Helena is a linguist, author, filmmaker, activist and one of the great pioneers of the localisation movement. She is the founder and director of Local Futures, formerly the International Society for Ecology and Culture, and the convenor of World Localization Day. For almost fifty years, her work has explored the impact of the global economy on culture, community, ecology, identity and human wellbeing.
Her life’s work began in Ladakh in 1975, where she became the first outsider in modern times to become fluent in Ladakhi and worked closely with local communities as they encountered the forces of tourism, development and the global market. That experience became the foundation for her classic book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, a profound exploration of culture, modernity, development and what we may be losing in the name of progress. Ancient Futures has been translated into more than 40 languages, and Helena has also written Local is Our Future, Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture.
She is also the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness, and her TEDx talk of the same name has helped bring her message to a wider global audience. Her work has received international recognition, including the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel Prize, the Arthur Morgan Award and the Goi Peace Award, which honoured her contribution to the revitalisation of cultural and biological diversity and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.
Helena’s work asks some of the deepest questions of our time. What happens when cultures lose their roots? What happens when economies become global but people remain human, local, relational and dependent on land, food, family and community? And what might healing look like if we stopped chasing endless growth and began rebuilding the small, the local, the intimate and the alive?
