Local Futures Podcast

Peace-pilgrim, life-long activist, and former monk, Satish Kumar has been inspiring global change for over 60 years. In 1962 he undertook a pilgrimage for peace, walking for two years without money from India to America for the cause of nuclear disarmament. In 1991, he co-founded Schumacher College, a renowned center of ecological education, and is a Visiting Fellow of Schumacher Wild. Now in his 80s, Satish has devoted his life to campaigning for ecological regeneration and social justice. He is a world-renowned author and international speaker, founder of The Resurgence Trust and Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist – a change-making magazine he edited for over 40 years. To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

How can we make our local communities healthy and resilient, and make sure that the voices and concerns of local people are heard? In this episode of the Planet Local Voices Series, Kate Taylor-Smith, Patricia Patterson Vanegas and Ben Christie, share their experience from Forest Row - a small town of 5000 people in East Sussex in the UK. They talk about localization and the process of building direct democracy, with genuine community representation in local, county and state-level governments.  It all started with FROCAL - a grassroots project that explores what the Forest Row might be like if they all lived and acted more locally. What would it mean for the sourcing of food, water and energy, for the local economy and livelihoods? Overall, the aim is to care for the land and each other to improve collective wellbeing. To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

William (Bill) Powers is an author, speaker and teacher whose essays and commentaries on global issues have appeared in the New York Times and the Atlantic and on National Public Radio. Powers has also spent several decades exploring the American culture of speed and its alternatives in some fifty countries around the world. He is the author of five books that probe issues of sustainability and the need for a new, bio-centric paradigm, and lives in a Transition Town in Bolivia where principles of a "sweet, slow life" are being put into practice. In this interview for the Planet Local Voices series, Powers questions the colonial categories of language and thought behind conventional 'development' models that are pushing globalization and urbanization onto the whole world. Powers argues that the antidote to the seeming invincibility of this destructive mainstream direction is by coming home to our senses, re-embedding ourselves in the fabric of Nature and life, and re-building interdependent communities and local economies. To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Ruby Van der Wekken is a member of RIPESS, a network committed to promotion of the Social Solidarity Economy, as well as Oma Maa, a Finnish food co-operative based on community-supported agriculture (CSA) as well as ecologically and socially sustainable food production methods. Ruby works both at the cooperative's community farm and with the development of the co-op, with a personal background in the global justice movement, and advocacy for solidarity economies and the commons. In this interview for the Planet Local Voices series, Ruby describes the work of Oma Maa, and how it exemplifies both solidarity economy and commons principles for fairer, more just and sustainable economies. She also emphasizes the importance of local ownership of the economy, and the need for supportive laws and genuinely democratic governance to enable such alternatives to flourish and spread.   To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Network and of Transition Town Totnes, and author of several books including 'The Transition Handbook' and most recently, 'From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want'. He is an Ashoka Fellow, has spoken at TED Global and at several TEDx events. In this interview for the Planet Local Voices series, Rob inspires with the story of how the Transition Movement  has for years been practically demonstrating and fostering a more resilient, healthy, and beautiful local future in communities around the world. Rob explains how this movement represents a profound - and urgently needed - break with the extractivist, (neo)colonial globalized economy, and emphasizes the critical need for boosting the radical collective imagination of what is possible as an antidote to despair and hopelessness.   To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Michael Shuman, a Stanford-trained lawyer and renowned expert in local finance, dives into the flaws of globalist economic strategies. He advocates for prioritizing community well-being over GDP, highlighting new metrics that foster local resilience. Shuman critiques the trend of offering incentives to large corporations, instead championing local businesses as engines of sustainable job growth. He also discusses how these businesses can adapt to modern challenges, emphasizing the importance of supportive policies for community development.

Morag Gamble is an award-winning permaculture teacher and designer and the founder of the Permaculture Education Institute. Over 30 years, she has led permaculture programs in 22 countries across six continents, inspiring countless people to join the practical permaculture revolution. She also curates a blog and practical YouTube channel called Our Permaculture Life, and hosts the Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast. In this interview, Morag elucidates the deep, mutually reinforcing ties between permaculture - a holistic practical philosophy of reweaving the practices and interdependent relationships of local living - and the localization movement. As Morag puts it in the interview, permaculture "shows the deep possibilities of what a more local way of being can do in terms of nourishing our souls, nourishing our stomachs, nourishing our communities, and nourishing life itself." She shares her experiential wisdom as well as heartening stories that illustrate how local food and community-building practices ripple out into an ethic of care and a sacred regard for the land that gives us life. To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.  

Jon Jandai is a farmer, seed saver, natural builder, eco-educator, speaker and co-founder of the Pun Pun Center for Self-Reliance, an educational organic farm and earth-building school in Northern Thailand where skills of self-reliance are demonstrated and shared. His TED talk, ‘Life is easy. Why do we make it so hard?’, has over 15 million views. In this interview, Jon talks about the links between community self-reliance and deep happiness. He explains how globalization has profoundly undermined this self-reliance, driving masses of people into a kind of urban slavery. It has also undermined the diversity of foods, cultures, and thinking, leaving a physical, mental and spiritual wasteland in its wake. Yet, especially for those people who have experienced both the old world of self-reliant local cultures, as well as industrial-globalized modernity, the pitfalls of the latter have come into sharp focus and sparked a movement to return to the countryside, and to reclaim the deep knowledge and skills of local living. To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.  

Ben Rawlence is an award-winning writer, activist and co-founder of Black Mountains College, Wales. He has written extensively about the human consequences of environmental catastrophe in Africa, and later turned his attention to similar issues in Europe and the Arctic. Ben's research led him to focus on building institutions that promote new ways of thinking, seeing, and learning, with a particular focus on climate adaptation through localization.   In this concise episode, Ben introduces the Black Mountains College project against the backdrop of a mainstream educational and economic system that is unfit for the future. He discusses the paramount need to reinvent education to prepare people and communities for a future in which intersecting global challenges will necessarily be met with local solutions. To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Camila Moreno is one of civil society's foremost experts on climate policy, and her critical analysis of carbon metrics, digitalization and corporate power is unparalleled. Coming from social and environmental movements in Latin America and her native Brazil, Camila has attended all the COP climate negotiations since 2008. She has written _Carbon Metrics and the New Colonial Equations_ and is a researcher at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. In this episode, Camila elucidates the history and possible future trajectories of the emerging techno-globalist power structure, with a particular focus on how that agenda is closely tied to international climate governance, like the COP climate negotiations. She highlights how the complexity of climate has been reduced to a narrow focus on carbon dioxide, and how that has served to co-opt diverse environmental struggles into a corporate-friendly agenda based on market-based schemes, digitalization and the financialization of nature. Camila gives us all a strong warning about continuing further down this technocratic path.   To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series. The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.