can afford it. They're spending more time in nature. Many of them are turning to farming.
We mustn't fall for the corporate trap of calling it elitist and dismissing it. We should be looking at the evidence that people actually want to have those types of connections, whether it's connections to animals, nature, or each other. I can show you dozens of projects that also heal deeply, heal people from addiction, from anger. Those who are gardening want connection, want love. Once they get that, they are loving and wonderful people. So my great faith in human nature goes against the dominant narrative—that's what gives me hope.
Kamea Chayne: Helena, thank you so much for inspiring us to really take a step back and to examine and understand this bigger picture. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Helena Norberg-Hodge: To keep dreaming, but really turn it into a dream not just of the Earth, but of people who are happy and healthy. We need to be aware that there is a path that is equally healing for people as it is for nature. It's the same direction. My message is to dream of human and ecological well-being.
