SHOW NOTES
Guest: Helena Norberg-Hodge
- 🌐 Website: https://www.localfutures.org
- 📘 Books: Ancient Futures | Local is Our Future
- 📱 Socials: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube
Localization, Happiness & Planetary Health: A Conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge
00:01 – Dr Ron welcomes Helena to talk about the Planet Local Summit and localization.
01:16 – Helena says the summit brought people together to reconnect with nature and community.
03:59 – They discuss holistic and local approaches to sustainability.
05:50 – Global systems are profit-driven and disconnected from real wellbeing.
07:38 – GDP growth ignores health and environmental damage.
09:02 – Globalization reduces biodiversity and food variety.
10:09 – Helena describes rising unhappiness in Ladakh due to modernization.
10:29 – True happiness comes from love, connection, and community.
13:40 – Local markets strengthen relationships and belonging.
15:37 – Indigenous wisdom teaches respect, connection, and reflection before action.
17:52 – Technology and AI are creating disconnection and stress.
18:05 – Many young people now prefer life without smartphones.
18:27 – Helena warns that technology mainly benefits the wealthy few.
20:11 – She remains hopeful for the future but calls for faster change.
22:57 – People should think globally and act locally, starting with local food.
25:44 – Ron thanks Helena for her inspiration and ongoing work.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:01)
Welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Today I have much pleasure in welcoming back Helena Norberg-Hodge. Helena is a source of inspiration to millions around the world and certainly has been a source of inspiration to me. She is the CEO and founder of Local Futures. I’ve had her on the program many times. She has just returned from Ladakh in Tibet from the Planet Locals summit and I wanted to touch base with her and hear how that all went, reconnect on this important message of localization. It’s a message we do not hear often enough and yet it is a message that affects us all. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Helena Norberg-Hodge. Welcome back, Helena.
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (01:00)
Thank you.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (01:05)
Helena, you’ve just been away for quite some time, I know, but
the focus, the major focus of it was the Planet Local Summit in Ladakh. I wondered if you could just describe for us the gathering, what was the atmosphere like, what were some of the highlights?
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (01:16)
Yeah, well, it was the gathering of our tribe and that is literally from every continent, people who’ve realised that the mainstream narrative, the mainstream culture is taking us not only away from nature but away from ourselves and creating epidemics of depression. And these are people who really woken up to the fact that when we reconnect, when we rebuild our deeper connections to others and to nature, to life, to the animals, to the plant, we can restore our health and happiness in a way that’s, yeah, it’s remarkable. And of course we all know that we’re dealing with absolutely horrific problems because our leaders in business and government are continuing to pull us in the opposite direction. But what we feel really happy about is having helped people to take that step of reconnection, to regain greater strength, greater optimism, deep faith in both nature and human nature and be willing to talk about how we’ve got to change things at the policy level as well. So this is a really exceptional group of people from every continent. And they were coming to a very special place. know, it’s high on the Tibetan Plateau, this place called Ladakh, or it’s actually West Tibet, where I had my eyes opened all of this 50 years ago. So this was my 50th a year celebration of 50 years since I first arrived there.
And so it was a double thing for me because I received the most amazing welcome from the Ladakhi people, from the Ladakhi government, from Ladakhi children. I mean, it was quite remarkable. And so even children whom I’d never met before had read my book and
And yeah, was, yeah. So it was so inspiring and so energizing, I think for all of us. I really hope the Ripples will continue. We did a lot of interviews. So you’ll be able to hear from people from Myanmar and from, you know, Brazil, from Germany, from Romania. And so we hope to keep spreading the Ripples.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (03:59)
Yeah. I know that we did a program with you’ve been on the program before, but we also did a program with Alan Savory, who talked about holistic management and talked about their needing to be a holistic context that sits over every decision that’s made. It’s not there’s not a problem with making money and producing things, but the holistic context over which every decision is made is a really important aspect of this whole movement, isn’t it really?
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (04:34)
Absolutely, and that’s also why we must decentralise economic activity. In order to allow any human organisation or human beings to have that holistic view, they cannot be operating at a global level. They can’t sit in New York and think they’ve understood the seed species that’s appropriate for this particular bit of land in Malaysia or this particular corner of Massachusetts, we need much more intimate knowledge in order to appreciate the inevitable interconnections in all of life to see the impact of what we do spreading through the web of life. And that’s what localization is about. So that’s why it’s Planet Local.
