- There's this statistic that's been called by some commentators, the most important statistic in human history, quote unquote, that's what's been said about gross domestic product, GDP.

So what makes it the most important statistic in human history?

What is it?

It actually reflects the total economic output of a country.

How much a country produces, how much economic activity there is for a pay.

In other words, every time we produce something that's sold, every time we earn income, every time we spend a dollar or a euro, whatever we are spending, that registers in GDP.

If you just use GDP for the purpose that it was intended for total, market output done for pay, no problem.

But the fact that it's misused as a measure of progress has been a catastrophe for human society, for the planet, deforestation, overfishing in the oceans, the loss of species, the loss of habitat on which those species depend, the growing gap between rich and poor.

You could say that in some way, all those are a function of, or very closely related to this misuse of GDP as if it were a measure of wellbeing and progress.

Once we understand what's missing in GDP in terms of measuring wellbeing and progress, then there's no obstacle to constructing a better measure of progress.

And that's what led us to this work to construct a genuine progress index.

(pensive instrumental music) - The GDP model has brought the most intelligent species on the planet to the verge of extinction.

Together with all other forms of life.

(violin music) - [Interviewer] It was the time of the global pandemic.

Ron Tashi Colman is my friend, and I hadn't seen him in a while, so I was surprised to run into him at the Halifax Farmer's Market.

Turns out he had just come out of quarantine after returning to Nova Scotia from India and Bhutan.

- This, okay.

- But I want you to tell me what's as good as that one.

- Ooh.

- [Ronald] We had worked together in the past and share the same concerns about where our world is headed.

I had often thought of making a film with him about his ideas for a new way of measuring the wellbeing of our societies.

Now, it seemed like the time to get started.

In fact, given the state of the planet vital, we had a lot to catch up on.

So I was in India when the pandemic hit, and of course, in the midst of all the anxiety and fear.

Delhi is ranked the most polluted city, capital city in the world.

Delhi suddenly had clean air.

It was the first time in people's memory that the air quality index actually registered good.

The first time people saw blue skies.

And I heard people were having these extraordinary experiences, people who lived in the Punjab, they would look out and for the first time in their lives, they actually saw the Himalayas.

And this experience in India was replicated in many places in the world.

So the fact that the economy was forced to grind to a halt, the fact that traffic stopped, air travel stopped, the economy basically shut down, factories closed.

You can't ignore the fact that it gave the environment a little bit of a reprieve.

People actually tasted what good air could feel like, could be like.

Not that we would choose that, I mean, the suffering that went with all of that we know is immense.

So no one's advocating such a drastic measure that's creating a lot of suffering, sickness, economic loss.

But it graphically demonstrated to us the impact of the economy on the environment.

And it potentially showed us a new way forward.

I mean, the question could be asked for the first time, oh, could we emerge from this in a different way?

Could we actually come out of this crisis in a way that keeps the air clean?

Do we have to crank up the old system, or is there another way?

In September, I came back to Nova Scotia, and what I saw actually moved me, it really touched me quite deeply, and it reminded me of why back in 1990s, I thought, "Oh, this would be a good place to experiment with the government actually potentially adopting the genuine progress index."

Some sense of social cohesion, that there was some palpable sense of we're all in this together.

- [Interviewer] About six months before you came back, all over the world, particularly the western world, there was a march organized by young people, mostly young women in Halifax, but there were marches everywhere.

And what did you think of it at the time?

- At last, our children were speaking up and saying, no, we're not gonna accept this.

And it was a spark of light to me.

I said, "Oh, there's actually, there's a chance."

And it really, it was almost like the first glimmer of light I'd had in such a long time.

Policy makers had disappointed me.

Journalists had disappointed me.

(people chanting) I was getting more and more literally despairing the fact that the window of opportunity for action was closing so rapidly.

Greta had a big impact on me.

It moved me very, very deeply.

I started watching whatever she was saying, wherever she said, I found tears coming to my eyes.

- You are failing us.

But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.

Entire ecosystems are collapsing.

We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and the fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

How dare you?

(audience clapping) (people chanting) - It was quite despairing about the stubbornness of the adherence to the old, the narrow market economy syndrome, the GDP, the economic growth of all costs.

I think that over the years, watching the scientific evidence being ignored.

I think that actually we've been mistakenly all these years working on the Genuine Progress Index.

I've been mistaken, I take personal responsibility.

We'd been aiming at the wrong audience.

We thought that we could change the minds of policy makers.

We thought we could somehow influence the policy arena.

And that's where we were aiming all of our efforts.

And those hopes have been relentlessly disappointed.

- We have to acknowledge that we have failed.

All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness.

But homo sapiens have not yet failed.

- Our generation has failed, I have to say that.

We got so wedded to our lifestyles that we've acted irresponsibly.

This is a moment when the generations could come together.

So that whole attitude, whatever you want to call it, whatever labels you put on it, patriarchal, capitalist, self-centered, selfish, how individualistic, whatever labels you want to put on it, it's had its time.

It has failed to take care of our basic environment, our basic ecology, what we need to survive as a species.

- Now, it's a very great honor to have with us tonight, Dr.

Ron Colman.

Ron has made an enormous contribution to some of the most important tasks that we face in this province, nationally and globally.

That is rethinking how we measure prosperity, wellbeing, or progress.

And even more fundamentally than that, rethinking what we mean by these terms of wellbeing, prosperity, and progress.

And I think the title of his new book sums it up very well, "What really counts".

So please join me in welcoming Ron Colman.

(audience clapping) - So I'm very, very happy to be here this evening at Dalhousie University, and particularly with you, because quite honestly, all my work convinces me that the only chance that the planet and the human species has is you.

I would trust a finance minister who has never studied economics over one with a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

I mean that, because economists have been drawn into this paradigm, which is fundamentally flawed.

And the policies we get from the Harvard trained PhDs in economics are the ones that are destroying the earth.

It's time to reflect that other economic systems like slavery, feudalism have come and gone, why assume that this one that we call capitalism should last forever?

Can we use our best expertise, all that you are learning here, to actually create the foundations to forge the new economic paradigm that the world so truly needs?

Well, the first line of the prologue to the book at the very beginning says, "In 1965, I dropped out of Economics 101."

