question because it undertakes that difficult leap from idea to execution from theory to practice it's very easy i think sometimes in groups of like minded people to sit and talk what you like and what you don't like i'd like some lights about the the the more challenging thing i think is ok what would this actually made on the ground what would a localized economy actually do how would it work how would people like us in an effort on first world country deal with that what does it mean for international is and what does it mean for solidarity and what does it mean for all sorts of other questions concerning the qualities of people's lives that practical emphasis is sometimes what i find lacking in discussion i can acknowledge people have great ideas but when i ask them ok what can i do what will it be like and how will it work sometimes the silence is overwhelming i don't think the science is going to be overwhelming today let me first introduce people i gather many of you already know well obviously sitting here if we go from what do you bring to this topic when we heat see that topic in visiting the future what would a localized world look like what you would take on a well my take is that i work with a lot of communities mostly in the united states but sometimes outside the united states and take on very specific localization challenges so just to give some examples over the last energy and prove that the state could generate about a billion dollars of additional wealth and prosperity over the lifetime of the dams that they did and i did another study in  ohio dealing with local food and showed that a twenty five percent shift toward food localization would create twenty seven thousand new jobs enough to reemploy one out of six unemployed people in the cleveland region so i see localization as a wealth building very practical economic development strategy in fact the only economic development strategy that works and so i hope i can bring to this discussion more specific examples like that but an i i think that when we talk about localization in the economy one of the things we need to talk very deeply about is our understanding of knowledge how we created how we share it how we  ecosystems so that kind of vision of localization is something that i really want to explore more because unless we look at that knowledge in a very different way and how do we create space for all the diversity of knowledge as we're living in an illusion that what happens in schools and universities as knowledge and what happens is life is something else so how do we move beyond what we have and how do we then redesign all of our spaces we're living our entire world has been and every aspect of our life has been disciplined and designed according to a certain industrial view of the mind in the world and so how do we starting with this this room how would we design it think in a way that and and who else would be in this room with us is some of the questions we should be asking thank you management it was also the person who brought us all from behind the desk by the why we were going to be behind that  it thank you my father used to tell me a story about how things were before i was born in those days it's always those days in those days he said we used to sell things by leaving them out of our houses we just placed our items and then we left we could you know laziness was not such a tense word then we left and just went to play and people who needed to buy stuff would just come and drop what they have and take and go it's impossible now to think of that we trade and we have and we have security fences and we have gone isn't all that so i think my take on it is  is really about iraq limitation of the species between us the stories that once binded us together and brought us together the spaces between us right now are so tense i mean i am and the taxi com towards to the airport on my way to australia i remember i was put in a taxi by the university and i felt this urge to just see to him or else i wouldn't have got to know his name does his job is to drive me my job is to pay him but i felt this urge to reach out to him and see what's your name and we actually engage in a conversation right now we need a conversation starter we need to  experience in life and to a great extent in rural span where we lived for a long time was still structures that were decentralized so that i could walk to everything i needed and that wasn't just to the shops it was to the theater it was to the music it was to the politics it was and that allowed then for that walking size that scale that human scale which was also a human pace the interactions in those structures allowed us the time that cable was also talking about how localizing and slowing down go together i tasted that to be convinced that i was infinitely happier that way and the evidence is so clear as far as i'm concerned because in those very same places a things have been it up and there's a car going faster and faster and the economic pressures pulling people into the city the statistics are very clear the epidemic of depression of stress related illness and so on is there so i do believe that we have a vault for most of our time in history almost you know this little blip let's remember that i think it's very helpful to realize that what we often think of divide and i grew up on the left of the left right divide and issues like choice as opposed to necessity have always been very important to me what's the difference if someone is middle class and has lots of choices and can make lives by necessity they don't have choices governing their economic life they do what they have to do and what they must do how does that reality feed into localization the way that either the consciousness or the income to buy what was perceived to be more expensive local food what was not appreciated is that most low income americans live in food deserts and the food that they face for purchase is at the corner corner store were bored bodegas or you know they have to drive very long distances in the food tends to be highly processed and in the end very expensive so in fact farmers markets which often do have slightly more expensive food than mainstream grocery stores nevertheless are more cost effective than the corner stores that people face in either inner city communities or in rural areas and i'll give you one specific example in portland oregon several years  a regional chain called new seasons which focuses on fresh local food they made they had a big question about whether they were going to build a new store in what was the lowest income zip code of portland and they decided to do that and it is now their most successful store and what it shows is that even people with low income know the difference between price and value ok someone learning of how i saw the board spending a lot of time with people in villagers and in