Ladakh, also known as Little Tibet, is a remote region on the
Tibetan Plateau. Although it is part of
India, it has more in common culturally with
Tibet. Because it borders both
China and
Pakistan, countries with which India has had tense relations and frequent border disputes, the Indian government kept Ladakh largely isolated from the outside world. It was not until 1962 that the first road was built over the high mountain passes that separate the region from the rest of India, and even then the region was off-limits to all but the Indian military. In 1975, the Indian government decided to open Ladakh to tourism and 'development', and Norberg-Hodge was one of the first westerners to visit the region, accompanying a German film crew as a translator. As she described in an interview with the Indian website Infochange, the culture she observed in those early years was a near-paradise of social and ecological well-being, but quickly broke down under the impact of outside economic forces: "When I first arrived in Leh, the capital of 5,000 inhabitants, cows were the most likely cause of congestion and the air was crystal clear. Within five minutes' walk in any direction from the town centre were barley fields, dotted with large farmhouses. For the next twenty years I watched Leh turn into an urban sprawl. The streets became choked with traffic, and the air tasted of diesel fumes. 'Housing colonies' of soulless, cement boxes spread into the dusty desert. The once pristine streams became polluted, the water undrinkable. For the first time, there were homeless people. The increased economic pressures led to unemployment and competition. Within a few years, friction between different communities appeared. All of these things had not existed for the previous 500 years." Many of the changes that 'development' brought were psychological, as she described in the film version of
Ancient Futures: "In one of my first years in Ladakh, I was in this incredibly beautiful village. All the houses were three stories high and painted white. And I was just amazed. So out of curiosity I asked a young man from that village to show me the poorest house. He thought for a bit, and then he said, 'We don't have any poor houses.' The same person I heard eight years later saying to a tourist, 'Oh, if you could only help us Ladakhis, we're so poor!' And what had happened is that in the intervening eight years he had been bombarded with all these one-dimensional images of life in the West. He'd seen people with fast cars, you know, looking as though they never worked, and with lots of money. And suddenly by comparison his culture seemed backward and primitive and poor." In 1978, Norberg-Hodge founded The Ladakh Project, for which Local Futures is now the parent organization, in order to counter the overly rosy impressions of life in the urban consumer culture, and to re-instill respect for the traditional culture. She also helped establish several indigenous NGOs in Ladakh including the Women's Alliance of Ladakh (WAL), the Ladakh Environment and Health Organisation (LEHO), and the Ladakh Ecological Development Group (LEDeG). LEDeG has designed, built and installed a wide range of small-scale appropriate technologies, including solar water heaters, cookers, passive space heaters, and greenhouses. In 1986, Norberg-Hodge and LEDeG were awarded the
Right Livelihood Award (also known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize') in recognition of these efforts. == Documentaries ==