Rob: $15 to attend that's unbelievable
HNH: And also I should mention that we will be launching this International Alliance for Localization. It is this big alliance that we are building up. And I say it so opens up the Vista and makes you feel more inspired and more hopeful when you are more in touch with what's going around the world. So localizing is not about shutting down our vision or our sense of collaboration and oneness, in fact we need that oneness and collaboration more than ever before.
So this International Alliance is part of building those bridges, typically between less Industrialized parts of the world and more Industrialized like in the United States. One of things that's really important about that too is that when you start getting a Global Perspective from a grassroots experiential point of view, one thing that emerges is that as human beings on this planet, for our entire Evolution, until just you know few seconds, relatively speaking,in the 24 hours cycle, we lived in community and in closer contact with the land and our most important economic activity was food production, because food is the only thing we produce that every single person on the planet needs everyday of their life, the only thing.
Now that basic need is being co-opted and corrupted by a Global Corporate System that also sends out the message that in order to feed the world we've got to have large farms and large super markets and Global Trade. This is a lie and thank God this lie is being exposed. Even the recent report from the UN from UNCTAD was entitled "Wake up, before it's too late". We need to shift rapidly away from the Global food system to Localized systems that are the only way that we can produce food in a way that respects diversity. The old McDonalds Farm-- the diversified farm-- is what can feed the world, producing far more food per unit of land and water than Giant Mono Culture. So this is a really important truth that also becomes more obvious when you have more contact with less industrialized countries.
Rob: Alright, let me stop you and get reviewed a little bit. So you said that for most of humanity's existence, production of food was the important thing we did.
HNH: That's right,
Rob: Let me just keep the question going here now. Production of food, you are talking about before farming and before domestication of animals, right.
HNH: Well, actually, what I am talking about is more optimistic than that, many millions if not billions of people were engaged in farming but not in industrial farming. The industrial farming is what so destructive.
Rob: Let me get this straight, we were both at this Techno Utopianism conference test this weekend and there was lot of talk about indigenous people, and I am always very interested in indigenous from before the time of farming and civilization and then after, but even once farming started up until the time of industrialization just a couple of hundred years ago, most people were still indigenous even if they were farming.
HNH: That's correct
Rob: We still have lots of indigenous people including some that spoke at this conference who have their own languages, own cultures, beliefs and values. So what are you talking I just want to get that clear.
HNH: So what I am saying is that lot of people, a lot of environmentalists would say everything went wrong when we went hunter gathering to farming and that farming was a major step towards destroying the planet. I disagree with that, I have lived in-- I have not only lived in cultures where farming was a main activity and that were sustainable ways. You know how sustainable in some way if we are looking at million years or something, it is hard to say, but clearly, vastly more sustainable than what happened with industrialization and corporatization.
We have to remember that the industrial era, from the beginning, was led by large business interests, was led by people who were profiting from extracting wealth from others. So this concentration of wealth in the hands of giant global traders is part and parcel of what happened with industrialization and so the industrialization causes a major problem and there is a way through a combination of understanding more indigenous or more traditional ways of doing things that are smaller scale, more localized and more diversified, working with biological diversity, that we could dramatically reduce the human ecological footprint and while increasing our well being. And this doesn't have to mean either that we all have to go back to do farming. We need a balance between City and Country. We need to be moving towards shrinking the large Megalopolis areas instead of making them even larger and starting to enliven and revitalize smaller towns and cities that maintain a balance of the land and around them where you have who have more localized food systems.
Rob: Okay, at the Techno Utopianism conference you had one statement made that really stood up. You said that previously cultures shaped the economies and in the modern eras the economies shaped the cultures top down. Explain that.
HNH: Yes, now that is so important because we need that bigger picture perspective to really see what's happening.I have worked with 50 different language books. My book Ancient Futures and the film we made, Ancient Futures, were translated between them in 50 different languages. We had the books from Peru, Burma, Mongolia and many parts of the Africa and so on, as well as Eastern Europe, Russia and from all around the world. We have worked with different groups and cultures. And what you see today is that literally every child, from Mongolia to Peru, is being influenced by the same standardized Monocultural, Corporate consumer images of what it is to be human, how you need to look and how you need to be in order to be respected and loved. So these satellite television in dealing in these images and it's a disaster. It is creating in the Children, the sense that if they want to have respect, love and recognition, they got to have the latest running shoes, they got to have the latest iPad, they got to look in a certain way and it is always based on the western standard. And the end result is that as they go down that path of buying modern things it doesn't lead to the love and the connection, recognition they are looking for. It leads to separation and envy. So this is a disastrous way that the Global Economy is promoting consumerism and promoting standard consumer images is intervening in what is truly a universal human need, which is in need to belong to be a part of community to feel loved and recognized. That universal human need is being perverted into what looks like a universal human need to consume, but actually that is not a universal human need. It is artificially created and I really want to stress that, it took me years actually seeing this happening in non-western cultures and seeing young people wanting to buy blue contact lenses, the advertisement would say "have the color of eyes you wish you had been born with", having people of darker skin use dangerous skin bleaching creams to try to look whiter and better.
So for several years I thought the problem was the western culture imposing itself on non-western cultures and then I started seeing in my native country of Sweden a six year old girl had blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin. They would say "I am not as thin as Barbie am not going to eat anything" and sometimes starving themselves to death. And if you look at the epidemic in the United States and well most industrialized countries now--depression, a desire for plastic surgery of addictions, I mean it all goes back to the same thing. The breakdown of the community the true imposition of an impossible standard ideal, that is unreal and so no single human being can ever conform to that perfection.
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