india and also in urban slums that i find that actually if i see that globalization  model makes everyone feel like they're in deficit and we look at people communities particularly through the development lens is always as these people are in deficit and i've actually found that from a from a from perspective of knowledge practical knowledge or people are much more skilled in every aspect how to build your houses from how to how to fix things or how to grow things and so that that is an aspect that is unaccounted for in our measurements that we're looking at or there are much more there's much more sharing that's happening of resources again and that again does not get calculated in in the way and things like that so there's a lot of richness there that is actually there and i find that if we really want to look at localization and understand it deeply there's a lot to learn from those so called poor people which we need to bring into our conversations and rather than side the considerable side issues with that in terms of that capacity to grow a food safety type example of a canyon fire who wants to be able to grow a crop that he knows w can sell into the european market is that not a good thing that suddenly that his'n can grow a monoculture of beans but can sell them in large amounts to a profitable third world market as opposed to is to be in an unequal and yet still paying relationship with a community in the north because at the end of the day any community is going to be wealthier if it is a self reliant as possible and then enters the global economy to the extent it cannot provide for its own needs from a position of strength and this is especially true in basic human needs food water medicine housing these are things that we know how to do self reliance in a cost effective way you can't do every foodstuff locally but you can do most stops locally and if we just built out level of self reliance worldwide vats when we can then invite other communities to just trade with us in the very small number of goods and services that they cannot produce for themselves ok  yeah i also i just wanted to add to that partly to the earlier question by the way i also want to let you know audience we had no idea about what questions he was going to pop out so we were quite brave to do this is a bit of an experimental thing now but i just wanted to add when you were talking at first but you know poor people not being able to buy the products that one of the things that we keep stressing is that we must expose the fact that we're paying for of food and housing  of two pockets our tax pocket put a lot of money into the santa and our private pockets the tax pocket is being used to subsidize old processed food from far away  and making that cheaper than local food and it's not just old process stuff that is cheaper but even a so called fresh apple from ten thousand miles away will almost without exception cost less very often hoff as much as a local apple and when i say local i was we just want to stress that we're talking about shortening of distances there's no absolute here we're talking about common sense and what we're promoting is this has grown out of colonialism previously slavery slavery colonialism debt and slave and so over they got some people who are not doing so well and over in the industrialized world you have people who've been  monetized handed lots of money from those banks that benefit from getting them indebted and having a lot of money in their pocket and then we have this completely on a called field it's the middle man the giant corporations that benefit by those long distances cheap labor over here people with money over here so when we think we can do fair trade and really a good a good project for creating wealth in the south we really have to understand that working across that very corrupt and very very destructive divide doesn't make sense it makes much more sense to help to rebuild local economies i hope that makes sense and shifting those subsidies and taxes here and there liberating ourselves from those banks and stimulus yesterday you know it could lead to very very rapid transition but eating as a really radical like i have spent so many time in indigenous communities the number of grains that they were eating is just mind boggling now they're read reduced to because of they've gone for those that have gone for the cash cash crop globalized model they eat cheap subsidized wheat flour or white flour which is one of the worst most unhealthy things that we're learning on the planet and so we think that that growth model has actually given them better but if you actually go and then there's other friends here like our korean friend you know that all the different kinds of green wild things that people had access to again have disappeared and you find that most communities who are going for that cash crop model they don't have enough green fruits or vegetables or anything in their diets anymore so and then in we go in terms of their social relationships wherever again cash crops and have ever grown you find a lots of weakening social bonds so what has increased yes is a number of consumer goods in their hands but i think the question we're trying to ask is what are all of those other things you know the ecological part of the green revolution and its damages come out but what is it actually done that story has not yet been fully told thank you to all of you and what my question is as a person living in this culture what can i do very practical what can i do with on an economic level to help promote this change apart from putting my money and credit union one else can i do i think michael has done a great job in establishing exactly how you could on personal level on an economic level things you could do to you know make the changes that you like to see but on a personal maybe should i call it the risk of sounding conventional psychological level i would say that for me it's all about regaining and finding again your vulnerability i think what connects us what connects us to each other is the idea that we are there we need each other at this time more than ever before and what builds community is the idea is the fact that i'm not complete i need you to survive i need you to be who i am and so we need to reclaim that story much more than the practices and the technological aspects of coming together we need to regain that story and i need you to survive most of the problems that are around the world right now have to do with the fact that i'm independent i'm i'm i can do without you all i need to do is just don't go chase this program of social ascension and all and everything is alright with me but basically that's a fallacy that's an illusion that we need to step out of much as you need me and from there from that story on where things start to get better i think dollars a week so we have to look at the whole aspect