Tuesday, 1st February 2011| 19:00 |Boole 4, Main Campus UCC. Cork

Wednesday, 2nd February 2011 | 19:30 | €5 on the door | Sugar Club, Lower Lesson Street, Dublin 2

We are delighted to welcome Helena Norberg-Hodge to Ireland for the first two Irish screenings of her new film – The Economics of Happiness. Helena is noted for her wonderful book and documentary film “Ancient Futures“.

Each screening will be followed with a panel discussion with well known activists in the area of sustainability and re-localisation. These include Richard Corrigan (RTE), Professor Peadar Kirby and Thomas Riedmuller (Hollies centre) after the Cork screening and Richard Douthwaite (FEASTA), Mick Kelly (GIY), Suzie Cahn (Carraig Dulra) after the Dublin screening.

In Ancient Futures Helena described the psychological, social, and environmental costs of modernisation as seen from the perspective of traditional Ladaki culture and asked what the modern world can learn from it’s experience.

In The Economics of Happiness the film-maker takes these experiences further to show how re-localisation and the strengthening of communities are powerful strategies to help repair our fractured world – our ecosystems, our societies and our selves.

“Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, an unholy alliance of governments and big business continues to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, people all over the world are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.”

watch the trailer here

more details on the Cork screening here

more details on the Dublin screening here