Transcript: HELENA NORBERG-HODGE on the Violence of Globalization /236
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Helena Norberg-Hodge.
Helena Norberg-Hodge So the mechanisms really, fundamentally are doing the same thing and that is destroying the small and strengthening the big and it's not just small versus big, but small, local versus big, global.
Ayana Young Helena Norberg-Hodge is a recipient of the Alternative Nobel prize, the Arthur Morgan Award, and the Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.” She is author of the inspirational classic Ancient Futures, and Local is Our Future. Helena is the founder and director of Local Futures and The International Alliance for Localisation.
Well, Helena, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to diving in with you.
Helena Norberg-Hodge Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. I've heard a lot about you.
Ayana Young Ditto. Well, I do think that many of our listeners are probably already acutely aware of the absurdity of our global trade system; catching seafood in Alaska, sending it to China to be processed, and then sending back to the United States to be sold, for example, but I think often we get fixated on the absurdity, and then we forget to really interrogate why this is done, who benefits from it, and what policies support it. Why is it critically important to care about trade deals, and what are the tax policy loopholes that continue to uphold and even strengthen the wastefulness of our global trade system?
Helena Norberg-Hodge Well, I would say the most important area to look at is trade treaties that in the name of free trade have been, particularly since the Second World War, been a vehicle whereby global traders in money, in other words, the banks, as well as the corporations, have been getting more and more freedom. So most people think about trade treaties as being deals between countries, what they don't realize is that the countries are tending to think that if they do a trade deal that will favor General Motors over Volvo in Sweden, you know, from America, that this is going to benefit their own country. And in actual fact, what's been going on is that these giant corporations that have become multinational, transnational, long ago - at one point, Mitsubishi said to Japan, “no, no, no, we're not gonna Japanese”, anymore, because they are operating globally and through the treaties are getting the freedom to move in and out of any country.
Particularly in the last 30 years, there's been an escalation of these treaties that have allowed big businesses, essentially, to use cheap labor in so-called poor countries and then, whether it's in manufacturing, or even things like sitting in front of the phone all day answering questions about train inquiries in England, someone sitting in the Philippines is answering the questions, it actually turns out to be incredibly inefficient on top of everything else, for ordinary use as ordinary citizens. But this global expansion of corporations through trade deals, I would argue, is the main reason why we are in this dire state where we are extinguishing species as we speak. We are extinguishing jobs and livelihoods and really importantly too,we are extinguishing identities. Now, the way that works is that by helping the giant corporations that are operating globally, what's actually been set in motion is a type of giant chasm where it's impossible for these companies to respect and respond to diversity. The authenticity, uniqueness, the incredible diversity of life becomes an inefficiency. It is standardization and monoculture that becomes necessary.
I would say that the best area to understand this is to look at food and farming and to just visualize, you know, in front of your eyes, the way that big and bigger monocultures link to larger, larger supermarkets, and link to importing food from all over the world so that in the giant supermarket you will find the items from every continent, and you get, you know, if people aren't paying attention to what's happening on the ground, you don't see those monocultures, they think it's a great thing, you know, you can get anything you want. But this system, which delivers this splendid diversity in the supermarket is actually actively eliminating the diversity. So whether it's the species of plants, animals, whether it's a different types of cheeses that were once made in France, or different types of miso in Japan, all of that diversity is being eradicated and more and more this system not only imposes monoculture on the land, I should also mention in the sea, with trawling nets that can hold 13 jumbo jets where you know, life is just lifted out and only a fraction of that is used. It's criminally wasteful.
And maybe the most important thing to point out is that when you take any two bits of land, and on one you produce monoculture, one thing, I'm only going to have in the same species of trees or fruit trees or vegetables, and on the other bit of land, you diversify - you will always be able to get more from the land on the diversified bit of land. You will always be able to be more productive. So what modern trade based global agriculture has led to is a steady path towards not only producing less and less and less from each unit of land, but destroying the very land that was used for the production. It's creating the dust poles that we know about. So the urgent need is to shift towards more localized systems, which I hope will come back to, but also maybe in plain language I just want to say to people think about the fact that every time you go to buy some food, and keep in mind, every person on the planet needs to eat every single day. There is no area there is no issue there is nothing that we do that to more fundamentally lever in shifting things towards greater health, towards ecological and human well being than focusing on the food system.