of being fair to the ninety percent of the world who are living way under our standard of living i think we're just going crazy we're celebrating our expectations of one little thing  and just drop in our imagination could we have imagine a world where everyone could live on less than one dollar a day but i think also it's incredibly important here you say this i think was part also when you were talking about the poor here in australia and the poor in america within the industrialized world we have been nice and pu away from the land the water the resources that could feed us that could provide clothing and our building materials so in that urban poverty it's almost impossible to survive without money but what we're talking a lot about and especially my knees when he talks about the poor in india it's only by people who are still on the land this is an incredibly important issue because if we don't distinguish we don't understand that there are a lot of people who can live like kings on a dollar a day i mean in places like lead back in bhutan in many parts of india they are far better off than many people here who are earning one hundred dollars a day and we don't we really are economic illiteracy you know in terms of understanding the system and how it operates prevents us from seeing that and therefore often through our goodwill and i desire to help them you know with a project of fair trade and how do we bring more money to whe we actually pull them into dependence that's partly what van i was talking about that even many of the microcredit skins have done that they've pulled people into becoming consumer culture members and it's been you know people would describe it as the creeping arms of capitalism poor people in you know through small debt but nevertheless a debt to people who were not in debt before who had some animals or had some land and were relatively self sufficient and most of them were not living like kings i'm not saying that but there are people who are living really well on the dollar they still the number is going down very rapidly because of the development paradigm because of the there's so much goodwill a lot of people are doing this to heart felt good will and they don't realize they're actually helping through commercializing and creating dependence on the global market they're making them more vulnerable and more dependent thank you governor i realize there are people waiting but i want to launch into another question the critique that is made of sometimes when this discussion comes up is that people advocating localization are somehow wanting people in both the developed world but also in the developing world to stay at a pre industrial level of activity that  what the call is for is isn't on the same hand there are people desperate to be connected that one of the virtues to many people of the twenty first century is global indicating connectivity you can communicate and get messages to and from everyone in the world so this is for me in my parents there is this seemingly difficult to reconcile reconcile ability on the one hand there is great virtue in a print just real life with it a contradiction that you think is not valid very happy to hear that listen or what do you make of that contradiction if i could take that first your ignorant questions are really scary i mean speak on the street line and we can't trace pre industrial industrial in that manner so basically we're progressing you know there's this logic of progress that seems to be from what you're trying to say and it's one that i refute and i disagree with i do not believe that societies can be placed on a linear scale and can be measured according to that in your skill or you spoke about communication i do not believe that we're getting closer to the internet or blackberries are bringing us closer i mean i've walked into a family in africa and actually seen brothers and sisters communicating with each other in the same room but i'm getting through the blackberry i mean that's how bad we now think of communication are we actually getting closer in a globalized world i would say no i would say we're getting isolated and we need each other much more and more and out of that frantic space of fear and anxiety and isolation we're reaching out with beautiful new technology beautiful and called that  i don't know we've heard of the new i pad i think it has a new u s b port and that's the innovation behind it all and i pad three oh look i can now come connect with you and see you in color and basically that's the indigenous by saying it's all well and good with how it was and stuff like that it's not about going back it's about marching on with reevaluating the stories that shape our lives basically  just as my quit just as a quick counterpoint that you know there is now the capacity using the internet and using digital communication to do say as an example remote surgery so someone living in reconcile the desire for information transfer with the desire for closeness community and all things communication i think is about hav fringes but in west african spirituality they are spiritual or should i call the psychedelic technologies that allow people to communicate without the use of the internet over far  distances so it's like it's treating the internet and all these information technology as if they are the only way to communicate you may not believe that and i i know it may sound incredulous to you  situation really is we cannot continue to treat these technologies as if they are the only way you know the only way to know the only solution basically what i'm seeing as a general trend is that those technologies are destroying and displacing the other technologies including more human scale technology and we're seeing a situation where medicine is becoming more and more expensive for the average person even in sweden you know these high tech approaches reduce the number of players you have to go into this capital the very best hospital and it cost often people are going into debt for a structure that has to be created for that how many other people's lives are being affected by the mining that's required for that structure by the pollution that's being created out of that structure by the hierarchies that are being created by the corporations that are created out like to read out a question by my friend who follows the discussion somewhere up stairs so let's take the position that this future we haven't visited for australia and the world is possible and is coming what steps do we need to hopeful statistic in the united states that farmers are making a comeback it's not huge but it's the it's the we've bottomed out on the curve and and now farming and the people who want to get into farming or are increasing and i think that that vast can be a cornerstone for how we rebuild the food system you know and i want to i want to add something that integrates