“This is an opportunity to take a drink from the wellspring of knowledge offered by people who are living a new normal.”-Charles Eisenstein, visionary and conference keynote speake

The European Ecovillage Conference’s vibrant programme is brought alive by co-creators offering talks, workshops, and interactive sessions centered on the theme “Conscious Happiness – Living The Future Today: Solidarity, Resilience, Hope.” Highlights will include keynote addresses by acclaimed speakers, authors and activists Charles Eisenstein and Helena Norberg-Hodge, who will engage some of the great challenges of our time – and invite participants to explore solutions offered by the ecovillage movement.

Norberg-Hodge, creator of “The Economics of Happiness” notes, “There’s been a really dramatic [cultural] shift, just in the last couple of years, and yet it needs more awareness. It’s the consciousness that’s missing…. There is this huge need for global communication and interaction… We need that flowering of connections which we can start with right now at home but also reach out across internationally into a global movement. ”

The Global Ecovillage Network is a membership-based coalition of Ecovillages, or intentional communities, that holistically integrate ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability into regenerative living models. The GEN Europe network connects, sustains and diffuses the work of ecovillage and communities across Europe, within ecovillage communities and also to those who are curious to learn about the movement. Solidarity During the 5 day conference, participants will explore a particularly timely series of events centred around our theme of solidarity.

At a time of great change and political divisiveness, there is an urgent need to address hardships with insights gained from living intentionally together. Norberg-Hodge describes a part of the work of solidarity this way: “Let’s get away from this idea that we don’t need anybody. We do need others. Let’s not be afraid to express that to one another.”

Workshops exploring the Eroles residential in Grenada, which put migrants at the centre of community co-creation, and the Sustainer, which combines permaculture principles and ecovillage innovation to build an autonomous shelter for those who’ve had to flee their homes, will showcase some of the many ways in which ecovillages are acting in solidarity around Europe. Resilience Personal and collective resilience in the face of changing climate, cultural upheaval, and spiritual emptiness is a key theme of many of our workshops and exhibits.

Workshop leader and evolutionary biologist Bjorn Grinde describes how ecovillages meet a biological need that increases our happiness and well-being: “Humans are adapted to live in tribal settings. Research shows people need to find meaning in these [smaller] units. For the future of the world, finding a meaning of life in a setting of ecological balance is even better because that will point towards a way of living that benefits future society.”

The Ecovillage Sustainable Technology Exposition will feature open source solutions for reducing carbon emissions and producing energy efficient systems, many demonstrated and built on site by their ecovillage inventors. Conference participants will learn how to build simple wind turbines or try out superefficient energy-saving cookware.

Exploring other aspects of resilience, workshop leaders from Spain, Sweden, Holland and beyond consider our human relationships and spiritual development, from addressing “the shadows” in our lives to learning innovative conflict resolution strategies to inviting attendees to try out organizational structures used in ecovillages. The conference will build an atmosphere that offers participants hope and inspiration. As Eisenstein, author of “The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible”, puts it, “hope is the feeling when you glimpse a real possibility. Hope is what comes when you have an experience of what’s possible in the future, even if you don’t know how to get there. This is an opportunity to take a drink from the wellspring of knowledge offered by people who are living a new normal.” Young people help us see the path to our collective future, and therefore our conference team is supported by an international team of young volunteers from across Europe. The conference will also feature a children’s festival and provide people of all ages a chance to connect across generations and cultures to create new friendships.

In addition to workshops, participants can expect opportunities to celebrate and practice healing arts, interactive events like a living map of ecovillages across Europe, and plenty of time to relax. The conference is a family-friendly drug and alcohol free experience, offering managed campsites with outdoor facilities and full vegetarian catering.

“A more beautiful world IS possible… and you will experience a part of it during the gathering at Ӓngsbacka” welcomes Ewa Jacobsson of Ӓngsbacka.

