Thomas Hübl:
Hello and welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m very happy to welcome Helena Norberg-Hodge. Welcome Helena. I’m happy that you’re with us.
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Thomas Hübl:
Yes. So Helena, we are all doing our work and I know you do your work for a long time. You have a lot of impact in the world and as we go along we constantly keep updating our work and I always have new things that I’m excited about. And so those new things give me also fuel to unfold my own creativity even though the body of work is there already for some decades. And I’m curious about you. So what’s the leading edge or what’s the edge of your own work that keeps you creative, fresh, excited about what you do? So where is that at the moment for you?
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Well, in a way it hasn’t changed that much, but what’s happening is that I’ve ended up for almost 50 years promoting what I call localization, particularly with a focus on food. And this is actually now worldwide movement. So every day I get some kind of information that nourishes me because these local food systems are very nourishing both spiritually and physically for people around the world. So seeing that despite the heavyweight of a techno economy that works against it from the bottom up, there are these initiatives that are healing people and places. So that’s what keeps me going. And also forever from my earliest years, the love for nature and nature being my sort of healing place every day. Yeah. Keeps me going.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, that’s beautiful. That I can also feel immediately when you talk about nature. It’s like you transmit the love that you feel for nature. That’s beautiful. So tell me, you say it’s something that immediately catches my attention. You said that people in places heal. Can you share a bit more how people in places heal through localizing economy?
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, it’s particularly clear around the local food economies where we’ve helped in various ways to encourage the reconnection between consumers and farmers by encouraging the setting up of new farmers markets or what’s called community supported agriculture. I’ve come to see it as deep, deep in our DNA that in our whole evolution we were connected to the land, to the plants, to the animals that nourished us. And that there is something extremely deep and archetypical going on here, why people respond as dramatically as they do. And why I’ve even found that new markets where it’s only food and local people come every week, it also becomes this cultural center that’s very alive and beautiful and where we have communities paying in advance to a farmer for the whole year. And supporting that farmer floods through droughts, through winds. They’re coming together between people and the land, the people who grow it.
And this economic activity, which is the only activity that’s providing for something we all need every single day of our lives. And then we’re sort of catalyzing these movements by alerting people to the fact that our governments are wedded to an outdated idea about growth through trade and they’re actually distancing us further and further from the source of our food. And it turns out that this global food economy is the biggest contributor to climate change, pollution, cancer, epidemic of diabetes and heart disease, obesity. So it turns out that the opposite direction is actually the cause of tremendous ecological and human suffering and decline. So it’s a very significant direction.
Thomas Hübl:
Oh yeah, it sounds like, I mean I want to learn more of course from you, but immediately what comes up in me when I compare it to the work that we do on trauma or also systemic trauma, how trauma creates a disembodiment and the disconnect in our sensing capacity between us and nature. That’s why many people see themselves separate if we don’t feel that connection that you’re speaking about. And most probably that also contributes to a global economy system that is also expressing this kind of disconnect. And when I listen to you and I hear you talk about the reconnection to the food locally, it feels in my body like something can relax and is much more grounded again in the local system. Doesn’t mean that the global system doesn’t exist, but it feels like very healthy in my body when I hear you speak about it. And I think that’s also there is a correlation between the kind of trauma stress and disconnect to a disconnected economy system disconnected from the local source. And I’m curious when you see communities healing, because I’m very much interested in healing also systemic healing. So when you saw communities healing, what are the signs that, how would you frame that healing? How did you recognize that something’s healing and how does that feel like, or what data do you have about it? Maybe you can describe that a bit
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
In lots of different ways. So for one thing, we did a study quite a few years ago and it showed that people have something like 10 times more conversations in farmer’s markets than they do in the supermarket. And when you actually look at the experience of rushing through the supermarket versus the slowing down, the intergenerational nature of the whole farmer’s market experience, it is quite remarkable the difference. It’s quite black and white. Also, we have this wonderful thing happening, which is that the farmers have often been, if you like, quite conservative in the sense they’ve been now pushed for generations to use fossil fuels and toxic chemicals that came out of the war machine to apply to the land, told that this is the way to grow more food to be efficient. They’ve been pressured to become bigger and bigger, use more and more energy, go into debt to buy more technology.
