In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations of a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and your fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And my guest this week is one of the elders of our culture. Helena Norberg-hodge is a linguist and author, a filmmaker, and the founder and director of the international non-profit Local Futures, in which role she has initiated localisation movements on every continent and has launched both the International Alliance for Localisation and World Localisation Day. She wrote the books Ancient Futures, Learning from Ladakh and Local is Our Future and she’s a producer of several films, including The Economics of Happiness and the more recent one Closer to Home. There are links to all of these in the show notes, as well as a more detailed biography for Helena. She and I met when I was at Schumacher College. I rented a room in her house for a while, so we know each other fairly well, and this means I was able to press her in ways I wouldn’t normally feel able or willing to do with a podcast guest. It meant we could drill down into the details of her ideas for a different way of being at heart. We need to get rid of global trade. We need to stop the globalisation and the hegemony of the multinationals so that we can move back to a localist economy based in sufficiency. The devil is in the detail, and I’m still not wholly clear how we get there. But if we have an idea of where we need to go, if we can unify around a common narrative, then we stand a far greater chance of getting there. So here we go, speaking with one of the genuine elders of our time, people of the podcast please do welcome Helena Norberg-hodge

Manda: Helena, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this sunny September afternoon?

Helena: I am in Badminton in the UK and it’s a glorious day.

Manda: Isn’t it? Yeah, I only know Badminton as a place where horse trials happen. What else happens in badminton?

Helena: Well, there’s someone named Tracy Worcester, who’s been a bit of a rebel and someone I’ve been collaborating with for the last 30 some years.

Manda: Fantastic. And you have good bandwidth, which is lovely because this is our second conversation, because the first one got eaten by the bandwidth gremlins. So we’re hoping that even though this is on zoom, which isn’t such good sound, sorry people, that we’ll get good things. So quite a lot of the world has changed since you and I spoke in the summer, but some things are still the same. So what is most alive for you at the moment in your world, of all that you’re doing to create that better future that our hearts know is possible?

Helena: What’s most alive for me is that I see more and more people, and more and more really good projects, suffering from a global economic system that is making everyone poorer. And I mean financially poorer as well as time poor. And what’s alive for me is that I do see more people waking up. And so those who have been talking about systems change but refused to look at the global economic system are now beginning to be willing to do that. And I think this is the last piece in what is actually a huge cultural turning, where all around the world, in every country where I’ve worked and I’ve been working in at least 20 countries on the ground for the last almost 50 years. And I’ve been in touch with more than that; about 40, 50 language groups. And this is a huge cultural turning, where people know that they want back home to nature. They want back home to a community fabric that is essential for our mental health and for a more intelligent and wise way of interacting with one another and with the living world. So there’s this huge cultural turning that is wonderfully positive, but most of the people who are engaged in rebuilding healthier structures and in a myriad of ways, you know, healing the land, healing torture victims and prisoners through helping them engage in deep community dialogue with each other and with the land. Those people generally have not thought it necessary to articulate their rejection of the globalising commercial path, which has tended to be rather invisible. And I think that’s the missing piece. And I’m convinced that it’s possible before I die that that there will be that wake up.

Manda: Okay, so you’re not dying yet. We’re establishing that.

Helena: Not yet.

Manda: But this sounds really exactly on point for the podcast. And I would like to come to the economics because I think that’s, as you said, that is the missing piece. But for people who haven’t followed you for the last several decades, can you just give us a very edited highlight of how you came to be somebody who is talking to many, many nations and many language groups about the changes that we need?

Helena: Yes, I do realise that my major big, big lesson was in Ladakh or Little Tibet, high on the Tibetan Plateau. But I realise now that my history of being mainly Swedish, but having family in Germany and England, having lived in those three countries, having lived in America, had already got me questioning cultural differences, before the age of 20. And I’d been speculating on why is it that in America there is more violence, there’s more unhappiness, there’s more unrest than in most of the European countries I knew. And I had already become aware that the mobility that uprooted people, so that growing up already in the 70s, children would have moved about seven times before they reached adulthood. And I was already a bit aware of that. But I was still, like most Westerners, aware there is something very wrong in the world, but I was certainly not pinpointing the global economy as the main reason for most of the psychological, social, spiritual, ecological and economic crisis facing all of us. And that is what I got to see very starkly in black and white, high on the Tibetan Plateau in Ladakh or Little Tibet, part of Tibet that belongs politically to India, that had been sealed off in the modern era.

Helena: From the 40s until the 70s, no one had been allowed to go there, and because it was a sensitive border area for the Indian government and this part of Tibet belonged to India. And I go out there, living in Paris, thinking I’m going to be there for six weeks helping to make a film, as a linguist who speaks quite a lot of languages. And I end up staying, you know, staying virtually for 50 years. And for many parts of the year, in the earlier days in the 70s and 80s, I was there for almost half of every year and then coming back to the West, absolutely convinced that we’ve got to wake up to the global economic forces that had shown themselves to be murderous. Proved to be an evil system that divided people from each other, divided them from the land. And I always used to say the devil could not think up a better system to destroy both people and the planet. So I do want to say very clearly, I don’t think we have to look for some deeper, darker secret than this. We don’t have to look for some inherent evil force that’s always been there or that’s extraterrestrial.

Helena: And a lot of people are unfortunately doing that, because they sense there’s evil going on. But what I’m saying is that I saw very clearly in this contrast between an ancient, spiritually based, ecological, community based culture and this modern techno economy that came in. I saw how it operated like a machine of divisiveness, separation and fragmentation, and how in the modern era it has operated through seduction; through shifting worldviews so that we don’t see the real root cause of our problems. We end up blaming ourselves. We end up blaming our own culture, our own government, or left political or right political. But we’re not looking at this global system. So I had over about a ten year period, almost a scientific experiment of this remote area with about 100,000 people spread out over quite a large area about the size of Austria. And this one road bringing up change, showing what these changes consisted of and what they led to. So very soon, actually, after a couple of years, I was trying to rush around the world waking people up to this. And so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 50 years.

Manda: So can you just very briefly describe to us the Ladakh that you met when you went, you were a young woman in Paris, you spoke seven languages as far as I can tell and you were invited because you were a linguist, to take part in a film that was being made? And you arrived and clearly you fell in love with the place and stayed. But can you give us a before and after of what Ladakh was when you got there and then what it is now and then let’s look forward to what it could be if we change things.

Helena: Yeah. Well, key in what I first encountered was the most vitally, vibrantly, actively happy people that I had ever encountered. The healthiest people I’d ever encountered. You know, slim and vital and wiry; no obesity, no starvation whatsoever. No unemployment whatsoever. Suicide was something that might happen in a lifetime. An older person might choose to end their life. And so poverty, unemployment, you know, non-existent.

Manda: Was it a farming culture? Is it agrarian based?

