EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL • SPRING 2020 41What is globalization? What’s wrong with it?
Globalization is a process of deregulating global traders who
already have near-monopolistic power, stretching all the way
back to colonialism and slavery. These are big companies
creating wealth on a scale that has increasingly made it nearly
impossible for local or national businesses to compete. And
since the mid-1980s, a whole series of new trade treaties,
both bilateral and multilateral, have continued this process,
and it’s become more of a relationship between giant, mobile
transnationals and nation-states than a relationship between
countries.
In short, we’ve ended up in an absurd situation where —
because we’re not shedding light on it — we as individuals
are more and more squeezed for taxes along with small- and
medium-sized regional businesses, and those taxes are used to
basically subsidize global monopolies. One of many ways we
subsidize is by building up a global trade-based infrastructure,
including ever bigger ports and airports.So, the deregulation of global transnationals has been
accompanied by ever-greater regulation of local and
regional businesses?
Yes, and this is a vital issue because from our point of view
what’s happening is that the smaller businesses are becomingmore and more angry at government because of what they
see: over-taxation and overregulation. And as a consequence,
they vote into the hands of neo-fascist leadership because they
have been persuaded that the laissez-faire free trade economy
is the way out of our situation, not understanding that there is
this greater injustice that began centuries ago, and kicked in,
in a much more extreme way, since the mid-1980s.
They then keep voting for smaller government, not
realizing — and this is where progressives really need to help
us out — that yes, we do need to look at what some of these
regulations mean and how virtually impossible it is to survive
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out how and why it’s unfair because we need government to
regulate and tax the giants. We need, urgently, new trade
treaties that are about re-regulation instead of deregulation.Imagining a genuine alternative to corporate
globalization is difficult for people who have only
known a “modern” way of life.
Yes, it is a bit like trying to imagine a new color. People
who have their eyes open to seeing another color are usu-
ally those who have had multiple experiences, particularly
those with exposure to less modernized, less urbanized, less
technologized and industrialized ways of living, and — andEver since I was an undergraduate two decades ago, I’ve been inspired by political
thinker and activist Helena Norberg-Hodge’s books and films. Serendipitously, I met
Norberg-Hodge in person in England recently. She knows, perhaps better than anyone
I’ve encountered, how to connect re-localization, the reclaiming of the Commons, and
the importance of direct participation in community with the transformation of big cor-
porate dominance. She also spent decades working and living with Indigenous people in
Ladakh, India, and is a pioneer in integrating traditional and Indigenous worldviews into
a coherent critique of techno-industrial society, politics, and finance.
Norberg-Hodge speaks eight languages and was educated in Sweden, Germany,
Austria, England, and the United States. She specialized in linguistics, including doctoral
studies at the University of London, and at MIT with close mentor Noam Chomsky.
She founded and directs the groundbreaking nonprofit Local Futures, and is now on an
international tour leading conferences on the penetrating documentary she produced,
The Economics of Happiness.
This conversation, which began in Norberg-Hodge’s Totnes, England home and
continued via Skype, conveys both her keen intellect and personal warmth.
— WILLIAM POWERSOn Radical Cultural Change
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Helena Norberg-Hodge | Conversation