We look around and what do we see? We see businesses going on as usual. We see governments, at best, thinking four years down the road, when they really need to be thinking seven generations down the road.
We need positive visions for humanity and the planet. Around the world I actually see more hope than hopelessness. The future with less oil could be preferable to the present with lots of oil. Ladakh or Little Tibet in the Western Himalayas, one of the highest inhabited places on earth. This is a remote land and was for centuries isolated from the outside world.
Until recently, the Ladakhis sustained themselves through farming and regional trade. It was a way of life that was finely tuned to the local environment. Economic analyst and author Helena Norberg-Hodge knows Ladakh from the inside.
She believes that the Ladakhis'story can shed light on the root causes of the crises now facing the planet. I've spent much of the last 35 years in Ladakh working with the people to find ways of strengthening the culture as it confronts the modern world. Over the years Ladakh became a second home to me or almost like a first home.
It was a huge source of inspiration. I learned about social, ecological and personal well-being, about the roots of happiness. I was also forced to reconsider many of the basic assumptions that I had always taken for granted and to look at my own Western culture in a different light.
There was this sort of radiance and vitality that I'd never experienced anywhere else. Even the material standard of living was high. They had large, spacious houses, plenty of leisure time.
There was no unemployment. It had never existed. And no one went hungry.
Of course they didn't have our comforts and luxuries, but what they did have was a way of life that was vastly more sustainable than ours, and that was also far more joyous and rich. In the mid-1970s, Ladakh was suddenly thrown open to the outside world. Cheap subsidized food, trucked in on subsidized roads by vehicles running on subsidized fuel, undermined Ladakh's local economy. At the same time, the Ladakhis were bombarded with advertising and media images that romanticized Western-style consumerism and made their own culture. seem pitiful by comparison.
As the area was increasingly exposed to the consumer culture, I saw how people started to think of themselves as backward, primitive and poor. In the early years I went to this beautiful village and just out of curiosity I asked a young man from the village to show me the poorest house. He thought for a bit and then he said, we don't have any poor houses here. The same young man I heard ten years later saying to a tourist, oh, if you could only help us Ladakhis, we're so poor. Today, Ladakh faces a wide range of problems that were unknown in the traditional culture.
The changes in Ladakh were so clear-cut and I saw with my own eyes cause and effect. One minute you've got a vital people and a really sustainable culture. The next you've got pollution, both of air and water.
You've got unemployment, a widening gap between rich and poor. And perhaps most shockingly of all, in a people who had been so spiritually grounded, divisiveness and depression. These changes weren't the result of innate human greed or some sort of evolutionary force.
They happened far too suddenly for that. They were clearly the direct result of the exposure to outside economic pressures. And I witnessed how these pressures created intense competition, breaking down community and the connection to nature that had been the core of the economy. cornerstone of Ladakhi culture for centuries.
This was Ladakh's introduction to globalization. Globalization is the most powerful force for change in the world today, affecting not only remote populations like the Ladakhis, but societies across the planet. For some people, globalizing economic activity is our biggest hope for the future, the solution to world poverty in particular. For others, it's a fundamental cause of many of the problems we face today, and an ongoing threat. People often think of globalisation as something that brings us all closer together, through faster communications, easier travel and so on.
But at its core, it's an economic problem. It's about deregulation, and that means freeing up big banks and big businesses to enter local markets worldwide. The focus is on profit, not people.
That doesn't bring us together. On the contrary, it's leading to increased competition and division. Globalisation is the rapid expansion of a process that started about 500 years ago. At that time, Europeans conquered and colonised much of the world.
They dismantled self-reliant economies and enslaved their populations, forcing them to work in mines, cotton fields and tea plantations. In the mid-20th century, colonialism gave way to a more subtle form of enslavement. Debt.
Shackled by so-called aid packages and crippling loans, nation after nation fell deeper into poverty, making it easier for corporations and financial institutions, the successors of the colonial merchants, to extract money, resources and cheap labour. Today, those transnational businesses have grown so large and powerful that they effectively control governments, dictate economic policy and shape people's opinions and world views. Yet the push for growth through global trade in both goods and finance continues.