And I think in some way that's a theme for me.

There's a reason for starting the book that way.

I think most people are... Most people are bamboozled by economics.

The language that economists talk, the way it's reported.

Most people don't really know what gross domestic product is or how it's, what it's made of, or how it's compiled or what its relation is to their lives.

That's the main thing, what does the economy exist for?

It exists for social wellbeing, for the benefit of society.

It's not just a system unto itself for the benefit of those who profit from it.

That's not the goal of an economy.

The purpose of an economy is to create social benefit.

So the gap between rich and poor, somehow it gets sidelined or ignored in conventional economics.

Conventional economics, amazingly, depends so much on averages.

When you hear reports, gross domestic product per capita, per capita income, all of those are averages.

So the rich getting insanely rich could pull the averages up even while most people are getting poorer.

The average can look just fine.

There's a longstanding joke among statisticians that if you have your head in the refrigerator and put your feet in the oven, then on average your body temperature's just fine.

- [Interviewer] So this is an average condition?

- On the average, I'm fine.

I would go so far as to say that the way economics is taught in universities, the way economics textbooks are written is largely wrong, it's faulty.

You sometimes see in economics textbooks these models of firms produce, households consume, households provide labor to firms, firms provide products to consumers and so on, as if the economy is a closed box.

As if the economy has its own rules and functions according to its own, somehow what Adam Smith called, maybe invisible hand.

So what's wrong with this?

First of all, it ignores it.

The economy is totally dependent on nature.

It's dependent on the flow of natural resources from the environment.

Without metals, without timber, without oil, without energy, without the sun, without the wind, without the soil to grow our food, there's no economy, there's no life.

And it dumps its wastes, including greenhouse gas emissions, but also plastics into the oceans.

It dumps its wastes back into that environment.

So the relationship, the fundamental structural relationship between the economy as a system and the encompassing environment is missing.

In 1763, King George gave the people of Halifax, what's known as the Halifax Common, which even today it's the oldest public park in all of Canada, the oldest urban public park.

It's questionable whether it was his to give, after all, this was indigenous land.

Today, the Halifax common is about 20% of that area.

Some of it's been used for public institutions, some of it's been sold off to private developers for residential and commercial development.

20% of it has become parking garages, but we still have a precious corner of it left.

So the Halifax common today is a fraction of the size that it was 250 years ago.

Now, this piece of land is interesting.

This was also public land, this was the site of the St.

Patrick's High School, which closed down some years ago.

And there was a public consultation, what to do with this piece of land.

And by and large, the public greatly favored its use for public and common purposes, and particularly strong with the voices for a community urban garden, the Urban Roots Garden.

Last year in a Halifax regional municipality sold off this land for $37.6 million to a private developer.

This area was conveniently rezoned to allow a tower up to 28 stories high.

And of course, you know, in our conventional economic measures, all of that counts as progress.

But that's only because our conventional economic measures don't count the value of green space or the enjoyment of the public in common land.

The gardens have cropped up anyway, people have built their gardens.

And not only the gardens, but actually the wild flowers have invaded as well.

In a way, nature and the public have spoken.

Many historians actually say that the mark of the birth of capitalism was the enclosure movement of the 18th century in particular.

Actually 10 years after King George gave the Halifax Common.

The British Parliament passed the Enclosure Act, was one of several enclosure acts, permitting landlords to force the peasants off the land to enclose the common land and turn it into commercial agriculture.

And that commercial agriculture that grew as a result of the enclosures has been really taken as the birth of this economic system.

The enclosures did not go unchallenged.

People were forced off the land into the cities.

They became the new urban working class, working in the new factories that were springing up.

So it was also protested.

People did not simply accept it.

And interestingly enough, about 250 years ago, this song was written, and it's remarkable that for the last two years, this 18th century song has graced this public space, which is now being sold to private developers.

But this song is as relevant today as it was 250 years ago.

♪ The law locks up the man or woman ♪ ♪ Who steals the goose from off the common ♪ ♪ But leaves the greater villain loose ♪ ♪ Who steals the common from off the goose ♪ - And geese will steal a common lack till they go and steal it back.

The enclosure of the Halifax Common is symbolic of a much larger ill of this present economic system.

And that is the enclosure or privatization, commercialization of the global commons.

After all, the commons are also our air, our water, our forests, our soils, our oceans.

This is the common inheritance, not just of the human species, but of of all species inhabiting this earth.

(bombs exploding) In 1944, at the end of the Second World War, at Bretton Woods, the Allied Powers came together to create the fundamentals and institutions of our present economic system.

The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund.

The gross national product, became the standard way for measuring economic progress.

- [Narrator] Delegates to this monetary and financial conference pose on the hotel lawn.

These meetings are designed to promote trade in the post-war world and to create a foundation for lasting peace.

- They might be excused, because at that point we didn't yet have the knowledge of the economy's impact on the natural world.

We didn't yet know that we could actually fish ocean species to extinction.

We didn't know that we could deplete natural resources to the point where they won't come back.

We didn't know that we were actually destroying species at 1,000 times the natural rate.

We didn't know in those days that human economic activity could change the climate of the planet Earth.

So in those days, there was an excuse.

I'm not blaming the people who came up with the present economic paradigm or wrote the economics textbooks back then.

It's just that now we know better.

We have to begin to ask the question, does capitalism depend on endless economic growth?

- On Thursday, we received a report on our gross domestic product or GDP.

This is an important measure of our economy as a whole.

One that tells us how much we are producing and how much businesses and families are earning.

We learned that the economy grew for the first time in more than a year.

(speaking in Chinese) - Over the past 40 years, China's GDP has averaged an annual growth rate of around 9.5%.

People have emerged from a life of shortages and poverty, are now enjoying abundant supply and a moderately prosperous life.

(speaking in Russian) - And I am thrilled to announce that in the second quarter of this year, the United States economy grew at the amazing rate of 4.1%, we are on track- - It's almost sacrilegious to doubt economic growth.

And it's so interesting that that's a consensus across the political spectrum.

Democrat, Republican, even so-called communist leaders like Xi Jinping, everyone touts growth of GDP as if it's an absolute belief, it's a dogma.

- I have three priorities for our economy.

Growth, growth and growth.