Helena: It was a balance between land and a trading centre, a town, where there had been trade, and that was primarily inhabited by Muslims who had come in about 500 years earlier. And then most of the culture around them were Buddhists living close to the land with animals and planting grains essentially. And their agriculture, as we found when we started trying to prove to the government that this agriculture was actually quite productive. We did studies and we found that in this ancient culture, using animal and human labour, the average yield was higher than in the United States. So this is in the 70s.

Manda: They weren’t diminishing their soil from 12ft to a quarter of an inch.

Helena: On the contrary, they did use human nightsoil, which was a valuable product. So the Muslims would give their nightsoil to the farmers in exchange for grain and other products. And there was this interdependence between town and country and among people generally. They needed each other. They relied on each other, they knew each other. So it was human scale. And there was even longer distance trade in precious jewels; turquoise, coral, gold, silver which came from far away. Most of it, by the way, in the hands of the women in form of jewellery. There was also, if you like, private ownership, in that there was a family ownership of the farm and the house, and a sense of identity that was tied to the land. You know, your name was the name of the household and the land. And I saw that it was entirely possible for them to have had small amounts of money, some coins and paper notes, in an old form that were exchanged and used. But the most important part of the economy, the production of food, the care for children, the care for the elderly, the ill, the looking after the commons was all non-monetized local economic activity.

Helena: And it worked. It worked to a perfection that was remarkable. And over the years I came to understand that it had to do with this deep, embedded way of living and experiencing the oneness of all life, experiencing that and having a worldview which reinforced it. So I just want to add one thing; one of the things they’ve been battling in the Western world is that there’s been this myth around that traditional peoples didn’t individuate, and that the difference between, particularly those eastern or more indigenous peoples and us was that they didn’t individuate properly. And I came to realise that there was such a nonsense. You know, every baby born out of its mother’s womb, never for a minute confused themselves as being one with her. On the contrary, in the West we have to be reminded of those invisible threads of interdependence. So there’s no problem whatsoever with the individuation and separation. But there is a problem, once we build a worldview which accentuates that and reinforces it to a type of madness.

Manda: Yes. Vanessa Andreotti, I don’t know if you’ve read Hospicing Modernity, but it’s beautiful. But her grandfather says that the core trauma of colonialism was not the taking of the land and the killing of the people, bad though they were; it was the sense of separability. Or the belief in separability. And the cultures that live knowing that there is no separation are the cultures that are sustainable. And so one of my key questions, let’s see what we could do with this; the key question that I am sitting with at the moment is if we take Francis Weller’s construct of trauma culture versus initiation culture, and you’re talking about an initiation culture, even if it didn’t necessarily have adolescent rites of passage. But an initiation culture is one where there is no separability, where connectedness is known. And individuation, of course, is a thing that’s such an extraordinary myth, but anyway, let’s leave that. The trauma culture, probably in the West, goes back to the start of our type of agriculture, which was very much based on separation and ownership; of I person or I group own this bit of land and we will kill everybody else. We’re not working with the land, we’re working at the land and taking from it, and that’s how we end up with where we’re at. And that to move forward, we can’t go back, we cannot go back to our indigenous Boudican, whatever, past when we were not trauma. But we can heal our inner traumas. We can potentially heal our collective trauma and move forward to becoming a connected, non separate, non-dual, understanding our place in the web of life, culture. The question then is how do we make that step from separation to not separate, from separability to connectedness?

Helena: Well, what I see happening, as I have been saying, you know, there’s this huge cultural turning where all over the world people are intuitively turning in that direction of reconnection. They are longing for it. Once they’ve been dragged into the big city, leading a life, in many cases completely disconnected from life, in a high rise apartment, nothing, no plants.

Manda: Concrete jungle everywhere. Yeah. And blasting music at your head. And eating and drinking things that are just switching your brain off.

Helena: And all of the distant images of people who are portrayed as perfect, whereas you are imperfect. So it’s a sort of torture chamber of separation and alienation. So these people develop a thirst for reconnection, and you see it across the world. You’re seeing it rapidly happening in China and India now. So I am absolutely convinced that we will find our way back home. But my sense of urgency is, can we try to prevent the juggernaut that’s dragging us away, kicking and screaming and depressed and clearly showing that we don’t want this; can we prevent it from going a lot further? Because it is going further now, and many people who are turning towards rebuilding community, towards rebuilding their deeper connections to nature in a myriad of ways, are often of the mindset that either that this system is too big to change, that they’re just too powerful. Or very often now it’s quite popular to believe it’s going to collapse anyway, so we don’t need to think about it. We don’t need to really understand it. In fact, most people who are involved in this wonderful turning towards life, towards healing, are pretty convinced that they understand that system. They don’t need to think about it. But I beg to differ. You know, I believe that the ecovillage movement is failing. I believe that lots of wonderful initiatives like Schumacher College, this holistic college which has just been shut down. I believe that that’s in part because people weren’t paying attention to this system. And now it’s high time that we do so, because that system is only powerful because the 99.999% of humanity are not looking at it, are not articulating clearly why they don’t want it. Instead, they’re in bits and pieces, supporting it. When they’re anxious to get their child into a good school, in a million and one ways.

Manda: Wanting to travel and getting on a plane. Yes?

Helena: Well, actually, I want people to get on a plane with the goal of understanding the world better. Because I have seen how in these last decades, people who have not travelled are part of the very, very clever, divisive mind that’s being imposed on us through algorithms, through simplistic soundbite media. It’s fabulous you have a long, long podcast, because you know the narrow vision and the lack of deep understanding allows us to fall into this thing about rich countries/ poor countries, all of it myths. The rich country, poor country discourse is outdated and was never actually part of the problem. Capitalism: I’m seeing all these people see it as this amorphous expression of human nature.

Manda: And there is no alternative.

Helena: Yeah. But also even by just seeing it as this sort of amorphous expression of some innate human need to grow, to control, to be greedy and aggressive by nature, instead of pointing very clearly to such a very distinct thread that would show us where this came from. And look at the global players. Look at the machine of the publicly traded corporation, that should absolutely not be allowed to exist. And of course, we can’t wish it out of existence overnight.

Manda: No, we can’t switch them off.

Helena: We can certainly start regulating it.

Manda: Okay. There are so many ways we could go from here. I realise I asked you for a before and after of Ladakh, and we got the before but we never got to the after. So let’s use that as a launchpad then to look at what we might do in remediation. So what is Ladakh like now when you go and visit?

