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Bhutan:

 

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 26th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 Brazil imports GNH from Bhutan.

25 November, 2008 - As Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) continues to draw international attention, its most recent destination is Brazil, one of the largest and most populous countries in South America.

Last month, when a team from Bhutan visited the country to attend a conference on GNH, they were greeted with an overwhelming response. GNH found its place in the hearts of Brazilians, or so the coordinators say.

“GNH seeds are planted in Brazil. Now we have to water it with care,” said a psychologist and educator Dr Susan Andrews, the founder of the Future Vision Ecological Park, who coordinates GNH in Brazil.

“There is a tremendous yearning in people’s hearts for an integrated solution to problems and GNH shows a systematic approach to all of them. People want to work together towards that,” said Dr Andrews, who was in the capital to attend the GNH conference scheduled to begin next week.

“More and more people in the world are material-oriented but there is also a yearning of the human soul beyond material possession, that’s why GNH has touched so many hearts,” she said.

According to her, Brazil today was becoming one of the superpowers in the world with vast resources of water, energy, food and forests, but had reached a threshold where they had to choose a path to follow.

“Will it follow USA where Gross National Product increased three times in the past 50 years but people are less happy? Where community vitality has been extremely degraded, number of people who don’t visit neighbours increased by four times, violence tripled, one in every 100 people jailed and one in every four people unhappy or depressed,” she said.

“Or should Brazil become like China, a country where a recent earthquake killed thousands of people but the count was less than the number, who died of respiratory diseases caused by pollution every year,” she said.

***


She said that one Chinese environment minister recently admitted that, even though their GNP increased by 10 percent every year, the same percentage was spent in cleaning environmental problems created by development every year, so there was no progress.

“Now is the time for Brazil to follow a new formula and GNH offers the most complete set of indicators for true progress,” she said, adding that even their mayors were interested to apply GNH in their cities and eagerly awaiting the GNH survey to be implemented in their areas.

She suggested that GNH, being a process of empowering people to do something for their own integrated progress, should come from within the people and not only from top-down.

“Here in Bhutan, many are talking about it but heard that only a few really understand it, so it’s important to involve Bhutanese people in the process,” said Dr Susan Andrews, who has plans to develop a Brazilian version of questionnaires and put them into practice as soon as she returns.

Meanwhile, she said Bhutanese had to be very aware that more people from outside were expecting a lot from them and really wanted to see Bhutan as a GNH country and that was a great responsibility.

“We hope you won’t disappoint us,” she told Kuensel.

By Kesang Dema
 kesang64 at kuensel.com.bt

Kuensel Newspaper - Brazil imports GNH from Bhutan
25 November, 2008 - As Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) continues to … in the capital to attend the GNH conference scheduled to begin next week. …
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Posted in Policy Lessons from Mad Cow Disease, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, UN Commission on Sustainable Development, Reporting from Washington DC, Canada, Global Warming issues, Real World's News, China, Green is Possible, European Union, Futurism, Asia & Australia, Japan, Bhutan, The US States

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 26th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

Looking at these figures, can we just say plainly that the people that run the economy just did not understand what they were doing or were plain crooks? Can we decide on this?
Can we also say that the politicians that made us feel we were living in a post-WWII paradise - ditto!

Can we conclude that unless we learn about SUSTAINABILITY and the concept of GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS - there is no chance to create a belief in a sound future? Will this mean that a new kind of Economy Science will have to be instituted and the folks running it will have to come from people with a background in real hard sciences rather then in what is regarded now as the soft social sciences. Not even the mathematicians that founded econometrics will do in this post-plunge era.

We lived in a garden of fools and the walls we built were a “fata morgana” construct.

« Three Day Rallies?
Another Crisis, Another Bailout »

Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks

By Barry Ritholtz - November 25th, 2008, 7:19AM

 http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/big…

Whenever I discussed the current bailout situation with people, I find they have a hard time comprehending the actual numbers involved. That became a problem while doing the research for the Bailout Nation book. I needed some way to put this into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

______________________________________________________________________

data courtesy of Bianco Research

>

That is $686 billion less than the cost of the credit crisis thus far.