Ayana Young It was so good to hear this analysis and it's something I think about a lot about this global trade, insanity. And yeah, I'd like to ground listeners in the massive disparity between countries that are tremendously resource wealthy versus those that dominate the spheres of production and manufacturing. And an example that immediately comes to mind is that of the chocolate industry, where the last time I checked Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire single handedly hold over 50% of the market share of cacao beans, yet the amount of money that they are able to generate in export earning is nothing in comparison to manufacturer's net sales. For example, in 2016 these two West African countries earned $5.7 billion in cacao exports, whereas in that same year, Hershey created $7.4 billion in net sales. So, I wonder if you could begin our conversation by elaborating how distribution networks, branding, marketing, and even intellectual property rights are assisting in this grave global robbery?
Helena Norberg-Hodge Yes, I mean, what I would say is that, generally speaking, farmers everywhere in the world have been marginalized and if we step back and look at the truth of what's been going on, we'll see that after the Second World War, these trade deals were brought in as a mechanism, supposedly, and I think in the minds of many of our leading politicians and so on, the idea was, we're going to prevent another depression and we're going to prevent another world war by integrating all economic activity under one umbrella. And so the World Bank, the IMF and the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is set up. I think the really important thing that we need to look at today is not so much the relationship between different countries, as the relationship between this gradual takeover and I mean takeover of every country. I'm saying that even America is captured by the global banking and corporate system, it sounds a bit like a conspiracy, and I don't think it ever was a conscious conspiracy, but what had happened is that, because the global traders in money and other goods, so the banks and other global actors had so much power, they were influencing governments already after the Second World War, and then this has been increasing.
So there is still obviously a certain divide between rich countries and poor countries, in terms of if you look just at the dollar value, and the dollar, if you like that sort of hourly wage, you'll see this huge difference between the majority of people in poor countries, and the majority of people in so-called rich countries. But I have to say already in the 70s, again, when I came back to Sweden, having lived in this traditional culture of Ladakh, and later on also working in Bhutan, as I came back, I saw extreme poverty in Sweden, a poverty that led me to have to talk about happiness, and what was causing that sort of widespread depression and later on, now, we've got epidemics of anxiety, and when you actually start looking at the fabric of community, the intergenerational community fabric is something that we evolved with. So in the human sphere we were deeply connected across the generations. And I came to realize how profoundly important that was in creating this wealth of self acceptance and feeling completely fine with who you are and what you are, and what a wealth that is.
So in terms of the, you know, cacao and in terms of what's happening with Hershey and Nestle, and so on, for sure, they're huge injustices and they're not in any way to sort of be to be dismissed, but I think we're gonna miss, you know, sort of missed the point if we don't recognize that the global narrative that's been pushed on us as part of creating a corporate dominated, global consumer culture is everywhere.
Ayana Young A particular facet that I’d like to focus on a bit more is making the connection between trade agreements and climate change really explicit. It’s been predicted that if nothing changes, by 2050 commercial ships and the aviation industry will make up 35% of the world’s Co2 emissions. Additionally, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, at one point, sought to require that the US Department of Energy approve all exports of liquid natural gas and embolden the fossil fuel industry to sue the government for trying to enact climate regulations, and while the United States ultimately ended up pulling out of this trade agreement, this does highlight that trade agreements work to the detriment of creating an inhabitable Earth. And so I wonder if you think it is even possible to have trade agreements that seek to address the rampant environmental pollution that they’ve created in the first place?
Helena Norberg-Hodge I think it's absolutely possible, but what it's going to require is that the movements which are very significant, of people around the world, who are, you know, particularly here, engagement, climate, wake up to the arena they need to focus on. And I think I'm seeing a shift. There is a shift going on. It gives me hope, because I've been, you know, trying to raise awareness about it for almost 45 years and there is definitely a willingness now, there's been the New York Times has even sort of cautiously stated, “Oh, well, maybe governments won't want to be so dependent on global trade anymore.” You know, when you can't even get loo paper or masks in your own country What's going on? And of course, remember again, how important the food side of it is because we're talking about an arena that is transforming the natural world more massively than any other.
