Interview with Helena Norberg-Hodge by David Leser
Printed in the May 27, 2000 issue of the Good Weekend
Global Warning
Okay, if we think about it, we know it’s absurd
that the average meal travels to us from thousands of kilometres away –
that the garlic comes from China, the grapes from Chile, mung beans from
Madagascar. We know it’s ludicrous that oranges from California cost us
about 89 cents a kilo, compared with $2.89 for ones grown at home.
But we’re pressed for time. And it’s easier to buy the polished
rhubarb from Woolworths than the stuff from the local organic farmer with
mud still clinging to it.
The other morning, I was drinking Italian coffee
and eating a pawpaw from Brazil and I didn’t think twice about it. Nor
did I consider how much our downsized workplaces, our imploding marriages
and our alienated youth might be connected to this Brazilian pawpaw, or
to the name-brand jeans and T-shirts my children are constantly demanding
to wear. I didn’t connect all this with the fact that local cultures, dialects
and communities are being destroyed every day by the same thing. The global
economy.
But that’s because I hadn’t met Helena Norberg-Hodge
yet. I hadn’t heard of her, her organisation – The International Society
for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) – or the work she has been doing for the
past 25 years in Ladakh, one of the most remote regions of the world.
They say that out of the desert prophets come,
but in this case, on this particular day, she appeared not out of the desert
but on that most easterly point of the Australian continent where the rainforest
tumbles into the sea.
The first time I saw her, she was standing under the lighthouse
at Byron Bay looking slightly befuddled, as if she’d lost her monocle or
her compass. Her long hair was silvery and wild, and under her wide-brimmed
hat you could see a weathered face and a pair of piercing blue eyes.
“Do you know what time it is?” she asked.
“Ten o’clock,” I replied.
That was the extent of our conversation until
the following morning at the same spot, when she repeated the question.
“Same time as yesterday,” I replied, but she
had no idea what I was talking about.
On the third morning, before she could even utter
the words, I told her she was half an hour early. It was 9.30. She gave
me a baffled smile and trudged on up to the lighthouse, looking like a
mythical figure from some Scandinavian folktale.
Only later that week, at a dinner given in Byron
Bay for environmentalist David Suzuki, did I find out that my lighthouse
acquaintance – in town on an extended visit – was a friend of David Suzuki,
the Dalai Lama and Prince Charles, and has been taught by American theorist
Noam Chomsky. She was also the only Westerner who could speak the language
of Ladakh, the mainly Tibetan Buddhist enclave in north-west India.
In that wildly beautiful Himalayan zone of Tartar
herders and cantankerous beasts known as yaks, Norberg-Hodge had witnessed
what happens to a well-functioning society once the global economy rolls
into town. It didn’t matter that it was Ladakh. It could have been Lagos
or Launceston. In Norberg-Hodge’s opinion, globalisation has done the same
thing everywhere. It has triggered an international “race to the bottom”
which threatens to impoverish people and ransack environments in every
corner of the world. And it is a multidimensional calamity which has grown
out of government and business-led economic policies.
So here on the north coast of NSW, at the birthplace
of the Australian countercultural movement, Norberg-Hodge has been trying
to tackle the problem, partly by giving talks and galvanising community
support, but also by proposing to Suzuki a three-way meeting between him,
the Tibetan leader-in-exile and the heir to the British crown, aimed at
saving the planet.
Norberg-Hodge first arrived in Ladakh in 1975
with a German documentary team, and within 12 months had managed to wrap
her mind and tongue around the impossibly complex local dialect. She also
travelled widely and, because of her language skills, became the first
European in recent times to gain a deep understanding of the inner workings
of the society.
What she saw was a people at ease with themselves,
a place where there was neither waste nor pollution; where crime was virtually
non-existent; where village communities were healthy and joyous; where
teenagers didn’t suffer from alienation; where the old were active until
they died. At least, that was until the Indian government threw open Ladakh’s
doors to tourism in the mid 1970s and the area gradually found itself exposed
to the vicissitudes of a newly emerging international economy.
