In April 2015, Angela Miles of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education hosted an evening of ten women speaking on themes of gift, matriarchy, mothering, and indigenous worldviews. Here is Sherri Mitchell’s talk, introduced by Angela Miles.
Host(s): Angela Miles Featured Speakers/Guests: Sherri Mitchell – Wena’hamu’gwasit was born and raised on a Penobscot reservation in the US state of Maine. She speaks and teaches around the world on Indigenous worldview and spiritual change. Sherri is the author of Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change. She is the Founding Director of the Land Peace Foundation, an organization dedicated to the global protection of Indigenous land and water rights and the Indigenous Way of Life. Sherri is also the visionary behind Healing the Wounds of Turtle Island, a global healing ceremony that has brought people together from all corners of the world.
Credits: Recorded and edited by Frieda Werden. Thanks to Angela Miles and Genevieve Vaughan for organizing and support.
WINGS: Women’s International News Gathering service produces weekly radio programs by and about women around the world. Their slogan is “Raising Women’s Voices through Radio Worldwide – since 1986.” WebsiteContact
Helena Norberg-Hodge, Local Futures With Noam Chomsky
What is globalization? Economic globalization is a process defined by the deregulation of trade and finance in order to enable businesses and banks to operate globally. Since at least the mid-20th century, national governments and international institutions have been nearly unanimous in supporting globalization, often through policies that prop up large transnational corporations to the detriment of small and local businesses. With the help of these policies, a single world market has emerged.
Corporate-funded think tanks and media outlets would have you believe that this global market is characterized by the free flow of ideas and technology, international collaboration, interdependence, and a worldwide sense of community – in other words, that the global market has created a ‘global village’.
But the reality is far different from this rosy picture. Our global economic system has become so large and complex – with producers and consumers, CEOs and workers, and cause and effect all far removed from each other – that ethical choices are almost impossible to make, and environmental and human rights disasters have become commonplace.
It can be challenging to understand the workings of a system that is so vast, out-of-control, and deeply ingrained into the fabric of our daily lives. But by breaking the global economy down into five key structural elements, and understanding how it came to exist in the first place, we can begin to comprehend it – and, ultimately, resist it.
What is localization? Ultimately, economic localization is about re-scaling the economy back to a human level. It is the process of building economic structures which allow the goods and services a community needs to be produced locally and regionally whenever possible. Localizing economies can strengthen community cohesion and lead to greater human health and material wellbeing, all while reducing pollution and degradation of the natural world.
From community gardens to credit unions, from alternative learning spaces to small business alliances and co-ops, local economies create networks of place-based relationships that affirm our human desire for connection to each other and to the earth. By creating this structural basis for community, local economies make caring for one another and for the land into guiding principles of daily life.
An important point to note is that localization does not mean total isolation. It isn’t about eliminating all trade; communities can still export surpluses once local needs are met, and they can still import goods that can’t be produced locally. But localization allows local, regional, and even national self-reliance to replace dependence on distant, unaccountable corporations.
Localized economies are created by and for the people who live there. Rather than subscribing to a global monocultural model, localized economies respect local cultures and needs, while allowing for the free exchange of knowledge and ideas across borders. In fact, localization requires international cooperation and collaboration to address global problems like climate change, and to forge agreements to scale back the rapacious power of global corporations and banks.
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Helena is a widely respected analyst of the impact of the global economy and international development on local communities, local economies, and personal identity, and is a leading proponent of ‘localization’, or decentralization, as a means of countering those impacts.
Helena is the founder and director of Local Futures and The International Alliance for Localization (IAL). Based in the USA and UK, with subsidiaries in Germany and Australia, Local Futures examines the root causes of our current social and environmental crises, while promoting more sustainable and equitable patterns of living in both North and South. Helena is also a founding member of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.
Helena’s seminal book, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, has been described as “an inspirational classic,” providing insightful solutions to the unintended impacts of development, based on her decades living and working in Ladakh, India. Together with the film of the same title, it has been translated into more than 40 languages, and sold about half a million copies.
Her most recent book, Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, outlines how a systemic economic shift from global to local can address the world’s social, economic, ecological and spiritual crises. It has been described by author David Korten as “a must-read book for our time”. Helena is also the producer and co-director of the award-winning film The Economics of Happiness, and the co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture.
The Earth Journal counted Helena among the world’s ‘ten most interesting environmentalists’, while in Carl McDaniel’s book Wisdom for a Liveable Planet, she was profiled as one of ‘eight visionaries changing the world’.
Helena has lectured in seven languages and appeared in broadcast, print and online media worldwide, including MSNBC, The London Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. She has written numerous articles and essays, and her work has been the subject of more than 300 articles worldwide.
Educated in Sweden, Germany, Austria, England and the United States, Helena specialized in linguistics, including studies at the University of London and at MIT. Since 1975, she has worked with the people of Ladakh, or “Little Tibet”, to find ways of enabling their culture to meet the modern world without sacrificing social and ecological values. For these efforts she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, or ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’. She was awarded the prestigious Goi Peace Prize in 2012.
For the sake of planetary and personal health, business will have to change.
Special Presentation: Sarah Savory
Our existing systems of media and education provide a limited worldview. This reductionist worldview limits our ability to see and exist in the world properly, effectively and in total health.
For us to truly thrive as a species in harmony with the natural world, we will need to see the world as ONE LIVING BREATHING ORGANISM, and our part and place in the world as a part of this organism. This will require a shift in our thinking, in our action and in the ways we make our decisions. This very forward-thinking conversation will clearly identify where we are at, how we arrived at this point, what needs to happen, how we get there, what are the obstacles and how will we overcome these obstacles. And yes, business will have to change.