And it’s also why we need global collaboration in order to bring about the changes to the system that would allow us to respect more localized knowledge, more decentralized structures.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (05:50)
You’ve used the word narrative before, you know, and that is a word that really I think we need to delve into a little bit more because people are exposed to a story narrative. used to think that was news. I’ve now realized that the news is actually a narrative. And that narrative is not promoting a more local future, is it? I mean, it is almost exactly the opposite.
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (06:16)
Well, I would say absolutely the opposite because the narrative is being told by global leaders who benefit from a system where they’re allowed to extract wealth from every corner of the planet where they’re allowed to pervert life, to essentially even study life for profit, not study life to understand and to allow for true productivity, true efficiency. You know, on a small diversified farm with lots of people, we can produce far more per unit of land.
We can be far more productive, far more efficient, eliminate waste, by the way, eliminate plastic as well. Plastic has been pushed by global corporations that need to keep things on the shelf and that need to be transporting things back and forth across the entire planet. It’s unbelievable when you step back and you look at how virtually every one of our problems has been created by this global system. That problem also includes a widening gap between rich and poor, which is simply unacceptable.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (07:38)
I mean, that context which we are operating in is really one which says GDP growth is a measure of a community and a country’s success.
And within that framework, think the costs to our human health and our planetary health have been externalised, not built into the products that are sold or the services that are delivered. Is that a fair assessment, do you think?
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (08:08)
It’s a very fair assessment. And when you look at it honestly, you know, it’s worse than that. Literally breakdown, illness, pollution lead to GDP growth.
Yes.
It’s little bit more crazy, you know.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, that means literally not only built in obsolescence, so if your fridge and your car break down far sooner than they need to, but even if we all get robbed and we have to go out and buy new cars and fridges, GDP goes up. Water is so polluted, we have to buy it in bottles. GDP goes up.
Yeah.
If we have, you know, constant need for
chemotherapy or pharmaceuticals because we’re so ill GDP goes up.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (09:02)
Yes, it’s an interesting one isn’t it? If we got sick or we had an accident that would be good for GDP and if we are healthy that is bad for GDP. Now there’s something wrong with that model. The other thing that you mentioned is biodiversity, understanding what is appropriate for a particular region and I think it often surprises people because. In the supermarket, we see one or two different types of tomatoes, and we think that’s diversity. I mean, I was surprised to learn that 100 years ago, there were about 300 or 400 different species of cauliflower, as an example, or 400 species of potatoes or tomatoes, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve now got it down to just a handful of each, and that is another price that we’ve paid for globalization.
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (09:046)
And it’s so dangerous. You know, that reduction in the diversity is the exact opposite of resilience. You know, we become so vulnerable as we reduce that diversity down. One pest could wipe it all out. And, you know, there’s been a real concern about that also with bananas, where the diversity has been reduced so dramatically.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (10:09)
Yeah. But when you return to Ladakh, and I don’t know how long it had been since you were last there? Ten years.
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (10:20)
Ten years.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (10:22)
Wow, and that had been 50 years since you were first there and it obviously changed your life, experience. What have you seen, what are some of the changes that you’ve seen in that region?
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (10:29)
Well, know, the changes I saw early on were very dramatic. Literally the happiest people I’d ever met, people who didn’t know the term depression, people who didn’t know suicide.
And then, you know, that was the indicator, the happiness and the rising unhappiness because of economic growth that opened my eyes so that after about a decade, suicide had emerged and now it’s about one a month and it’s young people. And because I had my eyes open to this 50 years ago and I went back to Sweden, my native country with my eyes open, realizing that this economic growth that we’re all pushing is actually harming us. And so in Sweden, then I realized, you know, this is why we have, you know, quite a high level of growth, but also a very high level of suicide, alcoholism, depression. So I’ve been an alternative economist ever since then, promoting what I call the economics of happiness.