And they’re struggling. Small farmers worldwide can’t survive In the beginning when we suggest setting up a farmer’s market, they can often be quite resistant, quite skeptical, but it’s so beautiful to see. And some of them even saying, I’ve been a farmer all my life and we were pressured to just do bigger and bigger scale and every product an identical size. And of course they were encouraged to do monoculture just one thing. Now suddenly in the farmer’s market, it’s like another galaxy, it’s another world. And it’s interesting that typically the consumers are more left leaning in green and now suddenly these conservative farmers are being in communication with people who actually, of course don’t care if every apple is the same size, but even more a little blemish is almost a symbol that they haven’t used chemicals. So they’re now in this opposite situation where they’re not being asked to do something completely unnatural and unhealthy.
And the diversification is a protection against one drought or one wind destroying everything. And yeah, on and on in the supermarket they get maybe 10% of what we pay. And in the farmer’s market they get a hundred percent of what we pay. And yet all of these farmer’s markets are only possible essentially because of goodwill from middle class people who can afford to support something, who have the time to help set it up and well all kinds of constraints that make it almost, I miraculous that these things are still happening and still growing and they are, it’s not nearly as fast as it could be with a little bit of help from government or from the media, which is at the moment not helping. But also, I guess the other thing I’ve seen is prisoners healed almost overnight by the combination of being in deeper conversation in community.
So curating that deeper conversation where you can be vulnerable, where you can be imperfect, where you can talk about your problems and still feel appreciated, feel loved, and combining that with helping them to learn to grow food and again the appreciation from local people for that food, it’s suddenly miraculously healing. So even hardened prisoners will show you and tell you about how magic it’s been for them to go through a program that allows for this. And these kinds of things are happening more and more. What’s a bit infuriating is that it’s not happening with the help of government or like I say the mainstream, it’s all bottom up. But in a sense that also gives me more faith in humanity, more faith in a deeper DNA drive to come back. I see it as coming back on track with evolution in our evolution. We were only able to survive because of deep interdependence in a larger community way beyond the nuclear family.
But in smaller economic units where there was more accountability and visibility and adaptation to place, to diverse ecosystems, to the fabric of life that’s constantly changing, that never remains static. And so this dialogue and this dance between human life and the diversity of beyond human life is how we evolved. And we need to come back on track because the trauma of through slavery and enclosures being forced away from the land to go into cities to become cogs in an industrial machine or as slaves onto big monocultures to produce for elsewhere. All that trauma, by the way, is why I maintain that in psychiatry we’ve never studied healthy people, we’ve only studied traumatized people who are driven away from nature and away from their human right to real community to real interdependence. Dunno what you would say about that.
Thomas Hübl:
No, this sounds like there are so many things I am exploding. I have so many follow up questions, I want to stay, I will sequence those. So first of all, as I said in me, my sense in my body, which I trust very much when I listen to you, it gives me a very organic grounded feeling. And I think also a lot of mental health issues are not mental health issues. They are issues that are also in our body and they express themselves maybe in our mental wellbeing, but they’re not separate. So I think even that’s that grounding effect that I feel that I listen to you is also part of the healing process for many things that you mentioned. So that makes a lot of sense for me just by listening to you. And then I’m wondering, let’s say we are in that kind of globalized big system, international system. If one listens to you now and says, okay, I want to contribute to that, I want to contribute to the localization of the food production, let’s say. So what are steps that somebody can do that feels inspired, that feels, listen, this makes sense to me intuitively, I feel that. That’s right. What are the next steps that we can do as people that get inspired by you or by your work? What would you suggest?
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, I mean we sort of like to lead people with five words and one of them is reconnect, the other one is rethink, the other one is resist and renew and rejoice. So the reconnect word, we’re urging people to try to change their “I” to a “We”. So we think the best thing to do is to identify a friend, could be family, could be someone in the workplace or a few people who would be interested in exploring a path which can take you towards both personal and planetary healing. So we are offering that as a big promise that we are saying that through understanding better the globalizing path, which has been a path of disconnection both from one another, from ourselves, from the land, this path of reconnection really truly offers benefits even right away. We are not being helped to understand how much we suffer from the isolation that we’ve been pushed into.