In order to compete, the big corporations are demanding ever more deregulation, still further globalization. It's an agenda that has major implications for both ecosystems and people around the world. It's hard to get your head around globalisation.
It's tempting to ignore it, to leave it to the experts, but we simply can't afford to. Even though it's something that happens out there. It has a profound effect on every aspect of our lives, even our sense of self.
What we're seeing is rising levels of depression in the West. Some studies show rises of doubling. Other studies show rising as much as tenfold. The stresses on the average household have increased enormously. Their jobs are much more demanding, more travel, more work at home, more access at any time, longer commutes.
commutes for many people. And all the time we're exposed to images of a certain level of material success, a certain level of looks, a certain lifestyle that we're kind of measuring ourselves up to and seeing ourselves not as good as. There is a constant pressure on people to have bigger, better, more.
But of course in the end, what does it bring us? It doesn't bring us happiness. Material reward has never brought us happiness.
Three years since the end of World War II. one of the big polling firms has asked Americans, are you happy with your life? The number of Americans who say, yes, I'm very happy with my life, the percentage, peaks in 1956 and goes slowly but steadily downhill ever since. That's interesting, because in that same 50 years, we've gotten immeasurably richer.
We have three times as much stuff. Somehow it hasn't worked, because that same affluence tends to undermine community. I think the only... Lonely people who are happy, deeply happy and deeply secure, are people who know they can rely on someone else in life.
People who know they are not alone in this world. Lonely people have never been happy people. Globalization is creating a very lonely planet. Come on slow guy.
Come on slow guy. Anything you wanted to pay, it's free for $7. Feel the price. It's corporations who are raising our children. Who's driving the food choices of children?
Who's driving the entertainment choices of children? Who's driving what they want to buy and what they care about? More and more, it's...
set of corporations that sell the kids. Human greed is very easy to exploit. The method of exploiting greed is also a very cruel method.
Comparison and competition. People lost their own identity. Right from the childhood.
Our children don't want to speak their languages anymore. They no longer want to be associated with their own culture. It's cool to wear designer jeans. It's cool to eat at McDonald's. The children had this rejection of the culture from school.
Why? Because the teacher was like that. The teacher would say, if you don't learn to multiply, then you'll go to graze pigs.
If you don't learn to multiply, then you'll go to graze the land like your father. As if scratching the ground was a crime, something sinful, something bad. Young people are looking for acceptance, they want to belong.
And they're now being told that if they want the respect of their peer group, they've got to have the latest running shoes, the latest gadgets, the latest clothing. And of course, as they go down that consumer path, it leads to separation and envy, not to the sense of connection. to the love that at a deep level they're really looking for.
In a previous era, before the modern era of consumer capitalism, people's sense of self, their personal identities, were shaped largely through their communities, their neighbourhoods. Nowadays, where all of those supports have fallen away, the gap that was left has been filled by the marketers who came in and said... Don't worry if you don't know who you are.
We will provide you with a packaged identity which you can use, by buying our products of course, to create a sense of self which you can then project onto the world. The role models that are beamed across the world today look very different from people in Africa, South America or Asia. They marginalise the majority of the global population.
And even if you're blonde, blue eyed and beautiful, you're never quite beautiful enough. Around the world, sales of blue contact lenses are escalating, and more and more people are using chemicals to lighten their skin and hair. If you look at what's currently motivating industrial growth, not only in the U.S., but in the so-called emerging developing nations, China, India, South Korea, and others, it has a great deal to do with the desire to emulate the American way of life.
Chinese people are different. They are more tasteful and fashionable. They are more casual when they dress up.
But when it comes to eating, they are different from Chinese people. I often compare them with the Americans. I am more of an American. Encouraging consumerism threatens the ecological fabric of the entire planet.
Natural resources are already stretched to breaking point by population pressures. And yet we have an economic system that encourages each and every one of us to consume more and more and more. It's a terrific onslaught of marketing, merchandising, advertising, brainwashing.
So we are on a big consumptive splurge, but if we have four times the population of US, If we start consuming, you know, the consumption levels reached like America, then we will be consuming all the resources of the planet right in India. The consumer culture that globalization promotes is increasingly urban. At first glance, high density urban living might appear to reduce per capita use of resources.
