“GNH not just GNP!” was our intended introductory article of August 12, 2005, prompted by UNEP awarding a 2005 “Seven Champions of the Earth” prize to the King of Bhutan, in the context of the King putting in practice the concept of Gross National Happiness.

The concept of GNH attracted my attention and I wanted to find out more about its potential for enhancing the concept of Sustainable Development. I made contact with the Bhutan Mission to the UN, and with travel agents overseas, and eventually, I went to Bhutan via Kolcata, India as part of a group. Individual travel to Bhutan is difficult and about this some other time. Mr. Kinga Singye at the Bhutan Mission in New York was very helpful in my endeavor. Bhutan has Embassies only in India and Bangladesh.

We flew September 10, 2005 to Paro with one of the two planes of Druckair, the National Airline of Bhutan; we traveled to Wangdue to the east, and then we returned to Thimphu, the capital. Eventually, September 18, 2005, we left by bus to India, passing nature reserves and hydro power plants.

We had a chance to meet with common folks, monks, at festivals and private homes, to visit old fortresses/monasteries and museums, including the National Museum and listened to the presentation of Dr. C.T. Dorji, the Director. We witnessed traditional and regular sport events, including a ceremonial archery competition. Eventually, I met with Mr. Karma Ura the Director of the Center for Bhutan Studies, with whom I had a set appointment arranged by the Foreign Ministry. He was kind to invite me to his home, and with his family I had the chance to participate at a reception that followed the knighting of a relative of his. I also discovered the existence of a Sustainable Development Secretariat in Thimphu and visited with the Director Nim Dorji.

In this trip I collected written material, and my intention is to dig diligently into the materials in an attempt to come up with what these ideas could mean for a possible culture change of our western society, and as I have the agreement of the authors of two important papers that were given to me, I will be able to bring their own material before the readers of SustainabiliTank.info. Nevertheless, upon my return from what amounted to a five week long absence from New York, I got involved with other issues, the like of the Petrocollapse Conference, as reported on SustainabiliTank.info. Eventually I saw the excellent article that Andrew C. Revkin published in the New York Times on October 4, 2005,: “A New Measure of Well-being From a Happy Little Kingdom”. I was happy that the subject finally broke into the public’s attention and I thought this eventually makes my task thus so much easier.

Andy Revkin is officially the Environment Reporter of the New York Times. I know him for many years as he covered events of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The problem is that he is a very underemployed excellent journalist at the New York Times. When he covers a subject he does it thoroughly, scientifically, and well, but I missed his presence many times in places I thought he should be there; I assume his editor thought differently. For one thing, I believe he should cover the meetings at the UN in New York of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), or when UNEP comes to New York. Just one such case - I believe he should have been at the UNEP prize ceremony I mentioned in my in my opening paragraph. In effect no one from the NYT covers those meetings held mostly in the UN basement - clearly an editor’s decision. When Barbara Crosette was the NYT Bureau Chief at the UN, 1994-2001, she had no interest in Sustainable Development subjects even though she had the experience in India, having been there NYT Bureau Chief 1988-1991. She even wrote two good nostalgic travel books on the region: “The Great Hill Stations of Asia” (1998), and “So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas” (1996), where she even writes about the Bhutanese, but without the insight into the potential of what their ideas could have for us in the west. Between the posting in India, and the posting at the UN, Barbara Crosette was with the NYT Washington Bureau and seemingly the political coverage did not allow her thoughts for what may really be important to the future of the world; when she retired from the UN position and the NYT she continued her travels to Asia, perhaps she could now start contemplating on what she might have missed previously. At present, the NYT UN Bureau Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Warren Hoge, seems to have wider interests, but he also, I assume as per assignment, does not delve into topics of Sustainability or the Environment. That is why I was always sorry that the UN headquarters seemed to be forbidden to the New York based Andy Revkin, and I sometimes, in frustration, even e-mailed him about upcoming events. I do see him nevertheless at other locations in New York, such as last week at an important meeting arranged by the Columbia University Earth Institute in collaboration with the management of Scientific American Magazine, where, coincidentally, without having seen him previously in the hall, I introduced from the floor the topic of Gross National Happiness, drawing out answers from Professors Herman E. Daly and Jeffrey Sachs (but on this in another article). Andy just has the personal interest needed to cover also subjects of sustainable development besides environmental science, but the editors seem to let him cover the topics only on a few precious occasions.