And it’s got worse and worse with social media as we know. So the reconnect is then also to identify some people together then to start a journey of reconnection to nature. And that can often be things like DIY vision quest. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to actually benefit from some of the practices that have been clearly that have been developed and that are helping people to do that deeper reconnection to nature. And when it’s combined with what’s happening all over the world now, people in circle having a deeper dialogue, deeper listening, being able to express their vulnerability, their imperfection. We are imperfect. Every bit of life is imperfect and we don’t realize how much we’ve been terrorized by this artificial pretense at perfection through the media and so on. So anyway, then we urge people as one of the most practical and beneficial things they can do to start healing both person and planet is to help build up the local food economy, which has, again, I could go on and on just about that because the multiple benefits really only become clear when you understand that the global food economy is the most insanely wasteful, polluting toxic process.
And that our governments are wedded to encouraging this madness and it’s the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. It’s that trans fats, it’s sugar responsible for most of our health issues and it’s all coming out of this globalized corporate food system. So then once you see the outlines of that, the healing path becomes so much more important and so much clearer. And then we’re urging people to be willing to both resist and renew, to articulate their opposition to a continued globalization. And to do that without anger, without ation, there are no individual enemies. It’s a system that we have unwittingly gone along with in many different ways. And it can be very healing also personally to move away from the self-blame that is often part of the dominant narrative, particularly in the climate narrative now it’s just terrible what’s happening. And so yeah, be willing to resist and be part of this renewal through localization, which also requires international collaboration, both between movements, climate and other movements and between governments.
So there’s a whole agenda that’s also political, one that could rescue all of us to take us on track towards evolution again, instead of being often unwittingly supporting a path towards AI being romanticized and essentially a path of war, both war literally, but also war against life. So yeah, I feel we offer something that can be deeply empowering and that can allow us to be clearly resisting as well as renewing. And we are also constantly reminding people of the need to rejoice, to engage in practices that lead to that relaxation. You were talking about that deep breath that allows your whole body to relax. And I’m very interested in meditation that can often involve movement or I found, I discovered that in indigenous cultures, chanting and singing together was a daily practice virtually that I’m trying to also encourage people to bring back. So there are many lessons from indigenous culture that are eminently practical and very helpful.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, I completely agree. And so one aspect that I hear is also that local food production also helps us to get off the addiction to processed or ultra processed food because it reduces that and reconnects us again to the products, to the local products that are simply much better for our health and our bodies. So that’s one effect I here. And the other big effect besides many that you said is that the climate impact of local production is simply very different than the climate impact of global production and all the transportation and all the side effects that come with it. So these are two very powerful aspects and then the grounding aspects, and I think that’s also in the trauma or collective trauma work. We would also say that nature is one of the big resources for us. And I think being reconnected to nature is a very healing, it’s a very healing experience or can support the healing experiences. It’s not the only thing we need to do, but I think that’s a good resourcing platform for a lot of healing that can happen. And then together with contemplative practices as you said, or other practices. That’s fantastic. Maybe you want to share with us a little bit what inspired you when you saw the, because I know you learned this a lot from the indigenous population and maybe you can share a few, I don’t know of the main points that you learned that you feel impacted also your life and your work.
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, well, so my background was I’m mainly Swedish, but partly German, partly English. I had family in all three countries and I had lived in America and I had already started looking at the differences between America and Europe and questioned why there was more violence and more unhappiness essentially in America than in Europe at that time. And I realized now, so partly those experiences informed me and made me open to seeing the changes that I experienced when I was invited to go to LADA or little Tibet in 1975, and I thought I was going out for six weeks, but it became a lifetime. I encountered their people who, this is the western part of Tibet that belongs politic to India. And it had been sealed off from outsiders for the whole modern era. And it was suddenly thrown open to development and progress. And I encountered people who were the most vital and actively happy people I’d ever seen, the healthiest people I’d ever seen.