Helena: Well first let me tell you that already within ten years, the signs of what was happening which were destroying the local economy, delivering across the Himalayas, having travelled for weeks: butter that cost half the price of local butter, which was one of the most important products in the local economy. So suddenly, butter that’s been transported for weeks costs half as much as butter that you can get a five minute walk away from the marketplace. So that opened my eyes to then study this around the world, in Mongolia where I was invited, in Kenya where I was invited by the Masai. And I saw across the world the same story. I saw in my native country of Sweden. I saw in the UK butter from New Zealand, sometimes costing a third of the price of the butter from a farm down the road. So what was going on was a completely artificial economy, nothing to do with efficiencies of scale or supply and demand. No, it was an economy where governments were now subsidising global trade at the expense of local businesses worldwide and creating artificial prices where human labour was becoming more and more expensive. And energy and resources artificially cheap. There are certain key elements in this, that if we change that, which we do have the power to do, we would immediately see a transformation. Unbelievable transformation towards health of people and ecosystems. But anyway, I saw within a decade already tension between the Buddhists and the Muslims that had been living side by side peacefully for 500 years. Also I worked in Bhutan in the 80s, and there saw the same pattern between Hindus and Buddhists. So suddenly the local economy, farming is destroyed. They’re pushed into the city, and they’re pushed both through psychological pressures that tell them that farming and traditional ways are primitive and backward, and that here in the city, they’re going to become like these amazing people who are beamed in in adverts, showing this remarkable culture where in the west, over there, people don’t work. They just sit and push a few buttons, they don’t have to lift.

Manda: And they’re happy.

Helena: And yeah, incredibly happy just beaming and showing this remarkable wealth and power. So that leads especially to young people thinking that they’d be crazy to listen to their parents who want them to get their hands dirty and to do work in order to make a living. So in a very short period, people are in the city and suddenly overnight unemployment is created. So now there is this battle for artificially scarce jobs. There’s never been a scarcity of jobs for thousands of years till this modern economy. And so we have to distinguish between this and other expansive civilisations that conquered and pillaged, but they never succeeded to this extent to destroy local knowledge, local self-esteem and local economies. So this modern system, particularly in the modern era, has operated through seduction rather than violent conflict. Which, by the way, some indigenous leaders recognise that when it was this conquering and violence, there was a reaction against it. But the seduction happens quietly and in the hearts and minds, particularly of young people. So I saw this and I saw in a culture where suicide was unknown, within a decade there were signs of depression, something that hadn’t existed at all. And now the suicide rate, instead of one in a generation, an old person; it’s young people, and it’s one a month. And I’d like the listener to be aware that this global epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide among young people is global, because of a global system. It’s not to do with Japanese culture being too repressive or Italian culture being too something. You know, it’s to do with this system. And that’s why it’s a global phenomenon. And we could solve so many problems by opening our eyes to that and ending the self-blame, ending the pointing of fingers to individuals, whether individual people or individual cultures or even individual corporations. It’s the system we need to look at.

Manda: Okay. Nate Hagens calls it a superorganism. And I read a Marjorie Kelly economics textbook a couple of weeks ago. And she said, if you took out every CEO of every hedge fund tomorrow, the system would still continue unabated. So we it’s not about the individuals, the death cult of predatory capitalism is an entity in and of itself. So how, in your view, can we turn that supertanker around? Or take it apart and make it into a 100,000 yachts instead of a supertanker?

Helena: Well, first of all, I just think it’s so important that we look at the fact that enclosures and slavery was the beginning of this. Now, actually, before that, we can see the precursor of Christianity.

Manda: Rome was doing pretty well at enclosing and enslaving 2000 years ago.

Helena: Not the world.

Manda: The world that it knew. And then we exported it thereafter. So I think we can go back a long way.

Helena: Yeah, but I actually think it can be counterproductive because I think Genghis Khan did a good job too. And other civilisations.

Manda: Okay. That’s true.

Helena: Or Gauls invading India. So civilisations we have to recognise as a problem; they’re expansive, conquering other cultures, robbing them of their language, their resources. So I’m a proponent of peaceful cultures, plural. And this is why it’s local futures or ancient futures, plural, as the goal. We’re not going to get there overnight, but we need to have clarity. And yes, Rome was there, but it did not go global and it didn’t have this hidden global dimension. I cannot believe how difficult it’s been to get people to look at it, and it’s partly because it’s so invisible. But if we remember very distinctly enclosures and slavery, pushed by elites on both sides; so the elites of India and Africa benefited all along from having cheap labour in the marketplace. So the gap between rich and poor from that point on was huge. And that’s why I was saying rich country, poor country also is an outdated polarisation now that doesn’t help us. The polarisation that can help us is to see global trade as an activity, trade is the enemy. Because it was an imposition of monoculture on the land from the start. That is deadly. It is anti nature from the outset. And of course it was anti-human rights by enslaving people and shipping them across the world, including those poor people in Dickensian London who got shipped off as slaves to Australia to rape the land. So trade and what was going on there has not been looked at clearly. Most of the left looking at capitalism have not looked at it. And tragically, when I took the initiative to set up something called the Forum on Globalisation, our strongest critics were left leaning thinkers, both from South America and North America, because they were rightly wedded to international collaboration, which I see as essential as a way forward. But we have to distinguish between international collaboration and international corpus. And amazingly, very intelligent people haven’t done that.

Manda: Okay. So let’s dig into it. What do we do? Because I’ve got the problem. If you were given the power to do anything, what’s your kind of ten point plan?

Helena: Okay, well, my template would be get some billions and get people from various spectrums of the politically correct, identity politics together. So I have spoken to diverse people like Angelina Jolie and Prince Charles and Dalai Lama, a spectrum of people who would will be willing as a group to say, yes, we need to tackle this. Get a massive education campaign where the voices behind it are so diverse that they cannot be decimated overnight. Because I’ve seen a lot of very good people who try to stand up and are decimated. Then get this truth out, which virtually everybody on this planet agrees on, which is global corporations have too much wealth and power, and it’s not right that our governments should be removing all rules for them, while not taxing them, while they tax and regulate everything that’s place based. You and me, charities, businesses, even national industries subject to ever heavier bureaucratic regulation and taxation. So we have a completely distorted playing field. So what people will then, and the estimate is that if 15% are awake that quickly enough, one could generate a situation where the big picture gets out enough to get anyone who still has the energy and the funds, or the freedom to think about and to speak out.

Helena: So whether it’s the person concerned with autism, this person concerned with climate, the person concerned with justice, with democracy, with any range of issues; that they would agree yes, this corporate empire is either the cause of the problem or it’s ensuring that there won’t be funding to support the issue we care about. So I think that this potential to come together with the big picture from north south, from environmental, social, spiritual, psychological. There is that potential. Because every single taxi driver I talk to, every single person I talk to in numerous countries, they all agree that global corporations have too much money and power. But then they turn around, as on recent taxi rides, having said that, they end up blaming immigrants. They end up blaming the conservatives. But generally now the fear of the outsider. So there’s no persistent voice anywhere spelling out this truth and reinforcing it. And I think people are really ready for it. And I think once the strong message is that you are struggling to just stay where you are, even as a middle class person, even actually as an upper middle class person.

Manda: Yeah unless you’re Trump or Elon Musk, then you’re in trouble.

Helena: For the multinational players who are getting their 100 billion, it’s a different story, but they are a tiny minority. They are not even a fraction of 1% of the global population.