“In the traditional culture, villagers provided
for their basic needs without money,” Norberg-Hodge wrote in her mini-classic
Ancient Futures, which – together with a film of the same title – has now
been translated in to more than 30 languages. “They developed skills that
enabled them to grow barley at 12,000 feet (3,600 metres) and to manage
yaks and other animals at even higher elevations. People knew how to build
houses with their own hands from the materials of the immediate surroundings.
The only thing they actually needed from outside the region was salt, for
which they traded.
“Now, suddenly, as part
of the international money economy, Ladakhis find themselves ever more
dependent – even for vital needs - on a system that is controlled by faraway
forces. They are vulnerable to decisions made by people who do not even
know that Ladakh exists.”
As Ladakh became linked to the global economy,
government subsidies made it cheaper to buy a pound of flour transported
from across the Himalayas than from the nearest village. Cash cropping
replaced subsistence agriculture as a way of life. The pressure to grow
food for profit forced thousands of farmers off the land. Eventually, it
proved uneconomic for Ladakhis to grow their own food.
Similarly, it became more expensive to build
a house out of local mud than imported cement. Land had suddenly become
a commodity with a monetary value. The more people crowded together in
the city, the less space was allotted to them and the more expensive that
space became.
Instead of simply digging up the land around
the house for mud, Ladakhis had to travel further from the growing urban
sprawl and pay hard cash for building materials. They also had to pay for
the labour to make the bricks, and then for the trucks to haul them back
to the city. Added to this was the fact that time now meant money, and
building with mud was slower. The more Western-educated Ladakhis had begun
learning how to build a house with cement and steel. Old skills were becoming
more scarce and, thus, more expensive. And given that people were beginning
to see the traditional ways as backward, a mud house was looking bad for
their image. In a sense, Ladakh was also being “Hollywoodised” by the monoculture
of the global village.
“I became aware that cultural breakdown was a
consequence of the pressures on young children that led to a loss of self-respect,”
says Norberg-Hodge. “It was tragic to see how media images made them feel
ashamed of their own skin colour, their clothing, their language, and I
realised that this was all happening because of a completely false impression
of Western consumer culture.”
Tourism and television had brought to Ladakh
a kaleidoscope of irresistible images which, in contrast to their own lives,
made them feel narrow and primitive. All Westerners seemed to be rich,
brave and beautiful.
“It has been painful to see the changes in young Ladakhi friends,”
says Norberg-Hodge. “Of course, they do not all turn violent, but they
do become angry and less secure. I have seen a gentle culture change –
a culture in which men, even young men, were (once) happy to cuddle a baby
or to be loving and soft with their grandmothers.” She describes a boy
she knew called Dawa who, at 15, was still living in his village when tourism
first came to Ladakh. After years of no contact, she bumped into him in
the city one day and found he’d become a tourist guide. He’d also become
a walking advertisement for Western fashion – metallic sunglasses, a T-shirt
emblazoned with an American rock group, skin-tight blue jeans and basketball
shoes.
“I hardly recognised you,” Norberg-Hodge said
to him in Ladakhi.
“Changed a bit, eh?” Dawa replied proudly, in
English.
Norberg-Hodge admits that some aspects of Ladakh’s
traditional culture were less than ideal. In Western terms, there was a
lack of basic comforts, communication with the outside world was circumscribed,
illiteracy rates were high and life expectancy lower than in the West.
But the conventional response to these problems
– from the Indian government as well as others – was to introduce Western-style
“economic growth”. And yet, this kind of growth brought with it more problems
than it solved. Today, if you travel into this Himalayan region, you will
find slums and unemployment where none existed before. You will find streams
and rivers unfit to drink from, air unfit to breathe. In this new, competitive
economy, friction has developed between Buddhists and Muslims who had lived
peacefully side by side for 500 years.
