Source Temple and the Great Reset

Is resistance futile? The myth of tech inevitability

COVID-19: An Opportunity for Localisation

What Indigenous Wisdom Can Teach Us About Economics

Adopt a Local Business

Comparative Resilience: 8 Principles for Post-COVID Reconstruction

Coronavirus and the Death of ‘Connectivity’

We Can’t Do It Ourselves

The Real Economy

Local is Our Future

I recently visited a spiritual community in Brazil called Source Temple. Drawing primarily on the teachings of Adi Da and A Course in Miracles, it comprises about thirty people from about ten countries, mostly Brazil and South America, ranging in age from 20-something to 60-something. I will neither endorse nor criticize the spiritual teachings and lineage; they serve their purpose to inspire the community and anchor it in non-ordinary thinking, perceiving, and relating. The first thing to make a deep […]

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” — Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage The relationship between technology and narrative is long-standing. Indeed, some have argued that it is at the heart of human civilization. It was once fashionable to characterize human beings as tool-using animals (although this turns out not to be the best way of getting at whatever might be distinctly human). It has also been suggested […]

Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was believed that globalisation would lead to development and prosperity. However, the whole scenario has changed now with almost every part of the world under some form of lockdown, which has posed a major challenge to the fulfillment of the demand for various goods and services. This is has shifted focus to the importance of the ‘local’. The situation was no different in Ladakh when restrictions were placed on the transportation […]

This blog is also available in Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The crises of the modern world verify what indigenous cultures have always known: that all phenomena are inextricably interconnected. As the Amazon – one of the most vital organs of the Earth – is razed to fuel the global economy, a virus borne of disrupted ecosystems assaults the lungs of human beings. And as economic policies are enacted in Washington, Brussels or Beijing, people are uprooted and […]

Many of us show our compassion and generosity through acts of adoption. Adopt a tree, adopt a baby giraffe, adopt a schoolchild, etc. For the last two weeks, my partner Audrey and I adopted a lovely four-legged pooch named Annie. Her “person,” a close friend, had to travel to Western Massachusetts to be with her dying mother. I’m not exactly a dog person – I didn’t grow up with dogs, and throughout my adult life my travel schedule has made me reluctant even to adopt a cactus. But Annie’s visit lit up […]

This past weekend, a bright Georgetown undergraduate asked me how I squared my passion for localization with the theory of comparative advantage. For economics newbies, he was referring to David Ricardo’s argument that every community should find one product to specialize in and trade for everything else. I gave my usual response that the theory is great – except for the thousands of goods and services that are cheaper to produce locally – but that answer left me uneasy. Once […]

The Covid 19 pandemic is the second major crisis of globalization in a decade. The first was the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, from which the global economy took years to reach a semblance of recovery. We did not learn our lessons from the first, and this is perhaps why the impact of the second has been even more massive. Trillions of dollars of paper wealth went up in smoke during the 2008 crisis, but few cried for the out-of-control […]

How to live a more sustainable life? This question generates a lot of debate that is focused on what individuals can do in order to address problems like climate change. For example, people are encouraged to shop locally, to buy organic food, to install home insulation, or to cycle more often. But how effective is individual action when it is systemic social change that is needed? Individuals do make choices, but these are facilitated and constrained by the society in which […]

An essential element of a functioning community is that all roles are filled, that people individually and together do what is necessary for the success of the community. In this era of climate change and contracting energy resources, one important and potentially divisive issue is household roles. Many American households these days are just fueling stations for people who sleep and microwave in order to return to work or school. When both parents work and the kids spend all day […]

« July 2021 »

[The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, a new book by Helena Norberg-Hodge, published by Local Futures in July 2019.] For our species to have a future, it must be local. The good news is that the path to such a future is already being forged. Away from the screens of the mainstream media, the crude ‘bigger is better’ narrative that has dominated economic thinking for centuries […]