What Does a Local Future Look Like? Jeremy Lent in conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge

Underlying the dominant world system is a 500-year-old process of systematic exploitation: slavery, enclosures, colonialism, imperialism, and—over the past 40 years—economic globalization. Today this system is responsible for increasing social and ecological breakdown, as well as threatening the sovereignty of nations.

It seems clear that any pathway toward a flourishing future will require a reclamation of sovereignty back to regional and local levels. This would need to incorporate multiple intersecting domains: economic, political, industrial, agricultural, and cultural. But what might that local future look like? We are so embedded in a globalized world that, for many of us, a more grassroots-based society can be difficult to envision.

In this Deep Transformation Network Live Interactive Conversation, Jeremy Lent discusses the vision of a local future with Helena Norberg-Hodge—one of the world’s leading thinkers on this topic, founder of the international non-profit Local Futures, and convener of World Localization Day.

We discuss the underlying destructive elements of the dominant global system and benefits of localization; different flavors of localization strategies such as “cosmolocalism”; and how each of us can become part of the movement laying the groundwork of deep transformation toward a flourishing future on a regenerated Earth.