Manda: But they wield the power at the moment. This is my question because this is largely where the book goes. They have control of the media. They have control over social media. They can could simply switch off our accounts tomorrow if they chose and we would then struggle, you and I, to connect to larger numbers of people than we could actually write physical letters to. So I have two questions really, and they’re interlinked. One is about sense making, because you and I are agreed that whatever we’re calling the superorganism and the meta crisis, the way through to this is a different system of economics. But to do that would require a different system of governance, because currently we have the best democracy money can buy. The people with the money buy the politicians, who do what they’re told by the people with the money, and they ignore everybody else except once every five years when they have to go out and beg for votes. We would need a different actual currency system. I saw today that Saudi Arabia is going to start trading oil in Chinese yuan, which is going to do interesting things to the global economy, but it will just be shifting one mega currency for another mega currency. It won’t be changing the underlying value system that promotes it. So we need a change in economics, governance, business, politics. And they need to happen more or less simultaneously because they’re all propped up by the same web of people who do the global trade and are doing very nicely, thankyou. And would like the existing system to continue until it actually falls over, because the climate has got completely unliveable.

Manda: We would like to dismantle it before the climate and everything else becomes unliveable. Are you seeing any signs that your coalition of coherent people who could make sense and create the global education, are talking to each other? And are they looking at, for instance, I’ve got ISDs and TIPP written on my pad. We have to dismantle ISDs and TIPP. Which for people listening is the International States Disputes Settlement Agreement, which basically gives companies the power to sue governments if there is a chance that a law the government passes might make their profits less. So one of the Eastern European countries, and I think it might have been Ukraine, but I’m not sure, decided to privatise its health system and a year later realised that this was a terrible mistake and tried to renationalise it. And the ISDs stepped in. And the three judges who are picked by the company and meet in private, said, well then you owe these companies, these health care companies, several billion pounds, which will bankrupt you, so you can’t do it. So the ISDs, (TIPP is the Pacific trading version of the ISDs), we have to stop those. But the people with the money will put quite a lot of barriers in the way of stopping them. How do we change all of those in the same step?

Helena: The first step is that we talk about it and it’s very, very rare to hear anyone talk about it.

Manda: I’ve written a whole book about it. I promise, it’s all in here.

Helena: Yeah, but you you must be aware of how rare it is. So I certainly am, because I’ve been talking about it for almost 50 years. About how the trade is not what we think it is and how it’s this destruction of the local economy, how it’s making people poorer. I think that message now needs to be at the forefront, really. Next to the green and democratic and so on. But the fact that everybody is getting poorer, because if you look at how many hours you have to work to put food on the table and to have a roof over your head, everybody is forced to work harder. So that means we have this rising poverty. And the scary thing is it’s also time poverty. But please believe me that, you know, I’ve tried to talk to the head of Greenpeace in Australia, in America, in the UK about trade and about how the emissions from global trade are nowhere mentioned in the climate negotiations. How the climate narrative has been completely co-opted by global corporations. Come up with this nice tradable commodity called carbon, managed to make money trading in carbon and then using carbon now to shut down even more viable farms, small businesses. It is criminally terrible. And yet when you try to grab the criminals like Al Gore, whom I met, or Maurice Strong, whom I also knew quite well. They were corporate heads who did become concerned about the environment, but the movements were not looking enough at that global trading thing to tell them, sorry, you can’t keep trading like that.

Helena: And the trade that is being favoured and you pressuring our governments to liberate it in the name of free trade is harming us. That wasn’t coming from the movement. So I think there is an opportunity right now where, you know, things have got so bad and there is an opening. So ISDs, investor state dispute settlements, these clauses which have been around for a long time, are now suddenly being addressed.

Manda: Oh are they?

Helena: And also when you think about it, you were saying how governments don’t pay attention to us except when they seek election. When they seek election from Sweden to America to here, they talk about power concerns; our jobs, our environment. And then suddenly in power, people still are not aware of how ubiquitous it is, left and right have been in bed with this corporate global agenda. So that specific issue of trade and that its roots go back to the beginnings of the economy, the principle of comparative advantage that said, it is in your interest to specialise for export and then you can import everything you need.

Helena: These things have to be turned upside down. Another one is that in this marketplace, what is favoured is energy and resource intensive activity. Anything that involves human labour is artificially made too expensive. Reversing that, honestly Manda, reversing that overnight we could see the most remarkable healing of people and land. And what we’re seeing is that quite often, middle class people are able to create little islands of sanity, particularly around local food. And we’ve helped to create that in many parts of the world by getting the big picture out about the global trade, supporting the supermarket, and how we need to build these shorter links between producers and consumers. And where they exist, they become remarkable examples of how quickly barren grassland can be healed, how quickly people can be healed, when they come into a deeper dialogue where they are able to be imperfect. They’re able to have a problem. They’re able to be depressed. They are not these perfect one dimensional beings on the screen, and they can feel that they can be connected and loved as imperfect as they are. Now, that’s a natural thing that’s happening through deeper dialogue across the world now. And when it’s linked to getting hands in the dirt, when it’s is linked to actually participating in the miracle of life, forever different, forever changing.

Helena: When it’s this deep connection with life and productivity where you’re producing the one thing everybody needs every day. You know you’re producing the most important thing you could virtually, except for having children. You know, so how we rear our children, how we rear our food in this dominant global economy have been marginalised to the sideline, unimportant events. In the localisation movement we’re bringing them back to the centre and it is just so wonderful to see. Middle class people are able to sort of subsidise this right now to create examples, but if we were able to shift even a fraction of the money that is being stolen, because of trade, because governments have signed over to global banks to do as they like. And in 2008, we were told that these boys on cocaine and God knows what, sitting in their trading rooms, speculating on the value of our mortgages; they were part of institutions that were too big to fail. We’ve got to protect them, we have to keep subsidising them. And don’t you dare talk about protectionism, which might be protecting your environment and your society. That’s a dirty word. But we’ve got to protect these global players. So I think we have an argument. We have a truth about what’s going on that I think could galvanise people.

Manda: It could, except that, what you said about your taxi driver. I hear you, because this is largely what I’ve been saying for five years in the podcast. But your taxi driver is aware that he has to work longer hours to pay, and the banks are basically price gouging him, but he blames the immigrants. We have a whole scenario in the US where they’re now talking about people who are not white eating dogs and cats. And J.D. Vance yesterday on CNN accepted that he had, in fact, made that up. But it’s still out there because it’s useful for the people whose politics depend on hitting people’s amygdalas with fear, to create tribalism, to divert them from understanding who it is that is actually price gouging them. How do you see us creating a capacity to make sense, when people are so readily diverted away from sense to something that is actual nonsense, but which sits easily on a narrative that’s already been established?

