Local Futures Podcast

Catherine Murupaenga-Ikenn is a Māori human rights and environmental advocate from the Ngāti Kurī and Te Rarawa peoples of Aotearoa (New Zealand). A lawyer by training and longtime activist by calling, she has spent decades working on Indigenous rights, climate justice, Treaty negotiations, food sovereignty and more, and applied herself from local campaigns close to home to international advocacy...

Lars Veraart is a veterinarian and agroecological farmer. Together with his wife Robyn, Lars moved from the Netherlands to a small village in the mountains of Romania, where he co-founded ALPA – Land for Life — an initiative supporting small-scale ecological farming, young farmers and bioregional regeneration. He and Robyn also run Provision Transylvania, an example farm and centre for agroecology...

Mattias Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology in the Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Ghent University (Belgium), a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. In this episode of Planet Local Voices II, Mattias explains how the poly-crises roiling the world today ultimately stem from a metaphysical crisis, a "de-souling" of...

Shrishtee Bajpai is a researcher, writer and activist working at the intersections of environmental justice, earthy governance, indigenous worldviews, and systemic transformations. She is a member of Kalpavriksh , and coordinates Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence) in India. She is part of the facilitation team of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. She also serves on the executive committee...

Jason Nardi is the European coordinator of RIPESS - the Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy, president of RIES (Italian Solidarity Economy Network) and co-founder of Solidarius Italia. Jason is an active member of the International Council of the World Social Forum and promoter of the World Social Forum on Transformative Economies. Jason currently lives in Flore...

Aseem Shrivastava is an environmental economist, philosopher and a writer. He is the co- author with Ashish Kothari of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, and The Grammar of Greed, among others. He taught economics for many years in India and the US and writes extensively on issues associated with globalization. More recently he taught ecosophy, an ecological philosophy grounded in the...

Drawing on a wealth of practical experience from regenerative community building, Laura Kaestele, discusses the importance of living models of localization in keeping alive a sense of active hope and radical imagination for a more beautiful, just and nourishing world. She calls attention to a 'mycelial network' of such alternatives, all over the world, which remains invisible in the mainstream wor...

We close the Bristol Conversations series with the much-admired teacher, poet and post-activist, Bayo Akomolafe. A public intellectual and writer, Bayo blurs the lines between the personal and the political, prompting a deep rethink of how we can act for change. He is the founder and curator of the Emergence Network and Chief Host of the We Will Dance with Mountains community. He’s involved with m...

Dr. Lyla June Johnston is an indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné Navajo, Cheyenne and European lineages. She blends her study of human ecology, graduate work in indigenous pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her research has focused on the ways in which pre-colonial indigenous nations shaped large regio...

In another life, Manish Jain was educated at Harvard, became an investment banker with Morgan-Stanley, and worked with the UN. Since then, he has been on a journey of unlearning, deschooling and decolonizing, returning home to India to learn from his illiterate village grandmother. Manish is the founder-coordinator of Shikshantar Andolan, which has been significant in shaping the larger unschoolin...

In the fifth episode of The Bristol Conversations, we hear from Iain McGilchrist, the author of the groundbreaking book ‘The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World’. Iain is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and scholar; a man who has shed light not only on some fascinating truths about our minds and our experience of the world, but also on how these truths rel...

In the fourth episode of The Bristol Conversations, we hear from Camila Moreno, civil society’s foremost expert on the international COP climate negotiations. Since 2008, Camila has been charting the emergence of what she calls a system of ‘global climate governance’. She describes the ways in which the environmental movement is being coopted and reduced to a mandate for decarbonization and digita...

In this episode we hear from Nelson Mudzingwa, a farmer and food sovereignty advocate, working with La Via Campesina. He teaches at the Shashe Agroecology School and is the national coordinator for the Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmer’s Forum (ZIMSOFF). In this conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Nelson extols the benefits of local food systems that are closely connected to culture, communi...

Welcome to the Bristol Conversations, a new podcast and video series by Local Futures featuring Helena Norberg-Hodge in conversation with some of the great minds who joined us in Bristol for the Planet Local Summit. Today, we hear from perhaps the world's leading expert on local finance and local business, Michael Shuman. With roots in the peace movement and social justice struggles, Michael is a...

Welcome to the Bristol Conversations, a new podcast and video series by Local Futures. In these longer-format, meandering episodes, our founder Helena Norberg-Hodge speaks with some of the great minds who joined us in Bristol for the Planet Local Summit. We kick the series off with Darcia Narvaez. Darcia is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. She studies morality, chil...

The final episode in the World Localization Extravaganza counters the “bigger, more complex and more violent” logic of the dominant system with a bottom-up approach built on peoplepower, local sovereignty and small-scale economies. The episode stresses how, even and especially in the face of global crises, localization simply makes sense.  VISIT OUR CAMPAIGN PAGE: www.worldlocalizationday.org to g...

On World Localization Day, 2025, we celebrate a planet-sized paradox – a GLOBAL movement for LOCALization.  VISIT OUR CAMPAIGN PAGE: www.worldlocalizationday.org to get active, and follow @localfutures_ This second episode in the trio offers shining examples of localization-in-action in the USA, Brazil, Bangladesh and Nepal, while also stressing efforts to build up broad-based, international coali...

On World Localization Day, 2025, we come to you with a very big story. It’s a story played out across every continent, told by 15 different voices, over three upbeat super inspiring podcast episodes. It’s the story of a global turning towards all things local and life-affirming. VISIT OUR CAMPAIGN PAGE: www.worldlocalizationday.org to get active, and follow @localfutures_   This first episode defi...

Described as "one of the greatest thinkers of our age," Jeremy Lent is an impassioned researcher and speaker who investigates the underlying causes of our civilizational metacrisis, and explores pathways toward an ecological civilisation. He is the author of The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning, and the founder of the Deep Transformation Network – an online global community where people...

Christian Jochnick, a Swedish entrepreneur, started his career in social projects for urban youth. After experiencing the challenges around finance in the philanthropic world, he decided to go back to university to get an MSc from the London School of Economics. He then worked as an analyst in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs before becoming an entrepreneur and venture investor. To...