Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Helena Norberg-Hodge

One of the best ways of reducing both CO2 emissions and poverty in the South would be to strengthen the existing, decentralised demographic pattern by keeping villages and small towns alive. This would allow communities to maintain social cohesion and a closer contact with the land.

As signs of climate instability increase, radical and rapid action is becoming ever more urgent.

Happiness, as a word, has become sort of equated with these smiling images on television, selling some nice cream or food product or something. It's seen a bit as being a stupid consumer.

At a deep psychological level, convincing young people that they will get the respect, admiration, love that they are looking for through consumerism is a manipulation of a deep human instinct to want to belong.

There's often a discussion about, 'Well, how do we know what happiness is? Is it real?' I've always argued that all of us know that there's a huge difference between how we feel when we feel happy and when we don't feel happy.

What motivates me is the conviction that our problems are mainly a consequence of a lack of holistic understanding of the man-made system in which we are entwined.

I think we should focus more, rather than less, on mobilising the middle classes. They often have a bit of time and money to contribute to change.

Even in America, people have said again and again that they would be willing to sacrifice for a cleaner environment.

Throughout the world today there is a gowing awareness of the failings of the Western model of development and a corresponding desire to look for more human-scale, ecological ways of living.

I have seen that community and a close relationship with the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible.

It may seem absurd to believe that a 'primitive' culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.

Globalization, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional, and national economy into a single world system, requires homogenizing locally adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial system-centrally managed, pesticide-intensive, one-crop production for export-designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods to the world market.

Economic localization is the key to sustaining biological and cultural diversity - to sustaining life itself. The sooner we shift towards the local, the sooner we will begin healing our planet, our communities and ourselves.