Helena: Well, I’m seeing that when people hear the bigger picture that connects all these issues, that they’re very open to it. But that message is very rare still. So I think the biggest block is not that people wouldn’t be open to this. The biggest block is that virtually every avenue of knowledge has been colonised. And so whether it’s like you say, doing your podcast is expensive. And we’re in this situation where we don’t even know for how long we can keep communicating with this technology. But I think if we could distinguish between this idea that people are resistant and the fact that we have a system that is resistant because the money is blocking us. You know, we’re shadowbanned by Facebook.

Manda: Who’s we?

Helena: My organisation, local futures.

Manda: Oh, is it?

Helena: So I only learned that term after Covid. All I knew was that our film The Economics of Happiness travelled the world and got amazing and amazing reception everywhere, and that some young people in my organisation started a Facebook page, which sometimes went up by a thousand a day and it went up to 140,000, and then just suddenly stopped about eight years ago. And now I found out that this is Shadow Banning, and it’s now at 137,000, you know, after eight years. It’s just so ridiculous. Also around that time, I was invited by US intelligence to come to their headquarters to do a seminar on what is localisation. So we’re obviously having a bit of an impact at the grassroots for that sort of awareness to be there. And they were again and again wanting me to agree, like most new economy activists, that blockchain, 3D printing, the internet generally, they were all tools to support decentralisation. And I was saying, oh, I don’t think so.

Manda: They could be. It depends who’s using them. There’s a redemptive finance whole group who are doing really interesting stuff, but it depends how you use it.

Helena: Well, I also think that, you know, my experience from Ladakh was that the last thing we needed, when the internet and computers were brought in, with very heavy propaganda, to be tools that would let us live in nature, which so many people already wanted. I had learned from Ladakh what Rachel Carson had warned about in the 60s, that science was moving rapidly in a direction of further reductionism that led to the madness of thinking we can just kill some insects over here, unaware that it was going to affect the birds on the other side of the country or the other side of the world even. So, her message was very strongly watch out! We need major changes in science towards much more holistic, interdisciplinary knowledge. And then Schumacher with Small is Beautiful and some other people around that time, were very clear we need to decentralise the economy. And so in actual fact, the truth that we need much more localised embodied knowledge to engage with this fabric of life, with its forever contradictions, it’s forever changing and being engaged in that dialogue; I’m maintaining means coming back to nurturing those embodied, slower, more holistic knowledge systems to get back on track with Evolution. We evolved in that deep dialogue, and that’s what we had, all that cultural diversity. So a tool of speedy, reductionist communication was really the last thing we needed.

Manda: But we’ve got it and it’s not going away.

Helena: I think we need to use it as a tool of communication to share this knowledge. So I think we need to make use of it as long as we can now to get the word out. You know, just like you’re doing. But we could simultaneously be warning about using our taxes or changing regulations to speed up to 5G. At this level the banking system, the corporate system are making use of these technologies far more effectively than we are. They have teams of engineers, they have mega systems. But right now, let’s use them, but with clarity that we need to be shifting towards technologies that are more adapted to place. And you know, you were talking to that guy Simonson the other day, I heard. Very interesting. I plan to look him up in Australia.

Manda: Yes. He’ll be local to you. Ish.

Helena: Yeah and the technology of the seed adapted to place, which everywhere is part of the localisation movement. Everywhere people are recognising and recovering heirloom species of animals or plants. And of course, it was never some absolute boundary around local and global. Never. But the transference was slower, more gentle, more carefully adapted. So the speed and the scale linked to monoculture is the enemy, you know, top down monoculture. So we have to be very wary of solutions that are top down and speedy. But the top down, speedy thing we need is the communication of the dominant system to build up a very clear, united ‘NO’ and in favour of literally billions of yeses. Because in terms of diversity, you’ll find in your own garden you know, the magic of that little patch one metre away, which has more clay or more sand and even, miraculously, it doesn’t seem to have more sun or more water, but plants are growing twice as quickly. So that’s the living world, all that constant complexity and change. And I see people from my point of view enmeshed in not distinguishing between a man made, top down, very monocultural system, man made, and that we can say a very clear NO to that. And that’s not born of hubris, that’s born of rejecting hubris. It’s born of rejecting a worldview that said, we can control nature, we can remake nature, and now wants to do that in the form of robots. And they’re romanticising them, you know, favourably vis a vis humans. So we’re in a very dangerous step right now.

Manda: Well, given that we are… So, it seems to me we are where we are. The technology is what it is. AI has got to the state that it has. There are now drones that can go along and pick individual blackberries and leave the ones that aren’t ripe yet. People are going to use them. And even I was having an interesting conversation the other day with somebody about ultra processed foods. And I’m saying we need to get rid of ultra processed foods, and we need all to be eating locally grown, whole things. And he said, and who do you think is going to be cooking them? Because it’s the women who are going to go back to spending many, many, many hours tied to the kitchen. And is that what you all want? And I thought, well, personally, I don’t have a family. Sod that for a game of soldiers. I’m not playing that game, but he’s probably right.

Helena: No, I don’t agree at all.

Manda: In which way. Which bit is not right?

Helena: In my world, that’s already birthing the more localised way. The men are cooking too, and they’re cooking together.

Manda: But they are spending many more hours cooking than the people who get something out of the freezer and put it in the microwave.

Helena: Yeah, but cooking is a joy. It’s a joyful experience.

Manda: It might be for you, I hate it.

Helena: Again, in isolation, cooking for yourself or just one partner in a little nuclear family is a very, very different thing from what’s happening from the bottom up. As people cook together, as they take turns doing it, as there’s a bigger group.

Manda: You just defined my idea of hell is cooking for more than one other person. But I concede I am unique in this.

Helena: I don’t think you are unique. I think a lot of people and you know, I can so understand it when you’re living a sort of normal life, with the time pressures and where cooking has been completely undervalued and everything. We’re looking at the clock and no, I totally understand within those parameters it’s not enjoyable.

Manda: But let’s have a look at what the world could look like. So, we live in the world we live in. We’re going to go through a transformation period. And I’m interested and I haven’t had someone who could talk to this and maybe you can. We live in Britain. There are some very big cities, obviously London is the biggest, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol probably. How do we get non monocultured food to these people? Are we going to be growing in the cities? Are we going to create green areas on rooftops or take tennis courts and turn them into allotments? How do you envisage, supposing we manage the education, we’ve sorted out the economy, we are in the process of reducing global trade – because we switch it off tomorrow, things are going to look pretty bad, pretty fast – we have to taper it down. Everybody’s on board and going, yep, okay, it was a catastrophe, we need to turn the supertanker. So we’ll just slow it and start winding the dial now. In the transition phase, what does it look like? How are we feeding the cities from the land locally? How does that work?

Helena: First of all, it starts by really looking at what’s going on now. And right now we’re in this process of rapid urbanisation into megacities. It’s very dramatic in the so-called Third World, but it’s going on still in the north. And to these sprawls, you know, between Seattle and Portland, you know.

Manda: Yeah. Manchester and Leeds just become one big urban zone.