“I have watched a whole range of different pressures
– all operating at the same time – pull the Ladakhis away from their own
resources,” Norberg-Hodge says. “The way the whole thing operates is extremely
complex and has to do with the systemic transformation of a whole way of
life. The pressure on every country in the world to pursue the development
model forces governments to expend vast resources trying to generate growth.
The end result is a total restructuring of society.
Helena Norberg-Hodge sits on her deck above a
glistening sea, surrounded by bottlebrush and eucalypt. She is wearing
rough cotton pants and an indigo-blue shirt from Ladakh. At 54, she appears
serene and comfortable with the world, as if nearly three decades in the
East might have washed all Western agitation from her mind. But she is
far more troubled than she looks. The fragility of the planet, the lateness
of the hour, give her a sense of urgency which, on occasion, brings out
the zealot in her.
“I am passionately driven to try and get this
message out, “ she says, leaning forward and fixing me in her Arctic blue
stare. “Right now, things are so upside down that people are led to believe
that promoting the same (approach to development and progress) is what
is going to maintain their prosperity.
“I am tired of being told that the reason people
don’t want to change is because they want to preserve a certain lifestyle
or because government leaders want to hold on to their power. If we continue
the way we’re going, those lifestyles will be increasingly undermined by
job losses and greater insecurity. And politicians will continue to see
their power shrinking at the expense of giant transnational corporations.”
Norberg-Hodge agreed to this interview reluctantly.
She loathes what she sees as the media’s obsession with personality and
relented only when I promised that my story would be much more about her
ideas than about her. Then she gave me the brisk, edited story of her life.
Born in Manhattan in 1946 to a Swedish industrialist
father and a German-born mother, she spent most of her childhood outside
Stockholm and then, after school, studied philosophy, psychology and art
history at universities in Austria and Germany. Later, she travelled to
Italy, France and Mexico and, by the time she was 25, could speak six languages
In the early ‘70s, she worked in London and Paris
as a linguist, and it was on the strength of these skills that she was
first invited to Ladakh in 1975 with a German film crew. In 1977, she began
studying linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky. The next year, she decided
to return to Ladakh with the man she had fallen in love with and was later
to marry, English barrister John Page.
By that time, Norberg-Hodge had become convinced
that the destructive changes she’d been witnessing in Ladakh since 1975
were neither natural nor inevitable. Rather, they were the result of specific
government policy – which could be altered. One such policy was promoting
and subsidising fossil fuels in an area that enjoyed 300 days of sunlight
each year.
“I began pleading for policies that would build
on the strengths of the local culture and promote the use of renewable
energy,” she explains. In 1978, the Indian Planning Commission gave her
permission to organise a small pilot project to demonstrate some simple
solar technologies. The focus of the project was to find ways of heating
houses and developing solar ovens and greenhouses. This led to the creation
of one of the largest renewable energy programs in the developing world.
Today, there are thousands of greenhouses throughout Ladakh providing fresh
green vegetables in minus 40 degree temperatures for domestic use.
Norberg-Hodge also became involved in a process
she describes as “counter-development”, writing plays with Ladakhi colleagues
as a way of helping restore cultural self-esteem, particularly to the young
people. She organised an exchange program whereby Westerners would explain
less glamorous aspects of their society to the locals.
“They would come to Ladakh and talk about the breakdown of family,
about the fear of ageing, about child abuse, about job insecurity, about
food scares,” Norberg-Hodge says. “They would also talk about the grassroots
movements that were trying to rebuild community and find a more sustainable
development path.”
By 1980, Norberg-Hodge’s work had expanded to
include extensive lecture tours in both Europe and America, and she found
herself explaining to economists from the World Bank, the IMF and numerous
universities that their model for economic growth was a recipe for social
and ecological disaster.
“I found in every institution that there were
individuals who were going against the dominant paradigm. But there seemed
to be almost a law that those with the most power were the most resistant
to my message.”
Early in December 1999, a state of civil emergency
was called in Seattle after the World Trade Organisation was subjected
to wild demonstrations not witnessed since the days of the Vietnam War.