As Bucky Fuller said: “Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. If we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.”
But humans don’t know how to manage the complexities of our world. The increasing social, economic, and ecological disasters we are experiencing across the world are the mounting symptoms of our not considering the whole and managing our societies, economies, and nature in isolation of each other when they are an inseparable whole – no person or nation on earth can have physical or financial stability without ecological health.
Sarah Savory has worked alongside her father, Allan Savory who created the Holistic Management Framework. In this exhilarating conversation, we’ll discover a new and improved decision-making process to enable us to manage and balance the inseparable complexity of human societies, economies, and nature. Remember, we’re all in this together
Sarah Savory
Sarah Savory is the single mother of 2 young children, Luke and Mika. She is the youngest daughter of Allan Savory, world-renowned ecologist and developer of Holistic Management (a decision making process which successfully guides us through the complexity we manage by ensuring simultaneously socially, financially and ecologically sound decisions.)
Sarah is following closely in his footsteps and has become a very successful Holistic Management Consultant and Educator in her own right.
In an effort to simplify the framework, she has written illustrated, educational children’s books on Holistic Management and has also broken new ground by teaching HM as a subject in Zimbabwean schools, with demand for education and educational materials growing rapidly and is now writing the first school curriculum for Holistic Decision Making and Ecological Literacy to be taught as a subject in schools.
She is a part of Africa Centre For Holistic Management’s new training and education team and she is part of a new, global policy task force which is focusing on breaking through in government policy. Sarah and her father recently met with President Mnangagwa to begin talks about working with the Zimbabwean government to develop the first ever agricultural policy using the Holistic Management Framework.
Sarah spends the rest of her time writing articles, giving presentations and being interviewed both locally and internationally.
A personal note from Sarah to our youth – you are the key to the future:
Holistic Management involves introducing people to new scientific insights that will not only help them to better understand the incredibly complex social, economic and ecological connections in nature and how earth’s ecosystems function, but teach a new way of managing which makes sure our decisions flow with the unpredictable, ever-present and constantly changing variables of that complexity.
Managers learn how to make decisions or develop polices in a way that guarantees they never lose sight of the whole picture and the fact that our physical and financial security and stability are intricately connected and entirely dependent on the health of our environment – the only economy that can ultimately sustain any nation is one based on healthy soil and the plant’s ability to turn the sun’s energy into food because everything we use or consume comes from the land.
When it comes to making a change and adapting to new knowledge and thinking, history shows us that most adults and institutions are almost incapable of it. I truly believe the key to the future lies in educating our children, rather than pinning all our hopes on the possibility of “old dogs learning new tricks.”
Let’s give young people the solutions and show them how vital it is to look at the whole picture and to focus on and address root causes instead of symptoms.
If we can have school leavers going off into the world ecologically literate and capable of successfully managing and balancing the unavoidable social, financial and ecological dimensions of their decisions, rather than being stuck as we are now, on a hamster wheel reacting or adapting to the inevitable and increasing symptoms of our current management, they will be proactively making decisions in a new way that will bring about the physical and financial stability we all want, reversing the current problems and preventing any more knock-on symptoms further down the line. When we do that, it will change everything.
We will discuss how to reset our anthropocentric Being-ness to Nature-centric Being-ness. It is clear that we have been turned into human knowings instead of human beings through the kind of education we have been subjected to. As we are taught the written word (the description) instead of the real world our cognitive system rewires to understand what is absent and also numbs our senses.
This activates ‘imaginary’ imagination instead of real imagination. The biggest damage to education is that from childhood we are exposed to the known and it destroys our ability to engage with the unknown.
We will discuss how to address your cognitive damages, re awaken your natural cognitive system and dare to step into the realm of the unknown.
Jinan Kodapully, EK Foundation, India
Jinan considers himself a victim of modernity, cognitively rewired to understand the written word instead of the real world. As a cognition activist, his basic concern has been to explore the cognitive crisis of modern humans who with their so-called education have become anthropocentric and turned against life itself. He considers cognitive rights as the most fundamental of existential rights which modern society brutally takes away right from childhood.
His exploration began with issues related to decolonization, especially of the aesthetic sense. His life with non-literate communities helped him to expand this exploration to include knowledge creation, “do nothing parenting”, and shifting the focus from sociological aspects to the biological roots of cognition and the formation of our sense of beauty.
His understanding further sharpened and clarified once he stopped reading — this helped him regain his biologically rooted cognitive system which is what all non-literate people have been using through eons. Another fundamental shift that brought in more clarity was shifting his enquiry from how to teach children to how do children learn. This question revealed the connection between our biological potential and what the context dictates — between the world and the word. This also revealed the falsity of using language as the primary cognitive source and the danger of solely engaging with ready made knowledge. This alienates humans from the living nature of the learning process and undermines children as creators of knowledge.
Currently, Jinan is involved in enabling people to explore and experientially recover their natural cognitive system damaged by schooling. The aim is to sensitize adults so they can provide the most conducive environment for their children to unfold naturally to their true potential.
Jinan has also been exploring ways to make the educated understand the matrix built by modernity in general and the damages caused by modern schooling in particular. He hopes to enable people to experientially understand the limits of language, reason, reading, etc and to empower them to address the maladaptive cognitive habits and attitudes.
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Our existing systems of media and education provide a limited worldview. This reductionist worldview limits our ability to see and exist in the world properly, effectively and in total health.
Sarah Savory
Jinan Kodapully, EK Foundation, India
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