(audience clapping) - Who questions whether growth is good?

If the GDP is growing at a rapid rate, at a decent rate, then policy makers say, oh, our economy is healthy, it's robust, it's strong, we are doing well.

If the GDP, namely the market economy, is not growing fast enough, then they say, "Our economy is weak.

It's sickly, if things get really bad, we call it a recession.

We even call it a depression."

So it's interesting, we're using health language to describe this statistic.

The only kind of organism that thrives on perpetual growth that I can think of that's not based on balance is the cancer cell.

Yeah, cancer cells just want to grow more and more and more.

So our economy shares that characteristic, somehow the more, the better, as opposed to some sense of balance, some sense of harmony.

And it's almost become a religious thing.

Almost like more people we convert the better.

As if the whole world has to buy into this single belief.

Economics has become like that.

Whatever will benefit the economy as if it's God.

Yeah, so we have to, yeah, well, manufacturing jobs disappear, they go somewhere else.

Well, too bad, it was for the benefit of the economy.

You know the health of the community that's left behind, it's just like religions literally have done that historically.

They've sacrificed people in the name of this higher religion.

We, these days, we sacrifice nature, we sacrifice other species aside from our own.

Yes, it's just the same system that we all have to prostrate to this almighty economy.

Whatever is gonna benefit the economy, economic growth, everything else has to pay homage to that god.

If I look back, I don't know, I can't pinpoint easily what it is that led me to this work, or what formed my view of the world, or the pattern of my life.

I don't know what the real causes were.

And I can just reflect.

I think there must be some effect from history.

I was a child of refugees who fled Germany.

They were fortunate enough to get out just before the second World War began.

Both my mother's side and father's side of my family had been generations German and thought of themselves as German.

So I think for both sides of my family, it was a shock.

So because they were Jewish, suddenly to find themselves outcast and rejected, and vilified, not wanted.

So they fled Germany as refugees.

I did lose some more distant relatives in the catastrophe of the Holocaust, the Second World War.

Then I think I grew up, you know, my father was a factory worker, worked in a... Worked long hours in a dusty textile factory six days a week.

And his aspiration was that I should have a better life, my brother and I. And that we should not be working class factory workers, blue collar workers like he was.

I grew up living in a tiny basement apartment.

We were one of the few families that didn't have a television or a car.

In the 1950s, education was becoming much more universally, widely available.

And he had hopes that I would become educated.

Both my parents had that hope.

(people chanting) It was a wild time, it was the 1960s, and it was the years of student rebellion around the world, the years of the Vietnam War.

But I was also connected with the Aboriginal rights movement while I was in university.

Going out into the middle of Australia into the desert areas, and how tiny human beings are in the middle of that vast desert.

So I had these early experiences that, oh, we human beings we're not quite as big as we think we are.

That nature could be awesome, powerful, and that we need to have some respect.

My first job out of university was as a journalist, and I got a job as a reporter with the Canberra Times.

I was doing very well and was considered, dare I say, as a kind of rising star in the newspaper and getting a lot of praise and compliments and support.

Virtually all of the media in Australia at that time were owned by three families, Murdoch, Fairfax, Packer, and those three wealthy families basically controlled the Australian press.

- [Interviewer] Do you like the feeling of power you have as a newspaper proprietor of being able to sort of formulate policies for a large number of newspapers in every state of Australia?

- Well, there's only one answer for that, of course.

And that's, yes, of course one enjoys the feeling of power.

- So I put a little questioning the way editorial policy is made, and does it really make sense that three rich families get to determine what Australians read and don't read?

I mean, is that... So something about the dynamics of rich-poor relations and power relations and the actual power to censor what I thought was free speech was quite a shock.

So I distributed this among all the other reporters at the Canberra Times.

The editor took one look called me in, he said, "Did you do this?"

I said, yes, he said, "You're fired."

At that time, Australia still had a very racist foreign policy, immigration policy.

It was actually called the White Australia policy.

But I had an interest in Asia very early on, and from undergraduate days, studied Chinese for three years and Chinese history, philosophy, Japanese, Indian.

So I was interested to go there.

In those days, a lot of the travel was still by boat.

So I got on a boat with my girlfriend of the time and we set sail for Hong Kong.

It was one of those old fashioned things you see in the old movies, the boat leaves port and there are streamers that are thrown.

Anyway, we got a boat.

Coming towards Hong Kong, we got caught in a typhoon.

We watched this ocean liner being tossed around the waves.

I lived in Hong Kong for half a year .

At that time, late 1960s, early 1970s, Hong Kong was unbelievably corrupt.

I taught English on the seventh floor of a building, and on the sixth floor there was a gambling parlor.

The police used to come by, I think it was every Tuesday, and collect their take.

I couldn't get into China.

It was the height of the culture revolution, which was a, turned out to be a catastrophe for China.

But at that time, foreigners were just not able to go.

When that plan fell through and all my efforts to go to China did not pan out, could not get a visa in those days.

So I left Hong Kong and set sail on a... I managed to get a very cheap ride on a merchant ship, left Hong Kong and was going to Calcutta.

That was another shock.

I had never witnessed poverty like that in my life.

Everything that I ever thought was a problem in my life existence up to that time, I was now just turned 22 years old at this time, so I was still very young, but everything that I thought was an issue or a problem just paled by comparison.

I was just, I was overwhelmed.

So I traveled across India on a train and then got a $50 bus ride from Delhi to London.

In those days you could do that.

We went up the Khyber Pass through Pakistan, through Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran.

When I got to United Kingdom, I had completely run out of money.

But I didn't know that being Jewish, Israel would accept me.

So I got another merchant ship from Marseilles on the French Mediterranean coast to Haifa and lived the next two years in Israel.

And there I got a teaching job actually teaching Bedouin Arabs in a school in the Negev desert in the South.

And again, I got very much caught up in the politics, how to find peace between Israel and the Arabs, you know, the Palestinians in particularly, the Arab countries of surrounding Israel.

And that became an obsession.

Like somehow there's gotta be a solution, some way to live peacefully together.

Being obsessed with that, I decided, okay, since China was inaccessible to me, I would study Middle East politics.

So I applied for, and got a Fulbright scholarship to study at Columbia University in New York where I studied political science and Middle Eastern studies.