So I think it's absolutely possible to have trade agreements, but no way are they going to be what we want, without civic society at the table. So it means the first step is much greater awareness about scrutinizing these trade treaties and then we'll find that even in Sweden, and I say, even because we're a bit more closer on governments, we feel that we have a little more access to what's going on, but about four years ago, some journalist contacted me to say that in Sweden, they had passed a law that now trade treaties had to be negotiated in secrecy, they have generally been done in secrecy, because it's, you know, it's quite specialized and people, you know, generally feel it’s very technical and even what you're relating there some of what you just mentioned, about those trade treaties, I'm not familiar with those details, because it gets extremely complex. But the basic principle, the basic fact that these trade treaties are about giving global traders more freedom, that and along with a few other key items here should be what the movements focus on.
And we need not just environmental movement, we really need, all of these people are waking up to the fact that if we don't look at the economic trajectory, we're going to end up, I believe, losing everything, because what's happening, because of this extractive crazy, crazy, crazy economy is that more and more people are working harder and harder. We're talking about poverty rising up into the middle classes, we're talking about all these people who supposedly are doing so much better in China and India, those people are now earning so much more money, which is being held up as this great victory of globalization, working harder and harder and harder. I mean, we're talking about, you know, people, splitting up families, it's a type of slave-like factory system. We're talking about the middle classes in Sweden, in America, in Germany, having to run faster and work harder than ever before. I've had economist friends document this Juliet Schor in America, at that time, she was at Harvard, she wrote a book called the Overworked American, looking at how the average American was having to work one month more per year to stay in place. In England, my colleague, Richard Douthwaite wrote a book called The Growth Illusion, in that he showed basically the same pattern but he looked at buying power. And so when you actually look at the real fact, of how many hours you have to work, to pay for your house, roof over your head, you know, pay for your food, for education, healthcare, what is considered basic needs, you will see that we are all getting poorer.
The scary thing is that as people get poorer, they are vulnerable to demagogues who are going to say “We’re going to grow the economy for you, we're going to make your country great. Forget about all this climate and all this business about the Amazon. It's irrelevant, the important thing is to grow the economy, and forget about looking after the immigrants of the poor. And we're going to really look after you.” So we're seeing the swing to the right. So I'm arguing to the moment I'm saying please, please any of you who care about what's happening to people who care about the injustice of this system, including those cacao growers in this, you know, crazy unfair system, and talking about them being better off than we think - I'm not at all saying that they're in a good position. We're looking at a system that really is marginalizing the majority of humanity and so if we care about the poverty and, and the injustice of that, and we see and care about the environmental disasters, let's please come together to demand that economic shift that so clearly can lead to both human and ecological improvements and ultimately with this goal of human and ecological well being, as we know they are completely linked. We are nature, we are part of nature.
Ayana Young I’d like to read a passage from “Poverty Alleviation at an International Development Organization: Resurrecting the Human Being as Subject”, where the authors [Sangeeta Parameshwar, Param Srikantia, and Jessican Heineman-Pieper] write; “While claiming to do the opposite, professionals in the field of “international development” have often been impoverishing global communities through Western economic and technological interventions, enabled by the “aid” provided by interested global financial institutions on usurious, harmful, and coercive terms. It is ironic that the West, with all its economic crashes, corporate scandals, addictive consumerism, runaway militarism, and unsustainable lifestyles, considers itself competent to “develop” the other three-fourths of the world’s population.” And I’d like to explore the fallacy of “rich and poor” countries or “developed and developing” countries, can you share with us how foreign aid really underpins these false understandings?
Helena Norberg-Hodge Yeah, and again, I'd say that the foreign aid part of it has been fundamental and continues to be, but more frightening now is the massive accumulation of wealth directly in the hands of global corporations and banks. And so a lot of the worse, you know, changes now have to do with the Free Trade Zones where corporations are able to move in and produce, and do exactly as they like. But foreign aid has been part of this problem, where we now know that in the name of aid, what was being introduced was increased dependence, there was an attempt in order to sell and push technologies produced in the West, there was, you know, or at every step, it wasn't aiding so-called poor countries to become genuinely wealthier. It was, it's taken on a language and a language that sounds perfect, beautiful now in the aid agencies is all about cultural diversity, about ecology, and when you look at what's actually happening, is the introduction of structures that push people away from the land into ever larger mega cities.
So one of the most frightening things is that the entire system is now set with the help of foreign aid, but also within our own countries. So the mechanisms really, fundamentally are doing the same thing and that is destroying the small and strengthening the big and it's not just small versus big, but small, local versus big, global. So whether it's the corner shop in New Hampshire, in some village, or whether it's the, you know, the small village shopping in a country on the other side of the world, they're all threatened by the takeover, essentially, of the merging, and now we're talking about the information society, we're talking about the financialization of nature, the financialization of the world, linked to high tech.
