A Stanford-trained lawyer and economist, Michael Shuman is the world’s pre-eminent expert on local finance, sharing practical tools to reclaim wealth from Wall Street for the benefit of communities. He is a prolific speaker and advocate for policy change, and is the author of ten books including Local Dollars, Local Sense, The Small Mart Revolution and his most recent title Put Your Money Where Your Life Is.

In this interview, Michael contends with the prevailing globalist strategies for economic development and thoroughly debunks them - beating conventional economists at their own game. With a robust research base, he sketches alternate strategies for economic development that focus on supporting small-scale enterprises and local economies, promising cascading benefits for society, community prosperity and the planet.

To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.

The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Morag Gamble is an award-winning permaculture teacher and designer and the founder of the Permaculture Education Institute. Over 30 years, she has led permaculture programs in 22 countries across six continents, inspiring countless people to join the practical permaculture revolution. She also curates a blog and practical YouTube channel called Our Permaculture Life, and hosts the Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast.

In this interview, Morag elucidates the deep, mutually reinforcing ties between permaculture - a holistic practical philosophy of reweaving the practices and interdependent relationships of local living - and the localization movement. As Morag puts it in the interview, permaculture "shows the deep possibilities of what a more local way of being can do in terms of nourishing our souls, nourishing our stomachs, nourishing our communities, and nourishing life itself." She shares her experiential wisdom as well as heartening stories that illustrate how local food and community-building practices ripple out into an ethic of care and a sacred regard for the land that gives us life.

To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.

The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Jon Jandai is a farmer, seed saver, natural builder, eco-educator, speaker and co-founder of the Pun Pun Center for Self-Reliance, an educational organic farm and earth-building school in Northern Thailand where skills of self-reliance are demonstrated and shared. His TED talk, ‘Life is easy. Why do we make it so hard?’, has over 15 million views.

In this interview, Jon talks about the links between community self-reliance and deep happiness. He explains how globalization has profoundly undermined this self-reliance, driving masses of people into a kind of urban slavery. It has also undermined the diversity of foods, cultures, and thinking, leaving a physical, mental and spiritual wasteland in its wake. Yet, especially for those people who have experienced both the old world of self-reliant local cultures, as well as industrial-globalized modernity, the pitfalls of the latter have come into sharp focus and sparked a movement to return to the countryside, and to reclaim the deep knowledge and skills of local living.

To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.

The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.