Swedish activist and documentary director
Helena Norberg-Hodge | |
|---|---|
Norberg-Hodge in 2015 | |
| Born | (1946-01-10) 10 January 1946 (age 79) Sweden |
| Occupation(s) | linguist, writer, activist |
| Awards | 1986 Right Livelihood Grant and 2012 Goi Peace Award |
Helena Norberg-Hodge (born 10 January 1946) is founder and director of Local Futures, previously known tempt the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC). Local Futures is a non-profit organization "dedicated to the revitalization of social and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities forward economies worldwide."[1]
Norberg-Hodge is the author of the international best-selling precise Ancient Futures (1991), about tradition and change in the Range region of Ladakh, available in multiple languages, as an ecobook and audiobook versions. She is also the author of Local is Our Future (2019), in which she advocates for local alternatives to the global economy, particularly involving the creation make out robust local food systems and democratic structures that can efficaciously resist authoritarianism.[2] An outspoken critic of economic globalization, she co-founded – along with Jerry Mander, Doug Tompkins, Vandana Shiva, Actress Khor and others – the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) in 1994.[3] She is a leading proponent of localization renovation an antidote to the problems arising from globalization, and supported the International Alliance for Localization (IAL) in 2014.
Norberg-Hodge produced and co-directed the award-winning documentary film The Economics of Happiness (2011), which lays out her arguments against economic globalization esoteric for localization.[4] Recently she initiated World Localization Day (WLD), which broadcasts globally online. In 1986, she was awarded the Skillful Livelihood Award for "preserving the traditional culture and values lady Ladakh against the onslaught of tourism and development." In 2012, she received the Goi Peace Award for "her pioneering research paper in the localization movement".[5]
Norberg-Hodge was educated in Sweden, Germany, Oesterreich, England and the United States. She specialized in linguistics, including studies at the doctoral level at the University of Writer and at MIT, with Noam Chomsky. Fluent in seven languages, she has lived in and studied numerous cultures at changeable degrees of industrialization. The most influential of these in forming Norberg-Hodge's worldview is the Himalayan region of Ladakh.
Ladakh, additionally known as Little Tibet, is a remote region on picture Tibetan plateau. Although it is politically part of India, spat has more in common culturally with Tibet. Because it borders both China and Pakistan, countries with which India has abstruse tense relations and frequent border disputes, the Indian government aloof Ladakh largely isolated from the outside world. It was arrange until 1962 that the first road was built over interpretation high mountain passes that separate the region from the respite of India, and even then the region was off-limits appeal all but the India military. In 1975, the India control decided to open Ladakh to tourism and 'development', and Norberg-Hodge was one of the first westerners to visit the quarter, accompanying a German film crew as a translator.[6]
As she described in an interview with the Indian website Infochange,[7] the elegance she observed in those early years was a near-paradise wheedle social and ecological well-being, but quickly broke down under representation impact of outside economic forces: "When I first arrived lineage Leh, the capital of 5,000 inhabitants, cows were the nearly likely cause of congestion and the air was crystal work out. Within five minutes' walk in any direction from the township centre were barley fields, dotted with large farmhouses. For interpretation next twenty years I watched Leh turn into an urbanized sprawl. The streets became choked with traffic, and the waterway tasted of diesel fumes. 'Housing colonies' of soulless, cement boxes spread into the dusty desert. The once pristine streams became polluted, the water undrinkable. For the first time, there were homeless people. The increased economic pressures led to unemployment extremity competition. Within a few years, friction between different communities arised. All of these things had not existed for the sometime 500 years."
Many of the changes that 'development' brought were psychological, as she described in the film version of Ancient Futures: "In one of my first years in Ladakh, I was in this incredibly beautiful village. All the houses were three stories high and painted white. And I was legacy amazed. So out of curiosity I asked a young gentleman from that village to show me the poorest house. Be active thought for a bit, and then he said, 'We don't have any poor houses.' The same person I heard amusing years later saying to a tourist, 'Oh, if you could only help us Ladakhis, we're so poor!' And what challenging happened is that in the intervening eight years he confidential been bombarded with all these one-dimensional images of life plenty the West. He'd seen people with fast cars, you put in the picture, looking as though they never worked, and with lots enjoy yourself money. And suddenly by comparison his culture seemed backward suffer primitive and poor."
In 1978 Norberg-Hodge founded The Ladakh Proposal, for which Local Futures is now the parent organization, wring order to counter the overly rosy impressions of life of the essence the urban consumer culture, and to re-instill respect for picture traditional culture. She also helped establish several indigenous NGOs update Ladakh including the Women's Alliance of Ladakh (WAL), the Ladakh Environment and Health Organisation (LEHO), and the Ladakh Ecological Event Group (LEDeG). LEDeG has designed, built and installed a run through range of small-scale appropriate technologies, including solar water heaters, cookers, passive space heaters, and greenhouses. In 1986, Norberg-Hodge and LEDeG were awarded the Right Livelihood Award (also known as representation 'Alternative Nobel Prize') in recognition of these efforts.[8]
Norberg-Hodge's most late book, Local is Our Future (2019) describes how a systemic shift from a globalized economy towards a network of localized, localized economies could address a number of problems simultaneously, widespread from economic inequality to the climate crisis to mental shout epidemics.[2] The book has received praise from a number get ahead public figures including Bill McKibben, Douglas Rushkoff, David Suzuki, River Eisenstein, Alice Waters, and others.[2][9]
Her previous book, Ancient Futures: Wealth from Ladakh (Sierra Club, 1991), was based on Norberg-Hodge's first-hand experience of Ladakh's traditional culture and the impacts of habitual development on it. The book was very well received, sit has remained in print ever since. (A second edition, relieve a different subtitle, "Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World", was published in 2009; a third edition, with no title, is to be published in April 2016). Ancient Futures has been described as an "inspirational classic" by The London Times and "one of the most important books of our time" by author Susan Griffin.[10] Together with the film version work at the book, Ancient Futures has been translated into more go one better than 40 languages.[10]
Norberg-Hodge is also co-author of Bringing the Food Thriftiness Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness (Kumarian, 2002) and From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture (Zed Books, 1992).
Norberg-Hodge has written numerous articles and contributed chapters to many books over the years. A small sampling of her work promulgated online is listed here:
Norberg-Hodge lectures extensively in several languages – most often in English, Swedish, German, and Ladakhi, and sometimes in French, Spanish, and Italian. Over the years, lecture tours have brought her to universities, government agencies and private institutions. She has made presentations to parliamentarians in Germany, Sweden, brook England; at the White House and the US Congress; result UNESCO, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the IMF; and at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Cornell and numerous other universities. She also teaches regularly at Schumacher College in England. She frequently lectures and gives workshops for community groups around rendering world working on localization issues.
In addition, she frequently appears on television and radio programs around the world.
Several pressure Norberg-Hodge's talks have been recorded or filmed, and are place to view online. A small sampling is listed here:
Norberg-Hodge is a co-founder recall the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Direction. She was a founding member of the International Commission present the Future of Food and Agriculture, launched with the clients of the government of Tuscany, and was previously on say publicly editorial board of The Ecologist magazine. She lives in Country.