on the previous conversation and that is to me to me there is a fundamental principle of sustainability that ought to guide localization so a lot of us are familiar with the brooklyn commission formula formulation that sustainability is meeting the needs of the current gen of the current generation without sacrificing the to future generations and the problem i have with that definition is that it lacks any awareness of place or the inequities that occur the venetian was talking about as one place profits at the expense of another so i think another formulation might be how can we meet all of the needs of the people of our community present and future without in any way impairing the ability of other communities to meet their needs present and future and with  i think one of the first places where we start to model sustainability in wealth building is in food and farming and bringing in the food system bringing sol for alliance in the food system i think all of us understand at a visceral level that if you get food right many of the other things fall into place have many of might have heard me say this many times but i also have found that in working on promoting a new economic paradigm that it's been rather difficult to get most economists interested in rethinking we you know we all know that they're only thing that human beings produce that every human being on the planet needs every single day is food the only thing we produce that we absolutely have to have every day we don't produce the water which is even more important and just think about it when we have disruptions now in weather or with financial crises you know the thing that will happen and has happened in some communities is with those disruptions the supermarkets are empty in about three days so rebuilding that diversified reach you know and an incredibly spiritually and psychologically joyful center of our communities and our lives rebuilding the food economy is the most important economic transition and we have seen that when that really starts moving the other thing start thing which is and this is this is a little bit of economic speak but one of the reasons why i woke up food is spreading not just in the industrialized north but really throughout the world is that food distribution systems global food distribution system is incredibly inefficient and as well prices rise it's going to be become even more inefficient give you some numbers from the united states when you bought a dollar of foodstuff in the er nineteen hundred basically twenty cents went to the farmer and the rest went to imports and distribution today it's seven cents that goes to the farmer and seventy one cents for distribution and distribution includes transportation packaging refrigeration retail mark up insurance things that have nothing to do with food when ever you get to a situation where the distribution costs are very large and production costs are very small it makes sense to localize because even really expensive food production instead of seven cents for the farmer fourteen science if you can get rid of most that seventy one science of global garbage that we call distribution costs you can have cheaper food and more income for farmers i totally agree with when food at the center and i would just like to point out how our entire educational system is totally disconnected from that there is there is nothing the majority of people are lots of young people i meet in india very talented very highly schooled i ask you what do you do you know how to cook that i can make a piece of toast and very probably you spent the last twenty two years of your life and you don't know how to even cook well or create something beautiful you don't know anything about how to grow food you don't know how to serve food don't not a compost food the disconnect is so stark it's scary and then we creating a whole class of people parasites educational parasites who are disconnected from this i just wanted to point that it really really if i if we had to redesign education the starting point is food and our people are not this is been for thousands of years food has been the center of community so i think that that and it's a center of learning so that's what i would just like to share i'm up in enjoying discussion about food but i'd like to broaden the discussion about things that we need locally great great question and there's there's a lot of i think really interesting trends that we can look at the give us should get us o i'm probably eighty or ninety percent of what the industrial laws north spends its money on can be cost effectively local was first point to make for households across the d countries about two thirds of the money that they spend is on services services used to be a third of our expenditures back in one nine hundred sixty now it's two thirds of our expenditures the thing about services is that they are inherently local now i acknowledge that there is going to be the occasional surgery that occurs over the internet most of us want our surgeons local  know that but not all of us have that choice not all of us have the choice outright but you know i i when i got off the plane last tuesday and i looked like a pretzel i got a massage right now i don't know how i'm going to get my massage over the internet some of you have some ideas i'm sure then the other so let's talk about the other third which is goods when you look at the good that we purchase three quarters of the goods we purchase are so called maan durable goods goods we consume regularly so food falls in this category paper clothing is kind of borderline durable non durable i guess increasingly it's non durable the way that it's baggage back but the interesting thing about most non durable goods is that they weigh a lot and their dollar value per unit weight is small and what that means is that when oil prices rise these are the first things we're going to be localizing in fact you can argue that this is one of the reasons why we're having food localization right now it's not going to you know yeah we still may be importing wines from around the world and we still may be importing spices but most foodstuffs it's not going to be cost effective to import long distances in less we continue to subsidize oil and banking and transportation and that's why the next time there's a g have saved and a bunch of big banks are ready to go out of business we have to have the courage to accept the verdict of the marketplace that global is no longer cost effective and how can we consider that they should truly on the cultural side how can we give back to a way around here by in china minded community which is which we have but we have because we have people coming from bhutan we have a because we have people global because that is maybe arguably the greatest beneficial benefit of capitalism in global society was that we were able to have people to have