So aid is involved in this, but most of it is now driven by private, for profit corporations and these are publicly traded corporations. And that's an important thing for us to remember, that that's the sort of structure there's almost like a machine that's become, you know, it's incapable of responding to ecological social realities and pressures, because it's just, you know, this blind pursuit of profit. If a CEO decides, “well, actually, this is a bit damaging, I really should make changes to care more for the soil for the worker” - they won't, they can’t survive. There are some privately owned corporations that are able to behave in a more gentle and thoughtful way, but really the problem is that we've got to get a clear look at the systemic problem in every country now that I know of, there may be a few, very few exceptions. The taxes people pay are used in this machine-like way to subsidize private corporate enterprise. And those subsidies have included mega infrastructure, also with government aid in so-called developing countries, that all the time furthered this extractive accumulation of wealth at the top.
And maybe I could also just mention, it's really helpful for me to realize that when this economic system started, the modern economy started, it was started by some white European men who were overtly racist, misogynist, and anti-nature, it's so important that we recognize that these overtly negative values are not necessarily carried by today's white male elites who are carrying out and continue with a system that started with that very explicit, anti-nature, anti- and you know of course genocide of Indigenous people, and so on. But you see, when they set that system up, fundamental to the economic principle that was born on the back of slavery, of genocide, and later with colonialism, the foundation of the economy was comparative advantage. This is a principle that was brought in. That principle says, “don't be self reliant, don't think it's good for your region to produce a range of things that you need. No, no, no, you're going to be much better off if you specialize, and export. And you specialize in what you have a comparative advantage in.” On the surface, you know, it sounds okay. But we have to remember, it was set up by this global sort of cabal, which, which wasn't, you know, exactly the sort of conspiracy that people might imagine today, but it was a very clear system that was blatantly about ripping people off around the world to make a few people rich. When we now look at the economy, we must reject this principle of comparative advantage in a fundamental way.
So what are we talking about? Comparative advantage meant monoculture, you just produce cocoa, you just produce cotton, you just produce sugar, tea for us, the traders, and then you import everything you need. Well guess who gets richer from this? The global traders. So now we have to recognize that built in, endemic to the modern economy is because of the principle of comparative advantage. monoculture, monocultural production, and endemic to the modern economy, monoculture endemic to life is diversity, endemic. It's not just diversity in the sense of every cell, every person, every leaf, being unique and different, but the miracle of life, each and every one of those cells is changing. It's alive. It's the most amazing miracle of this richness of relationships. And it's what every spiritual teaching is about, we wake up to that magic of that interconnected, ever rich, ever mysterious, ever unknowable fabric of life. And as we're in tune with that, you know, what I'm saying is I have seen I have lived with people who were radiantly happy, who emanated such a deep sense of equanimity, of rightness, of feeling “I'm fine the way I am.” But it wasn't about I, it was a sort of a we sense. So if we could wake up to that, we really must be looking at how can we collectively turn towards a way of doing things that is truly life affirming. And what I'm saying from this 45 years of looking at what's happening in both industrialized countries and non-industrialized is that it really does require this localizing path instead of a globalizing, it's about essentially starting to rebuild greater self reliance, which by the way, goes hand in hand with greater self respect, which goes hand in hand with lowering the gap between rich and poor. Yeah, again, my answers are too long, I'll stop now.
Ayana Young Well there's just so much to say, you know, there's so much to analyze, because it is global. It's these huge, overarching issues. And, you know, now that we've spoken about globalization, I'd love to orient listeners to localization. You point out that localization is about bringing the economy back to us; no longer does it have to revolve around the whims of transnational corporations, instead it can nourish human health and wellbeing at the community level. What are the benefits of an economic shift from global to local? How is localization a wealth-building strategy?