Having made above side-complaints, let me sum up these comments by saying that the NYT Board of Editors, two days later, followed up on Andy Revkin’s article in the paper’s editorial page. But this is not the norm at the NYT, and as we can read these days in all papers, the problematique of the NYT is to be found in its editorial rooms, while the stable of journalists is indeed widely mixed in its quality.

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Andy Revkin’s article brought out quite a few themes I was toying around with, and I will take now advantage of the fact that he did put them already in a clear perspective. I will not go into the history of the concept as started by young Jigme Singye Wangchuck quite soon after he became King of Bhutan in 1972, but will rather deal with the main points as seen today, 33 years later. While household incomes in Bhutan remain among the world’s lowest, life expectancy increased by 19 years from 1984 to 1998, jumping to 66 years. Bhutan, which had no public education system in 1960 now has schools at all levels around the country, and rotates teachers from urban to rural regions to be sure there is equal access to the best teachers. In order to sustain tradition, people entering hospitals with non acute health problems can choose Western or traditional medicine (we had the chance to visit in Thimphu such a fully integrated, but in our eyes double tender, institution). Among conditions that improve quality of life, the Bhutanese rave about their attention to the environment — a major part of Bhutan is still covered by law with original forests. Policies considered are not intended to maximize economic return, but rather in order to achieve a good balance — specially in respect to agricultural policy. The balance here is between preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment, and maintaining a responsive government.

A further sign of success is the fact that about 95% of Bhutanese that study abroad return to Bhutan; but the fact that many of them find it hard to obtain adequate employment becomes a problem. This, the TV, and the introduction of the internet, will have to be dealt with eventually as they have the power to become factors of unwanted change.

Andy starts his article by asking what is happiness? He remarks that in the United States, and in many industrialized countries, it is often equated with money; but he also remarks that around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time with family, conservation of natural resources, and other economic factors. Does that mean we actually start to contemplate ideas that where proposed in Bhutan because of a special lineage Buddhist configuration (Drukpa Kagyu lineage of Tantric Mahayana Buddhism) that led to a peculiar outlook on life?

Andy remarks that the goal, according to many westerners involved in this effort, is in part to return to a richer definition of the word happiness, more likely what the signers of the Declaration of Independence (US) had in mind when they included “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right to liberty and life itself.

To pursue this revival of western ideas, using the intellectual wind originating from Bhutan, the Francis Xavier University in northern Nova Scotia, Canada, arranged for a seminary, earlier this year, with the participation of 400 people from more than a dozen countries. Material from that meeting is the base for the New York Times article.

John Ralston Saul, a Canadian political philosopher, defined at that meeting happiness as a balance of individual and community interests. Revkin quotes him as saying: “The Enlightenment theory of happiness was an expression of public good or public welfare, of the contentment of the people”. Saul puts this idea in contrast to the conventional 20th century idea “that you should smile because you’re in Disneyland”. This reminded me of James Howard Kunstler’s presentation at the “Petrocollapse” Conference (see SustainabiliTank.info on Petrocollapse, October 11, 2005). E.F. Schumacher tried such ideas in “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered” (1973) but could not stop the consumer-driven economic growth that is bringing us now to the abyss of Petrocollapse.

Not everyone has fallen into this race to growth. Ronald Inglehart, from U. of Michigan, found that Latin Americans registered far more subjective happiness than their economic status would suggest. In contrast people in former communist countries stayed unhappy even long after communism had collapsed. His conclusion that some societies do a better job at enhancing their people’s sense of happiness. (I would like to suggest that the two examples here have high degree of correlation to respect for the environment in those societies.)

A different type of study comes from the Harvard School of Public Health. They found that students and staff of Harvard, given the choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000, or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000, resulted in a split response. About 50% of the participants chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but better off then their neighbors. These folks could thus be very happy with lower standards of living if that is accepted norm of their society. (This could be a base for Sustainability.)