About the conference: http://www.angsbacka.se/GEN

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1334767663264375/

General enquiry: [email protected]

Press contact: For interviews in English and Italian: Evan Welkin +39 334 259 0522, [email protected]

In Swedish: Annette Ericsdotter Bettaieb, [email protected], + 46 70 777 91 00

GEN–  Global Ecovillage Network.  The Global Ecovillage Network was founded 20 years ago and represents over 100 countries in the 5 continents. GEN-Europe is a network that connects, sustains and diffuses the work of ecovillages and communities. The network offers consulting and coordination for member communities across Europe as well as supporting projects of interdependence, including an international youth exchange program, a community-sponsored forced migration relief project, and advocacy in grassroots climate change networks. GEN-Europe has representation in Brussels under the umbrella of ECOLISE, together with other intercontinental networks; also, it has a consultative status at the UN for educational material for 10 years.

Ängsbacka, outside Karlstad in Sweden, is a vital meeting place for people who want to live a more conscious life, live from the heart and care for our planet. Since 1997 thousands of people have been touched by the warm, open, loving atmosphere during workshops, festivals and visits at Ängsbacka.

Ängsbacka is a full member of GEN Europe since 2016.

“A more beautiful world IS possible… and you will experience a part of it during the gathering at Ӓngsbacka” welcomes Ewa Jacobsson of Ӓngsbacka.

#ecovillages #community #beautifulalternatives #innovativesolutions #togetherwerise

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Photo by TEDxEQChCh

The post A Conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally published on localfutures.org. Chat transcript available for download as PDF here.

A 500-year-old economic and political system is dying. ‘Trump trauma’ is affecting people around the world, but the current climate (in every sense of the word) is not the result of one man alone. While we come to grips with that bigger picture, it’s worth asking: What gives us hope? What keeps our hearts beating, and gives us the spirit to keep the struggle for justice alive?

Moving from the personal, to the communal, to the political, this webinar explores the concept of ‘sacred activism’. Combining resistance with renewal, and structural critique with a celebration of life, sacred activism rejects the corporate message that we are greedy and aggressive by nature. It integrates politics, spirituality, and a deep-rooted sense of place into a holistic practice capable of bringing together indigenous peoples, traditional environmentalists, union organizers, New Age spiritualists, and ordinary citizens alike – as it did at Standing Rock, and as it continues to do in people’s movements around the world.

Delve into this exciting field with our speakers, Alnoor Ladha from The Rules and Helena Norberg-Hodge from Local Futures.

Resources to complement the webinar

Memory, Fire and Hope: Five Lessons from Standing Rock, by Alnoor Ladha. March 8th, 2017
Big Picture Activism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge. October 26th, 2014

PRESENTERS

Alnoor Ladha’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, storytelling, technology and the decentralization of power. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world. Alnoor is a writer and speaker on new forms of activism, the structural causes of inequality, the link between climate change and capitalism, and the rise of the Global South as a powerful organizing force in the transition to a post-capitalist world. He is also writing a book about the intersection of mysticism and anarchism.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the new economy movement and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goi Peace Prize. She is author of Ancient Futures, co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up, and producer of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness. She is the director of Local Futures and the International Alliance for Localization, and a founding member of the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.

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Continuing our series of reactions to Trump’s electoral victory last month, Helena Norberg-Hodge and Rupert Read provide the following analysis. Originally published in The Ecologist:

The election of Donald Trump was a rude awakening from which many people in the US have still not recovered.

Their shock is similar to that felt by UK progressives, Greens, and those on the Left following the Brexit referendum.

In both cases, the visceral reaction was heightened by the barely-disguised racist and xenophobic messaging underpinning these campaigns.

Before these sentiments grow even more extreme, it’s vital that we understand their root cause. If we simply react in horror and outrage, if we only protest and denounce, then we fail to grasp the deeper ramifications of their votes.

For the defeat of both the Clinton campaign in the US and the Remain campaign in the UK can be explained by their inability to address the pain endured by ordinary citizens in the era of globalisation.

By failing to focus on the reckless profiteers driving the global economy, they allowed their opponents to offer a less truthful and more hateful explanation for voters’ social and economic distress.

In order to move forward, we need to give those who voted for Trump and Brexit something better to believe in. And we can. Because in both countries, voters emphatically rejected the system that has inflicted so much social and economic insecurity: pro-corporate globalisation. And that is the silver lining to the dark storm clouds we see.

Late lessons from early warnings

Before the Brexit vote, we warned that the gigantist, pro-growth rhetoric of most of the Remain side was utterly alienating to many small-c conservatives and to people who have been harmed by the uncontrolled movement of capital, goods, services and workers.