But this is only true when compared with life in the suburbs. Compared to more genuinely decentralized living patterns, urbanization is extremely resource-intensive. This is particularly clear in the global south.
The moment a person moves into the city, the energy use shoots up, the water use shoots up. The infrastructure to run a city per capita is much bigger than the infrastructure to produce a high quality of life in a village. When hundreds of millions of rural people are pulled into cities, the food they once grew themselves must now be grown for them on jobs. Giant chemical intensive farms.
All this food must then be brought into the cities on roads purpose-built to accommodate larger and larger trucks. Providing water involves enormous dams and man-made reservoirs. Energy production means huge centralized power plants, coal and uranium mines, and thousands of miles of transmission lines.
Meanwhile, much of the waste that is produced, including countless tons of potentially valuable compost, must be trucked out of the city to be treated, buried, incinerated, or dumped at sea. The end result is that urban dwellers typically consume significantly more non-renewable resources than their land-based relatives. We've gotten to the end of the supply chain.
And there is no more. If we decide, in the name of fairness, to try to industrialize the entire world, the result will be universal starvation, universal famine. Ecosystems will collapse and ultimately see the end of our species.
The globalization of the economy is having an ever-increasing impact on the Earth's climate, not only through the waste and excesses inherent in the consumer culture, and the escalation in resource use that results from urbanization. but because the very logic of globalization requires that goods travel ever longer distances from producer to consumer. Because of hidden subsidies and skewed regulations, Food from the other side of the world tends to cause less than food from a mile away.
In the UK, butter from New Zealand costs significantly less than butter from the farm down the road. And in Ladakh, butter trucked in over the Himalayas for several days costs half as much as local butter. We often hear about efficiencies of scale, but actually the truth is what we've developed today is a system that could... not be more wasteful.
We have tuna fish caught on the east coast of America, flown to Japan, processed, flown back to America and sold to consumers. We have English apples flown to South Africa to be waxed, flown back again to be sold to consumers. The whole process involves incredible quantities of waste.
A series of treaties, new ones almost every year, promote economic growth through international trade. As a consequence, countries today routinely import and export nearly identical quantities of identical products. Every day of the year, grain, meat, live animals, canned goods, and a whole range of manufactured products, not to mention waste, even used batteries, crisscross the planet.
All of this at a time when rising CO2 emissions are threatening our very survival. The global economy has become a casino and we're all potential losers. One major casualty is our jobs.
Corporate mergers, takeovers, relocation to lower-wage countries threaten the livelihoods of the people. of virtually all of us, accountants, assembly workers, even CEOs. And when we retire, it gets no better.
As we've seen recently, pension funds are at the mercy of uncontrolled speculation. It's not just in the West that livelihoods are under threat. In the less industrialized parts of the world, finding and holding onto a job is becoming increasingly difficult.
The first victims are small farmers. The current economic development has made the people weaker because the government or the new economic system has made the cultivation of crops less profitable. People don't want to grow crops. This policy has created a lot of labor in the... We have to work hard to get the money for the land.
If you give us the land, we will fill our stomachs. We will have to work hard. Removing of people on land is the root of all unemployment.
It is at the root of the creation of slums and the rural... disposable in terms of working with the land is creating probably the biggest human crisis. No human rights community is noticing it, no amnesty has noticed it, but 100,000 Indian farmers have been driven to suicide.
When people are pushed off the land into crowded cities, members of diverse ethnic and religious groups are forced into intense competition for the few available jobs. Differences that were once accepted become a source of fear, fundamentalism and conflict. Globalization, which is creating the gap between rich and poor, is directly affecting the survival of certain people, a lot of people.
And this gives them only few options. And people will have to take options when it is a life and death situation. It will create terrorism. It will create a lot of disharmony. You destroy language, you destroy the roots of who you are, you destroy the history, and you become nobody in the world.
Globalization with its homogenous way of looking at the world and that we must have one world view is extremely dangerous. It's dangerous for diversity. This is not healthy for harmonizing our societies.