There was no poverty as we know it, even in America in the west, there was no unemployment. I’d never existed. Suicide was something that maybe would’ve happened one in a generation and the old person. And I witnessed over a 10 year period this multi-pronged process of now in the modern era using seduction through media, through schooling that made people feel backward and stupid if they worked on the land that made them feel useless and backward if they didn’t belong to this urban western consumer culture. And I saw them being pulled and pushed into a city where they were suddenly competing for scarce jobs. And the centralization of this top-down system led to conflict between groups that had lived side by side in the case of LADA for 500 years. And in Bhutan where I worked over a five year period in the eighties between Hindus and Buddhists.
So I see this virtual genocide coming out of the system that so removed people from the land and from the security of dependable community relationships and a dependable relationship with the land. Now we can believe many people have been taught that when you rely on the land and on other people, you’re very, it’s all fluctuating and it’s all very unsafe. You need a secure job in the city. And it turns out that’s the opposite of the truth. And so I witnessed this very dramatic change. I can also tell you that now the about one a month, many young people and fairly early on I was in touch with many other peoples across the world and visited many of them. And my tribe was people who had experienced both of something more land-based, traditional and the urban consumer culture, which is a monocultural reality since the rise of this western system.
And those people were aware of where happiness and health lie. And yet I helped to set up some organizations, a global eco network, a global forum on globalization. But it was, yeah, anyway, it’s been difficult to see that in in these last 50 years. There was much more awareness in the sixties and seventies and then as a new form of globalization was taking off in the late eighties, these voices were silenced. There’s been a lot of pressure to prevent the truth of what people want and the truth of what they’re doing and the truth about what makes us healthy both spiritually and physically. But now I see another opening in the last, it started opening up a bit after 2008 when we had this financial crisis and the world was told that these banks must be able to continue speculating on our lives. They must be able to play around with our mortgages because they’re too big to fail.
And from that there were more people beginning to look at the economy. And so now particularly I guess since Covid, well more steadily since 2008, there is a rise in awareness and there are more people willing to look at the global economic system and much more interested in localization. So I feel encouraged and I hope that before I die, I am 78 now and I am hoping that in the next five, six years we’ll see this awareness growing because to fix this practically would be a lot easier for governments than to continue going against what the planet and people need going against the life of diversity, the life that we need. And imposing an artificial monoculture, it is not working and it’s not going to work. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next five, six years.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, that’s very interesting. I’m curious, is there, what’s the healthy correlation between localization of economy and the global body of economies? So if we see a lot of side effects of the, let’s say things that don’t function well, how would this look like when it’s healthy? So when there’s a healthy combination of both?
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Well, first of all, I think we need to distinguish very importantly between international collaboration and one centralized top down monocultural economy. So in order, first of all, we need desperately, we need international collaboration at every level, and that includes international information exchange collaboration at every level. Now in terms of what I’m trying to build up is an global movement because we are all being affected by two systems. One of them is an artificial manmade system that started with enclosures and slavery and had behind it the burning of witches and the more decentralized ways of living, NATO connected ways of living. So that one manmade artificial system is having an impact across the entire world. And the other system is Mother Gaia with infinite diversity, constant change, and interdependence and flow that as we know nothing has a static separate existence. Everything is in this flow and dialogue.
So to come back in this deep connections between humans and that living mother Gaia, it needs to be localized. It requires deeper ongoing bonds of dancing with real life. It can never function as one way of doing thing. It can never function with this one genetically modified seed or this one species of potato. No, people are waking up to the heirloom adapted species of animals of plants and they’re bringing them back and they’re seeing that’s how they can produce far more food per acre of land. Small diversified job, rich farms can produce vastly more food. So the lie, there were too many people to go back to, the land needs to be exposed. We need people on the land, we need people to replace blind stupid machinery which impose this monolithic hybrids which use lots of fossil fuels. We need to tend to every plant, to every animal with more care just as we need to care for one another with more people.