The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II: Original Cost: $288 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion

The $4.6165 trillion dollars committed so far is about a trillion dollars ($979 billion dollars) greater than the entire cost of World War II borne by the United States: $3.6 trillion, adjusted for inflation (original cost was $288 billion).

Go figure: WWII was a relative bargain.

I estimate that by the time we get through 2010, the final bill may scale up to as much as $10 trillion dollars…

>

UPDATE:  November 25, 23008 10:34am

A few additional details:

-Well regarded Jim Bianco did the number crunching. The easiest method is to recalculate the numbers using  CPI data.  There are other ways to depict this — such as percentage of GDP, or on a per capita basis, or in terms of costs of common items (eggs, bread, big macs, etc.).

Bloomberg calculates the total amount the taxpayer is on the hook for is $7.76 trillion, or $24,000 for every man woman and child in the country. (Data breakdown is here)

Regardless, no matter you calculate it, we are talking about an ungodly amount of money.

###

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 25th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

OUR PLANET EARTH: Junk0 Edahiro -Asia’s first lady of the environment.
 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fe20…

By STEPHEN HESSE for Japan Times online.

If Barak Obama is serious about developing proactive environmental policies that are international is scope, he would do well to work closely with Japan.

Green queen: Junko Edahiro, translator of Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth,” is a champion of Asian environmentalism in her own right.

But for the inside scoop on Japan’s most creative initiatives, I suggest he bypass the bureaucrats and the prime minister. The person to talk to is Junko Edahiro.

***

Edahiro is widely known in Japan as the translator of Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth,” but that’s just one tip of her professional iceberg.

Besides translation, Edahiro, 46, is perhaps Japan’s most dynamic and prolific environmental writer and speaker, and a valued adviser to top corporations, civic organizations, local and national bureaucrats and the prime minister. She is also Executive Director of Japan for Sustainability (JFS), which oversees a network of more than 400 volunteers across Japan who search for environmental news and draft articles that are posted on the JFS Web site in Japanese and English.

In an interview earlier this month, Edahiro explained that she sees herself as an agent for environmental and societal change, her goal being to share information and translate awareness into action, both nationally and internationally.

Last month, for example, she was in China to address government leaders on the history of NGOs and civil society in Japan, but she also learned about encouraging changes taking place in Chinese environmental policy.

This week she is in Bhutan at the International Conference on Gross National Happiness (GNH), where participants are discussing alternative ways to quantify and measure economic activity, environmental health and human well-being, in contrast to the widely used, but myopic and outdated, Gross National Product (GNP).

Talking with Edahiro and Noriko Sakamoto, the JFS communications director, offers a refreshing glimpse of Japanese civil society. Too often in the past, Japanese NGOs have tended toward exclusiveness and self-absorption, hesitant to cooperate with others and more concerned about ideology than impact.

Edahiro and Sakamoto couldn’t be more different. Well aware of the daunting challenges facing Japan and the planet, they dedicate long hours to their work; but they are also upbeat and outward looking, laugh easily, and are driven by an empowering combination of idealism and pragmatism.

I last spoke with Edahiro in 2003, so I asked her how things have changed since then.

“In recent years, especially last year, there have been many changes, and what is going on in Japan is similar to what is going on in the world as a whole. Since the most recent U.N.-IPCC report on Climate Change was released, and following Al Gore’s movie (”An Inconvenient Truth”), awareness among the general public and politicians is increasing,” she said.

“The Government of Japan does not usually take the lead, but they are very good at following suit. Many Japanese companies, too, are finding that the rules defining competitiveness are changing, so government and corporations are gradually changing,” she added.

Edahiro noted that corporate environmental activity used to be limited to philanthropy, but environmental action is now becoming a core part of corporate culture. “The bottom line has changed, especially for companies that are involved in overseas operations,” she said.

Change comes more slowly to domestic firms, but she was pleased to see a variety of interesting initiatives surfacing in local markets, particularly in the banking and finance sectors.

“Small banks are very eager to help local companies reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions. For example, some banks are offering special reduced-rate loans to help businesses invest in emissions reductions. Others, such as Shiga Bank and Biwako Bank, are offering savings accounts with interest rates that rise as reductions are made in community CO2 emissions. Similarly, other banks are tying higher interest rates to reductions in the amount of garbage generated by the community,” she said.