In Ladakh, Buddhists and Muslims had lived side by side for 500 years without any conflict. But with the advent of the new economy, unemployment increased exponentially. And so did competition for the narrow range of new commodities, like kerosene and coal, cement and plastic.
The end result was friction, conflict and ultimately violence. After only about a day of In a decade, Buddhists and Muslims were literally killing each other. It's widely believed that whatever the social and environmental costs, globalization is unstoppable. It's seen as an inevitable, almost natural process, driven by free markets and the so-called efficiencies of scale enjoyed by bigger businesses. If there's one thing that political parties from the left to the right...
seem to agree on today is the power and value of the free market. But the irony is that the majority of really polluting things that are happening today would not exist within a genuine free market. Nuclear power couldn't exist, for example, without massive state support. There are billions and billions of dollars being poured into continuing business as usual. Whether that's subsidising fossil fuels, whether that's subsidising huge monocultures, whether it's giving corporate welfare to some of the already largest and most powerful corporations around.
It would be impossible to maintain the current global economy as it is today without enormous support from governments around the world. We're about as far away from a free market as it's possible to be. Support for big business comes not only in the form of subsidies, but through the increasing deregulation of trade and finance under the auspices of such bodies as the World Trade Organization.
At the global level, regulations are being increasingly stripped away with the effect that transnational corporations and banks are free to operate across the entire planet. Meanwhile, at the national level, There's ever more red tape and bureaucracy. This places an unfair, disproportionate burden on small and medium-sized businesses. And every year, hundreds of thousands of them are going out of business.
It's basically a system which criminalizes the small producer and processor and deregulates the giant business. The leverage of international financial agreements and the World Trade Agreements levers people, often against their will, into a beggar-thy-neighbour, dog-eat-dog global commodity market in which speculation is king and real people and local communities are an afterthought. If the global economy is such a destructive force, why do policy makers continue to promote it? More than anything, perhaps, it's because they believe that the world needs what globalisation is supposed to deliver, economic growth. Economic growth means strength and vitality.
Not only our economies, but our societies, our political systems, the entire culture is focused on making sure that our GDP grows as fast as possible. I stand for programs that will mean growth and progress. It's as if every problem we have can be solved by increasing GDP. Economic growth is the key to the future of this country.
Poverty is the problem. more economic growth is the answer. Unemployment is the problem, more economic growth is the answer.
Environmental decline is the problem, more economic growth is the answer. A fiscal stimulus plan that will jumpstart economic growth is long overdue. Using GDP as a measure of societal progress is little short of madness. If there's an oil spill, GDP goes up.
If the water is so polluted we have to buy it in bottles, GD... GDP goes up, war, cancer, epidemic illnesses, all of these things involve an exchange of money and that means that they end up on the positive side of the balance sheet. It's not only the measure of growth that is coming under scrutiny, it's the whole concept of growth itself.
You cannot have infinite growth on a finite plane. No matter how you dress it up, the whole thing stares at you in the face. There isn't enough resources for growth. The evidence is clear that we as a species are now beyond the carrying capacity of the planet.
And this shift has happened within the last 20 years. I mean this hasn't happened in the 4.5 billion year history of the planet Earth. Concerns over climate change, coupled with the near meltdown of the global financial system, have ensured that alarm bells are finally beginning to ring. The response of governments, however, has been essentially more of the same.
Whether it's bailouts to big banks, stimulus packages to encourage consumer spending, or carbon trading schemes, all of these supposed solutions actually reinforce the system that them in the first place. In the meanwhile, big business is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince us that they are leading the way to a green economy. Industry is ready for the green revolution. Superficial solutions extend to the general public as well. The emphasis is on changing individual consumer behaviour.
We should drive less, screw in more efficient light bulbs, consume less, and make the world a better more environmentally friendly products. There are things that we can do as individuals, but I worry a great deal that all of those, including enlightened, well-meaning environment groups, who urge us to take individual action, try to persuade us that we personally can solve the problem. You can turn off the television in your house, you can say no to McDonald's and Nike, you can decide not to work in a job that doesn't have meaning for you or isn't making the world a better place. world a better place and live on less.
But there's a limit to how far we can go with those solutions as a society. We have to do something about the institutions that are at the root of the problem. And those are primarily the large corporations which drive our society.
