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Richard Heinberg in Totnes: “The End of Growth” (video)
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
11 Mar 2011
Something for the weekend… Richard Heinberg in Totnes
A week ago today, Richard Heinberg gave a stunning talk in Totnes on ‘The End of Growth’. Thanks to our dear friends at nuproject, I can now unveil the film of his talk. Enjoy… .
(11 March 2011)
What is “Gross National Happiness” ?
Morten Sondergaard, YouTube
What is “Gross National Happiness” explained in 3 min – Inspired by GNHFund.com – Created by MortenSondergaard.com
(13 December 2010)
In China, to get rich is not always glorious
Isabel Hilton, Guardian/UK
China is wealthier – but its people are unhappier. Its new five-year plan will hope to cheer them up
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Two years ago a book called Unhappy China became a bestseller in the People’s Republic. It was a collective effort by a group of nationalists who complained that their government was giving in to western bullying. It carried an unpleasant political message, but it did raise the question of why – given that China had prospered for 30 years and its people were better off than they had been for 50 years – should unhappiness be an issue at all.
Regardless of their motive, the authors of Unhappy China were on to something. Earlier this week, as China Digital Times reported, China’s censors in the State Council Information Office issued an order: “All websites are requested to immediately remove the story ‘In China 94% Are Unhappy; Top-Heavy Concentration of Wealth’ and related information. Forums, blogs, microblogs, and other interactive spaces are not to discuss the matter.”
The figures came from a global Gallup Poll in which Denmark scored an impressive 82% of respondents who described themselves as happy. In China only 6% said they were, ranking the country 125th. China’s least happy respondents lived in the first-tier cities, where people are relatively better off. Results like this are not very good news for a government whose legitimacy for the past 30 years has rested on rising living standards.
… As the National People’s Congress meets in Beijing this week, happiness is much on its collective mind. Before the 3,000 delegates is China’s 12th five-year plan, an economic blueprint that aims to spread the wealth a little more evenly. From this year, China will attempt to chart a course that will transform the economy from its current export-led, low-wage, low added-value model into a greener and more equitable mode of development. If it succeeds, it will be a shift in China’s economic direction that will have global importance.
(10 March 2011)
What the Fight Against Measles Can Teach Environmentalists
Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
This week I’ve been re-reading Richard Lewontin’s excellent book The Triple Helix. It’s a concise and compelling critique, from the perspective of one of the world’s most respected evolutionary biologists, of the simplistic genetic determinism that often passes for biological science or evolutionary thought these days. I recommend it highly.
I had forgotten, and was pleased to rediscover, that in passing Lewontin offers a valuable insight into the drivers of environmental destruction. His starting point might seem strange: it’s the history of measles.
In Europe in the 1800s, when my great-grandparents were young, more children died from measles than any other disease. Today, thanks to a vaccine that was introduced in 1963, almost no one in the advanced countries gets the disease at all. That’s a major victory for public health.
But Lewontin points out a surprising fact: the number of children who died from measles had fallen dramatically, long before the vaccine was introduced. A quick check on the web reveals that the measles mortality rate dropped more than 98% in the United States between 1912 and 1963. Similar declines occurred in other developed countries — people stopped dying from measles long before we figured out how to stop the disease itself.
That wasn’t because fewer children got the disease. When I was in elementary school in Canada, it was expected that every kid would get the measles sooner or later, and that is just what happened. In my great-grandparent’s time, that would have meant many funerals. In the 1950s, we were all sent home for two weeks to recover, but none of us died.
Lewontin writes that the decline in measles-caused deaths wasn’t the result of modern drugs, because it started well before antibiotics were introduced. And it wasn’t caused by improved sanitation, because measles is airborne, not waterborne. The causes of the reduced death rate were social, not technical:
“The most plausible explanation we have is that during the nineteenth century there was a general trend of increase in the real wage, an increase in the state of nutrition of European populations) and a decrease in the number of hours worked. As people were better nourished and better clothed and had more rest time to recover from taxing labor, their bodies, being in a less stressed physiological state, were better able to recover from the further severe stress of infection. So, although they may still have fallen sick, they survived.”
In short, Lewontin writes: “Infectious diseases were not the causes of death, but only the agencies. The causes of death in Europe in earlier times were what they still are in the Third World: overwork and undernourishment.” [emphasis added]
That same distinction, between causes and agencies, throws light on environmental issues
… That does not mean that we don’t need to campaign against particular sources of pollution and ecological destruction. As Lewontin says, the fact that only social change can eliminate high mortality in Africa doesn’t mean medical care is irrelevant. To be blunt, an army that won’t fight battles for immediate objectives will never win the war.
But it does mean that focusing on agencies can only buy us time. To actually win the war for our vulnerable planet, we need to understand and confront the underlying cause that creates those agencies and gives them their destructive power.
(11 March 2011)