Helena: We have on automatic pilot with lots of propaganda, architecture students that are ecologically minded: got to go high rise, there’s so many people, so many people. Constant propaganda. With too many people to go back to the land. We cannot feed the world with small scale, diversified farms. All of those things are lies. The fact is, we actually need more people on the land. The fact is that small, diversified farms can produce vastly more per unit of land and water than any monoculture ever can.

Manda: And they don’t destroy the soil down to quarter an inch of topsoil.

Helena: Yes. And that’s also part of diversified farming with animals. And so when you see the evidence of these small diversified farms, including community based initiatives where people do cook for each other, or they might take turns, but where they really enjoy fresh, healthy food, they enjoy good food. You’re seeing also prisoners, torture victims, mentally troubled people healed as they engage with that very simple activity. So I say it starts with understanding that all the incentives right now are pushing more people into the city. In the city, life is becoming harder and harder. So if we were to get clarity about what we want, we would number one, help people who are on the land, stay on the land. And we’re talking now about billions of people in the so-called Third world. We’re talking about reducing the pressures that create mass migration, starvation, endless war. So stopping that, then starting a process of actually helping more people get back to the land. If we could shift these hidden ways of subsidising the use of energy and resources and punishing everybody who employs people, so we’re too expensive for ourselves. If we shift that around so that everything that employs more people and uses less energy and that means less transport, less plastic, less packaging, less chemicals, and does things in a natural way; overnight we would see amazing things happen. And I’m telling you, once you really look at the amazing things happening already, subsidised basically by middle class people, either through their volunteerism or donations or some foundations that are rooted in some kind of wisdom. Then I think you would be persuaded by what I’m saying.

Manda: I don’t need persuading, but I’m still trying to envision what happens. So does Birmingham empty of people who’ve only ever lived in the city, and they come out and we teach them how to farm?

Helena: Certainly not overnight. But Birmingham, already in Covid, was emptying, as was every city on the planet. In Turkey, in India and China, people left in droves the big cities.

Manda: The people who had somewhere to go left in droves. The people who didn’t have a second home out in the country were stuck in the middle of town.

Helena: Oh, no. So many of them even left if they could.

Manda: But they had to go somewhere and there weren’t a lot of places. I have a friend in West Wales, and he had volunteers come out of cities over there and work on the land, and they loved it. But there were six of them. So what happens?

Helena: Once things went back to normal, you know, a lot of people went back. But I’m just saying, if the economic incentives shifted to create meaningful work, doing that would not be difficult at all. To encourage.

Manda: But I’m really interested in the practicalities. Because I get the theory. So the government subsidises farm workers and stops subsidising fossil fuels, for instance?

Helena: Exactly.

Manda: Because otherwise this is how you end up with butter that costs ten times as much as imported from New Zealand, is because you’re paying the people who make it a proper wage, which would be nice, but if everybody isn’t doing it…

Helena: So we’ve done a report called Small is Beautiful, Big is Subsidised, that looks at some of these hidden subsidies. That now allows Amazon to fly things around the world three times and deliver it at a price that destroys the local shops. Once you look at what’s going on, it’s very easy to imagine reversing that. And it’s also easy to imagine that people from left and right would say, absolutely, we agree, whether left or right, we don’t want this. Because it’s so monstrously against everybody’s interests except a tiny, tiny group of billionaires. So I think the enmeshing between government and the global corporate world is a problem. But the main reason it’s happening is because the voter is not aware, it’s not demanding of government.

Manda: But how do we demand of government? We can demand all we like. We demanded lots of stuff at the Labour Party and they’re busy ignoring us.

Helena: Being economically literate. Honestly, Manda, it’s not happened from the environmental movement. It’s not happened from Save the Children.

Manda: Okay, so I hear it’s not happening. I’m really curious as to, so Amazon manages its stuff, flying stuff three times around the world because it makes all its money out of the AWS, Amazon Web Services, most of which it makes from the American military. So we would have to dictate, legislate such that Amazon was broken up. Or the American military stopped buying its web services from Amazon and sourced it in-house. And at the moment, the people who legislate are pretty much owned by the big businesses, whatever we choose to call them, we need to be careful because we don’t want to be sued out of existence. How do we actually practically, we can we can say what we like and while they control the message, they largely control the votes. It’s very interesting watching the US at the moment, because you have two halves of the establishment vying to create slightly separate messages, and definitely I think one would be a better option than the other, but it’s still going to be the establishment. They’re not going to break up Amazon or Apple or Microsoft or Google or any of the others, because much of their funding came from there. So within the existing system as it stands, unless we’re going to resort to violence and I’m sure you and I are both agreed that that’s not the way forward.

Helena: Absolutely.

Manda: How? Actually, practically how do we make a dent? You’ve been trying for 50 years. Schumacher and Rachel Carson wrote those things in the 60s. It’s now 2024 and things are worse. How do we actually practically, step one tomorrow, begin to shift the hegemony of the dollar?

Helena: See, what I saw was that for some reason, and I hope it doesn’t sound arrogant, but I saw that the movement which meant that I was on the same page with almost all environmental leaders in America, throughout Europe. And because I spoke all those languages, you know, I was in many different countries. I was in America every year. We were all on the same page, but I was going back to Ladakh every year, and then I’d come back to the west and I suddenly see people starting to change and no longer talking about decentralisation, no longer addressing these key issues. So I can love all of them, forgive them, I don’t think I’m better than they are; the only thing I can say is that my tribe ended up being people who had their foot on a regular basis in both the so-called poor countries and the rich countries, a small universe of people. And those were the people who realised, oh my God. So I’d be coming back to the West and they’d say, oh, Helena, you’re being far too negative. Government is now sustainable. Haven’t you seen? It’s all about sustainability. Look, we’ve cleaned up the Thames.

Manda: Yes, and we know that’s not true. But what do we do? What changes do we make tomorrow?

Helena: Recognising that they were asleep about the trade agenda. They were asleep about what was actually happening at the global level, and that almost no one has been talking about that. And people who did talk about it got silenced.

Manda: Yeah, exactly.

Helena: Yeah. But how did they get silenced?

Manda: Well, they got silenced because the people who want it to keep going have the capacity to silence them by pressing a button or telling a minion to press a button. It’s effortless. You were shadowbanned. I mean, literally, that’s a line of code.

Helena: Yeah, but I’m saying that I think that there is still space for you and others who are now online and out there in the real world to start addressing the big picture and to talk about the specific details of what happened and what we need to do. So the trajectory forward that could happen in theory, is that we first of all understand this is a global issue, and we need to create a movement where we’re all demanding of our governments that they go back around the same tables where they’re signing away our rights, signing away our economy, and start regulating the global banks and traders. We have every reason to demand that they take back the right to print money. There is no scarcity of money.

Manda: Well, they actually do print money. They just don’t print all of it.

Helena: It is amazing how easy it would be to do the right thing, because working with people’s needs, working with nature’s needs.