And from Ladakh, it became so clear what we need for happiness. We need good social relationship. We need to feel loved. We need to be able to love. We need to be able to live in structures that are more collaborative and more intergenerational, and segregating us into separate age groups, creating more and more elbows and competition.
Technology speeding up life so that we barely have time to breathe and we barely have time to know each other or know ourselves. That speed that we’ve been subjected to with a narrative of progress, with a narrative that technology just marches on inevitably by itself. We have no control over it. That I think is the… probably the single most important thing we need to look at today. In the meanwhile, having encouraged people to reconnect, to create more localized economic structures, seeing the benefits from that. You know, one of the classical ones that we talk about in the localization movement is that in the typical farmers market, you have 10 times more conversations with people than you do in the supermarket.
So even in today’s crazy Russia and so on, we are creating spaces and examples of localization.
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Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (14:29)
Yes. And you mentioned indigenous because that’s something that I’ve been very keen to champion is that we have so much to learn from the indigenous cultures of the world. I I did a program with Tyson Yonkaputa who wrote a book called Sand Talk and he said the way that an indigenous person approaches a problem is firstly to start from a perspective of respect then connection, then reflection, and finally action or direction. And in our Western society, so that again is respect, connect, reflect, and then act or direct. And one could argue that we actually go the other way in our modern society. We act, realize it hasn’t worked, then we reflect, then we think maybe we should connect, and then we have a great deal more respect for what we did.
We have so much to learn from indigenous cultures, don’t we?
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (15:37)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s where I learned everything in Ladakh, this indigenous culture that had not been affected by colonialism, that hadn’t been affected by essentially a system that tears us apart from the connection and it prevents us from reflecting. So this…
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (16:24)
The deeper connection and the deeper reflection was part of life. That was some of the main things I learned. I was looking at the program of the Planet Summit and there was some amazing areas or topics balancing inner and outer transformation, self and society. mean, that sounds fascinating.
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (15:25)
It was, it was, and it was wonderful to have and this cross section of people, including neuroscientists and people from the West who are looking at this from that angle again, point of departure is indigenous culture, is learning from cultures that were able to sustain themselves for tens of thousands of years without destroying the land or themselves.
Obviously we have to learn from them. And in order to do so, we also need to go back and read the earlier accounts, you because now in many cases, those indigenous countries are not living in the way that they were when the first encounter. And what we’ll see is that in case after case, the first encounter, people’s reports were very positive. It was after they tried to steal their land, that they turned tribal people and indigenous people into violent and the opposite. The same people who had been described as incredibly peaceful and happy a decade later would be described as violent and yeah, the opposite.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (17:52)
One of the big challenges I think is if I was to identify, think technology is perhaps one of our biggest challenges. And I noticed that was a topic, digital dystopia, big tech addiction and AI. my goodness. That is a huge challenge.
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (18:05)
It is a huge challenge. And I think one of the most positive things I know about that is that in England, about four months ago, some studies show that roughly half young people under 16 said they prefer a world without the mobile phone.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (18:27)
Is that right? That’s an encouraging statistic. Very encouraging and very surprising.
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (15:28)
Yes. It’s extremely addictive. And you and I are using these things because we are virtually imprisoned in a system where we can’t get along without them. This is why with all our work in local futures.
We’re talking both about steps we can take personally, and we can do a lot at the community level, but we also need to be looking at policy change. There’s no reason at all why in another few years, we couldn’t have policies that enabled us to lay down many of these tools. Unfortunately, right now our governments are pushing for 5G because it’s profitable for giant banks and corporations. And those giant banks and corporations are not benefiting even 1 % of the global population. You know, it’s so unbelievable when you look at who the winners are in this casino and rat race, not even 1%. So it’s crazy that we’re allowing this push for more more high tech more and more speed to extract more and more wealth to fewer and fewer people.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (19:58)
Yes, that’s a compelling model, which we are you optimistic? She Helena tough question, but are you optimistic?
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (20:11)
I’m definitely optimistic for the longer run, but I’m very selfish. I’d like to see things change before I die.
