because what I have to say is very similar.

As we all know,

everything from global warming to the global financial crisis tells us

that we need a fundamental change in society.

And I am going to be arguing that for all of us around the world

the highest priority, the most urgent issue

is fundamental change to the economy.

And from my point of view,

the change that we need to make is shifting away

from globalizing to localizing economic activity.

Localization is a solution multiplier

that offers a systemic, far-reaching alternative

to corporate capitalism, as well as communism.

It's a way of dramatically reducing CO2 emissions,

energy consumption of all kind, and waste.

At the same time,

as adapting economic activity, localizing economic activity,

can restore biodiversity as well as cultural diversity.

It's a way of creating meaningful and secure jobs

for the entire global population,

and perhaps is the most important of all,

because it is about rebuilding the fabric of connection,

the fabric of community between people,

and between people and their local environment:

it's the economics of happiness.

I first had my eyes open to this, I was forced to see this connection

between the economy out there and our inner well being, our happiness,

when I was thrown into a situation on the Tibetan Plateau,

in Ladakh, called Little Tibet, about 35 years ago.

This area had been sealed off from the outside world,

and it was suddenly thrown open

to the outside world, to the outside economy.

And I saw with my own eyes

how subsidized food, coming in on subsidized roads,

running on subsidized fuel,

how that food and other goods brought in from thousands of miles away

destroyed the local market.

And almost overnight, this led to unemployment,

this in turn, led to friction between people

who lived peacefully side by side for generations.

After a decade,

Buddhists and Muslims in Ladakh were literally killing each other.

I also worked in Bhutan between '84 and '89,

and I saw exactly the same pattern there.

There, it was Buddhists and Hindus who were killing each other.

So, I became very motivated

to try to bring this message out to the rest of the world.

I started speaking and writing about it,

and in the process, I've come in contact with economists, environmentalists,

anthropologists, people from every continent

who are basically saying the story of our country, of our place

is very similar to the story of Ladakh.

What we have seen is that worldwide

there is a trend towards a split

between government and the interest of their people,

and that governments are pursuing an economic model that is simply outdated,

that has been carried far too far.

It's a model that says:

more trade, more production for export, and more foreign investment.

That's the formula for creating prosperity.

This formula is not working.

Why are governments worldwide so impoverished

that they have to cut, cut, cut, for our needs

while spending billions and trillions

for a global infrastructure in transport, trade, and weapons?

Why is this happening?

>From my point of view, it's fundamentally about that distancing,

the globalizing of economic activity.

It's led to what I call a "drone economy".

You must have heard about the drones,

the unmanned aircrafts that are now being manipulated from Las Vegas

as people are bombed in Afghanistan.

We can not carry on warfare without ever seeing the people we kill,

without hearing the screams, without being there risking our lives.

That long distance creates a blindness, a heartlessness,

and basically, an impossibility in terms of ethics.

It's very similar to the ability

for someone to sit in New York and speculate on the Valley of Wheat

and not seeing what is happening to those farmers

on the other side of the world.

How can we be ethical, how can we be kind and compassionate

when we don't even see our impact?

It is as though our arms have grown so long

that we don't even see what our hands are doing.

Whether as a CEO or as a consumer,

we really need to open our eyes to what is happening,

and when we do,

what we will see is that around the world

there's a movement towards localization

that is about shortening those distances,

and that movement is demonstrating the multiple benefits;

the most powerful and the most inspiring and heartening of all

is The Local Food Movement,

which consists of literally thousands,

if not millions of initiatives around the world,

from permaculture to edible school gardens

to more urban farms to farmer's markets.

It's all about shortening distances, and you talk to farmers as I have,

- because we've helped to stimulate and catalyze these initiatives

on many continents -

and you can talk to farmers

that were previously going bankrupt, that were depressed,

and as one farmer said to me in Australia,

"I've been a farmer all my life and I felt like a serf;

constant pressure to reduce the cost and to standardize the products,"

and he was producing only two things.

"Now," he says, "after we started a farmer's market,

it's like entering a new galaxy," and he beams as he said that.

He is now producing about 20 different things

and he has contact, weekly contact, with the consumers.

This shortening of distances is far, far more fundamental than we realize

and is absolutely essential in terms of all our basic needs:

the need for food, clothing, and shelter.

When we realize that in the modern economy

this pressure to produce for export,

this pressure to encourage foreign investment,

when we realize that this means that worldwide farmers are being pressured

to produce more and more standard products,

larger and larger monocultures, in the long distances, you can't say,

"Well, you know, today, some of my basil is ready to be harvested,

but I'll have some more tomorrow

and I'll also have some blackcurrants, or some apples,

and some milk from my cows."