At the local-government level, Edahiro noted the use of incentives in Nagoya City to get city employees to ride bicycles rather than drive. While car drivers are paid a flat rate monthly for travel expenses, bicycle riders are paid a variable rate that begins higher than cars and rises with the number of kilometers traveled. As of 2003, car use was down 25 percent, bicycle riding up 50 percent.

(For more information on these and other initiatives across Japan, visit the JFS Web site  www.japanfs.org), scroll down to the index in the right-hand margin, then search more than a dozen topic choices, from energy and transportation to manufacturing industry and NGO/citizen activities.)

Hundreds of volunteers scattered across Japan are the eyes and ears of JFS, providing information on these and other local initiatives from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

This enviable grassroots network, providing Edahiro with a unique perspective on Japan’s environmental landscape, has not been entirely lost on the central government.

Last February, former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda appointed 12 individuals from various fields to serve on an advisory committee, the so-called Panel on a Low-Carbon Society, in an effort to address the problems of global warming and climate change. Edahiro was selected to represent Japanese civil society and now sits on the panel with representatives from Toyota, Japan Steel, TEPCO and academia.

Edahiro believes that the appointment is proof that the government is finally opening its doors, however little, to direct cooperation with civil society. “To put someone like me on a panel at this level would have been unthinkable just three or four years ago. It reflects change at the highest level,” Edahiro noted.

As one government official confided to her, working with NGO people in the past has been difficult because they tended to be quite confrontational. Edahiro hopes that by listening and discussing problems and solutions in a more cooperative spirit, she and representatives of government and industry can find shared goals and means to achieve those goals.

Recently she was even invited to speak at an annual training seminar offered to executives of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation and Tourism — the ministry that sits at the heart of Japan’s concrete and construction culture. This is the first time an environmentalist has been asked to address the executives, according to Edahiro, and represents a symbolic step forward in awareness.

However, the real problem in Japan is not awareness. Surveys consistently show the Japanese are well aware of environmental problems — as much as 96 percent of the population is concerned about global warming and climate change. Edahiro attributes this high level of shared concern to Japan’s homogeneity.

The challenge now, for Edahiro and JFS, is to convert awareness into sustained action.

JFS is a nonprofit organization established in 2002 to share Japan’s societal and environmental progress with the wider world. Its Web site is bilingual, it distributes weekly digests and monthly newsletters to more than 7,000 subscribers in 179 countries and it invites foreign researchers to speak in Japan.

Edahiro shares oversight of JFS with a brains trust of colleagues that includes co-CEO Hiroyuki Tada, 47, General Manager Riichiro Oda, 41, and Manager Kazunori Kobayashi, 32. However, the day-to-day operations are in the hands of just two full-time office employees: Sakamoto and Nobuko Saigusa, the JFS general administrator and accountant.

Other staff include a Web-site administrator, an information administrator and project staff in charge of the Daiwa-JFS Sustainability College research and educational programs.

At JFS, however, size belies impact.

Asked about the future, Edahiro has her sights set on taking JFS to the regional level. “I’m hoping that in the future we can shift from JFS to AFS — Asia for Sustainability — then to WFS, or World for Sustainability. First, though, we would like to create a platform so that other Asian countries, such as Korea and China, can send out their information to the world in English,” she said.

Last month, she took part in a conference in China titled “Learning from Japan,” which was sponsored by the Chinese Government and supported by Hitachi Corporation. Other Japanese speakers were from government, academia and Hitachi, with Edahiro representing the NGO sector.

Her talk on the development of civil society in Japan was well received by Chinese officials, and she feels they appreciate that cooperation among government, industry and citizens is key for progress on environmental issues.

She also spoke informally with officials about the importance of information dissemination and was very impressed by the ambitious goals China is setting for energy efficiency and for the introduction of renewable energies, “a goal much higher than Japan’s,” she said.

Another initiative that impressed Edahiro was a change in the government’s policy for civil servant promotions. Traditionally, central government officials would be promoted after being sent to work in local areas. In the past, the sole criteria for evaluation, and promotion, was economic growth in the local region.

That is changing. Now environmental criteria are being included, such as better energy efficiency and water quality. If a civil servant does not show progress on these criteria, despite good economic performance, the chance for a promotion to a prestigious central government position is lost, says Edahiro.

