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Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick, and John Page have spent three decades raising awareness and the past five years creating an extraordinary documentary which offers a big-picture analysis of globalization and demonstrates both the imperative and the potential which localization offers our species. The “Economics of Happiness” (2010) gives us a fresh, inspiring look at how we can turn a three-decade policy of globalization into mobilizing flourishing local economies in order to bring prosperity not only to our own communities, but to every community on earth.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, Director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC), is intimately familiar with the people of Ladakh and their culture, and she believes their story can assist with the crisis facing the planet. Living with the Ladakh over the course of many years, Norberg-Hodge learned from them such things as personal, ecological, and sociological well being as well as values, and basic assumptions about the roots of happiness. This caused her to look at her own Western culture in a different light because the Ladakh material standard of living was high. At one time they lived in large, spacious houses; there was no unemployment, and no one went hungry. Their way of life was vastly more sustainable and far more joyous and rich.

But a momentous shift began in the 1970s when Ladakh was thrown open to the rest of the world. Cheap, subsidized food was trucked in on subsidized roads, and capitalism descended on the culture and undermined Ladakh’s local economy. The culture was bombarded with advertising and media images that romanticized western consumer culture at the same time that Ladakh culture was being portrayed as backward and poor.