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Helena Norberg-Hodge founded Local Futures with a mission of strengthening local economies and ending the most wasteful aspects of the global trade system.
This article is part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting the work by women around the world addressing climate change.
In 1975, the Swedish linguist Helena Norberg-Hodge became one of the first modern Westerners to visit Ladakh, a region on the Tibetan plateau that was largely closed to international visitors until 1974. While making a documentary film and creating the first Ladakhi dictionary, she fell in love with the Ladakhis — “the happiest, most vital, most brilliantly joyous people I had ever encountered,” she said.
But over the years, as global trade and economic development arrived in Ladakh, Ms. Norberg-Hodge witnessed a rise in previously nonexistent unemployment, poverty, pollution, depression, suicide and divisiveness between cultural groups. Dismayed by similar problems around the globe, she started Local Futures, a nonprofit organization dedicated to addressing climate change, mental well-being and more by strengthening local economies worldwide and ending the most wasteful aspects of the global trade system.
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Ms. Norberg-Hodge, 78, recently spoke about global trade and the benefits of localization in a video interview.
How is the global trade system contributing to climate change?
Food is being traded over longer and longer distances, and this includes insane redundancies and processing things on the other side of the world. The U.S. exports as much beef as it imports. England exports as much milk and butter as it imports. Fish is sent from Europe, Australia and America to China to be deboned and sent back again. Apples are sent across the world to be washed and waxed. Shrimp are sent from England to Thailand to be peeled.
And with the global trading system, the pressure from global institutions is toward bigger and bigger monocultures. Monoculture is ecocidal. It demands lots of chemicals, additives and technology. So it’s very toxic, and it’s killing the soil.