Even more exciting for Edahiro, Chinese officials agreed to let JFS publish the contents of their discussions with her.

With Asia for Sustainability on the horizon, Edahiro is even more focused on the biggest challenge of all: translating widespread awareness into widespread action. Being a translator, it’s a challenge to which Edahiro is perfectly suited.

Stephen Hesse can be contacted at  stevehesse at hotmail.com

—————–

Japan for Sustainability (JFS), established in 2002, is a non-profit organization providing information on developments and activities in Japan that lead toward sustainability.


Junko Edahiro
Environmental Journalist
Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive, Japan for Sustainability (JFS)
Founder and President, e’s Inc.
Co-Founder and Chairperson, Change Agent, Inc.
Visiting researcher, Research into Artifacts, the Center for Engineering (RACE) at the University of Tokyo
Member of International Sustainability Innovation Council of Switzerland(ISIS).
Translator

Junko Edahiro was born in 1962 in Kyoto, Japan. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Education and a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Tokyo.

At the age of 29 years old she set her goal to become a simultaneous interpreter, and started learning English from scratch. Within a few years, she transformed herself into a simultaneous interpreter and a translator from otherwise deemed as an “ordinary housewife.” Later, she published a book titled Anything Is Possible If You Wake Up at 2 A.M. and wrote her own stories about this transformation. It became a national best seller and is very popular among those ordinary people with hidden aspirations.

In 1993 she was inspired to work in the environmental arena after her encounter with Lester R. Brown, then-President of the World Watch Institute and a renowned thinker and writer on environmental and global issues. As an interpreter and translator, she has interpreted at many international meetings, lectures, and seminars on the environmental subjects and has translated several books on the environment and sustainability, including Revolution for Eco Economy by Lester Brown, Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update by Donnela Meadows, et al., and Believing in Casandra by Alan Atkisson.

As she has built the more experiences in the environmental field, she became an environmental journalist and has started writing and speaking with her own ideas and words. In 1998 she started a list serve which passes on information on the state of the global environment and initiatives of sustainability development worldwide, which attracts over 7,500 subscribers from government, industrial and civil sectors. She has written several books, including How to Fix the Earth published in 2005 and intended for business people and policy makers. She also has delivered hundreds of lectures and speeches on the environment, sustainability, corporate social responsibility and corporate communication. She is regularly on TV and Radio shows on topics of the environment.

She also invites prominent opinion leaders from the U.S. and Europe, and presides several networking events, which attracts hundreds of business people, policy makers, researchers, and concerned citizens. With these activities, she is deemed as an icon figure of networking across different sectors.

In 2002, along with other collaborators, she founded Japan for Sustainability (JFS), a non-profit environmental communication platform, which provides information on Japan’s activities promoting sustainability on the website  www.japanfs.org) and publishes weekly digests and monthly newsletters to over 7,000 subscribers in 179 countries.
She is also an initiator of the Candle Night campaign  www.candle-night.org), in which over five millions of people join to turn lights off in the night of the summer and winter solstices to think about the environment and peace.

From 2003 to 2005, she founded three companies, all related to sustainability in one way or the other. e’s Inc. sells eco-products and supports those who would like to transform themselves. Eco Networks, Inc. provides translation and consulting services and help Japanese corporations to conduct effective communication on sustainability and CSR. The other company is named Change Agent, Inc. (www.change-agent.jp), and it provides consulting and education services, with tools such as visioning, systems thinking, communication and management systems.

She has been chosen as a most successful career woman by Nikkei Career Women magazine in 2003. She has been selected as one of the “100 Planet Earth Lovers” at the World Expo 2005 held in Aichi, Japan.
——————

The Fourth International Conference on Gross National Happiness will be held 24-26 November 2008 in Thimphu, Bhutan.

The official announcement can be downloaded from www.bhutanstudies.org.bt

###

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 31st, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 asia001.jpg


Asia-EU Summit to Address ‘Financial Tsunami.’

Analysis by Antoaneta Bezlova, IPS, October 23, 2008

BEIJING, Oct 22 (IPS) - Cast in the role of global saviour in the unfolding financial turmoil, China is playing host to a meeting of Asian and European leaders in Beijing this week that is expected to castigate the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism and press for a reshaped global economic order.