I never 100% felt hooked to any particular culture or country.

Maybe there's something in that history that not been completely swallowed by the nationalist trends that we're seeing today.

To me, human beings have a lot more in common than they have by nationality.

So these days we make big deals about being this nationality or that nationality.

But when you look closely, when push comes to shove, human beings share very similar aspirations.

So maybe something in that history made that bond with other human beings primary somehow.

So to cut a long story short, I got my PhD in political science from Columbia University.

After I graduated, I got a job for a couple of years with the Israeli mission to the United Nations, and I was researcher for the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Chaim Herzog, who later became president of Israel.

So I worked closely with him and did research and prepared drafts of speeches and so on.

And it was an interesting experience because I became quite disillusioned with United Nations.

I saw countries, including Israel, but every country posturing, presenting itself as the best, giving lip service to high ideals, but not practicing them.

And those two years of the United Nations a little bit disillusioning watching national representatives talk the talk and not walk the walk.

Quite discouraging to see that, to witness that.

The United Nations grounds are filled with monuments basically calling for the abolition of war.

Every dollar spent on tanks and missiles and fighter aircraft makes the economy grow.

There's a counter at the United Nations, the ticks off the daily amounts spent on arms.

Just since 9/11 alone, the US budget cost of wars has exceeded $8 trillion.

And that's just the United States.

So long as you're spending money, including on weapons, gross domestic product will grow.

I left that job.

I got my first teaching job at State University of New York.

It was during that period that I first came in contact with critiques of the economic system that we're so accustomed to, that we so believe in.

So here we are on Wall Street at the New York Stock Exchange.

Seen conventionally as the very center of capitalism, the heartthrob of the capitalist system.

When Wall Street is doing well, the economy is doing well, we're supposed to be better off.

So that's progress conventionally.

But I think that that's a little bit of a mistake, and it obscures the degree to which this capitalist system has come to pervade every corner of our lives.

(jazz music) We're all complicit in the capital system.

How it determines our values, our way of thinking.

We're all dependent on its products.

So it's actually a system that has pervaded every aspect of our lives.

And I think the danger of focusing on Wall Street as if it's some separate entity, is that it leads us to point the finger and accuse these evil capitalists of creating our problems.

But I think that's a mistake.

I think it's also a mistake just to condemn capitalism out of hand.

Capitalism has provided us with enormous benefits that we take for granted today.

Extended our lives, improved the quality of our lives in countless ways.

However, we can also ask the question, is it now long overdue for this capitalist system to change?

Have the harms that it brings far outweigh the benefits?

It was 1995, and there was an article in the Atlantic Monthly called, "If the GDP is up, why is America down?"

That article knocked my socks off.

And then the work of another researcher, my wife handed me these two articles, one was by Hazel Henderson, who had also done some groundbreaking work, Herman Daley, together, those deeply influenced me.

And I somehow saw that this, what count really does affect what gets attention.

It affects our behavior.

And then I discovered, same year, National Film Board of Canada produced this documentary on Marilyn Waring.

- The more that you smoke cigarettes, or the more that you have automobile accidents, the more growth increases.

Now, I'd be fairly unlikely having smashed my car to come home and say, "Darling, don't worry about it.

We've just contributed to the national income of the country."

(audience laughing) I mean, I wouldn't run my household like that, and I can't think like that.

I would consider that a loss.

You know, I would kind of consider that a debit in my account.

A cost, not a benefit.

National income accounting doesn't have a debit side.

As long as the activity passes through the market, it's good for growth.

- New Zealand economist, Marilyn Waring was key in pointing out, actually most of the unpaid work in the world is done by women.

So a very large proportion of women's work is simply ignored, it's invisible as far as GDP is concerned.

The voluntary work that people do is for their communities, for their environment.

All the voluntary work that people do counts for nothing in GDP because no money's exchanged.

All of this happened at once, 1995, Marilyn Waring, Hazel Henderson, and the first GPI that had been produced in California.

And it all suddenly made sense.

The light went on in terms of the work that I then pursued for the next 20 years.

So we are now constructing an accounting system that actually takes into account the larger picture.

We don't just look at financial capital, we're also looking at social capital.

So here we are in Central Park, New York, and I love this place.

To me, it's not just a beautiful place with meadows and trees and, you know, it's beautiful, but it's also a testimonial, I think, to the power of human vision.

To some understanding that there's something beyond material growth.

I mean, think of the real estate value of this piece of earth that I'm sitting on.

This is probably some of the most expensive real estate in the entire world.

But somehow or other, miraculously it seems, 150 years ago, there were architects and planners who had the incredible vision and foresight to know that commercial value alone is not all that matters.

They understood that green spaces are essential to our quality of life, to the wellbeing of humanity.

And in the middle of New York City, between Central Park West and Fifth Avenue, all the way from 59th Street to 125th Street, they created this extraordinary beautiful green space.

Trees, meadows and New Yorkers are enjoying it.

Every quarter of this park, there are people who are just lying on the grass, jogging, riding, bicycling.

It's just a, it adds something immeasurable beyond anything that could be achieved by building another high rise on this spot.

So this to me illustrates that humanity has what it takes, it has the understanding, it has the vision and the depth to know what matters, to know what really counts.

When I moved to Nova Scotia in 1990, I felt it viscerally.

I couldn't believe that if you're even thinking that you might cross the road, cars will stop and wait for you.

There's a certain warmth, gentleness, kindness that was different from New York City.

I'm not putting New York City down.

It has wonderful, wonderful qualities.

There was something about coming to Nova Scotia that really felt like coming home.

There was something about the atmosphere, the quality of life in the Maritimes.

All my work on the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index, I thought that here's a way of measuring progress.

It's not completely materialistic, it doesn't just depend on what we spend and how much money we're using, but that looks at bigger issues.

It's through that, that my real appreciation and understanding of human society within nature really started blossoming.

- The genesis of the idea of GPI Atlantic came from Ron Coleman, and I know this because he and I sat together and kind of forged where to go with this idea that Ron had.

But I think to his great credit, he brought together a big team of people who either wrote reports or served on a board that kind of guided the whole organization.