Further, this year, a Canadian group headed by Hans Messinger, the director of industry measures and analysis for Statistics Canada, who actually calculates the official yearly GDP figure, and similar groups in Australia and New Zealand, will release first attempts at an index - an assessment of community health, living standards, and people’s division of time among work, family, voluntarism, and other activities. Obviously, the challenge is to decide how much weight to give the different indicators. Also, as proposed by one participant, some of the most important contributors to happiness - such as love - cannot be quantified. This may point to the need of something that is more like a report card then a single figure as we are used to in GDP or GNP.

Kurt J. Bauman, a demographer with the US Census Bureau suggested that there is growing interest in moving away from simply tracking indicators of poverty, and look for more comprehensive conditions. A Professor from the U. of Ulster in Ireland suggested that when someone is starving and hungry, and given two scraps of food a day, he can be very happy. One economist suggested that happiness can be illusionary, while another suggested that capitalism can persist even with a shift to goals broader than just making money. From all of this, it seems that the attendees, having seen how difficult it is to actually quantify happiness, nevertheless, showed intent in persisting with the mapping out of a way towards a society that is less monetary oriented, and that rather puts important value on the gains to the human psyche. One clear statement that shows the value of the Nova Scotia exercise, I see in the statement by Ray C. Anderson who defined himself as “a radical industrialist” - he is the founder of Interface inc., an Atlanta-based carpet company with $1 billion in annual sales - he “cut pollution and switched to renewable materials”. Now, he understood the essence of making the world more livable, and in my humble opinion this is the essence of happiness.

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The New York Times four paragraph editorial of October 6, 2005 - “Net National Happiness” tries to reinforce some aspects of Andrew Revkin’s article.

The Editorial board writes: “An economic cynic may argue that a country with a gross national product as small as Bhutan’s can well afford to worry about its gross national happiness, and that the best way to increase GNH is by increasing GNP”, but then, to its credit, the editor continues “…Our sense of happiness is created by many things that are not easily measured in pure economic terms, including a sense of community and purpose, the amount and content of our leisure and even our sense of the environmental and ecological stability of the world around us”. This is a draw, I really had no use for the remark about the “cynic”. I would rather have suggested “the uninformed”. Bhutan does not chase after increased GNP - period. It does not show such interest because the Royal House understands that with increased contacts with the outside world will come increased influence on its young people, and a lessening of its special cultural coherence. The simple truth is that Bhutan limits tourism which could have been a real money maker, because it knows that this will bring about cultural changes. Bhutan is a very conservative society and they want to keep it this way. The word “cynic” left me feel that the editor did not really understand Bhutan’s problems. But then, really, in all honesty, we do not talk here about Bhutan but about ourselves, and we must beware the words of the cynics by being truthful.

Next paragraph is more straightforward. “To talk about GNH may sound purely pie in the sky, partly because we have been taught to believe that happiness is essentially a personal emotion, not an attribute of a community or a country. But thinking of happiness as a quotient of cultural and environmental factors might help us understand the growing disconnect between America’s prosperity and American’s sense of well-being”. Now this points out correctly that the problem is with our contorted misunderstanding of our place in nature. We are the product of a religious belief that the creation was intended to serve us - this is very different from what Buddhism taught its adherents. Now we must unlearn the notion that God is in our contorted image in order to be able to continue life on earth. For those that believe that God was the creator, it is imperative to understand that man should not be allowed to become the terminator. In this respect the paragraph is correct.

I feel now that what I just said is in effect what the editorial also stresses in its last paragraph when it says: “The world looks the way it does - as if it is being devoured by some grievous species” - now this species is us - the humans who are destroying the world. The editor wants us to take into account - environmental, social, and cultural damage in calculations made by corporations and nations. That is an excellent conclusion.

A clearer understanding of what makes humans happy - not merely more eager consumers or more productive workers - might help begin to reshape the narrow economic assumptions that govern the behavior of corporations and nations - in a way that has a measurable and meliorating outcome on the lives we lead and the world we live in. This is a message to telegraph to Washington.