“Can Asia be global economy’s best hope,” asked an editorial in the Economic Observer last week. Noting that Asia hardly played any role during the global economic recovery after the Great Depression of 1929, the paper suggested that the continent’s established and emerging economies constituted the world’s best chance for recovery after the “financial tsunami”.

“And even if the Wall Street demise does not instantly signify the triumph of Mahathir’s Asian model, it is the beginning of a much-needed readjustment of economic power in the world,” it concluded.

More than 40 leaders will converge in the Chinese capital for the 7th Asian European Meeting (ASEM) summit from Oct. 24 to 25 to discuss the global financial crisis and a plan for joint action.

Aside from the 27 EU countries, 10 ASEAN countries, the European Commission, China, Japan and South Korea, the summit will be attended by three other Asian countries — India, Pakistan and Mongolia. The talks will be co-chaired by France, which holds the European Union’s presidency, and China.

***

“China maintains that the international community should strengthen cooperation and jointly handle the current financial crisis on the basis of equal consultation,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in Beijing on Tuesday. But he warned that “developing countries’ interests and concerns should be fully respected and safeguarded.”

China — a major emerging economy which sits on 1.8 trillion US dollars worth of foreign exchange reserves — has been looked upon as an important player to lead the way out of the global financial meltdown.

U.S. Treasury Department officials and politicians have all called on Beijing to show a pro-active attitude and join efforts with the Western world to fight the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Qin Gang said Beijing had adopted a “responsible and constructive attitude” in dealing with the crisis. But few details have emerged over the role China is expected to play. Latest economic figures show that the country’s economy is also vulnerable to the effects of the global economic slowdown.

The National Statistics Bureau said on Monday the economy expanded by just nine percent in the third quarter, the slowest rate in five years. By comparison, the economy grew 10.6 percent in the first quarter and 10.1 in the second quarter of 2008. The slowdown was blamed on plummeting demand for Chinese goods as consumers in the U.S. and Europe cut back on spending.

In recent weeks Beijing has grown more critical over the lack of financial surveillance in developed economies, which it blames for the spiralling crisis. The deputy governor of China’s central bank, Yi Gang, who took part in the emergency G20 meeting in Washington earlier this month, chastised the International Monetary Fund for allowing too much leverage in the system and failing to exert control of big Western financial institutions.

He told the media that “weak financial-policy discipline resulted in excess global liquidity and disorderly capital flows”. The line has been echoed in a numerous articles and columns in the Chinese media attempting to dissect the reasons for the downfall of Wall Street powerhouses. Some have sung an “eulogy to U.S. capitalism” while others have proclaimed the end of the “era of Washington consensus”.

But there has been less certainty about what would replace the current order of international capitalism. “The demise of Wall Street Anglo-Saxon model doesn’t signify the victory of China’s financial modus operandi,” said a commentary in the 21st Century Economic Herald.

“Even as we criticise Wall Street’s excesses, we should be aware that China’s model of financial operation is not necessarily the answer,” it said. “True, Chinese banks are stable and they don’t pursue excessive profits blindly. But they are far from free from red tape and administrative interference.”

According to Qin Gang the ASEM summit offers the “perfect platform” for leaders to discuss ways of dealing with the crisis.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has proposed a global system of financial supervision that would empower international bodies including the International Monetary fund to monitor global markets and act as early warning systems. French President Nicolas Sarkozy — one of the summit’s coordinators — has pledged to use the meeting as a platform to persuade Asian nations to take part in a plan for the rebuilding of international capitalism.

“What has happened is an act of treason against the values of capitalism; it is not a result of the market economy,” said Sarkozy during a speech Tuesday at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

“The most simple solution” for the global summits would be to bring the G8 (group of eight) largest industrialised nations together with the five biggest emerging economies, led by China and India, he told European politicians.

Chinese analysts anticipate that the summit may produce an agreement for the establishment of a joint trust fund between Asia and Europe, similar to the one launched during the second ASEM summit in London in 1998, to combat the Asian financial crisis.

—————

The update comes October 31, 2008 to the original posting of October 25, 2008 and it deals specifically with the place of Mongolia in all of the above. This because of a breakfast meeting at the Asia Society in New York today, October 31, 2008 - the traditional Halloween day, and I will mention after a few further lines why I say this.

