Helena Norberg-Hodge Quotes

In the End, the economic problem in Greece is the product of a global system that puts the needs of corporations and banks ahead of people and the planet. The same system is responsible for the polluted rivers and air in China, for the sweatshop conditions in Bangladesh, for the economic refugees from Africa desperately seeking asylum in Europe, and for the collapsing economies of Puerto Rico, Greece, and beyond. The internal logic of this global system favors no nation – not Germany, not even the United States – but only the footloose corporations and banks that dominate the global economy.

For our species to have a future, it must be local.

The first step is to connect with like-minded people, and then collectively start questioning the dominant assumptions. Part of that is to listen to what really makes your heart sing. Where were you and what were you doing when you experienced moments of deep contentment and happiness? Listen to the answer and use it as a guide.

Rather than attempting to solve every problem by growing the economy, we need to focus instead on meeting real human and ecological needs. This is what we mean by the economics of happiness... The world is at a tipping point - culturally, socially and economically. We urgently need to reclaim our sense of community and our connection to place.

In part, the Ladakhis’ confidence and sense of having enough emanated from a deep sense of community: people knew they could depend on one another... But in 1975... the Indian government decided to open up the region to the process of development, and life began to change rapidly. Within a few years the Ladakhis were exposed to television, Western movies, advertising, and a seasonal flood of foreign tourists. Subsidized food and consumer goods — from Michael Jackson CDs and plastic toys to Rambo videos and pornography — poured in on the new roads that development brought...
For more than 600 years Buddhists and Muslims lived side by side in Ladakh with no recorded instance of group conflict. They helped one another at harvest time, attended one another’s religious festivals, and sometimes intermarried. But over a period of about 15 years, tensions between Buddhists and Muslims escalated rapidly, and by 1989 they were bombing each other’s homes.

If you’re seeking some good news during these troubled times, look at the ecologically sound ways of producing food that have percolated up from the grassroots in recent years. Small farmers, environmentalists, academic researchers, and food and farming activists have given us agroecology, holistic resource management, permaculture, regenerative agriculture and other methods that can alleviate or perhaps even eliminate the global food system’s worst impacts: biodiversity loss, energy depletion, toxic pollution, food insecurity and massive carbon emissions.

I believe that we need both “resistance” and “renewal” simultaneously. What I mean by “resistance” is, first of all, linking together locally to resist the advances of the top-down global monoculture in all its destructive forms. But it also means linking up with other groups around the country, and even around the world, to push for a kind of democracy where people have a choice...

Even bolder action is needed if there is to be any hope of eliminating the damage done by the global food system. A crucial first step is to raise awareness of the costs of the current system, and the multiple benefits of local food.

In an ideal world, we’d be looking at the way that the whole weapons race is linked to the race into space, and we would be putting an end to that. We would be looking at the ecological and social effects of mineral use in technologies. We would be talking about slowing down and shrinking our use of the Internet for global business, the way that several European countries have done with bans on advertising... I think part of the big shift that we need is a better balance between masculine and feminine — finding a more deeply interconnected, nurturing side. But that requires time... A genuine appreciation of the other, a genuine appreciation of the plants, the animals, and the sun requires free time we cannot get through the speed that these new technologies are imposing on us. You might ask yourself: What happens to us — as individuals, as communities — under the time pressures that nearly all of us experience today?

Implicit in all the rhetoric promoting globalization is the premise that the rest of the world can and should be brought up to the standard of living of the West, and America in particular. For much of the world the American Dream – though a constantly moving target – is globalization’s ultimate endpoint. But if this is the direction globalization is taking the world, it is worth examining where America itself is headed. A good way to do so is to take a hard look at America’s children, since so many features of the global monoculture have been in place their whole lives. If the American Dream isn’t working for them, why should anyone, anywhere, believe it will work for their own children?

We should be talking about what is essential in an economy: the ways people use nature and other people to make ends meet, and basically, it should be about providing for our needs, not about a system that artificially creates needs. Using psychological manipulation to encourage people to consume was tied to economists arguing that the only way to avoid another economic depression was to integrate economies around the world, in other words to create one global system...

Another important point is that small, diversified farms always produce more per unit of land, water, and energy than large monocultures. So we have to turn this lie around that there are too many people now to localize, too many people to have small farms. It’s exactly the opposite.

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 is being challenged by a much gentler, more ‘feminine’, inclusive perspective that places human and ecological well-being front and center...

People (in Ladakh) were so so at ease with themselves and with the world, and so full of vitality and joy... I saw step-by-step how the outside consumer culture was destroying local businesses and jobs, particularly farming. Everything about the local culture became under-valued or – more than that – seen as primitive and backward. I saw how destructive that was for people.

Tragically, our political and business leaders remain blind to these and other realities. They are taking us down a different path, one where biotechnology will feed the world, the internet will enable global cooperation, robots will free people from the drudgery of physical and mental effort, and that the wealth of an ever richer 1% will somehow ‘trickle down’ to benefit the poor.