 www.araustralia.org |
Alternative Radio (Aust.) PO Box 780 Morwell Victoria 3848 Australia tel. 61-3-5134-8556 mob. 61-413-597-828 inquiries@araustralia.org |
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www.araustralia.org |
Alternative Radio (Aust.) PO Box 780 Morwell Victoria 3848 Australia tel. 61-3-5134-8556 mob. 61-413-597-828 inquiries@araustralia.org |
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For many, the rise of the global economy marks the final fulfilment of the great dream of a 'Global Village'. Almost everywhere you travel today you will find multi-lane highways, concrete cities and a cultural landscape featuring gray business suits, fast-food chains, Hollywood films and cellular phones. In the remotest corners of the planet, Barbie, Madonna and the Marlboro Man are familiar icons. From Cleveland to Cairo to Caracas, Baywatch is entertainment and CNN news. The world, we are told, is being united by virtue of the fact that everyone will soon be able to indulge their innate human desire for a Westernised, urbanised consumer lifestyle. West is best, and joining the bandwagon brings closer a harmonious union of peaceable, rational, democratic consumers 'like us'. This worldview assumes that it was the chaotic diversity of cultures, values and beliefs, that lay behind the conflicts of the past: that as these differences are removed, so the differences between us will be resolved. As a result, villages, rural communities and their cultural traditions around the world are being destroyed on an unprecedented scale under the impact of globalising market forces. Communities that have sustained themselves for hundreds of years are simply disintegrating. The spread of the consumer culture seems unstoppable.
Helena Norberg-Hodge is an internationally acclaimed author, peace activist and the founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture. She has been at the forefront of the struggle in Tibet to protect the culture and society from the effects of modernisation. She is the winner of the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Price and the author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture with Peter Goering and co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home with Todd Merrifield and Steven Gorelick. Ms. Norberg-Hodge spoke in Byron Bay in November 2003. ** CD only |