Peace-pilgrim, life-long activist, and former monk, Satish Kumar has been inspiring global change for over 60 years. In 1962 he undertook a pilgrimage for peace, walking for two years without money from India to America for the cause of nuclear disarmament. In 1991, he co-founded Schumacher College, a renowned center of ecological education, and is a Visiting Fellow of Schumacher Wild. Now in his 80s, Satish has devoted his life to campaigning for ecological regeneration and social justice. He is a world-renowned author and international speaker, founder of The Resurgence Trust and Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist – a change-making magazine he edited for over 40 years.

How can we make our local communities healthy and resilient, and make sure that the voices and concerns of local people are heard? In this episode of the Planet Local Voices Series, Kate Taylor-Smith, Patricia Patterson Vanegas and Ben Christie, share their experience from Forest Row - a small town of 5000 people in East Sussex in the UK. They talk about localization and the process of building direct democracy, with genuine community representation in local, county and state-level governments.

It all started with FROCAL - a grassroots project that explores what the Forest Row might be like if they all lived and acted more locally. What would it mean for the sourcing of food, water and energy, for the local economy and livelihoods? Overall, the aim is to care for the land and each other to improve collective wellbeing.

William (Bill) Powers is an author, speaker and teacher whose essays and commentaries on global issues have appeared in the New York Times and the Atlantic and on National Public Radio. Powers has also spent several decades exploring the American culture of speed and its alternatives in some fifty countries around the world. He is the author of five books that probe issues of sustainability and the need for a new, bio-centric paradigm, and lives in a Transition Town in Bolivia where principles of a "sweet, slow life" are being put into practice.

In this interview for the Planet Local Voices series, Powers questions the colonial categories of language and thought behind conventional 'development' models that are pushing globalization and urbanization onto the whole world. Powers argues that the antidote to the seeming invincibility of this destructive mainstream direction is by coming home to our senses, re-embedding ourselves in the fabric of Nature and life, and re-building interdependent communities and local economies.

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.