The really nice thing about the Genuine Progress Index approach is that you're really trying to get a sense of how things are going from a very broad and diverse perspective.

So we were trying to look at a whole range of different indicators.

So everything from pollution through to the state of the fish stocks.

We also looked at who was getting what from the fishery, what was the fairness in a sense of distribution of the benefits from the fishery.

But we also wanted to look at it from a point of view of what's referred to as natural capital, the fish in the ocean and what value that has as well as the fish that's coming out of the ocean.

And in a way that I think was the underlying focus of GPI Atlantic, that idea that just measuring what you take out from the environment doesn't give you a good sense of progress.

- So we're trying to account for economic benefits and costs in those larger terms.

So we don't just have a concept of financial capital or manufactured capital like factories, equipment.

We're also looking at social capital, human capital like health and education, the wellbeing of communities, our fish stocks, our forests, the quality of our atmosphere and our air quality, our water resources, our soils.

So those are also capital assets.

If you don't look after them, they depreciate in value.

We've seen that.

- I mean, I had never heard of GPI or, you know, anything like it myself at the time.

So I was learning about how to do these, you know, how to look at something and try to figure out what the economic cost or benefit is, you know, full cost accounting.

But for me, a lot of the stuff that I worked on in the forest accounts was more qualitative than it was quantitative.

I was much more interested in describing what were the losses when there's a forest clear cut.

What happens to the species at risk?

What are the species at risk?

Which species at risk need for our forest dependent?

I mean, that was kind of information that wasn't even really known that well.

But also I was really interested in the data.

- I think William, everything we're talking about seems to me to have to do with taking a somewhat longer term perspective.

If we're trying to get the fastest, make the fastest buck as quick as we possibly can, get the most in the shortest time, then none of this makes any sense.

- Right.

- We have to think about the fact that it, once you clear cut a forest, it will take hundreds of years for it to grow back into its original value and original form.

- Well, absolutely, I mean, that short term thinking is what's leading to the sort of undermining of what could be actually much greater wealth potential.

- Exactly.

- So this is an interesting spot, because it's actually a very lovely example of how the Acadian Forest develops and grows and how it can actually support a lot of resilience over time.

Because it as a forest type, it never all sort of dies at once.

And instead what you get are these nice mature tall trees that eventually as they die, they open a gap in the canopy that allows the light to come through and then it kicks off all this beautiful young growth.

And that's happening all across this forest.

These sort of patches of openings where young trees can get a start and you end up with this sort of all-aged structure, which is really resilient in terms of forest condition.

It also provides tons of habitat, 'cause you've got something for everyone here essentially.

And from a species or tree quality and value perspective, when trees grow under a canopy like this, they're reaching for the light.

So they're motivated to grow extra tall and straight and don't put on a lot of extra branches.

So you end up with nice clear lumber.

And maintaining this kind of structure is what really made the Acadian forest such a valuable and rich forest type in the region.

So one of the interesting things when you consider carbon and addressing climate change is that it's important to remember that actually two thirds of all the terrestrial carbon is in the soil.

And so look at this forest and think about, like how is carbon actually cycled through this system?

You've got these large mature trees that are still sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere, converting into their mass, but then as that tree dies and the sort of large material hits the ground, it's actually when that sort of tree trunk gets incorporated into the soil, that's truly how you get long-term carbon storage and sort of create the carbon sink that forests provide.

And that also means when we think about how land is treated and when we overcut or clear cut an area, why it can be so damaging for the climate is not only are you losing the capacity of these trees to sequester carbon and incorporate it into the soil, but you're also heating up the soil that's here and all the carbon that has been stored for generations before.

And so that carbon starts to actually burn off and release back into the atmosphere.

- William, we're hearing you talk about the values of the forest.

It's so almost painful to think of what does GDP count?

It counts nothing, but the timber which is extracted from the forest, as if that's the value of the forest.

And what doesn't it count?

It doesn't count in carbon storage value you were talking about, the watershed protection, the habitat for species, the resilience against disease and infestation.

So many values that a forest has.

- Yeah, well and even just the value to this community, right?

Of having this space and the value to people to be connected to nature.

Or, you know, this is a coastal area.

So think of that resilience not only as sort of long-term ecosystem health, but also as we're facing more and more extreme events in our climate, it has a buffering capacity to help protect the community as well.

It absorbs the energy of the storm.

It absorbs the heavy rainfall.

Lumber is important for building homes.

There is value there, but there is a way of accessing that value without undermining all of the other values.

- So I mean, when we did our Genuine Progress Index work, we really looked at the, the history of Nova Scotia Forest over time.

And it was not good news, quite frankly.

It was the history of the degradation of our forest.

So I mean, I have to tell you, the forest industry was not happy with our report.

- Right.

- They hired one of the most expensive accounting firms in the world, KB&G, to do what they called a forensic audit of that report.

But they actually couldn't find fault with the data or the calculations of the results.

So the second volume profile, sustainable forest operations, that actually brought a good livelihood, provided more jobs than clear cutting, were actually more economically viable, increased the value even at the lumber.

So I mean, what we're talking about William, is really, it's not an Nova Scotia issue alone, it's a global one.

We're seeing still the loss of 10 million hectares of forests a year globally.

- The entirety of our forest systems are needed to really address what is coming at us.

We can't afford to lose any of the carrying capacity of our forest.

If anything, we need to be rapidly increasing the health and resilience of our forest in order to have something.

- You know, we're not just producing this genuine progress index for policy makers and for others.

I have learned so much myself from the research we've done.

That's actually contributed hugely to changing my own way of thinking.

We have had an outstanding soils and agriculture researcher, Jennifer Scott, and she produced some work on the economic value that earthworms provide.

And she described the functions that earthworms perform.

It's extraordinary.

That sustainable soil practices which actually conserve and preserve the value of those earthworms are so valuable, they're almost irreplaceable.

Some of the research for me has been like discovering the wonders of nature.

Norbert Kungl is an organic farmer.

I've known him for about 30 years now.

He farms with real integrity, care for the earth, care for local communities, care for us, and our health.

- The only right way to farm and to live is to behave in an environmentally responsible way and produce food that is not contaminated with potential pesticides that doesn't derive its nutrients from synthetically manufactured fertilizers.

But it's all based on the works of nature the way it is supposed to be.