Helena Norberg-Hodge Again, I think it's really helpful to start with food and farming. And I just want to remind, you know, the listener again, that, maybe I didn't say it before, but I usually always say that every person on the planet needs food every day, you know, usually about three times a day. Now, just with that simple recognition that our governments around the world are separating us further and further from the source of that food, something that we need to survive every day. How is it that we've been separated further, further? How is it that something that’s been transported for 10,000 miles will be cheaper than something that’s been transported for one mile? Well, the basic structures and principles I've been trying to outline are part of that. We have our governments using taxes, subsidies and regulations, to distort the economy to preference and favor the global traders at the expense of billions and billions of smaller businesses, enterprises of every kind. This is what we need to be looking at. And with that shift towards saying, “No, we need to support the multitude of place based ways of doing things.” And if we start by looking at food, I hope many of you will be as inspired as I am. Because I've helped to plant ideas around the world, including in California and New York, and going back to the 80s. And then, yeah, really starting in the 70s and what I can report is that over these years, it's been slow, but there's a steady increase in local food initiatives. Absolutely steady increase and it's a miracle. It's a miracle.
Our work and the work of the people who've been doing this have been almost invisible. Almost no support from the media, almost no funding. It's been sort of blood, sweat and tears. 90%, I would say, led women all around the world. Things have happened like a woman in Devon where we had an office and did quite a lot of work in helping to get the English local food movement started and there you know, she had heard that we'd set up a farmers market and that they really helped small farmers. Her husband was depressed, on the verge of suicide, started drinking, was just giving up because as a small farmer, he was just couldn't survive. Why? Because of our taxes, we're ending up supporting the system that nobody wants, that we don't see the connection. So these small farmers around the world are suffering, high suicide rates. Anyway, this woman had heard about the farmers market that we had set up, and she decided to try. And his story was so moving for me. You know, because she talks about how it was quite difficult to persuade people, even right now, here in this area where I am, I've helped start four farmers markets, they are so successful, people love them. Still now, as I'm trying to start a fifth one, because it's the best way of helping small farmers, it's still a struggle. You know, it's amazing, because the system is geared against it. But anyway, this woman, she persisted, and the shopkeepers in the town where she wanted to do it, were opposed to it, the council wasn't supportive, the local government, the farmers themselves, and this is also my experience with trying to set these things that they're resistant, they don't think it's going to work. And you know, that often aggressively and antagonistically against them, even those who are going bankrupt. But anyway, she persisted. And finally, they had their first small market, she hadn't been able to get that many growers, and it poured with rain. So that was like this gonna be the end of this, you know, it's just, but even then it was so successful. And it went from strength to strength, and it's there, it's bigger. Every day in my inbox, I get more of those stories, every single day.
So there is this silent, local food movement growing. Interestingly enough, a lot of people who are doing it are not necessarily thinking about the global system, they're not necessarily even calling what they do local. And I would urge people to do so because this is much harder to co-opt “local”, the fashionable term right now is “regen”, but watch out, it comes from big business. Nestle is boasting of being “regen.” So you know, we need a holistic analysis and local as one single word is probably the safest, but really, it has to be thought of holistically, so it's a local system. Now, what happens when you have shorter distances between the farm and the consumer, is that you get a market pressure towards diversification. The farmers previously have been pushed for these hundreds of years towards bigger and bigger monocultures, it goes against nature, becomes harder and harder, you kill the soil. You think that by killing off all the, you know, external life, the weeds, the worm, everything, you're going to be doing better? No, you're killing life and it becomes almost impossible to produce. You have to buy more external inputs, they become more and more expensive. You try to spend more, you have one hailstorm, it kills off everything. When you have diversity, you are working with life, you're actually even restoring space for wildlife. And you're getting more per unit of land, but vastly more in highly diversified systems that we need to create. You might call it agroecology or permaculture.
But what's really true is that if we build on traditions, with farming, in many cases, that have been going on for 1000s of years - we build on that local knowledge and increase the diversity often by importing something but with care, being very careful about bringing in species from outside that might will become problematic weeds, etc. But anyway, in the local food movement, you can see most of all, you know, the farmer, you know, right here has become a friend who said he'd been a farmer his whole life and felt like a serf. There was such pressure for them to produce this standard sized avocado for the central market. Larger larger quantities pressured for lower and lower prices. And victims of these larger systems where supermarket chains say “Okay, well take X number of kilos from your tons” and then suddenly turn around say, “Sorry, no, no, we don't actually need it.” Or, you know, total victims of the pressures from the central market. And he said, “You know, we felt like serfs, you know, just slaving away.” He said, “After you started the farmers market, it was like entering another galaxy.” It's just such a pleasure; you're talking to consumers who don't care if every avocado is the same size, they even value seeing some little blemish as a sign that they haven't been sprayed, they talk to you about whether you had an effect from that hailstorm or how it's going without any rain. There's just this beautiful coming together, where different needs are being met and answered through a we you know, rather than an isolated i. So, in the local food movement is where you'll see the most beneficial and the most important effect of localization.