The meeting today had the title - Mongolia Rising: The Incredible and Continuing Story of Mongolia’s Emergence as a Free Market Democracy.

At the breakfast meeting spoke the US Ambassador to Mongolia, Mr. Mark C. Minton, and in the audience sat also Ambassador Ms. Enkhtsetseg Ochir, the Permanent Representative of Mongolia to the UN. Jamie F. Metzl, the Exec. VP of Asia Society chaired.

Strangely, when I looked up the website of the Asia Society, I found that on October 31, 2005  The Asia Society  Washington DC Center had a meeting on Mongolia. Here the strange coincidence of the Halloween date repeating itself exactly three years later and my possibility to compare the progress of relations between the US and Mongolia in the last three years - to the date.

The information from 2005 - http://www.asiasociety.org/speeches/us-m…

Strangely, already at that first meeting there was a reference to Halloween, but that was a very serious meeting - “US-Mongolia Relations: History and Future Prospects.” That meeting, according to the pdf had a large cast of Ambassadors participating, including Tony Lake, and it was arranged before President Bush trip to Mongolia - the first Summit of a US President with a Mongolian President. Since then there was a return visit - a Summit of the presidents in the Washington DC White House in 2007.

Mr. Mark Minton, a career member of the US Foreign Service got to UlaanBataar in December 2006 after having served in Korea and Japan, so he was in Mongolia for the last two years of the US- Mongolia rapprochement.

So why Mongolia? It is a country, the size of Alaska, of 3 million people, and 45% live now in the capital area urban environment. Culturally they are close to Tibet and are of the same religious belief as the Tibetan Buddhism, thus I would assume also close culturally to Bhutan, but they were a nomadic people.

In the 20th century that brushed with Soviets, Chinese and Japanese occupation and are fiercely intent on preserving their freedom. Being geographically wedged in between China and Russia, they want that “third neighbor” that geography did not give them. So thy go the long distance and want the US as their third neighbor. To reach the US they developed their democracy so they can interact with countries beyond their two immediate neighbors. They reorganized their army as a peace making army and they participate in UN peace missions like Sierra Leone, and with the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. in exchange the US established an AID program involved in preventive health care and in construction workers education as the transformation from the nomadic lifestyle created needs for new skills in the housing sector; further the US Peace Corps are active in Mongolia - it is actually the largest per capita Peace Corps location. But obviously the US does not have Mongolia to itself, the Japanese foreign aid is the largest in Mongolia and the EU, Australia, and Canada are also active.

Democratization made large progress - there is transparency, a judiciary, there are elections and they have a market economy and the leaders are involved in diplomacy. They are visited often by the Dalai Lama and the university is in exchange with the University of Alaska.

Obviously, the US is interested in Mongolia’s mineral resources - so is China. Peabody Coal and Rio Tinto International are active in Mongolia. Hilton International opened this year. Mongolia is becoming a middle income country. It is landlocked but is starting to take advantage from its location by becoming a country of transit between China and Russia.

In the democracy department there was a blemish recently when after the summer elections there were riots. The Ambassador explained those as inexperience because they have an army but not good police service. The fact was that the army, that was trained for peace work, did not know how to act when called in after the opposition protests about the elections. The authorities panicked and the army was inefficient.

An adviser to Nature Conservancy criticised the ambassador as he said nothing about the environmental problems and the mining industry. Further there are issues resulting from foreigners buying up grazing land for meet production and farming.

The nuclear issue came up as Mongolia wants to be part of the six Party talks on North Korea programs. Further, what was not mentioned is that Mongolia declared its nuclear-weapon-free status. In effect I have in front of me UN General Assembly document A/c.1/63/L.28 where Kazakhstan, Morocco, and Mongolia brought up together Mongolia’s rejection of nuclear weapons. Also, in recognition of their specific situation, Japan let Mongolia host one of the six-Party talks commissions.

Japan is also looking into the problem with desert dust from Mongolia reaching Japan.

From all this material, what is China doing when insisting in bringing in Mongolia to the meeting they hosted between the 27 EU countries and the four major Asian economies, when besides Japan, India and Korea, they also invited Pakistan and Mongolia? We understood Pakistan as sort of balance to India, but now we also figure that bringing in Mongolia has more to do with trying to redirect this country towards Europe and weakening a runaway relationship with the US directly, or via Japan.