To this day, we actually have not fully understood or implemented what we call full cost accounting.

'Cause with any kind of production and especially with conventional production and long distance transportation, we're creating problems that are not reflected in the price that we pay as consumers.

This kind of behavior is ultimate suicide.

We cannot go on with it.

We have to come to a point where it costs what it costs.

And those costs need to be determined by the impact on our environment and our societies.

- We produced the genuine progress index really thinking that if policy makers had the right evidence, they would've to take notice.

- Take the truth and make decisions of it.

- We were just telling the truth, it was common sense.

- A small farm can only sustain itself and thrive if loyal customers pay a fair value for the food.

If you go to a grocery store, you're dealing with many levels of middle men who have something to do with it be it in transport, storage, processing of course, a very big thing.

Many of the environmental costs of high inputs, fertilizer inputs and chemicals and things like this do not take in effect the amount of water that is being polluted, the air that is being polluted, the greenhouse gases that are generated.

This has nothing to do with a sustainable food system.

It has nothing to do with an ethical food system.

The only truly sustainable way of buying food is to buy local.

There are so many benefits to that.

The money stays in a closer loop within your community.

You ideally know the people who produce, process, market your food.

And again, not just food.

Every single item that we buy, we have a choice as consumers.

The way I like to put it is, every dollar we spend is a political statement.

I heard it from Vandana Shiva not too long ago.

When these roundup-ready crops were introduced in parts of India, and the extension service really forced or educated farmers towards more modern and more productive methods of producing rice.

It resulted in a dramatic increase in suicides amongst the farming community.

What happened was that with some of these technologies, it was necessary to invest more into your farm, more upfront cost to buy seeds that had those genes altered that you could spray roundup.

And then of course you had to pay for the roundup and all of these kind of things.

So you had higher and higher investment with the promise of getting higher yields, but then a hundred other things can happen.

And if the higher yields didn't materialize, and if you didn't get paid for the extra investment by higher commodity costs, you were literally screwed.

And again, farmers are proud people, and if you feel like you cannot provide for your family, and you feel like you are the bottom end of your community, you kill yourself.

And that is an unfortunate reality.

Again here, you know, we've had incidents where a number of disastrous years, unmanageable debt loads have prompted farmers to kill themselves.

Some of my colleagues that I have known and worked with for the last 40 years, they're very hesitant to encourage their own children to take over the farm.

And that speaks volumes actually.

If you don't want your kids to continue a legacy that chances are generations of your family have started long time ago and you want to tell your kids, "Don't go back into farming," let's stop it here, it's too much.

The odds are stacked against us.

- I think one reason that our results on agriculture on the declining economic viability of small and medium sized farming, why policymakers did not pay attention to those results is because there's a global tendency for large industrial agriculture to take over, and a belief that only large industrial agriculture can produce the quantity of food that we need.

And maybe they're not so concerned about the demise and disappearance of small scale and medium sized farms.

But when we looked closely, we found that actually small and medium sized farms have major economic impact, beyond what GDP can possibly capture.

Right after we completed, after almost 15 years of work, our Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index, all 20 components were done.

We released the report.

So at the very time we did this, the political party that had regularly used our GPI numbers, while it was in opposition and which promised to adopt the GPI if it were elected, came to power with an absolute majority.

For the first time in Nova Scotia's history, we were full of beam and hope.

We believed that at last our GPI work would see the light of day.

Once elected, the politicians ignored this and many other promises they made, and they carried on GDP business as usual.

- And I have been in communication with the government for many years trying to access data so that I could extend the time series, you know, to take, say, our 2009 GPI liner report about forest indicators and extend it to, you know, today.

I really would like to be able to do that, what's happened in the forest.

But you can't do that, because they created breaks in the series.

They've changed definitions, and I don't think it is a stretch to say that it's a disinformation campaign that the government has basically used over this time period to make it almost impossible for a person looking at the data to know what's going on.

- Well, I had heard of Ronald Goldman and read about his exceptional devotion and his design and application of the Genuine Progress Index.

I met him for the first time at a GNH international conference that I hosted here in Temple.

- Well, it was a big surprise to get this invitation to Bhutan, and I had no idea where Bhutan was on the map.

I actually had to look it up, I didn't know where it was.

I just had this invitation to go and talk about measures of progress.

You know, a handful of foreigners, a very small number of us actually, invited just to talk about what we did.

And the Bhutanese wanted to see if it was relevant to what they were trying to do.

That's where I first met Jigme Y. Thinley.

- I've always believed that how one sees the world is through one's eye of the mind, or the mind's eye.

Reality as we perceive and understand and the choices that we make in life are conditioned by the circumstances into which one is born, and the experiences and the events that one encounters in life.

As a Buddhist, I was always reminded to be mindful of the interdependence of all forms of life, our mutual dependence.

And to pray as well as to try and act in the mutual interest of all beings.

Well, as a young service servant, I was very fortunate to have had the special privilege of interacting with the even younger king, but far, far wiser.

It was during these interactions that he shared his dissatisfaction with the prevailing economic model that promotes limitless, senseless, infinite economic growth on a planet that has only finite resources.

I was inspired by the king's search for a deeper meaning and purpose for development.

- When their king, the fourth king of Bhutan first said, "Gross national happiness is more important than gross national product," for about 20 years, not much happened.

Bhutanese understood intuitively what was meant by that, that just material income wealth wasn't the only thing that mattered.

That there were other ingredients to quality of life, to wellbeing.

But as Bhutan entered the world stage more, as it started to join international organizations, the United Nations, other international organizations, there was increasing demand from outside.

Well, what do you mean by gross national happiness?

If you're not going to use gross national product the way all the rest of us do, so what's your alternative?

- Is not good health and education.

Secure and adequate livelihood with a balance between work and leisure, mental wellbeing, a benign resilient environment, and a good and caring government.

Is that not what everyone wants in life?

While GNH is precisely a philosophy, a paradigm for development that incorporates all these elements.

- Bhutan passed the first Forest Conservation Act before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was even published, which is often seen as the birth of the environmental movement in the West.

But Bhutan to this day has 50% of its land under environmental protection and about 70% forest cover.

- The third polar region comprise the Himalayan ranges and adjoining mountain systems.

