The International Society For Ecology And Culture

Counterdevelopment programs, including Ladakh Project. During summer 2024, Local Futures Ladakh coordinators Kunzang Deachen and Alex Jensen led a collaborative effort with volunteers and numerous groups across the region - including village organizations, outdoor recreation clubs, sustainable travel collectives, and the Women's Alliance of Ladakh. With help from local young people, we completed the restoration of a traditional house in Chuchot village, which now serves as a venue for events like the Western Himalayan Vikalp Sangam. During the year we also revamped our Mindful Travel in Ladakh campaign, helped with the harvest in villages across the region, hosted the Vietnam Community of Integral Learning travel group, and helped the Women's Alliance of Ladakh to organize a variety of workshops. We also screened our films Ancient Futures, The Economics of Happiness and Planet Local every week at Solja Cafe and at Women's Alliance of Ladakh meetings.

Word Localization Day. WLD 2024 events were held in 25 countries, including New Zealand, Switzerland, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Portugal, Spain, Australia, the UK, the US and Japan. A total of 89 events were registered through our online form. However, some of these were campaigns that led to broader actions. For example, the World Farmers Markets Coalition registered their #EatLocalChallenge involving over 70 member associations in 50 countries, representing 20,000 farmers markets, 200,000 families and over 300 million consumers. For WLD 2024 we developed and offered many free resources, including: toolkits for organizing film screenings and local food feasts; free localization films for community screenings; webinars from world localization leaders; our updated Localization Action Guide; and a series of visual posts that have been shared widely through social media. We also created a new WLD website in-house, which now enables us to update and add new material on an ongoing basis. Our own contributions to WLD activities were three events to mark the launch of our new film Closer to Home.

International Alliance for Localization (IAL). We continued to build this international network of grassroots groups working to protect their communities and local environments in the face of rapid development and corporate control. IAL membership continues to grow thanks to World Localization Day, and currently sits at nearly 2,000 members. Our team continues to send out regular news and events updates relevant to localization.

Grassroots localization efforts. This effort centers around Byron Bay, Australia, where we work with farmers and food activists to strengthen the region's local food movement. Director Helena Norberg-Hodge also participated in events organized by the indigenous leader Ella Noah Bancroft. We continue to be active in setting up additional farmer's markets in the region, and arguing against zoning regulations obstruct ecological living arrangements like co-housing and ecovillages.

Film projects. In 2024 we released three short films: Closer to Home, The Power of Local, and the animated Trade Gone Mad. We also created MP4 files for earlier short video, The Future of Progress, and the feature film, Paradise with Side Effects, and added these to our YouTube channel. Preparations for a major, full-length film began during 2024, with a planned release date of February 2026. The film will include footage of Helena Norberg-Hodge preparing to return to Ladakh fifty years after her first visit, enabling the storyline to cover important lessons from ancient nature-based cultures, as well as the effects of the globalizing economy and the real benefits of systemic localization.