They have enormous political power. It's a system run amok. In the end, the only power that any of these institutions of empire, plutocracy, or whatever have, are the power that we as citizens yield to them.
And they remain in power because we accept their legitimacy and affordability. we withdraw that legitimacy, they lose their power over us. We shall have to raise our voice and unite ourselves and help those people who are telling the truth.
We're here to support folks who are trying to fight against the world's largest, richest and probably meanest corporations. I think we need to start imagining an economy that isn't obsessed with economic growth. One whose purpose is not to maximise profits, but to provide high quality, satisfying jobs, producing goods and services that people really do need. In 1972, the then King of Bhutan coined the term gross national happiness and embedded the concept in the country's development policy. Following his lead, economists across the world have begun to develop more meaningful ways of measuring well-being and prosperity.
One such measure is the GPI, or Genuine Progress Index. The purpose of the Genuine Progress Index is to count things more accurately, more comprehensively, to take into account our human, social, community, natural wealth, in addition to our produced and material wealth, and actually count full social and environmental and economic benefits and costs. Only with a full-cost accounting system will we begin to understand That goods that are shipped from 10,000 miles away are actually far more expensive than goods produced locally.
If you look at the current system, we're seeing the distance between production and consumption continue to increase. We're seeing the distance between people and power continue to increase. I think economic globalization is responsible for that. It's increasing those trends.
And the obvious answer for me is the opposite, and that is economic localization. We've got to begin localizing. Our politics, localizing our economies, localizing our cultures, localizing our spirits, you know, even our spiritual natures.
There is only one economics that will make sense. It is local economics. Everywhere. Localization is a systemic, far-reaching alternative to corporate capitalism. Fundamentally, it's about reducing the scale of economic activity.
That doesn't mean eliminating international... trade or striving for some kind of absolute self-reliance. It's simply about creating more accountable and more sustainable economies by producing what we need closer to home. No one's saying there's going to be a complete end to international trade. But at the very least, we should be saying local needs should come first.
At a policy level, the first step is to start the process of bringing transnational corporations under democratic control. We need to focus on three key mechanisms that governments use to shape the economy. What they choose to regulate, both at the national level and internationally through trade treaties. What they choose to tax and what they choose to subsidize.
At the moment, governments of every political color are using these mechanisms to favor the big and the global. If there's to be any chance of averting further social and environmental breakdown, We need to level the playing field. In the United States right now, local governments are giving $50 billion a year to attract and retain non-local business.
And we've calculated that the federal government is giving another $63 billion. That's $113 billion a year that is making local business. less competitive.
If, for example, a fraction of the subsidies that have gone into nuclear power or fossil fuels were to go into renewable energies, if a fraction of the subsidies that have gone into the whole infrastructure that supports the private car was to go into mass transit systems, it's incredible what we could achieve. One of the initiatives that I'm involved in is the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. And it's about bringing together local independent businesses to withdraw their dependence on the corporate global economy and begin to weave together the relationships of a new economy that is really grounded in community and works by community. values. In the global economy, it's as though our arms have become so long that we can't see what our hands are doing.
But when the economy is operating on a more human scale, it becomes easier for us to see the impact of our choices. We can see if the environment has been polluted with chemicals or if workers have been exploited. And so business becomes much more accountable.
Across the United States, communities thought that their pathway to prosperity was to attract and retain non-local business. And they've come to realize that this is a fundamental dead end. So instead, they are now working with their local businesses to nurture local jobs. And helping those businesses connect with local markets.
By redefining their economic problem as a local one, they've been able to take control over forces that previously seemed overwhelming. Global business creates enormous wealth for the few, but leaves the great majority worse off. Small business and local economies, on the other hand, can generate wealth in ways that are both more equitable and sustainable. One of the most important studies that we have on the effects of local business compared the impacts of $100 spent at a local bookstore versus $100 spent at a chain. $100 spent at the local bookstore left $45 in the local economy.
$100 spent at the chain left $13. So we get three times the income effects. Three times the jobs, three times the tax proceeds for local governments. The principal difference was that the local bookstore had a local high-level management team.