And we pointed out that neither side was painting a big picture that corresponded to the brutal reality of successive trade treaties, including those within the EU itself, that have put ordinary people in permanent competition with each other. It was against that system – and against the elites that alone have benefitted from it – that many millions in Britain voted, in some desperation and anger, to Leave.

Much the same applies to the US election. While many voters saw Hillary Clinton as capable, they did not see her as an alternative to the neoliberal status quo. Bernie Sanders would probably have beaten Trump, precisely because he firmly and explicitly rejected the pro-free-trade, pro-corporate ‘consensus’.

We need to learn from the Brexit and Trump votes that the far-Right thrives because it has a populist answer to the vicious impacts of globalisation. Voters want fundamental change, and the ‘reforms’ sought by mainstream progressives, Greens and those on the Left – like job training programs for displaced workers or voluntary safety standards for Third World factories – are simply inadequate.

Instead, we need to offer an alternative to globalisation itself.

How globalisation drives racial tension

Globalisation and market-driven centralisation actually drive the increase in xenophobia and racism that we have seen, by forcing people from every part of the world to compete against each other in a vicious economic race that only a handful can win.

One of the authors (Helena Norberg-Hodge) was a first-hand witness to this process in Ladakh, a region of India in the western Himalayas known as ‘Little Tibet’. For more than 600 years, Ladakhi Buddhists and Muslims lived side by side with no recorded instance of group conflict. They helped one another at harvest time, attended one another’s religious festivals, and sometimes intermarried.

But over a period of about 15 years starting in 1975, when the region was first opened to the global economy, tensions between Buddhists and Muslims escalated rapidly: by 1989 they were bombing each other’s homes. One mild-mannered Buddhist grandmother, who a decade earlier had been drinking tea and laughing with her Muslim neighbor, told me, “We have to kill all the Muslims or they will finish us off.”

How did relations between these two ethnic groups change so quickly and completely? The transformation is unfathomable, unless one understands the complex interrelated effects of globalisation on individuals and communities worldwide. These included

• the undermining of Ladakh’s local economy through the import of ‘cheap’ but heavily subsidized products;
• the centripetal pull of urban areas where jobs and political power became centralised;
• the consequent breakdown of village-scale cultural and governance structures;
• and the creation of unemployment and real poverty (problems that were preciously unknown in Ladakh).

In combination, these factors led to rising hostility against ‘the other’. (Norberg-Hodge has described these connections more fully in her book Ancient Futures, and in the documentary film The Economics of Happiness.)

Ladakh’s experience is not unique: all over the Global South, cultures have been impacted in a similar manner beginning with the era of conquest and colonialism; so have the UK and Europe starting with the Enclosures. But in recent decades, during the modern era of globalisation, the process has accelerated dramatically.

Destroying jobs, reducing wages, undermining conditions of work

By allowing corporations to move unfettered around the globe, ‘free trade’ treaties put workers throughout the industrialised world in competition with those who will accept a fraction of a dollar per hour.

For example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) resulted in a net loss of 680,000 American jobs, and the Permanent Normal Trade Relations deal with China led to a net loss of another 2.7 million jobs. And it’s not only the disappearance of jobs that leads to impoverishment, but the threat that jobs can be easily taken elsewhere if workers don’t accept lower wages or fewer benefits.

At the same time, the infiltration of big business throughout the global South – most often with the support of national governments and backed by international financial institutions – has eliminated many of the livelihoods that local economies in those countries once provided.

With locally-adapted ways of life systematically undermined by economic policies geared towards the big and the global, millions of desperate people in the South find themselves with just two options: to accept minimal wages and appalling working conditions in industrial metropolises, or to migrate.

It is estimated that, as a direct result of heavily subsidized corn flooding the Mexican market under NAFTA, 2.4 million small farmers were displaced, and subsequently funneled into crowded urban centers or across the border to the US. So the loss of jobs in the North and the migrant crisis in the South are two sides of the same coin. But people have been steered away from looking at the flawed rules of the global economy that are behind both problems.

Although philosophically opposed to government regulation, the Right is now exploiting a situation – the cultural, economic, and psychological insecurity of vast swaths of the population – that is a product of the systematic deregulation of big business. Rather than allowing them to pull this sleight of hand, Left and Green voices must present a cogent critique of globalisation, and a coherent alternative.

We must show that it is not real progress to force every culture to commodify their commons, to subject every policy decision to the ‘discipline’ of monopolistic markets, to transform citizens into mindless consumers, and to lengthen supply-lines endlessly. The world has become dominated by a neoliberal ideology that makes all of this seem natural, desirable, unavoidable. It is none of those things.

In fact, voters are telling us that the age of David Cameron, Hillary Clinton and Francois Hollande is already over. The question now is: will it be succeeded by the age of Farage, Trump and le Pen. Or will we instead offer a viable green set of alternatives to globalization. If it is to be the latter, then our best option is localisation.

The solution: going local

Essentially, localisation means reducing the scale of economic activity – it’s about bringing the economy home. That doesn’t mean pulling up the drawbridges and retreating into isolationism. Nor does it mean an end to trade, even international trade.

But it does mean a fundamental change of emphasis: away from monoculture for export towards diversification for local needs. In a time of human-induced climate chaos and dwindling energy supplies, we need to reject out of hand the absurdities of the global marketplace, in which countries across the world routinely import and export identical products in almost identical quantities. The subsidies and other supports that currently make such practices ‘efficient’ and ‘profitable’ need to be reversed.

By reducing the scale of the economy, the environmental impacts of economic activity shrink as well. But the argument for localisation goes beyond the environment. Among other things, localisation allows us to live more ethically as citizens and consumers.

In the global economy, it’s as though our arms have grown so long that we can no longer see what our hands are doing. By contrast, when the economy operates on a smaller scale, everything is necessarily more transparent. We can see if the apples we are buying from the neighbouring farm are being sprayed with pesticides; we can see if workers’ rights are being abused.

We can already catch glimpses of localisation in action. Across the world, literally millions of initiatives are springing up-often in isolation one from another, but sharing the same underlying principles. The most important of these initiatives relate to food – which is important since food is the only thing humans produce that we all require every day.

From farmers’ markets to community supported agriculture, from ‘edible schoolyards’ to permaculture, a local food movement is sweeping the planet. But there are also projects underway to localise business, energy sources, banking and finance, and other needs.

Seeing the big picture

The UK decision to leave the EU is a risk, in that it might lead this country to seek to race even faster to the bottom, in particular by abandoning hard-won environmental protections. But it is also a great opportunity. We could choose, now, to disentangle ourselves from a fragile, resource-intensive and utterly-destructive global economy, in favour of re-embedding ourselves back into the Earth and our localities.

Similarly, President Trump is likely to serve up an incoherent mélange of protectionism on the one hand and deregulatory, pro-corporate policies on the other. Localisation, by contrast, represents a coherent and comprehensive shift in direction – it protects not only our countries and workforces but also the Earth, future generations, and the poor.

Relocalising would radically reign in the invisible Right of corporate domination, and would reverse the rising tide of the more visible Far-Right. But this can only happen if we see the bigger picture. It isn’t enough to defend immigrants against bad treatment if we fail to act against the system that drives the breakdown of community and of civility, that pulls people out of their own cultures and economies.

If we do not relocalise – if we continue to throw people into ruthless competition with each other while making local communities unviable – then we are watering the seeds of further anti-immigrant sentiment, and worse. But if we embrace localisation, then we sow new seeds of cooperation and international understanding.

Relocalising won’t be easy. The forces that promote globalisation control most of the avenues of information to which people have access, and their propaganda saturates the media, including the Internet.

It is going to take a linking of hands internationally – among labour and environmental groups, small businesses and family farmers, educators and students, religious groups and peace activists – to put new political leaders in place who do not ratify treaties that devastate our present and our future.

Instead, they need to collaborate to create treaties that protect the local, everywhere. And it will take determined effort in localities everywhere to restore local food and energy systems, and to rebuild local knowledge and local democracy.

Perhaps you are already part of that determined effort. If you are not, we hope you decide to join us in this vital work.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is author of ‘Ancient Futures’ and a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award.

Rupert Read is co-author of ‘The post-growth project‘.

Lead image: Woman preparing herbs for winter at Tso Moriri, Ladakh, India. Photo: sandeepachetan.com travel photography via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND).

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