friends in south korea to have people who and ideas come from all its one of the greatest things we have to be global maybe the greatest benefit of capitalism was to bring that how can we keep that truly local without having to be yes i'll do my garden but i'll take a flight to spain next week and thank you  i actually think that's a difficult question to ask and it difficult at the answers i'm not going to be absolute it's just an experiment basically but i think most people have the idea that localization means some kind of isolation that it don't know how many people know about your about people in the house over here but if anyone does most people would think of our flamboyant dresses the rituals that we practised the colors we paint in our faces the tribal marks we tell stories with but those things in themselves are not what makes us europe it's the conversations we have so a written emission of culture is a rick limitation of the conversational spaces that bind us together that is i think at the heart of exact science thank you it's not an exact science to be able to answer such questions is really difficult to kind of even contain it in one's mind the question the answer really is the question is how do we maintain both strands global and local and i believe on the end it means us coming together and concretize in practices that bind us together it could mean a ritual it could mean some kind of food network it could mean anything but it just means us interacting with each other how do we maintain the global aspect of well it also means that we have to open up spaces for learning and continue to learn from other people now how that is going to happen i cannot tell but i know that we cannot continue to see culture as a closed boundary we see it as an open space for conversation with other people hope i did good that cannot cannot come in quickly if one of the things in my life that i am very happy that i did as a young man i went to nicaragua in the immediate aftermath of the nicaraguan revolution and i specifically went there not to carry a gun  coffee and i picked coffee for three months in nicaragua as part of an international solidarity if it nonviolent activism to help the economic basis of that new country for many many years i would  coffee ok i wanted to keep buying nicaraguan coffee it meant a lot to me personally and politically what i want to and i want to follow the young man's question is is that one of the things that concerns me about ation does it mean in practice a diminished of solidarity is it better for me to be going out and buying byron bay coffee which is also good coffee or should i be hunting down that one durin central american coffee because those people have a huge economic challenge is what ok is it better the question is it better to want to engage in your globalization needing to shift towards economic localization and as far as i'm concerned that has absolutely nothing to do with isolation or a reduction in collaboration and international exchange support nothing in fact what i've experienced is that when people feel secure and they need to feel secure in their identity as well as materially you know especially for men it's incredibly important that they should be able to provide for their families and to feel that they're contributing in that way and the current global market which is marginalizing the ninety nine percent is creating an absolutely clear and dramatic increase in violence abuse of women abuse of children from particularly from man who are feeling so frustrated that they've been robbed of their identity robbed o their livelihood and across the board one sees this increase so we mustn't lose sight of this that we're talking about this economic shift away from a few banks and corporations corporations that are making it illegal for farmers to grow their own senior aides who want to patent them and push them on them and make sure that they put in a terminator gin so the seeds can't even be replicated that is what we're trying but there is a very very clear need to try to translation and in costa rica what we were trying to say earlier is that when you have established this relationship where in costa rica there is less money and more poverty it's going across this global divide of currency speculation and manipulation it's going to be very difficult for you to guarantee that your need coffee board here has gone through a system that's going to make them bring some money in there and they haven't thought enough about the vagaries of the of the financial speculation and the change in value of currency and would be locked in the market that has led to so many small produce only producing coffee only producing cocoa suddenly getting a tenth of what they were getting before this is why we have a worldwide movement that is the biggest social movement in the world please remember that name the biggest social movement in the world their campus in two hundred million small farmers who are saying please please please let us grow food for ourselves they are for food sovereignty and i want to thank try to advocate a two track position and really encouraged many people to try to practice that and on the one hand we need to raise awareness about the of interlinked capital and corporations that are getting a bigger and bigger and edgy appetite a bigger and bigger appetite for minerals and resources we know now i think spoke a bit about it she could tell you more th just realization just rapidly heating up our planet we need to raise awareness about that and the wonderful thing about localization is that we have i have practical grounded evidence that when it comes to food production and every other kind of production we could dramatically reduce our energy and generally our resource consumption by diversifying  make may not have heard the arguments about the fact that small scale diversified farming is actually much more productive per unit of land and water than big monocultures so we have the evidence we can show that there is another way and other type of banking another type of farming we have a paradigm that could above all build up that quiet so i'm i'm very keen on trying to get that vision out as globally as possible as quickly as possible and so i'm very keen on the books and the films using the internet using our sources of all forms of communication  information and part of what we've been demonstrating is also the really experienced grandmother based relational more holistic wisdom that we need to regain but let's get media people media but i do want to point this out folks this movement and tonight's of that was not covered by corporate media at all right but i do want to give a big shout out to any of you who are watching me right now let's just acknowledge you're watching it on people's media wherever it is that you're watching me right now some unpaid volunteer took the time to record