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An worldwide marketing campaign, World Localization Day, affords a brand new financial imaginative and prescient – broadly termed ‘localization’ – that may improve wellbeing and prosperity for almost all, whereas systemically decreasing resource-use, emissions and poisonous air pollution.
June 20 2021 marks the return of the worldwide marketing campaign, which goals to provoke the worldwide localization motion right into a drive for systemic change. Launched by the worldwide non-profit Local Futures, the marketing campaign has the assist of distinguished figures like H.H. The Dalai Lama, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Jane Goodall, Russell Brand, and Brian Eno, the worldwide marketing campaign consists of in-person and on-line actions in 28 nations on six continents, plus a five-day on-line programme of inspirational discussions, interviews, and brief movies.
It additionally brings collectively a worldwide community of fifty+ companions, spanning 28 nations. From Japan to Benin, from Brazil to France, on-line conferences, talk-shows, hands-on workshops, seed exchanges, native meals festivals and extra are going down underneath the banner of World Localization Day.
Even whereas a globalized financial system – primarily based on company revenue and large-scale, technocratic management – remains to be accelerating, there are noticeable and profound shifts taking place inside folks and native communities that talk to a really completely different future.
A higher appreciation for indigenous cultures, in addition to a rising the need for connection to neighborhood and the pure world, signify marked shifts in methods of considering.
These shifts are maybe extra seismic than we notice; is the standard narrative of Euro-centric ‘progress’ damaged? Are we starting to eliminate the concept that ‘success’ means high-rise residing in centres of consumerism, competitors, and concrete isolation?
There are additionally sensible shifts taking place inside communities, particularly within the wake of COVID-19: an area meals motion – together with farmers’ markets, neighborhood gardens, CSAs and extra – is flourishing, regardless of a dire lack of assist from top-down financial coverage. Meanwhile, neighborhood teams are forming networks of mutual assist and seeking to strengthen their very own native companies.
A worldwide motion for localization is rising as much as realign our priorities with our deeper human values, in addition to with the wants of the planet. At its coronary heart is a vibrant and flourishing native meals motion, which is demonstrating its potential to feed the world whereas minimizing emissions and air pollution and maximizing regenerative influence.
What is Localization?
Localization is about supporting native retailers, native farms and farmers’ markets, native companies. By shortening the distances between producer and shopper, native meals techniques dramatically cut back air pollution, whereas growing biodiversity and productiveness, and offering extra jobs per farm.
Related Post: Local Matters: Why I Shop Local, Eat Local and Support Local
Localizing our meals techniques is likely one of the most essential issues we are able to do for the wellbeing of individuals and our planet. Consider the truth that the US exports round 1.4 billion tonnes of beef yearly, and imports roughly the identical quantity. Similarly, Australian nuts are commonly flown to China to be cracked open, solely to be flown again once more to be bought.
These examples of pointless and polluting commerce are solely the tip of the iceberg. The international meals system – from clear-cutting to poisonous air pollution to food-miles – is answerable for as much as 57% of all greenhouse fuel emissions. This three-minute film reveals its disastrous, hidden results.
But meals is just the start of a wider localization motion that features enterprise, finance, power and training. It’s additionally about holding cash inside the neighborhood, and investing within the place the place you reside – financially, emotionally, virtually.
It’s not about eliminating worldwide commerce, however about decreasing the facility of unaccountable companies. And it’s about urgent for coverage change: to shift taxes, subsidies and laws that presently favour a small variety of international giants to assist as a substitute a mess of companies and industries which are extra clear and tailored to position.
Related Post: Farm-to-Fork: A Global Look at the Slow Food Revolution
Localization affords an financial technique to reweave the material of native communities, democratize financial exercise, regenerate ecosystems, and meet our elementary wants for connection to at least one one other, to nature, and to significant work.
“Localization goes past left/proper politics to deal with elementary human wants and the constructions required to fulfill them,” says Helena Norberg-Hodge, a pioneer of the rising localization motion, writer of Local Is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness and Executive Director of Local Futures. “Strengthening native economies is a win-win-win technique, concurrently restoring environmental well being, constructing neighborhood and securing livelihoods.”
Local Food Feast marketing campaign
To have fun and lift consciousness in regards to the transformative energy of native meals techniques, a worldwide Local Food Feast marketing campaign is on the centre of this yr’s World Localization Day efforts.
Hundreds of feasts are going down throughout the globe this month. They are celebrating various native traditions, at the same time as they increase consciousness in regards to the worldwide localization motion. They are thus an essential image of a decentralized however united motion for change.
Media launch submitted by Local Futures. For extra info go to www.worldlocalizationday.org.
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Cover picture by Anna Tarazevich.
