Why are we running harder and faster just to keep a roof over our heads? Why is our food being flown around the world and back again? Why is the gap between rich and poor widening to obscene levels?… Because nation states are allowing global corporations to run the show.

I mean, did you know this that our modern economy has roots in the late 1400s when the elites in Europe began destroying close-knit self-reliant communities by the enclosures – they burnt crops and destroyed villages, began invading and decimating local economies around the world, enslaving and colonizing people everywhere. The shift towards global trade had begun, eroding local sovereignty and independence.

LOCAL: A Story Of Hope, examines the root causes of our social and environmental crises – the global economy – and proposes a call to action: “re-regulate the big and global – rebuild the small and local”.

Featuring Helena Norberg-Hodge (Director, Local Futures), Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film, 2040) and Ella Noah Bancroft (indigenous storyteller), the video is made by Local Futures (https://www.localfutures.org) in collaboration with film maker Damon Gameau (https://www.whatsyour2040.com).

Last week (yes, this makes me late to the party), my kid and I showed up to BMX night. I had been feeling a bit down on Pemberton, I confess. Almost 2 years barely leaving the house, watching houses pop up like mushrooms, and prices go up like emergency flares, had me wondering about this place… is it still the community that I loved? Change and isolation had left me feeling disconnected. Then we showed up, with the boy’s scuffed elbow pads and a mountain bike and a motoX helmet, with a ton of keenness to try something new, and Jess and Jody and Tara made it simple to sign up for a trial run, and I got to have casual random encounters with people I know well enough to say hi to, but not well enough to call up or invite into a pandemic bubble, and I watched the parent-volunteers swing into gear to turn the whole machine on, and we watched the toddlers on their run bikes getting cheered on unreservedly, and I fed my kid a giant slice of amazing pizza from the incredible Backcountry Pizza on the way home, and we were outside, in the fresh air, with far more in common than what divides us, and it felt amazing. It was the medicine of community, of local, of grassroots, of belonging to something bigger than myself or my household, but smaller than the entire world… (some beautiful space where i am more than just a number, but not the one on whom everything depends), and I was like: this is the magic place… Local community. This is the panacea to globalization. To be here. To act here. To give and receive here.

Thanks Pemberton BMX. To the local organizations, volunteers and local businesses that really make this place something special… thank you!