But we’re strangled in a system that makes energy and resources artificially cheap and labor too expensive. So the collaboration and the global commitment to supporting people and planet and real help, we need that urgently from the movements with governments and in business. But those businesses need to over a period choose are they going to be, is Mitsubishi going to be Japanese or does he want to jump off and be Swedish or is General Motors going to be American because they cannot anymore continue to roam the world and blackmail our governments into letting them have total freedom, no rules, no taxes, while everybody else is squeezed with inefficient bureau bureaucratic regulations and taxes. Now this squeezing of everybody else leads to many business people being completely opposed to government regulation. So it’s very understandable that with the bigger picture people will understand that yes, we need to change those regulations to make them much more localized and much more accountable to diversity.
But at the same time, we need to reverse the situation so that global corporations will be regulated, they will come back to belong to a nation state. That’s how a shift could start happening. Some people think that’s impossible. They think those corporations have far too much power, but I’m basically convinced they only have that power because most people haven’t understood what’s going on and they end up caught up in a very polarizing blindness of left and right, which is meaningless now truly meaningless. Both left and right governments all around the world have been handing over more and more power to these global corporations. And that’s now where the real power is because no one has been paying attention to the global and people are starting to now. And I’m hoping that our approach of really encouraging big picture thinking, so it’s not some narrow anger, it’s not some narrow targeting of individuals or individual corporations, but it’s really looking at the system and understanding what could serve it.
So in the long run we would need a sort of global environmental protection that would realize that these monolithic solutions like genetically modified seeds or nuclear power or plastering all the earth with solar panels so that global trade has more energy, doesn’t serve people’s needs. So there would be a protective world environment organization instead of a world trade organization. But that doesn’t mean that this body would impose how are you going to farm in Austria in the Alps or in the heat of Spain or in the mountains of the Alps. You’re not going to be imposing the madness that European Union already does with rules about when you’re supposed to harvest and preventing heirloom seeds from being grown and sold. So we’re having a commercial interest stifling and preventing diversity. So this environment organization would protect against c corporate commercial monoculture whilst simultaneously being very engaged in decentralizing and supporting more local knowledge adapted to diversity.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, it’s interesting as I listened to you and I also applied this to our field of work, like looking at systems and systemic traumatization and what are the systems that are traumatized? So colonialism, holocaust, racism, genocides, wars, like created huge wounds and those wounds are far from healed. So they’re still reciting in our collective unconscious and in our ancestry, in our epigenetics and they have effects. And I think when I listen to you, on the one hand I hear so that what we can still sense and feel is what we can respond to when certain things that are too big become abstract. So you lose the sense. So you lose also the sense making. So once it’s abstract, it’s easier to disconnect from it because it seems too big too far away to not me. And then there’s a certain, and that combined with the trauma absence creates indifference.
I think that indifference is also what I hear you speak to that many people didn’t pay enough attention or don’t pay enough attention because it seems like too much too far. The more we bring it back into a local system that we can connect to, that we can also feel and sense because it’s in our sphere of influence, we’re also more engaged and so then we also have more impact and agency. So that sounds really beautiful and important I think. And that’s why I think the work that you’re doing also combined with the systemic understanding of trauma, I think is important because I would even argue that there is a certain trauma is pretty pandemic in the world and as we know and you know have been to many also indigenous populations around the world, the herd that has been created through colonialization is tremendous.
And that’s only one ring around the world that is like that impact, but there are many others. So I would even say that the call for a sustainable society can’t work fully without the sustainable interior because trauma stress will always exhaust natural resources in our body. So actually if you have billions of people that carry some sort of, even if it’s just five or 10% of over consumption of energy in our own systems. So we are not able to build a system that is not exhausting natural resources. And so that’s why I love the dance or the interplay between your body of work and the understanding also of systemic trauma because I think both can be show symptoms or become the remedy like the trauma work can support your vision and your vision is also a remedy for the trauma work because the more we can reconnect to nature, it’s what many people do when they heal their trauma, they go to nature. Yeah,
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Also the reconnection to community. Yeah,
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
I love it. If we can also talk more about that in the future, how to collaborate and look more at that, because I know you agree that we have to look both at the inner and the outer and sometimes people who understand about trauma fall into the trap of believing only once I’ve completely sorted that out.
Thomas Hübl:
Exactly.