Ayana Young Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about the term downshifting and it comes to mind as we think about localization, scaling local and scaling down; and finding ways to resist the work-spend lifestyle, while also creating a resilient community; and a lot of questions come up for me here, because localization obviously requires consumption, but I think we can implement localization while also creating a different sort of consumerism that isn’t so rampant and devoid and constant. So, this is somewhat of an open-ended question; but can you explain how community structures and community ownership models work in a local economy, and how much consumerism is still necessitated under this model? And what is really required of the community to sustain themselves?
Helena Norberg-Hodge First of all, even now, in this crisis situation, I want everybody to be aware that if there is a major climate emergency, or a financial, or political emergency, and and this insane trade infrastructure is blocked in some way, it's the supermarket shelves that are going to be empty in about four days. So focusing on building up greater food security should be the highest priority everywhere. Now, it turns out that focusing on that food security and by that I don't mean some kind of, you know, bunker building with, you know, having lots of tinned food, we're talking about a building up of food security through localized food economies and growing and we're talking about the importance of maintaining the seeds and finding the heritage seeds that are much more adapted to your region. And the only way to protect that wealth from seeds is through growing it, seed banks can't work at all in the long run.
What you'll discover is if you start going into this movement of the local food systems is that there's so much meaningful work to be done, there is so there is so much joy in it, because as I was saying earlier, it does help to restore wilderness as well and I guess I've for myself, my little religion is nature and has always has been. I grew up in Sweden and I was very lucky to have, you know, wide open spaces and with almost no people around and that's still sort of my church and I still prefer to go out you know, in unspoiled nature like that. But I'm aware that for many people, and to some extent, for me, that when you engage people, which is now happening as part of this whole localization movement, prisoners have been given a chance, for the last few months in prison to learn how to grow food and to learn it, in community, you know, curated by people to help them to sit in circle, to get to know each other from that deeper place where we talking to each other not to show off, which is this separation and fear, but to actually connect by being able to be more vulnerable, and more honest about your feelings and who you really are on the inside.
So that along with growing food, and learning those skills and actually becoming a productive part of this fabric of life, it's amazing that it has these multiple multiple effects of supporting greater self esteem, and increasing skills that also train people for a type of work that they just love. And that there's such a need for and that they can continue with. So if you keep in mind, just how much there is to be done in that arena. And if you can just, you know, I wish I could have the visuals to sort of show you on the one side, the dominant path supported by the government is making jobs available to fewer and fewer people and then, you know, the idea of some kind of handout, you know, better social welfare, or sort of UBI, universal basic income, as far as I'm concerned, they're not appealing, because people like to feel that they're engaged with something meaningful, that they're doing something productive. And it's of course, people can't, it's a different thing. But when you realize what these pressures mean on young people, and you see, which I do very clearly, and it's very scary, the epidemics of anxiety, of depression, fear, insecurity, you really see how urgent it is that we steer people in this other direction towards localization.
Ayana Young What you just shared was really valuable and there is one part of localization that I think about a lot and in “Localization: A strategic solution to globalized authoritarianism” you write; “A major challenge to the acceptance of a localist agenda among progressives has been the impression that local and natural are ‘elitist’ and affordable only to those of comfortable means. Corporate think tanks have been effective in disseminating this message, but the relatively higher cost of healthy alternatives—whether organic food, local natural building materials and fibres, or alternative medicine—is largely a product of externalised costs and government subsidies for export-oriented corporate production. Strip away all that artificial support and the cost of globalised products would be out of reach for most.” And, I’d really like to dig into the notion of elitism around localism, because I’ve encountered it often, and what I always think about are subsidies, and how global fossil fuel subsidies have created a false understanding of price and value; do you think as a response to charges of elitism, we need subsidies local goods?