It used local lawyers and accountants. It advertised on local radio and TV. None of those things were true of the chain store. There are movements to localize not only business, but banking and finance as well. One of the things we have to do is to put finance back into its box.
So the re-regulation of the banking sector is vital. Breaking up banks that are too big to fail, or was called too big to fail. Separating speculative functions from high street, main street. retail functions of banking so that money becomes our servant once more rather than our master. The financial crisis has actually given us a reminder that local banking and local pensions are in fact more stable financial institutions.
We can have our money at credit unions, where that money is available to the community for community reinvestment and the profits are reinvested in the community, rather than these huge speculative bubbles caused by financial shenaniganry by big banks. Turning away from global business has nothing to do with turning away from the world, turning away from international collaboration or cultural exchange. More than ever today, with our global problems. We need global cooperation, but that's very different from the globalization of the economy.
Agriculture and food production is one area where not only is localization desirable, in fact it is necessary. If you shorten the distance between producers and consumers, you're cutting out your food miles, you're cutting out your emissions, your oil dependency, you're putting money straight back into the local economy where it's desperately needed. In a local food economy, consumers often pay less, while farmers'earnings increase. What's more, local food systems actively benefit the environment.
Localisation is structurally inexhaustible. ...strictly linked to the revitalization of diversity on the land. When farmers sell in the global market, they're forced to specialize in a very narrow range of standardized products, whereas when they sell in the local market, it's actually in their economic interest to increase the variety of their products.
A whole array of food-based movements is emerging. Farmers'markets. Consumer-producer cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, edible schoolyards, slow food, permaculture, and urban gardens. Let's take the example of a farmer's market. It's good because it uses less energy.
It's really good because it builds more community. The average shopper at the farmer's market has ten times as many conversations as the average shopper at the supermarket. You know, you go into the supermarket and you just run in and you register and you run out. And you come shopping here and you just go, Ah! Paradoxically, many of the most effective initiatives to rebuild local food economies are happening in big cities, from London to Sydney.
In San Francisco, government policy now requires all public institutions, from schools and hospitals to prisons, to obtain their food from local sources. It goes without saying that most of the food that's consumed in this country is consumed by cities. So by definition, citizens within those urban centers should be designing and directing policy around food procurement.
So we have an executive order that is advancing a series of principles. One is we want to see more gardens like this throughout at least our city and county. Second, we want to establish new procurement strategies, new purchasing strategies. If we're going to buy food in San Francisco, let's buy it regionally. In Detroit, a city hit hard by the collapsing car industry.
A focus on local food is helping people regain control over their own lives. We went from a situation where this area was fully populated. Today, most of the land is vacant.
The grocery stores that we have are basically liquor stores that have a little food in them. That food is old, old, old and terrible quality. Since we have so many people who need food, then it's only magical for us to use the land to raise food. The garden feeds any and everybody, from that person who comes down here every day in her Jaguar to the person who comes down here asking if we have any cans. Right.
So any and everybody can eat, but the only thing we ask is come get dirty. If you see a weed, pick a weed. And you can always eat. Yeah, I mean people looking for the garden. See the tomatoes over there looking good.
Can I get a couple of those? Yeah man, come on. If we want one to grow, we gotta put water, seeds, and sunshine, and water on them too. We should have something to share with the rest of the country and people who are middle class about what needs to be changed in society. and values changing and ways of surviving.
You know, just as a prophetic message, I think that Detroit might need to look into agriculture again. We have no choice. All these vacant lots and empty buildings.
With the state of our economy and where we're headed, the big three no longer, so there are no factories to take care of people, you're going to see a lot more people actually getting back and attempting to reclaim that which was once theirs. Right. The rapidly growing local food movement represents a powerful challenge to the corporate order.
Increasingly, big businesses are attempting to jump on the bandwagon by painting themselves as local. I've been growing potatoes for Lay's since 1964. We grow potatoes in Texas. Lay's makes potato chips in Texas.
So it's a natural fit. At the same time, it's commonly argued that if we in the West localize, we'll be depriving the third world of an important export market. The reality, however, is very different.