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
I have time for the outer, but again, like I was saying, we’re seeing that some of this coming together actually does reduce the damage of trauma. It doesn’t do complete healing, but then that can also start the journey of doing the deeper trauma work. And so if we can work at both ends, and that is, I think you’ve seen the new age movement ended up also with this idea that once there’s peace inside me, then there’ll be peace in the world. But in the meanwhile, by not looking at these crazy changes in policy that we’re so increasing the traumatic pressure on all of us. And so right now the trauma for the average person to just stay in place, to just be able to pay for food on the table and the roof over their head, that’s now becoming a traumatic situation for more and more people. And so again, whatever we can do to raise awareness about that and reduce that pressure while doing the inner work.
Thomas Hübl:
I completely agree also with what you said, the inside outside work and sometimes, sometimes even mindfulness or spirituality becomes and rolled in the trauma aversion to the world. That is difficult. Instead of that the integration helps us to engage more with the world. It’s difficult so that we can really change certain structures in the world. And that combination is truly powerful as you said, and I completely resonate with it, that the inner and outer work are both very important together and they reinforce each other if done well. I think they’re really good partners.
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, no, definitely. I’m definitely seeing that and that is basically what we try to encourage. But it’s also difficult in our work because course from that indigenous culture experience and seeing the system coming in from the outside and affecting everything. So we are talking about education and infrastructure and taxes and inner work and dance and song and male female balance, old and young. By the way, one of the key lessons from indigenous culture was this beautiful marriage between the youngest and the oldest.
And it was so obvious that when you segregate children into these monocultures, it’s like factory farming. And when you just, I often like to talk about one room with 31 year olds, it’s just like elbows and screaming and no one able to lend a hand to the other. And it was so beautiful out there to see the five-year-old brother carrying the little baby on his body or going arm in arm with this 80-year-old grandmother. Never ashamed that this wasn’t masculine enough, but I realized that the maintenance of the feminine in men and women was key to the healing, which I think in the trauma work is also
Thomas Hübl:
Absolutely
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Hurting.
Thomas Hübl:
And also as you’re saying, also a healthy place for eldership and wisdom in our world and the guidance that comes from elders, I think. And also the intergenerational learning that you described is so beautiful. It’s a both way learning stream all the time. And that’s so fruitful and if interrupted, then a lot of dissonance starts to happen in the society. Yeah, that’s beautiful. That resonates a lot. I mean many things you’re saying resonate a lot for me and I see our time. I wanted to see if there’s anything in specific that we didn’t talk about that you think is important for our listeners or anything you want to leave our listeners with any encouragement or practice or anything.
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, I would say that sharing the big picture is a type of education and it’s skipped over. It’s an activism. It’s an activism that’s needed to convey the bigger picture in a loving, non-aggressive way without making people feel guilty and blame themselves. In fact, the bigger picture removes that self blame. So sharing the big picture, please think of this as one of the most important actions you can take. Please share our films. The most recent one is called Closer to Home and another one is just a series of case studies of local initiatives. It’s called The Power of Local. We have a localization action guide and many other tools and if you wanted to try to set up a local scheme, we would also be happy to try to help you even though we’re a very small organization so we can also use financial support, which we’re normally not asking for.
But we we’re going to be doing that this year and we’re going to be having a big summit in LADA or a little Tibet in August next year, the beginning of August. And maybe you’ll want to join us. It’ll be an amazing summit of people from all over the world, from every continent who are working from both that inner and outer awareness and who are strong and brave and healthy, wonderful people. We had a summit like that last year in Bristol and it was so nourishing for all of us. So if you want to join us, please come to our website, local futures.org. It’ll be my 50th anniversary going back to Looc and yeah, so that’s one of our biggest projects for this year.
Thomas Hübl:
Oh, beautiful.
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Yeah, I really hope we can collaborate more Thomas really
Thomas Hübl:
Soon. I would love that. I would love that. Let’s stay connected and I would love that. I think there’s a lot of resonance and a lot of mutuality and mutual synergy here, so yes, I would love that. That’s amazing. It’s so lovely to get to know you and to be in resonance with you and learn from you and thank you for joining this podcast point of relation. Thank you very much.
Helena Norberg-Hodge:
Thank you.
