42 http://www.earthislandjournal.org
Conversation | Helena Norberg-Hodge
this is key — also at least some exposure to living in the heart
of the urban, speedy, competitive industrial world. That’s
the sort of experiential base that helps people look at a more
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this urban-industrial way of life can be.
What about people who haven’t had such cross-
cultural experiences?
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people to go inward can be dramatically eye-opening in terms
of questioning the dominant path, which we also have to
recognize centers on a fundamentally unsatisfying consumer
identity.
Another entry point is a deep experience of nature —
perhaps very profound relationships with animals, people
who have farmed and know the language of nature — where
one begins to recognize how this consumer path, this so-called
“modernizing” path, is taking us away from nature.
What about people who live in cities, far from daily
contact with nature?
Urban experiences sometimes force folks to start deeply
examining what has meaning for them, leading to a search.
The archetypical urban industrial high-rise experience can
generate a thirst for connection because it’s nested in a
consumer path which is fundamentally alienating from nature
and community. ... If it weren’t for the fact that we’re still
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the current economic-development path, I’d feel quite
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balance with nature and recovering community.
What do you say to people who feel the change you
are talking about is just too huge?
Recover sanity and joy and physical health and emotional
health by staying right where you are, but explore how to con-
sciously connect more deeply to others and to nature. In my
work with Local Futures, we help to create this through our
ongoing “Economics of Happiness” conferences, bringing
together like-minded and mature people in your proximity
with whom you start a process of reconnection. We create
settings where people can to be more vulnerable, to be more
deeply honest about their deepest fears and move away
from the mask of perfection undergirding consumer culture.
What do you mean by a mask of perfection?
We’ve been taught to pretend: 1¼UIJ[WT]\MTaÅVM. That is the
mask of perfection, and it keeps us isolated and separate.
It’s particularly painful to see it among young people where
they are isolated into their peer groups; it’s one of the crueler
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anxiety, or I have an eating disorder, or I’m still wounded by
my relationship with my mother is something that I cover up.
Some of us, in our commercialized and rather individualistic
way, try to gain some help through therapy, but it’s not the
deep help that we need.
There’s more and more coming out about the number of
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that they have activity on the earth — like outdoor exercise
and gardening — rather than on asphalt. Another aspect is
a very conscious attempt to rebuild deeper intergenerational
relationships.In the conferences you have been hosting in places like
Vermont, Ohio, and New Mexico, and also globally,
what would you say has been a take-home message
for participants?
What we hear quite often is people saying, “Thank you for
this bigger picture which puts things together into a way
that I haven’t seen before, one that feels uplifting.” Another
take-home is that people are not realizing the extent to which
— not just in the mainstream but also in alternative and
progressive circles — there is this dominant sense that human
nature is all wrong. In other words, that it’s in our nature that
we all are greedy and aggressive. That is a deeply depressing
message, and I do see a lot of people, especially people my
age, saying that they’ve given up on humanity, alas, that we
deserve to extinguish ourselves.
No, there is actually a cultural story here. It’s not human
nature, but rather the culture into which we’ve been subtly manipu-
lated, to the point where we cannot see that recovery from this
sad and addictive culture can be surprisingly rapid. We face
climate chaos, too, and things that are very alarming, and
of course there’s great reason to be concerned. But there’s
simultaneously a deeply uplifting message in realizing that
not only can recovery happen faster, but it is happening.Your views on technology have been controversial ...
It’s really been only over the last couple years that I have
come to see that we must speak out on technology. You see, in
the 1970s large numbers of people and organizations pushed
governments to decentralize renewable energy, and govern-
ments started making these changes. But sadly, there wasn’t