Manda: But still, how do we get the power to make these demands? Because we can demand whatever the (expletive deleted) we like and they will ignore us.

Helena: No, I don’t believe that. I think they cannot ignore us. If we build up…

Manda: What mass of people do we need for them not to ignore us? Because I think it’s close to 50%.

Helena: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

Manda: Why not?

Helena: Because I guess partly because I was able to influence some billionaires, and I know there are some billionaires around still, I think that it could be a much smaller number to get the ball rolling. But maybe not, maybe not. But in the meanwhile, I’m also betting and I always have on trying to get out the message: do what you can to build that local boat. Remember that food right now coming from further and further away? Be aware your government is doing absolutely mad, crazy things to support plastic food and ever more distance and brainwashing you into talking about regenerative instead of local, because regenerative still is big monocultures in many cases and also using glyphosate. So please be holistic. Use the language of local diversified.

Manda: We could reclaim regenerative I think. Because in the States it means quite different from over here.

Helena: You could use regenerative as well, but it’s not enough. We need more holistic.

Manda: It depends what it means.

Helena: No, but it can’t on its own mean that. It doesn’t say anything about distance.

Manda: I think it does.

Helena: One of the problems is people have just been talking about the modes of production. We’re not talking about a regenerative economy, we’re talking about regenerative agriculture.

Manda: I know, yes, we talk about it a lot on the podcast. So let’s let that one go, because it’s something we litigate a lot. So let’s not go down that rabbit hole. I’m much more interested, because we’re running out of time, you have to be somewhere else, in what would a regenerative economy look like in your view? Because right at the top of the program you said we need a different economy. Let’s assume that we’ve worked out how we work the power and we’re making it happen. What does it look like?

Helena: What it looks like is then that those governments come back and start regulating global trade and give corporations some years to decide, is Mitsubishi going to be Japanese? Is General Motors going to be American? And that also means people waking up to the fact that you can have global collaboration, you do not have to allow businesses to run around the world freely blackmailing governments against each other. That is something that should be forbidden. And then in the meanwhile, we can be demanding and we are, from the bottom up, more localised support. And it’s happening from mayors and some local councils, they are beginning to respond to the real needs on the ground. And the regenerative economy will not be one economic system. It will be economies shaped by diverse cultural and ecological needs. But there will be an umbrella of protection, because we’ll have woken up to the fact that the global monocultures are everywhere an enemy, be they human, be they ecological. So there will be a united protection in the form of something like, instead of a WTO, a WEO, world ecological or environmental organisation, that will say no glyphosate, no genetic engineering, none of these things that we’ve seen don’t work. But we’re not going to be dictating from a world environmental organisation how you should grow your food, because that requires local knowledge. So it’s a little bit complicated, the distinction between the protection umbrella, which many people get confused into thinking that we do need one ecological economy. We need to allow for that diversity but protected from the monocultural.

Helena: So it will mean also that money will be protected. People at a global level cannot speculate and use this as an instrument to every day now the algorithms looking for the cracks, the breakdown that generates profit to the top. I mean it is so evil. It is so terrible, the current system.

Manda: Would you have a global currency then? Because it seems to me I can’t see another way. How then do you prevent people from trading on the fact that a dollar and a pound vary in value?

Helena: Because you prevent them.

Manda: How? What’s the difference between a global currency and preventing, because then if you peg a pound at $1 or $1.50, you’ve got a standard.

Helena: Of course, precisely because something that’s valuable in one part of the world, you know, up on the Tibetan Plateau, and when you see diverse ecosystems and so on, it just doesn’t make sense to have this universal.

Manda: I hear that, but how do you stop people who otherwise are going to trade on the fact that yesterday a pound was worth $1.20, and today it’s worth $1.30 and therefore I can make a lot of money in that ten cent difference?

Helena: It’s not that long ago that that was simply not allowed because governments had the right to protect their own economy. We will come back to the right to protect our own economy, all the time linking it to being our water, our seed, our soil, you know, come back to a truly ecological economy, where the money can be used to support.

Manda: So are you going for hard currency and no digital money? Because otherwise you can arrest someone at the airport if they’ve got a suitcase full of £5 notes. You can’t stop somebody wiring £5,000 to their cousin in the States, who then returns them an amount of dollars. It seems to me that cat is out of the bag.

Helena: Well, that again is confusing the power of government versus the power of these external trading entities. And now for many people, governments become the enemy.

Manda: Well let’s not worry about the semantics. Let’s worry about the actual practicalities of I’ve got pounds, you’ve got dollars. Either they’re pegged, they’re always going to be the same value; £1 is worth one $1.50, say for the sake of argument. Or they fluctuate. And if they fluctuate, how do you stop people trading?

Helena: Because you don’t allow that kind of trade.

Manda: How do you stop it?

Helena: Because you have laws and regulations. And because government will be responding to the voter, because the voter will be more economically literate. So the voter is not going to allow for this invisible hand to carry out in a way that’s destructive to their own wealth and to their own well-being.

Manda: I honestly don’t see how you make that work. Honestly. Because you’re expecting voters then to be literate in quite detailed economics and agriculture and trade. And we haven’t got time, but we’d end up on power generation, who’s generating the power, who’s got it, what money are you paying for it in? Let’s say hydrology. People aren’t. And even if we’ve managed to get them away from the bullshit jobs into actual work that they really enjoy doing, that’s what they’re doing and they’re working locally, I don’t see how you get people educated enough that they’re on top of all of these things.

Helena: Yeah, I know I can understand that, and I don’t think that people would need to be educated on all of these things, because I believe that with enough support to get out the truth of how much better the more localised systems work, I think that once they’re set in motion, it’s going to be viewed so favourably that you don’t need everyone to be completely literate in all of this. But in order to get the ball rolling, I’m hoping that we can get the people who have the time and the privilege to think about these things. So I’m hoping, particularly in the New Economy movement, that there could be more literacy about cultural and ecological diversity, and to understand that to have this global standard of money everywhere, in every situation being worth the same, now who’s going to impose that? Who’s going to insist that that’s the case? To me, practically, that’s much harder to insist on than to have awareness that we can’t be allowing global traders to determine the price of what we value in a particular culture. You know what kind of food we want, what kind of seeds make sense here. So I think the practicality of working with diversity and with the real economy is going to be so much more effective.