The idea that poverty reduction in the South depends on market access to northern markets is a child of globalization. We have limited resources. There's limited land, there's limited water, there's limited energy. And if we have to use that land and water and energy to produce...
One extra lettuce head for a British household. We can be sure we are robbing Indian peasants of their rice and their wheat. We are robbing India of her water. We are in fact creating a situation where we are exporting to the third world in the south famine and drought.
The smarter thing to do is to help communities in the Global South achieve food self-reliance and other forms of self-reliance. That's a vision for eliminating global poverty I think we can stand behind. Proponents of globalisation argue that on a crowded planet, only large-scale industrial farms can feed the world. But smaller, locally adapted farms are much more efficient in two very important ways.
First, because they are less mechanised, they provide far more jobs than their industrial counterparts. And second, they are able to produce substantially more food per acre. This is our vegetable garden.
It's 100% organic. You can see the yield of these. Basically, we get very good yields because we don't use fertilizers.
The soil is, if it is managed well, the productivity is unbelievable. For 15 years we have been analyzing small farms of India in the wet areas of Kerala, in the high Himalaya, in the deserts of Rajasthan. And our research has shown again and again and again that biodiverse small farms farms using ecological inputs produce three to five times more food than industrial monocultures. All I need is a complete integrated farm of one acre.
I can feed twenty people. We don't need agriculture scientists, we don't need hybrid seeds, we don't need GM, we don't need anything. We just need to be left alone to do our farming. Global warming is already here and the era of cheap oil will soon be over.
But projections of energy needs for the future almost always assume the continued growth of global business and long-distance trade. And that means a continued large-scale use of fossil fuels. We need to get back to basics to see what our real energy needs are.
Do we really need the stuff that the consumer culture is posting on us? And couldn't most of our real need for clothing and housing, for food and drink be produced far closer to home? If we cut out the outrageous waste inherent in the current system, we'd be able to meet a far higher proportion of our energy requirements from decentralized renewable sources.
We have wind power, we have photovoltaics, we know how to save energy. our energy consumption in half in the next few years by some strategic investments at no cost. The wide range of renewable energy technologies, small, medium, large scale, well, pound for pound, dollar for dollar, yen for yen, give you between two and four times as many jobs as the kind of centralised, old-fashioned energy technologies we've got at the moment. There's a win-win-win. I'm going to have to go.
I'm going to have to go. The argument for pursuing a more localized energy path is particularly strong when applied to the global south. In the less industrialized world, most people still live in relatively decentralized towns and villages.
and are far less dependent on fossil fuels. It's not a question of no development. In Ladakh we've been working with local NGOs to demonstrate a range of renewable energy technologies from photovoltaic energy to solar energy.
the passive solar, small-scale hydro and some wind. We've been able to show that it's far less expensive and much easier to introduce a decentralized renewable energy infrastructure than it is to build up the conventional fossil fuel-based infrastructure. And it also allows the fabric of community and social cohesion to continue. When we localize, we give our children role models and I think a standard that they can live by that affirms them.
...affirms who they are in society without having to look outside their culture to find imagery or symbols to emulate the symbols the standards the values are right here amongst them. When people turn away from the global consumer culture and start reconnecting with each other in their own local communities, they're providing very different role models for their children. images of perfection in the global media and in advertising create feelings of inferiority, which all too often in later life translate into fear, small-mindedness and prejudice. On the other hand, when children identify with real flesh and blood people who all have their strengths and weaknesses, they get a much more realistic sense of who they are, of who they can be.
I saw this so clearly in Ladakh. There were no celebrities there. Everyone was seen, heard and appreciated.
In effect, everybody was somebody. And that sense of belonging built confidence and a deep sense of self-respect, which in turn generated respect for others. Local economies create a more secure identity, not only by strengthening community, but by nurturing it. ensuring a deeper connection with the earth. Young people are now desperately looking for something else than what they were learning in universities.
They were desperately looking for contact with nature. It's important to learn traditional farming, but at the same time, just being in the mud and having fun working like this. They are learning what it means to live. They eat rice every day, and now they are learning.
hey you know this is where rice is coming from. Local knowledge is knowledge that tells you about life. It is about living. I call it grandmother's knowledge and I think the biggest thing we need, the task for today, is to create grandmother's universities everywhere so that local knowledge never disappears.