That are home to 14 of the world's highest peaks, and some hundred thousand square kilometers of glaciers.

These are the sources of water, of the river systems that sustained some 1.7 billion lives.

In China, in Southeast Asia, in much of India, the Himalayas, this third polar region is so much more fragile and vulnerable than even the Antarctica and the Arctic regions.

The resultant hydrological changes are already causing unprecedented drought in the winter and flooding in the summer.

Life in this region is no longer as predictable and comfortable and secure as it used to be.

The ecological state of Bhutan is important to the rest of the world because the ecological integrity of this country is a reflection on the integrity of the rest of the region, which are critical to the survival of so many people.

We came to know each other developed a mutual respect, especially after the international conference he hosted in Canada.

- Back in 2005, we hosted a big international conference.

Representatives from 33 countries, 450 people.

The Bhutan delegation of 21 was front and center.

It was the only nation state independent country actually committed to implementing this integrated view of development in which ecological, social and economic concerns were joined.

- May you always stand tall.

(audience clapping) - [Ronald] I was struck by his, the depth of his vision, his big view.

- May you always walk with good health.

- [Ronald] He completely understood that this is something that the world at large needed.

So I think he was very gratified with the interest being shown in Bhutan's experiment.

and our traditional territory we call Esge'gewa'.

I'd like to welcome you in you in the same manner that our ancestor did many hundreds of years ago.

Many of our young men are singing tonight.

They walk a journey of prayer, developing their prayer and the things you come to discuss and talk about, I pray that the creator will come and give us understanding and peace in our humble attempts to live on this earth together.

Thank you very much.

- This understanding, everything I'm talking about, everything that the genuine progress index is about, has been deeply understood by indigenous cultures for hundreds, thousands of years.

The notion of living in harmony with the earth.

(people chanting) That didn't separate the sacred from the secular, that didn't separate lived reality on this planet from their daily lives.

At that conference, at least 20% of the conference participants have to be youth and youth leaders.

And we profiled and modeled on existing best practices.

Everything from the community level to the multinational level.

- Dr.

Mathis Wackernagel has come up with, I think, one of the most powerful measurement tools of the century.

And I don't say that lightly.

I think that the ecological footprint, which he and Professor William Reese at University of British Columbia developed together is probably the strongest and most powerful tool to actually measure our progress towards sustainability.

But subtly, the onus was always on the farmers, the loggers and the fishermen to produce sustainably.

We always got away scot free.

The ecological footprint makes us squirm.

And he's with us today, Mathis Wackernagel.

- Just let's go back 60 years when in the United States- When the United States ended World War II.

They realized that they could lose the war either on the battlefield or in economic terms.

They wondered, can we actually afford to invest that much in our military machinery?

So they rounded up their best economists and they told them, "Develop the GDP."

60 years later, we have won economically.

The human enterprise has never been as successful, never been endowed with as much prowess as today.

And so the question now becomes, will we lose the future economically?

Will we lose the future ecologically?

And we need similar measures to find out how do we need to guide ourselves in the future.

So the question for the 21st century where it becomes, how can we all have rewarding lives?

How can we have satisfying, great, happy lives within the capacity of this one planet?

- And it's the US Constitution in this conference on happiness, let's face it, that says, our goals, our life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What I see has happened in terms of that pursuit of happiness in the United States is how did that go wrong?

It's worth knowing where it went wrong.

It was mistranslated very clearly.

Happiness was translated as meaning material wealth.

The more you had, the happier you are.

This is a big fat lie.

And of course it never disproves itself as a lie, because if you're not happy and you have more stuff than you once had, you just don't have enough yet.

So the motto of he who dies with the most toys wins is very hard to disprove.

So the mottoes of my mother's depression in a childhood of waste, not want not, have been translated in my childhood and my daughter's childhood to shop till you drop.

This is driving the gross national product.

The great economic enterprise is founded on a false notion of happiness that tells us consume waste, consume waste, and do it as fast as you can.

Happiness is not about self gratification.

Real happiness always comes more from sharing.

Real happiness is love.

- Evidently there is growing interest in how to be happy as opposed to how to make money.

Dollars and cents are not the bottom line in life.

It is our hope that as more thought is given to this common quest in life, there will be more ideas and reasons why GNH should guide human development to further true human civilization.

I thank you, I wish the conference prosperity and lots of happiness.

Thank you very much.

(audience clapping) - But something changed in there.

First of all, for some reason the New York Times sent a reporter.

And when the New York Times came out with a full page article on Bhutan's gross national happiness policy, in a way it lit a fire.

Oh, Bhutan has a new different way forward.

And it became international news fairly quickly.

And other major magazines and newspapers picked it up.

- Gross national happiness means the collective happiness of the Bhutanese people, not so much as individuals, but collectively.

And what leads to collective happiness is when each individual strives for, finds happiness for himself by creating and contributing to the happiness of others.

And we are in a country where the youth are in larger majority.

There are more youths than older people here in this country.

And this will continue to be so for quite some time.

If the youth cannot be happy, if the youth are not committing, not committed to pursuing happiness, then I think there is no future for Bhutan.

- It was soon after he was elected, I was in Bhutan at the time and I got a call to go over see the Prime Minister together with my wife Gwen, and he wanted to talk to us.

And in his office, he said, "Look, now that I'm Prime Minister, just all my time is taken up with meetings and organizing things and overseeing this, that or the other, and I don't have time to deal with the things that really mattered to me."

And he said, "Would you mind kind of moving here?"

He said, "I'm afraid that our values and our principles of gross national happiness are gonna be gone.

We're not gonna be able to sustain them."

The pressure for economic development and now television and the internet had just come to the country a few years earlier, but now young people are coming under the influence of outside pressures and influences, values.

He could already see the change in values.

More materialistic young people leaving the villages, moving to the cities, abandoning their families, the social networks breaking down.

He said he was disturbed by the changes.

And not that he wanted to go back to the past.

He knew that wasn't possible.

But he said, "Unless we bring the values and principles of gross national happiness into the educational curriculum, we could lose this in the generation, it could be gone."

Our culture, the protection of the environment, everything we've treasured, there's no guarantee it'll last.