Helena: But maybe I could also just mention that in Europe, in all of Scandinavia, we had a strong and healthy resistance to entering the economic union of Europe, because we knew it was an economic union from the top down global corporations that didn’t want diversity. And now a lot of people can’t imagine how you could possibly have trains in Europe without this economic union. Actually trains, when we cross borders, they had to make some adjustments. They were different. Some people drove on the left, others on the right. We had our different languages. When we were lobbying our government, we were doing it in our own language. And so in Scandinavia, we were aware that we were now being pulled into this economic union to compete with America, not a political union to oppose American policy. And so that in another way, I would say that’s what we need is a political union to prevent economic forces without accountability, without name, without any visibility from running things. So that now we’ll be talking about more genuine democratic processes. And I know it can sound complex, and many people, I myself was confused at the time of Brexit. I was thinking, oh my God, what am I going to say? You know, I was really opposed to the EU, but I realised Brexit was the opposite. Brexit was are we going to get a better deal with America and get away from these regulations from Europe? You know exactly the opposite. So you know, it is complex. But I think diversity, real life, ultimately will prevail. I’m absolutely convinced that in the long run, what I’m talking about will win. But it might be much further off and I won’t see any of it. But I’m still hoping.

Manda: So we do have to stop, and I will let you go very shortly, but I’m working on really quite tight time frames on this, because there’s actual biophysical limits to how long we can keep kicking the can down the road. Most of them, I think, are to do with the oceans, to be honest. But that’s because I’ve read the GOWS paper and absorbed it. How long do you think we’ve got before breakdown happens to the extent that all of this is hypothetical and we’re basically growing whatever will grow in a changing climate?

Helena: Well, I think with climate that for sure, right now, we do have vested interests that want us to focus on climate exclusively.

Manda: Yes, totally.

Helena: And they want us to link it to this narrow carbon narrative. And everything they’re doing is making things worse.

Manda: Yes, I get all of that. But nonetheless, the CO2 is rising and the climate is in chaos. How long do you think we’ve got?

Helena: Very, very hard to know. Very hard to know. Definitely what I’ve said from the outset is that I was seeing these vagaries, you know, and especially up on the Tibetan Plateau, where it was so stable for centuries. You know, four inches of rain a year, irrigation from glacial meltwater. And then suddenly rain in this village and suddenly a flood there where even my life was threatened. So these extremes. And I keep saying, maybe it’s Mother Gaia’s way of warning us and staving off this terrible load. Maybe those vagaries won’t continue just to escalate and escalate. Maybe not. I would like us all to be aware that you cannot model Gaia. It comes back again to that absolute conviction about diversity and change in the living world, and the mechanisms of exchange and interchange. We cannot fathom. And we cannot make a man made model to be saying anything with certitude.

Manda: I don’t think anyone saying anything with certainty, but I think there are fairly broad margins of error that are still not very nice.

Helena: Yeah, definitely. But I would say that again, once we see the propaganda, once we realise that animals are on the farm, the animal dung is one of the best ways, actually, of healing both the land and the climate. So once we see those things happening and once we start supporting that on a larger scale. And that is happening, you know, that really is happening. Whether you call it regenerative or not, but it’s about diversity and it’s not just about the soil. It’s diversity above ground where we can start making, you know, geometric improvements in increasing productivity and healing in a very, very rapid way. So I’m so thrilled to see how many barren bits of land in five years are thriving with life. So I think it’s very important we keep that in mind, as well as feeling a sense of urgency and real concern. And, you know, trying to move that way as quickly as possible.

Manda: Okay, we are running out of time. You have got another call at the top of the hour. Is there any very last little thing that you would like to say in closing? I think we’ve covered a lot of territory in the last hour and a half.

Helena: Well thank you. I would love to urge people to come to our website, localfutures.org, and use our films as a way of trying to bring people together across the divides of particular issues; social, environmental, spiritual issues, to see that we all will benefit from a shift in this system, in this techno economic system, towards the local, away from the global. And we have lots of films. Our films can be used as a mini conference to bring into a local environment. They’re often in many languages anyway. And then you can invite people who live in your area to come together to talk about the projects that they’re doing, and that way it can help to strengthen regional activism. And that’s what we’ve been doing around the world. We’ve been running Economics of Happiness conferences, had quite a strong movement in Japan and South Korea, did a lot of work in Italy. So we are so heartened by the information we keep getting every day from individuals and groups who are finding that this path of localising meaning reconnection between people and people and the land. How healing it is. And if people are interested, they might want to join us at a big summit in Ladakh next year at the beginning of August. We have always been proponents of people travelling if they want to travel to learn and to be part of a healing movement, a global healing movement. We actually urge people to travel, to see with their own eyes and to hear stories from the ground up, because they are not getting into the media.

Manda: Where would we find that? The summit in Ladakh. How are we going to track that down?

Helena: From our web website. It will be between the first and 10th of August. And you might want to look at our summit in Bristol last year, which for many people was hugely inspirational. People from all over the world coming. People who are aware that we have to work at both ends, at the inner end and the outer, and that they come together in a beautiful way. Once we become both more emotionally and body literate and more ecologically literate, then this economic bit we’re talking about sort of falls into place. And and so there are brave people who are willing to take on the global system, but people who are not doing that out of anger, not doing it only out of fear, but out of a conviction of the positive, nurturing, healing path through reconnection.

Manda: Brilliant. That’s a really nice place to end. But I have one last question. Yes or no? You were doing a feminine futures workshop. Has that been and gone and passed? Did we miss that?

Helena: Yes, it did happen and it was wonderful. And it made me think, you know, we want to do more.

Manda: Okay. But if you do another one, then that would be on your website also.

Helena: Yeah.

Manda: Brilliant. Helena, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. It’s been a delight, and it’s been really wonderful to have someone with such a depth of understanding and breadth so that we could really dig into the the ideas. So thank you.

Helena: Thank you so much for doing this wonderful podcast, and let’s hope that people listening support it also financially. So thank you so much Manda, very very grateful.

Manda: Thank you. And there we go. That’s it for another week. Huge thanks to Helena for all that she is and does. She puts so much time and effort into meeting the right people in the right places. And as you heard, she is talking to some of the biggest movers and shakers on the planet, explaining to them how we can move forward. The keys that we need to turn in the locks that need to be opened. And as we said at the top, if we can unify around a common narrative, if we can find the common value set, if we can set a common vision for where we need to go, that’s a huge step on the way to being able to get there. And if enough of us do it, we will create enough of a tipping point, enough of a critical mass that others will be entrained in our wake. We can draw them along. We can hold open the doors, we can show them that a different world is possible, and actually that it’s better for all of us, including the people who think they’re doing really well out of the current system. Vanishingly few though they may be. So please do head off to the show notes, click the links, find the ways you can watch the films that Helen has made and read her books, and then talk to the people local to you.

Manda: Explain that the system is dying, and that we can do so much better if we all work together. So there we go. We will be back next week, talking to Judith Schwartz, author of The Reindeer Chronicles. She too works in many, many places with people on the land who are transforming the way that things grow and evolve. Building soil, changing water flows, doing all of the things that we need to do if we’re going to heal the biosphere. So look forward to that next week.

Manda: And in the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Alan Lowells of Airtight Studios, for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcript, and Faith Tilleray for all of the work behind the scenes that keeps us moving forward. And as ever at the end, an enormous thanks to you for listening. And if you know of anybody else who wants to know more deeply what we need to do and how we might do it, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

You may also like these recent podcasts