Given the coverage in some sections of the mainstream media, you might
have thought the Martians had landed. Who were these people? Where were
they from? What did they want? According to The New York Times’s Thomas
Friedmann, they were a “Noah’s Ark of flat-earth advocates”. In fact, they
were, as Noam Chomsky put it, “a very broad opposition to the corporate-led
globalisation that has been imposed under primarily US leadership” (Among
their ranks were small farmers, indigenous groups, lobbyists from Third
World nations, trade unionists and representatives from non-government
organisations.) Norberg-Hodge believes Seattle represented a major turning
point in postwar economic history.
“The demonstrations,” she says, “came about as
a result of a build-up of awareness by millions of people worldwide that
the root cause of escalating unemployment and environmental breakdown wasn’t
what they’d been led to believe. It wasn’t dark-skinned immigrants taking
their jobs away. It wasn’t a question of right or left politics. It wasn’t
the result of some sort of evolutionary ‘progress’, innate human greed
or even propensity to overpopulate. It was a result of institutional structures
that had been imposed by governments.”
Six months later, demonstrators followed up their
successes in Seattle by trying to shut down the half-yearly meeting of
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the two organisations
deemed most responsible for promoting globalisation. Soon after, on May
Day, there were frenzied scenes in several major cities around the world
as demonstrators again took to the streets.
More and more people, it seemed, were beginning
to care about and understand what William Greider recently described in
The Nation as “the imperious attitudes and amoral operating assumptions
embedded in every aspect of globalisation”.
“This is a man-made artifact,” Greider wrote.
“A political regime devised over many years by interested parties to serve
their ends. Nothing in nature – or, for that matter, in economics – requires
the rest of us to accept a system that is so unjust and mindlessly destructive.”
But any optimism Norberg-Hodge might have felt
about the Seattle and Washington protests – and it’s not much – is tempered
by the fact that “this engine of destruction” is moving at a frightening
pace. It is therefore up to all of us, she believes, to get economically
literate.
“That’s the most vital form of activism,” she
says, “for people to understand what these economic policies mean. Not
even most environmental groups are doing that. They are still fixating
on the destruction of forests and rivers, but not the economic policies
that lead to that.” The next form of activism, she says, is to get involved
at the community level – to start community banking systems, strengthen
local currencies, establish community land trusts, and institute a local
food movement.
“There is almost nothing more important than
the localisation of food,” she says. “Every human being has to eat three
times a day, so to call a system efficient that separates people further
and further from their source of food is nothing short of madness.”
The transformation of food production is beginning
already – from Australian farmers challenging the middle men who buy food
on behalf of big corporations, to community-supported agriculture programs
throughout Western Europe. In these programs, consumers in towns and cities
link up directly with a nearby farmer and, in some cases, actually purchase
an entire season’s produce in advance, thereby sharing the risk with the
farmer. In Britain, Norberg-Hodge and her colleagues spearheaded a local
food movement which three years ago resulted in the setting up of a farmers’
market in Bath. This model, which has since been replicated throughout
the country, brings consumers and producers together and cuts out unnecessary
transport, packaging and waste.
“This is about using resources, technology and
economic systems on a human scale,” she says finally. “It is about putting
the local economy first and long-distance trade second.”
Helena Norberg-Hodge has been saying this for
a quarter of a century. It seems that, at last, people are starting to
listen.
Links to other Helena Norberg-Hodge
interviews & articles:
- Articles by Helena Norberg-Hodge about globalisation and its effects
- http://www.newint.org/issue282/endpiece.htm
- http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/hodge.cfm
- http://zena.secureforum.com/znet/ZMag/articles/barhodge.htm
- http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC17/NHodge.htm
- http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC31/NorbergH.htm
- http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/articles/norberg_naess.htm
- http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/articles/norberg_hodge_cola.htm
- http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/articles/norberg_hodge_buddi.htm
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