Henry Coleman
Henry connected with the work of Local Futures at age 15, and is now a Project Coordinator for the organization, working in Ladakh, India and Australia. In 2017, he co-founded the NGO ‘Wildspace’.
Beware the “Investment”!
A crash-course in economic literacy as the AI bubble gets blown up with hot air and public funding I recently learnt that a $20 ChatGPT subscription gets you access to about $700 worth of computing power.1 This inspired two ideas: WOW, I’d better turn my whole camera roll into Studio Ghibli-style remakes before this awesome…
Humanity Is Not the Problem!
‘Humanity has missed the mark. Humanity has failed.’ As COP30 gets underway, this was the media’s take on the UN Secretary-General’s announcement that 1.5 degrees of global warming has now been locked in. We should be rolling our eyes at such proclamations. Once again, humanity takes the blame for the impotence of corporate-led summits. …
How to Feed the World and Save the Planet – A View from the Ground
“Better production ultimately means … protecting soils instead of depleting them, it means using water more wisely, it means bringing back diversity and local solutions.” – Beth Bechdol, FAO Deputy Director-General, on the FAO’s World Food Day 2025 opening plenary Anyone who tuned into the FAO’s World Food Day programme last week would be forgiven…
Trump’s Tariffs = Localist Liberation?
Last week, on so-called “Liberation Day,” the Trump administration announced its new wave of tariffs. The language was poignant. Liberation. It was a word meant to stir, to conjure up the dream of breaking free from foreign exploitation. Dependence on global trade is indeed a trap. For decades, our deepening reliance on faraway markets and…
Go Back and Fetch It: Sankofa and the Cult of Progress
Last year, I was one of an international throng of localists (yes, international localists) to descend on Bristol, UK. We were there for the Planet Local Summit – perhaps the largest gathering of this movement to date. It was as if everyone I’d ever read or listened to on a podcast or seen in a…
Active Networks for a Rapid Global-to-Local Transition
It’s too easy to get depressed by the daily news cycle of wars and the threat of A.I., and to assume that nothing at all is going on to take the world in a more life-affirming direction. The truth is, there are thousands of grassroots projects on every continent challenging the bigger-is-better, high-tech trajectory of…
Local Food for Rapid Transition
As a nature-loving child growing up in the 2000s, I was debilitated and depressed by the idea that we could either save species and ecosystems, or provide a reasonable quality of life to human beings. Everything I was implicitly taught about ‘development’ and ‘progress’, at school and in the media, pointed to one seemingly inexorable…
Supply Chain Failures: Another Reason for Localized Economies
The mainstream media – television, print and digital – routinely cycle through the litany of crises gripping the world. One week they’ll tell us about the latest climate disaster. The next, the focus may shift to the war in Ukraine. A few days later, COVID-19’s latest variant might be trending. The hot topic of the…
Art as Activism: an interview with Brenna Quinlan
Brenna Quinlan’s passions are art, sustainability and education, and she combines these three into what she calls ‘Art as Activism’. Having lived and worked on permaculture sites around the world, her drawings convey the power of permaculture and localization principles, and act as powerful tools for environmental and social justice movements. She created the illustrations…
Indigenous and feminine wisdom: an interview with Ella Noah Bancroft
Ella Noah Bancroft is a descendant of the peoples of the Bundjalung nation (in present-day Australia) and has bloodlines to England, Poland and Scotland. She is an Indigenous artist, storyteller, mentor and active advocate for The Decolonization movement. She is the founder of the not-for-profit event The Returning, which works to reconnect people back to…