Local Futures
Local Futures’ mission is to protect and renew ecological and social well being by promoting a systemic shift away from economic globalization towards localization. Through its “education for action” programs, Local Futures develops innovative models and tools to catalyze collaboration for strategic change at the community and international level.
#Occupy Happiness
Occupy Wall Street has captured the imagination of people all over the world with the prospect of a more participatory, people-powered future. We at ISEC are particularly excited that the Occupy Movement is focusing its critique on corporate control. We have been working for many years to scale back the power of corporations by building…
The Case for Local Food
By Helena Norberg-Hodge If you want to create a more sustainable society, a good place to start is by helping to rebuild your local food economy: food is something everyone, everywhere, needs every day, which means that even relatively small changes in the way it is produced and marketed can have immense effects. And since…
Bringing the Food Economy Home
By Helena Norberg-Hodge and Steven Gorelick Today’s mounting social and ecological crises demand responses that are broad, deep, and strategic. Given the widespread destruction wrought by globalisation, it seems clear that the most powerful solutions will involve a fundamental change in direction – towards localizing rather than globalising economic activity. In fact, ‘going local’ may…
Tipping the Scale
By Steven Gorelick Looking back on the latter half of the 20th century, a dominant theme that emerges is the way large scale has steadily supplanted small scale. This scaling-up is closely linked to globalization — shorthand for the relentless expansion of the western industrial model — and has expressed itself in several interrelated ways:…
Reclaiming Our Food
By Helena Norberg-Hodge Paris in the 1970s was a city full of character and life. Each quartier had its own colourful market, selling wonderful fruits, all kinds of vegetables, meats, superb cheeses and wine. All of that diversity originated at no great distance: most of it came from different regions of France, if not from…
Rambo, Barbie and Wordsworth
The scene is a classroom in Leh, Ladakh, twelve thousand feet up in the western Himalayas. A young teacher stands in front of her class of 12 year-olds. “I appreciate the poetry of …”, she starts, inviting her students to complete the sentence. Milarepa? Nagarjuna? Tagore, perhaps? But no. “Wordsworth”, they dutifully respond. This scene…
The March of the Monoculture
For many, the rise of the global economy marks the final fulfilment of the great dream of a ‘Global Village’. Almost everywhere you travel today you will find multi-lane highways, concrete cities and a cultural landscape featuring gray business suits, fast-food chains, Hollywood films and cellular phones. In the remotest corners of the planet, Barbie,…
Globalisation versus Community
By Helena Norberg-Hodge Society today is faced with a choice between two diverging paths. The path endorsed by government and industry leads towards an ever more globalised economy, one in which the distance between producers and consumers will continue to grow. The other path is being built from the grassroots, and leads towards strong local…
The Pressure to Modernise
Why do traditional societies break down upon their first sustained contact with the modern world? The easy answer is that Western culture is intrinsically preferable—that blue jeans are simply better than homespun robes, the nuclear family better than the extended family. My own view is very different. I believe that the most important reason for…
No more ‘pseudo-solutions’
By Helena Norberg-Hodge 2007 When ISEC first started our global-to-local work in the mid-1970s, there was widespread awareness that both policy change and individual action were needed to solve the world’s growing social and ecological problems. In the last two decades, however, mainstream thinking in both the media and academia has focused almost entirely on…