The bottom line is that because of size and economic potential, Mongolia is a country with much higher importance then it might be assumed from the mere 3 million people. China night then want to keep it in its own orbit and to guard it from  “third neighbors’” exaggerated footholds.

###

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 8th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org www.happyplanetindex.org

screenshot_2.png

Download the reports
Download the Happy Planet report (2006, pdf)
Download the European Happy Planet report (2007, pdf)

See the Global HPI map:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 5th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)


Why your happiness matters to the planet: Surveys and research link true happiness to a smaller footprint on the ecology.

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor / July 22, 2008
From New York, Reporter Moises Velasquez-Manoff discusses the correlations between happiness, material goods, and ecological footprints.

Overall, people around the world have grown happier during the past 25 years - this according to the most recent World Values Survey (WVS), a periodic assessment of happiness in 97 nations.

On average, people describing themselves as “very happy” have increased by nearly 7 percent. The findings seem to contradict the view, held by some, that national happiness levels are more or less fixed.

The report’s authors attribute rising world happiness to improved economies, greater democratization, and increased social tolerance in many nations. Along with material stability, freedom to live as one pleases is a major factor in subjective well-being, they say.

But the survey, based at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor, also underscore that, beyond a certain point, material wealth doesn’t boost happiness.

The United States, which ranked 16th, and has the world’s largest economy, has largely stalled in happiness gains – this despite ever more buying power.

Americans are now twice as rich as they were in 1950, but no happier, according to the survey.

Other rich countries, the United Kingdom and western Germany among them, show downward happiness trends. For psychologists and environmentalists alike, these observations prompt a profound question. Rich countries consume the lion’s share of world resources.

Overconsumption is a major factor in environmental degradation, global warming chief among them.

Could a wrong-headed approach to seeking happiness, then, be exacerbating some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems? And could learning to be truly content help mitigate them?

In the past decade, a cadre of psychologists has directed its attention away from determining what’s wrong with the infirm toward quantifying what’s right with the healthy. They’ve christened this new field “positive psychology,” and what they’re discovering perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprising. At the core, humans are social beings. While food and shelter are absolutely essential to well-being, once these basic needs are fulfilled, engagement with other human beings makes people happiest.

For Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the problem in the US is not consumption per se, but that as a society we consume in ways that don’t make us happy. He divides the pursuit of happiness into three categories: seeking positive emotion, or feeling good; engagement with others; and meaning, or participating in something larger than oneself.

People, he notes, are often happiest when helping other people, when engaged in “self-transcendent” activities. What does this mean?

Rather than making a gift of the latest iPhone, buy someone dancing lessons, he says. Instead of taking a resort vacation, build a house with Habitat for Humanity.

“The pursuit of engagement and the pursuit of meaning don’t habituate,” he says, whereas trying to feel good is like eating French vanilla ice cream: The first bite is fantastic; the tenth tastes like cardboard.

By definition, happiness is subjective. And yet, scientists find measurable differences in people who describe themselves as happy. They’re more productive at work. They learn more quickly. Strong social networks – a large predictor of happiness – also have health effects, researchers say.

One study found that belonging to clubs or societies cut in half members’ risk of dying during the following year. Another found that, when exposed to a cold virus, children with stronger social networks fell ill only one-quarter as often as those without.

For psychologists, social networks explain one of the seeming paradoxes of WVS findings: While relatively rich Denmark took the top spot, much less wealthy Puerto Rico and Colombias are second and third. In fact, relatively poor Latin America countries often score high on WVS rankings. This may underline the value of community, family, and strong social institutions to well-being.

Scientists say this need for community may be a result of humanity’s long evolution in groups. Living together conferred an advantage, they say. In the hunter-gatherer world, relatedness, autonomy, curiosity, and competence – the very things that psychologists find make people happy – “had payoffs that were pretty clear,” says Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester in New York. “Aspiring for a lot of material goods is actually unhappiness-producing,” he says. “People who value material good and wealth also are people who are treading more heavily on the earth – and not getting happier.”

High consumption fails to make us happy, and it comes at a cost. According to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) 2006 Living Planet Report, humanity’s ecological footprint now exceeds earth’s capacity to regenerate by about 25 percent.