And there, I don’t know, you know, I’m convinced that in the long run, human beings and nature will prevail. This system, you know, that’s rushing towards AI is a system that’s rushing towards mining in ever greater concentration and depth, this seedbed going to mass to fight over minerals to replace human beings with scarce minerals. Why? in order to give profit to some billionaires. know, it’s just so, but because it’s being marketed to us as this is, you know, going to help us diagnose cancer at an earlier age and all kinds of propaganda marketing these technologies. So people are not informed enough yet. But I think for sure over the next years, we’ll see that AI suits extractive capitalism for less than 1%. And I think people will see that they cannot keep running faster and faster, which is what the AI will force us to do. Running faster and faster also means sitting for two hours on the phone trying to talk to a person in the bank or in the government office for two hours. And then we can get a human, we get you know, robot if we only get a human, it’s a human that’s been robotized, who cannot deal with individual situations, everything becomes a formula. And we’re spending already how much time now on the internet trying to prove that we’re not robots. So just look at that increase. People are going to be quite fed up having robots tell us we have to prove that we’re not robots.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (22:19)
Yeah, yeah, no, no. Well, as you know, we’re putting on a conference in November, nourishing Australia and our aim is to engage with an urban group and try to present an alternative narrative of which thinking more locally is definitely one of our biggest aims. Look, from your perspective, what do you think if you had to speak to that audience?
What is the most important insight or action that people living in the city need to embrace now to ensure human and planetary health for future generations? How can they make a difference? What would you say to them?
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (22:57)
Well, for one thing, I’m not talking about thinking locally. I’m talking about above all thinking globally. And that means we actually need far more information about what’s going on in other countries. We are so trapped actually in far too national discourse. So we end up blaming our governments, blaming our culture, blaming ourselves for a poly crisis. A poly crisis where we just see everything seems to be breaking down from the environment to our mental health, our physical health. We need a big wake up and that’s through more global discourse. And the global discourse will help us to understand that it’s when we have global corporations running our economy that we end up completely denying the truth of diversity, cultural diversity, biological diversity, and that includes local knowledge systems. But in order to retain those and in order for us to regain health and sanity, we need global collaboration and actually more global information to really see what’s going on. And when we do, we’ll see that the problem is allowing our governments to hand over their power to global banks and corporations, sign agreements where they say, we won’t do anything that threatens your profit. That means we can’t remove a toxic chemical because you will lose money. We can’t raise the minimum wage.
No, no, we won’t do any of that. So once we know the truth about what’s going on globally, we need to be collaborating locally. And one of the first steps we can take is to connect to the sources of our food. There’s no other economic activity that has a bigger impact on the environment, on our health, both physical and mental, than what’s happening to the food economy.
So creating local food systems from the city, connecting to the farms around the city is one of the most healing, one of the most rapid, one of the most significant changes we can engage in. It’s happening. If you start opening your eyes to it, you might be able to support the organizations that are setting up new farmers markets, new farm shops and reconnecting people to the land.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (25:44)
Wow, what a great message and that’s exactly why I wanted to invite you on to share that because I cannot think of a person more inspiring to share that with our audience. So Helena, thank you again for everything you do and you are a constant source of inspiration to me and millions of other people and thank you again for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Helena Norberg-Hodge (26:01)
Thank you, Ron. Thank you so much for what you do. I’m so happy to collaborate with you.
Speaker 1: Dr Ron Ehrlich (26:07)
Well, if you’re not familiar with Local Futures, that organization, I would encourage you to connect with it. It’s obviously Local Futures, easy to find on the internet. Helena’s book, Ancient Futures, has been available for many, many years. Look, I’d also encourage you and I invite you to join us at Nourishing Australia Conference in Sydney on the 1st of November and the conference topic is how soil health affects climate and human health and it’s a topic that touches every single one of us about nutrient dense diet, about local food production, about food sovereignty, about human health, about climate health. There is a wide range of topics that we’re going to be covering. If you use the code unstresshealth, all one word, capital 20, all one word, unstresshealth20, and you go onto the Humanti site or the link in these show notes. You can register. It’s at the University of Technology in Sydney on Saturday, the 1st of November. It’s also being streamed globally. You can join us online and you can pose questions online. That is also an option to you, although being in the room and meeting the speakers is the preferred way to go I think. Look, I hope this finds you well. Until next time, this is Dr. Ron Erlich. Be well.
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