He said he wanted, that was one of his deepest wishes to see the educational system transformed to reflect these values.

And at that time, what was the Bhutanese educational curriculum?

It was basically imported from India, and it reflected really the legacy of British colonialism, you could say.

- 10 years from now, five years from now, 20 years from now, what I would like to see happening in Bhutan is firstly an education system that is quite different from the conventional, you know, factory where certain knowledge and capabilities are imparted.

Where children are just turned out to become economic animals, thinking only for themselves and working and earning for themselves.

I would like to be able to see an education system that is truly educational, that will be able to bring out and produce, you know, graduates that are more human beings with human values that place and give importance to relationships.

To students that are educated, that are contemplative, that are analytical in terms of how they approach, you know, issues, challenges, even new knowledge.

- So he had very specific ideas how this could be done.

He brought international educators from around the world, leading educators in critical thinking, ecological literacy, bringing indigenous values into the core educational curriculum and all these areas.

- What comes to your mind when you hear this term, cross national happiness?

- The happiness and joy within the community.

- You know, money?

- Money doesn't come into that thinking.

I think more, it's a sense of abundance and what brings abundance too is real wealth.

- That there is an alternative available.

You know, Mark Twain said, "Never let school interfere with your education."

We are a great believer in that.

School is what you learn in... School is what you learn to read and write.

But education is what you get from your family, your environment, and your community.

- Young people should be taught that we are part of nature and not apart from nature.

Second thing, the young people need to be taught that we need to learn to live from the resources of the natural world.

- And to do your PhD in physics, you know, you have to be smart.

And I was so humble because I didn't know any of the plants the women in the villages knew and they became my teachers.

I've always said, I went to two universities in my life, the University of Western Ontario in a London that's not in England, and the Chico University of Biodiversity.

And I think we underestimate the knowledge of people.

That's why I've started, you know, I run a school now called the School of the Seed, and every year we do a course called the Grandmother's University, which is this hidden wisdom, which has to be the way forward.

- And so many of our problems in the world today are created by highly educated people.

They have been to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, big, big universities.

And when they come out, what do they do?

They go and work for industry, which is destructive of natural world.

They go and work for companies like Monsanto where they create genetic engineered seeds, which is destroying the natural process of the seeds.

They go out and work for the military.

So all the educated people who have not learned anything from the heart and for the heart and not learned anything to make with their hands, they just think and they create this kind of unsustainable, destructive, economic, political, social, industrial systems.

(upbeat music) And so young people should be taught not to just learn things academically and intellectually and a kind of learning, like reading, writing, arithmetic.

That is fine, that is no problem.

But there is more to education than just reading, writing, arithmetic.

True education should be educational, head, heart, and hands rather than just head.

- For three years, we have been gnashing our teeth on the education component of the Genuine Progress Index.

Is just conventional indicators of schooling, graduates per population, school living rates, school graduation rates, which tell us nothing about whether we actually have an educated populace.

We couldn't find a way in Canada of bringing this bigger vision into the educational measures.

We just met resistance wherever we turned.

- What we do here in this room this week is not important only for this little Himalayan kingdom, but for the world, for humanity, and for so many non-human species whose very survival depend on what we humans do.

We are deeply aware what we are trying to do here is unprecedented.

There are no roadmaps.

- And here suddenly was this invitation from a prime minister who shared exactly what we were trying to get at with our GPI work.

So that invitation at that point was somewhat irresistible.

And it was then that I moved to Bhutan and lived there full time for the next seven years or so.

- Ronald Coleman played a vital role together with his GPI team in the confinement of the GNH Index.

In fact, several of the indicators, GPI indicators, have been incorporated in the GNH index.

He and I worked on many projects together.

He is heading the secretariat that ultimately helped me to convene the high level meeting in the United Nations.

- This was the scene of maybe the greatest hope that I had at the time that our work was gonna really find its way into the mainstream.

- Gross national product has long been a yard stick by which economies and politicians have been measured.

Yet it fails to take into account the social and environmental cost of so-called progress.

We need a new economic paradigm that recognizes the parity between the three pillars of sustainable development.

Social, economic, and environmental wellbeing are individual and together they define gross global happiness.

(speaking in Spanish) - The prime Minister of Bhutan is putting before us a framework for a new economic paradigm based on principles of happiness and wellbeing.

- The GDP led development model that compels boundless growth on a planet with limited resources no longer makes economic sense.

- Bhutan began to talk about a new economic paradigm, a new Bretton Woods was actually one of the phrases that was used.

That's when some of the vested interests began to get worried that some of these holy cows of the establishment were being challenged.

The World Bank, after all, is built on Bretton Woods.

So what does it mean to talk about a new Bretton Woods?

Is that threatening the very foundation?

Is that challenging the foundation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund?

So I think at that point, some of those big players began to be concerned.

When Bhutan sketched out a new economic paradigm, the government of India objected.

There was a secret memo which I saw that India sent to Bhutan.

Basically pulling apart its new economic paradigm policy.

(somber music) - Human wellbeing has now become a primary concern and motive in politics, in business, in education, and in the way we conduct our private lives.

And that I think is very significant.

- Somehow I thought this is a win-win situation.

We were presenting scenarios that would create greater long-term economic prosperity at the same time as the ecology communities were being protected.

- [Interviewer] Rob, did you ever think that there would be so much opposition from vested interest to these ideas?

- I think that I was very naive.

And that goes for both the work we did in Nova Scotia and also the work in Bhutan in New Zealand.

Because I've always viewed this work as pure human common sense.

- The genuine humility that this man has despite his achievements, his genuine compassion, and the sense of altruism that you rarely find in most people, but one who lives the most simplest.

Ronald Colman is a man who has done much for the world, for human society, and so little for himself.

A great man.

- I just love to go walking here.

It's something about this landscape.

It's so primordial, primitive.

It's called the Barons, but it's very, very rich.

You can get the beautiful, the whole vista of the vast ocean out there.

I like it also because it actually reminds me of how we, human beings, need to be a little more humble than we are.

We're like little matchsticks being tossed around on the waves of nature.

It's such an absurdity and so arrogant in a way to think that our human economy and human society are separate from this big, big world.

If we could construct our human society and human economy with some respect for this world, that would be good.

(soft instrumental music)