Source: Cottage Country & The David Suzuki Foundation

Beyond Growth: ‘Gross Domestic Happiness’

From TVO:

The British government measures progress not just by how the economy is growing, but also by the quality of life of its citizens. The United States is following the UK’s lead and looking at how it can incorporate wellbeing into its census data. The move is based on the idea that on its own, GDP is an incomplete measure of a country’s success. Can you judge success by economic growth alone? Will measuring happiness help government make better policy?

Beyond ‘business as usual’: Ideas for moving toward a globally sustainable economy and future 

In the last few months, a number of heavyweights on the world stage have spoken out about the fundamentally unsustainable nature of our current economic system.

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon boldly stated that:

For most of the last century, economic growth was fuelled by what seemed to be a certain truth: the abundance of natural resources.

We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences.

Those days are gone.

In the 21st century, supplies are running short and the global thermostat is running high.

Climate change is also showing us that the old model is more than obsolete. It has rendered it extremely dangerous.

Over time, that model is a recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.

In February, the UK’s Prince Charles wrote an article advancing that:

There is, surely, no way round the fact that we have to move away from our conventional model of growth based, as it is, on the production and consumption of high carbon intensity goods. It seems the current economic system, characterised by a catastrophic decline in biodiversity, increased water scarcity and food insecurity, has little hope of securing our prosperity. The challenge is all the more urgent if, as predicted, the world’s population grows to some 9 billion by 2050. We need to meet the challenge of decoupling economic growth from increased consumption in such a way that both the wellbeing of Nature’s ecology and our own economic needs benefit simultaneously.

And in May, Jochen Zeitz, CEO of Puma shoes and clothing, wrote an article of his own acknowledging that:

The world has changed and sustainability in business can no longer be assumed or assured unless something changes in our economic model, and radically so. It is as simple as that.

In knowing that the current paradigm does not take businesses’ unintended collateral effects on society and the environment into consideration, we need to adapt our thinking to see sustainability not only as a responsibility but also as an opportunity.

Their pronouncements follow similarly themed statements and reports over recent decades from a number of groups including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the board of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the team conducting a study of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, and a group of experts preparing for the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20).

One of the “experts” in the Rio +20 group is Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, professor (University of Surrey, UK) and author of ‘Prosperity without Growth - Economics for a Finite Planet’. In the TED Talks video above, Jackson:  

delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future.

It’s funny, provocative and definitely worth a look if you’re interested in exploring routes to globally sustainable future. Enjoy!

Documentary: The Economics of Happiness

I came across this trailer recently for what looks to be a pretty interesting, timely and ultimately optimistic documentary. The film’s producers, the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC), explain they created it to “strengthen and promote the worldwide movement for economic localization.” Reflecting this goal the film is being distributed in way that encourages people to host screenings in their communities.

As for the official blurb on the film, here it is:

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people 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.

We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents including Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Michael Shuman, Juliet Schor, Zac Goldsmith and Samdhong Rinpoche - the Prime Minister of Tibet’s government in exile. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. The Economics of Happiness restores our faith in humanity and challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world.

Emerging Science: ‘Ecological Economics’

Instability in our global economic and natural systems is shining a light on strategies to improve their long term sustainability. One such approach is Ecological Economics, which Robert Costanza (Portland State University’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions) explains in his article ‘What is Ecological Economics?’:

In ecological economics, natural capital is added to the typical capital asset analysis of land, labor, and financial capital. Ecological economics uses tools from mathematical economics, but may apply them more closely to the natural world. Whereas mainstream economists tend to be technological optimists, ecological economists are inclined to be technological pessimists. They reason that the natural world has a limited carrying capacity and that its resources may run out. Since destruction of important environmental resources could be practically irreversible and catastrophic, ecological economists are inclined to justify cautionary measures based on the precautionary principle.

Costanza and Jon Erickson (University of Vermont’s Gund Institute) explore these idea further in the documentary above to answer the age-old economic question:

How do we allocate scarce resources to create alternative desirable ends?

Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index

From TED.com:

Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation’s success by its productivity — instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn’t have to cost the earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You might be surprised.

On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.