Talk given by Helena Norberg-Hodge at the Advaya event Economics of Happiness: Post-Growth, Localisation & Wellbeing, 6 June 2017. About the Talk: The Economics of Happiness
Helena describes the emerging localisation movement - the greatest sign of hope today. In city and country, people are demonstrating a path to reweave the community fabric, restore secure livelihoods, biodiversity and genuine productivity, while reducing pollution. Helena highlights the steps needed to turn this grassroots movement into policy.
About the Speaker:
Helena Norberg-Hodge, Local Futures
Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the local economy movement. Through writing and public lectures, she has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for four decades. She is a widely respected analyst of the impact of the global economy and international development on local communities, local economies, and personal identity, and is a leading proponent of ‘localisation’, or decentralisation, as a means of countering those impacts. For this work she was awarded the prestigious Goi Peace prize in 2012 and Arthur Morgan award in 2017.
Since 1975, she has worked with the people of Ladakh, or “Little Tibet”, to find ways of enabling their culture to meet the modern world without sacrificing social and ecological values. For these efforts she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, or ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’.
Helena’s seminal book, Ancient Futures has been described as “an inspirational classic,” offering guidelines for a better future. Together with the film of the same title, it has been translated into more than 40 languages, and sold about half a million copies. She is also the producer and co-director of the award-winning film, The Economics of Happiness. Helena has written numerous articles, essays, and book chapters, and is the co-author of two groundbreaking books on food and farming: Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture.
Helena has lectured at numerous universities including Oxford, Harvard, Melbourne, Tokyo, Stockholm, Munich and Berkeley, and taught regularly at Schumacher College. She appeared in media worldwide, including MSNBC, The London Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian.
Helena is the founder/director of Local Futures and The International Alliance for Localization (IAL). She is also a founding member of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.
Read more: www.localfutures.org
About the event:
We all know that our current economic system isn't working. It is an economy based on ravaging the Earth's finite resources and on immense social injustice. To ensure a more democratic, sustainable and prosperous future we need to look to radical, ethical solutions that go beyond the debt-growth trap. We need to find an economic system where ecological sustainability, social justice, and financial stability go hand in hand: an economy that meets the needs of all, not just the privileged few, and allows us to thrive.
At this event we were joined by HELENA NORBERG HODGE, the groundbreaking activist and pioneer of the local economy movement, and JASON HICKEL, anthropologist, author and spokesperson on global inequality, post-development, and ecological economics.
We explored the growing worldwide movement for de-growth and economic localisation and came to understand the situation our economic system has put us in in order to mobilise ourselves to take a stand against current economic thinking.
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