Furthermore, with only 5 percent of the world’s population, North America accounts for 22 percent of this footprint. The US consumes twice what its land, air, and water can sustain. (By contrast, WWF calculates that Africa, with 13 percent of earth’s population, accounts for 7 percent of its footprint.) America’s outsize footprint results in part from its appetite for stuff – what psychologists now say is the wrong approach to lasting well-being.

“The pursuit of happiness can drive environmental degradation, but only a degraded type of happiness pursuit leads to that outcome,” says Kennon Sheldon, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in an e-mail. “The standard western focus upon economic utility as the highest good (exemplified by the US) seems to encourage that kind of degraded pursuit.”

Worse, so-called “extrinsic” values (wealth, power, fame), as opposed to “intrinsic” values (adventure, engagement, meaning), seem to go hand-in-hand with more environmentally destructive behavior.

Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has found that people who are more extrinsically oriented tend to ride bikes less, buy second-hand less, and recycle less.

Nations with more individualistic and materialistic values also tend to be more ecologically destructive.

“The choice of sustainability is very consistent with a happier life,” Professor Kasser says. “Whereas the choice to live with materialistic [values] is a choice to be less happy.”

The idea that what’s good for humanity is also good for the planet is central to environmentalist Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy.” His prescriptions for lowering carbon emissions – living closer together, relocalizing food production, consuming less – line up with what psychologists say promotes happiness.

In fact, although painful in the short term, high fuel prices may result in happier Americans in the long run, says Mr. McKib ben. This year, Americans drove less than they did the year before – probably for the first time since the car was invented, he says. They also bought double the vegetable seeds this year compared with last. “These are signs of a new world,” he says by e-mail.

For their part, psychologists are advocating that policymakers use indicators other than the Gross National Product (GNP) to make decisions. What’s the purpose of an economy, they ask, if not to enhance the well-being of its citizenry?

“It’s because growth for growth sake” says Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Well-beong at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in London. It’s got its own internal logic, but it’s not serving humanity. So why are we doing it?”

Bhutan uses Gross National Happiness as a measure of its success. Although small and undeveloped, the largely Buddhist nation is the happiest in Asia, according to BusinessWeek.



Psychologists also have specific recommendations to promote national happiness, based on their findings about what makes people happy. Insecurity fosters a materialistic approach to life, they say. Policies that combat insecurity – universal healthcare, say, or good, affordable education – promote happiness. Many link social policies like these to Scandinavian nations’ consistently high happiness rankings.

Kasser has more ideas: Limit – and tax – advertising, he says. To promote consumption, ads foster insecurity, he says. That hinders self-acceptance, which is another predictor of lasting well-being.

NEF’s Happy Planet Index (HPI), meanwhile, has developed a new measure of a nation’s success. How efficiently does it generate happiness? HPI takes a country’s happiness and average life span and divides it by its ecological impact to measure how much it spent in achieving its well-being. On this scale, the Pacific archipelago nation of Vanatu comes in first place, Colombia second. Germany is twice as efficient at producing happiness as the US, which ranks 150th by that measure. Russia, with its low happiness scores and relatively low life expectancy, is 178th. And Zimbabwe, plagued by poverty and political turmoil, is the least efficient at producing happiness on Earth.

How The HPI is calculated:

The HPI reflects the average years of happy life produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of planetary resources consumed.

Put another way, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.
The Global HPI incorporates three separate indicators: ecological footprint, life-satisfaction and life expectancy. Conceptually, it is straight forward and intuitive:

HPI = [ (Life satisfaction x Life expectancy) /(Ecological Footprint + α) ] x ß

(For details of how alpha and beta are calculated, see the appendix in the full Happy Planet Index report)

The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org www.happyplanetindex.org

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Download the reports
Download the Happy Planet report (2006, pdf)
Download the European Happy Planet report (2007, pdf)

See the Global HPI map:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm

The article appeared in The Christian Science Monitor - http://features.csmonitor.com/environmen…

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It’s not genetics that makes Danes happy and Russians gloomy, according to the World Values Survey which, for thirty years, has been sending out questionnaires to people in 95 countries to ”know how others experience the world”. (NEWSCOM)