Sometimes we get an impression that it's all doom and gloom, that absolutely nothing's happening. That's both complacent and wrong. Wherever you look, there are things happening at the local level that if they...
were identified and supported by government could rapidly accelerate the change to a more sustainable way of doing things. In ecovillages, transition towns and post-carbon cities, people are working to rebuild their economies from the ground up by favouring local production for local needs over long distance trade. The transition town movement in Britain and in other countries around the world has been described as one of the fastest growing social experiments we've ever seen.
We're going to be looking much much more towards the local, towards the local. and agriculture, realigning our local agriculture towards local markets rather than international markets. I think building will move much more back towards local materials using straw bale, cob, clay plasters, hemp.
using the best of modern design, but using those local materials. In the Japanese town of Ogawa-machi, an organic waste recycling scheme is the starting point for a whole range of locally run projects. A collectively owned bio-digester produces both energy for the community and compost for a nearby farm. The farm in turn sells its produce to the local farmers. to local residents and a local food restaurant.
Purchases within the community can be made in the town's own currency. Not just in Ogawa, but all over Japan and the world, money is coming out of the regions. There are various mechanisms, and money is coming out of the water from the wells.
And that's why we started thinking about the resource of this waste. On every continent, a pattern is emerging. We're seeing the beginnings of a worldwide localization movement.
One organization alone, via Campus Seed, which both opposes globalization and campaigns for food sovereignty and local self-reliance, represents more than 400 million people. million small farmers worldwide This is a huge change that we have had from these gardens. Tomatoes, cabbage, cabbage. And people are getting happier. Our actions are based on the resistance of the peasant people.
Our resistance, our stubbornness, is also a way of facing the industrial capital and the big corporations. In some communities, even the government is supporting a shift towards the local. Local governments realised in recent years that we have a much bigger role to play in what goes on in the world.
And what we've encouraged is... local business, local people supporting each other rather than relying on on the multinationals. It's about building community as well as a strong economy. We can do this and do it well and enjoy a quality of life that's far superior.
to a homogenized corporate way of life that's imposed on people. Local communities are gaining strength by linking up across the world to collaborate and share information. In exchanges with the less industrialized world, Westerners can play an important role by exposing the reality behind the romanticized images of the consumer culture. People often say, how can we tell them in the third world?
world not to consume, not to drive cars, we're doing it. And of course that's absolutely true. We have no right to tell people how to live their lives, but we can tell them that they're not stupid and backward or primitive if they live on the land and that there's no need to blindly emulate a consumer culture in order to feel that you're worthy. We can provide more real information about the situation. in the West, about our social and environmental problems, and also about our search for more ecological and sustainable solutions.
We've been doing this in our work in Ladakh. We've also been providing community leaders with reality tours to Europe where they can see with their own eyes that yes there are certain comforts and technologies that can improve life but there are also huge problems We've lost so many of the things that the Ladakhis take for granted. We've lost our connection with community, our connection with nature.
We don't have time, something that the Ladakhis have plenty of. So there's a reality there that needs to be conveyed. Have you got any grandchildren Albert? No, no, no.
Not buried. The global consumer culture is failing us, but we're told it's the only way, that there's no alternative. For an increasing number of people across the world, however, there is an alternative. One that offers the prospect of real and lasting prosperity. Bringing the economy home, back to the local level, isn't about sacrifice.
It's not about returning to the dark ages and asking people to do things they wouldn't want to do. On the contrary, it's about enriching our lives. It could be more vibrant and diverse and abundant and people...
working closer to home, spending more time with their families, breathing cleaner air, eating better food. Rediscovering the values of community and mutual caring, that's where the real happiness, the real well-being lies. Consumerism has got us weighed down with carbon chains and I suppose the message would be break your carbon chains, be free, have a better quality of life.
The wonderful thing is that as we decrease the scale of economic activity, we actually increase our own well-being. That's because at the deepest level localisation is about connection. It's about re-establishing. our sense of interdependence with others and with the natural world.
And this connection is a fundamental human need. I love you.