Impossible.

Larger and larger scale monocultures

are not only the same product, but the same size.

The size that fits the machinery,

the harvesting machinery, the machinery that washes,

the machinery that loads it onto the supermarket shelves.

In the process, tons of food is being thrown away

because it's not of the right size.

But far worse than that, in the process, we are eradicating biodiversity.

Not just agricultural biodiversity but wild biodiversity as well.

As you shorten the distances, you're suddenly creating a market

where it is in the interest of the farmer and producer to diversify.

He can actually make more money and do better

if he starts building up a more diversified farm.

This is what is happening. This is what is happening.

As a consequence of the diversification,

what we can see is that you can produce more food per unit of land.

This is perhaps the most important thing

about understanding that if we want to make change to the economy,

if we want to make change to the world today,

we have got to start looking at food production,

at the interface with the natural world which is our real economy,

and I'm afraid that I find

that most economists are simply ecologically illiterate.

They don't distinguish between growing potatoes and apples,

and creating rubber balls or plastic toys.

There is a certain economy of scale

when you are producing standard, petrochemical, industrial products,

but when it comes to the natural world,

the adaptation to the diversity, the nurturing of diversity

is how we can get more out of each unit of land.

Many studies show ten times more food from small diversified farms

provide plenty of jobs.

We can see this in traditional systems,

and we can see it in the new farmers' movement,

of young people, many of whom have studied architecture, law, medicine,

are actually deciding that they prefer farming.

As part of the local food movement, they have access to a local market,

they are earning a very good salary

because when you shorten the distances,

we cut out all that waste of the energy, the packaging, the refrigeration,

the irradiation, the advertising,

and above of all, those preservatives and waste of making food appear fresh

when it isn't.

When you cut out all of that so called "value added activity",

what you find is an economic system, a free market,

where the farmer earns vastly more,

and the consumer pays less for fresh, healthy food.

In the longest and supermarket economy, generally speaking,

the farmer gets 10% of what we pay or less.

In the farmer's market, they get 100%.

In the local food co-op, in the local shop, they can get 50, 60%;

40% significantly more.

This is like a magic wand.

We are talking here

about increasing productivity while reducing the ecological footprint

because as you restore diversity,

they're starting to reduce the dependence on imported, expensive, toxic chemicals,

and you're starting to create more space for wild life as well.

So, it's a magical thing that we can increase productivity,

and increase profits simultaneously to the farmer.

What I'm saying here applies to fisheries,

applies to forestry, applies to the production

of our basic primary needs for food, clothing, and shelter.

When we adapt to the local climate, to the local area,

we are actually going to be increasing prosperity

while reducing our ecological impact.

This is, as far as I'm concerned, the real elephant in the room,

that the global economy with the long distances

is responsible for poverty,

for a widening gap between rich and poor in every single country.

You will not be able to find me a single country,

including my native country of Sweden,

where the gap between rich and poor isn't widening in an unacceptable way.

You won't find a single country in the world

where people are not more and more frustrated with their governments,

swinging back and forth from left to right

and beginning to realize that left and right is not the issue;

the issue is global versus local.

I want to make it very clear that localization, economic localization,

is about a shift in direction,

particularly from primary production and basic needs.

It's not about ending international trade,

it's not about some kind of isolationism,

where we don't care about what is going on on the other side of the world.

On the contrary; today, because of our global problems,

we need global collaboration more than ever before.

Localization is actually going to come about on a large scale,

once we look up and see the bigger picture,

and we link up internationally

to collaborate, to bring about this transition.

It's beginning to happen.

There's a worldwide movement that is not just about food,

it's also about business and banking.

In the U.S., in the last 18 months,

7,600 credit unions have outperformed the big banks.

In the United States, in 130 cities,

there are 30,000 small businesses that have linked up

into business alliances, local business alliances.

but many of these are becoming part of a network,

like the BALLE network,

The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

The farmer's markets and the localization movement

are also at their beginning to have some money for research,

because it's become so successful.

One of the things that is being stressed

is that in the local economies

we are seeing the revitalization of community,

the reconnection between people.

For instance, studies show

that when you shop in the farmer's market, as compared to the supermarket,

you have ten times more conversations with people.

These are demonstrations of the fact

that small, slow, and local is the way to go,

and structurally fundamental to that is the shortening of the distances.

It might seem like a very difficult thing to do,

to take on the big captains of industry,

but just to remember that in terms of globalizing,

the actual initiative to further deregulate global finance and trade,

these initiatives have been taken

by less than 1% of the global