Helena Norberg-Hodge Well, I think absolutely, we need to shift the subsidies. And, and I think it's so important that instead of saying to people, if you care about the environment, if you care about the health, your health and your children's, you should buy organic and shame on you if you don't, it's tragic that in the environmental movement, there's been a lot of that, you know, pointing the finger to the end of the door, making people feel guilty. You know, even if they drive their car, you know, they're living in a system where it's almost impossible to get around without a car. So it's really about collective change that we're talking and we're saying, let's start thinking about what we can do, rather than what can I do? It's not at all to say that we shouldn't take any responsibility but within the environmental movement, this has been a really tragic thing. So when it comes to this food issue, instead of saying to people, let's come together to create a system where we can lower the price of healthy food, or no, you should spend more money on your food, we should be saying, let's get our voices heard and demand that the subsidies are changed so that the subsidies are not supporting old food from far away, there supporting our own local farmers, our own local varieties, and healthy non chemical agriculture.
I believe that if we could get the message out to the majority of people, left, right, center, whatever they are, if you said, “Would you prefer to have your taxes support the farmers in your area, to support the businesses in your area? Or would you prefer that your taxes end up supporting global corporations?” I can almost guarantee that people would vote in the right direction. But that choice is not being made available to them because this distant trade regime and these distant corporations are in a way invisible, in another way they're not, you know, everybody knows that big business is big, and that they have too much power. And most people don't like that. But they end up usually focusing on government and then the sentiment becomes anger against the government. And I see that even at the level of a local government here, so many people who don't realize that the local government is actually carrying out, essentially orders from above, and they end up being like little policemen regulating us, you know, whether we're going five miles over the speed limit, or if we want to build a staircase in our house, we can't have it, you know, one inch smaller or higher. And it's so crazy that our taxes are ending up used to police us money, while global corporations are getting away literally with murder, you know, in terms of this incredible, wasteful, polluting practices, and, you know, slave like conditions in these big factories in China, and so on.
So it's just, it's really not a system that I'm seeing that from the very bottom to the very top of society, nobody would really want that system, if they could have the opportunity to step back and see it as a system, connect the dots and see how it all spins, to make their own health, their own children, less happy, less healthy. And of course, to present, on the other hand, the possibility of another systemic direction, it needs to be done in a far better way than we've done. I mean it's really difficult to sort of on the one hand, talk about the big, bad global and then as I've done, you know, wax lyrical about the local, but really what we also need to be talking about is the steps in between. And yes, a key step in between, is that yes, we do need to subsidize the localizing part. And not only that, it needs to be deregulated. Many of these regulations are harmful, a lot of stuff that's brought in, in the name of, of health and, and public welfare is actually not that - it's actually preventing the small, especially again, in food and farming, from functioning more freely, and far more efficiently.
You know, we have examples of farmers in France, you know, who have been producing the most divine goat cheese for like five generations and then suddenly, new EU regulations say they have to have [inaudible] in their ceiling, as well as everywhere else in order to keep operating, and we’re talking about 1000s of dollars in rebuilding and so on, which they couldn’t afford, so they go out of business. Anyway, these are just millions and millions of examples like this that most people aren't aware of. But once you can get a clearer picture of the benefits of a shift towards localizing, we can present a picture, which is not about revolution. It doesn't require some dramatic collapse. I'm afraid so many people are, you know, sort of waiting for some kind of a collapse. It doesn't require any major suffering from any significant numbers of people. Because if we were to insist on shifting taxes, subsidies, and regulations, these are the mechanisms by which the government steers society. Now they're steering it towards more unemployment, more pollution, energy consumption, resource consumption, together in one fell swoop, this globalizing part destroys jobs, massively increases energy use, resource use, and massively increases pollution.
On the other path, we're doing the opposite. We're creating more livelihoods, vastly reducing energy use, reducing resources, and as it happens, that path also leads to greater physical and emotional health. So healthy ecosystems, health of people connected, and this could be done relatively smoothly, but it's like, you know, we started talking about the trade treaties, and how could they ever be a good instrument, it's going to require that the social environmental movements do realize that this is a central systemic arena, and that we organize things so that we insist that civic society is at the table. So now as we're working out the treaties, to take control of big businesses and banks, rather than them controlling our government and us, we need to be at the table.
Ayana Young Yes, well, I mean, there's definitely so much to metabolize, and I really appreciate everywhere you took us. Yeah, this has been such a wonderful way to spend the afternoon and thank you so much for giving us so much of your time and your heart and your mind.
Helena Norberg-Hodge Well, thank you so much for doing this really important podcast and I hope we can collaborate further.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild podcast. The music you heard today was by Dana Anastasia and Chloe Levaillant. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell.