Local Futures Podcast

Local Futures

Tracking the rise of the local economy movement and related ideas from around the world.

  1. DEC 15

    The Bristol Conversations – Bayo Akomolafe

    We close the Bristol Conversations series with the much-admired teacher, poet and post-activist, Bayo Akomolafe. A public intellectual and writer, Bayo blurs the lines between the personal and the political, prompting a deep rethink of how we can act for change. He is the founder and curator of the Emergence Network and Chief Host of the We Will Dance with Mountains community. He’s involved with many other projects, some of which you will hear about in this episode. In this conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Bayo reflects on the ruptures in modernity that have sparked his own questioning. Going beyond a politics which fetishizes identity and category, he invites us to open up other spaces of power – where the immediate, the understated, and the local are more profound and more promising than grand slogans and ideas.

    22 min

  2. NOV 20

    The Bristol Conversations – Lyla June Johnston

    Dr. Lyla June Johnston is an indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné Navajo, Cheyenne and European lineages. She blends her study of human ecology, graduate work in indigenous pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her research has focused on the ways in which pre-colonial indigenous nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems. In this conversation, Helena and Lyla weave together different lines of heritage and experience, getting into deep discussions about identity, psychology and culture. They focus a lot on European identities and salvaging them from cruel and inaccurate narratives of progress which have cast many as fools, and many as villains. They come out with a throughline that connects the 'ancient primitive' with 'ancient futures'.

    27 min

  3. OCT 28

    The Bristol Conversations – Manish Jain

    In another life, Manish Jain was educated at Harvard, became an investment banker with Morgan-Stanley, and worked with the UN. Since then, he has been on a journey of unlearning, deschooling and decolonizing, returning home to India to learn from his illiterate village grandmother. Manish is the founder-coordinator of Shikshantar Andolan, which has been significant in shaping the larger unschooling movement in South Asia. He's the co-founder of Swaraj University, Udaipur as a Learning City, the Indian Multiversities Alliance, the Ecoversities Network and more.  In this conversation, Manish and Helena Norberg-Hodge bounce of each other in a radical questioning of concepts like progress, freedom, wealth, empowerment and knowledge. Manish shares his personal story of disillusionment with the dominant system, sketching the profound worldview shift he had to undergo in order to come back to life, love, and local wisdom.

    28 min

  4. OCT 10

    The Bristol Conversations – Iain McGilchrist

    In the fifth episode of The Bristol Conversations, we hear from Iain McGilchrist, the author of the groundbreaking book ‘The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World’. Iain is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and scholar; a man who has shed light not only on some fascinating truths about our minds and our experience of the world, but also on how these truths relate to many of the seemingly intractable predicaments we find ourselves in today. He helps us see the world and its problems with a new eye. In this conversation with pioneer of the new economy/localization movement, Helena Norberg-Hodge, the two draw connections between their seemingly quite different bodies of work. They discuss human psychology, community, connection to nature, spirituality, technocracy, and AI. They illuminate how the struggle between the brain’s left and right hemispheres relates to the global techno-economic system, the damage it’s doing, and exactly how we might change it.

    47 min

  5. SEP 24

    The Bristol Conversations – Camila Moreno

    In the fourth episode of The Bristol Conversations, we hear from Camila Moreno, civil society’s foremost expert on the international COP climate negotiations. Since 2008, Camila has been charting the emergence of what she calls a system of ‘global climate governance’. She describes the ways in which the environmental movement is being coopted and reduced to a mandate for decarbonization and digitalization, which are in turn paving the way for the unfettered financialization of nature and the extension of technocracy.   This conversation between Camila and Helena Norberg-Hodge strengthens our critical awareness of the often unconscious but undeniable hijacking of social and environmental concerns and their buzzwords. It’s a conversation that will help activists and everyday people remain impervious to co-optation and stay true to a vision of real ecological integrity.

    28 min

  6. AUG 27

    The Bristol Conversations – Nelson Mudzingwa

    In this episode we hear from Nelson Mudzingwa, a farmer and food sovereignty advocate, working with La Via Campesina. He teaches at the Shashe Agroecology School and is the national coordinator for the Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmer’s Forum (ZIMSOFF). In this conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Nelson extols the benefits of local food systems that are closely connected to culture, community and the land. With firsthand experience, he highlights how local seeds and local knowledge systems offer real resilience and prosperity, especially in a time of climate change and market volatility. As a leading spokesperson for the global peasant movement, Nelson debunks the stubborn notion that we need big agribusiness – and particularly the so-called ‘Green Revolution in Africa’ – to feed the world.

    29 min

  7. AUG 5

    The Bristol Conversation – Michael Shuman

    Welcome to the Bristol Conversations, a new podcast and video series by Local Futures featuring Helena Norberg-Hodge in conversation with some of the great minds who joined us in Bristol for the Planet Local Summit. Today, we hear from perhaps the world's leading expert on local finance and local business, Michael Shuman. With roots in the peace movement and social justice struggles, Michael is a Harvard-trained lawyer and economist who has spent his career going against conventional economic dogmas to champion the local. Local economies, he maintains, can deliver greater justice and wellbeing in society, and greater prosperity and political power to people. He shares his wisdom across the world in talks, workshops and his publication The Main Street Journal. In this highly informative episode, Helena and Michael deliver critical but creative takes on buzzwords like ethical investment and impact investing. Drawing on demonstrative examples, they explore how place-based institutions, economies and the policies that support them can revolutionize not only our local communities but global geopolitics, and ultimately give rise to an 'economics of happiness'.

    45 min

  8. JUL 15

    The Bristol Conversation – Darcia Narvaez

    Welcome to the Bristol Conversations, a new podcast and video series by Local Futures. In these longer-format, meandering episodes, our founder Helena Norberg-Hodge speaks with some of the great minds who joined us in Bristol for the Planet Local Summit. We kick the series off with Darcia Narvaez. Darcia is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. She studies morality, child development and human flourishing, and she does so by integrating disciplines like anthropology, neuroscience, developmental psychology and evolutionary biology. Helena, in turn, holds a very compatible perspective on human development thanks to her learnings from many years spent in the indigenous culture of Ladakh. Their conversation explores who we really are as human beings and the kind of supports we need to develop healthily. They show how so-called 'human nature' itself is molded by the economy and culture, and give anecdotes that illuminate some fundamental differences between modern Western (i.e. globalized) culture and more land-based communal cultures. How deep does the damage of disconnection go in the modern world? And how might we begin to reverse that damage through care, touch, play and vulnerability?

    24 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Tracking the rise of the local economy movement and related ideas from around the world.

Information

  • Creator
    Local Futures
  • Years Active
    2013 - 2025
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0)
  • Show Website
    Local Futures Podcast

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