Genuine progress indicator

I heard an interview on the radio the other day and it sparked my interest. the interview was with Ronald Colman and it was about the genuine progress index. The idea that GDP does not measure wellbeing or indeed progress is not new - I have read numerous articles about this over the years but what interested me that here is an organisation actually working to develop and use an index that might be useful instead.

A small problem with awareness raising!

I used to work at a busy youth hostel. In that job I was required to communicate with a lot of people who did not have a good command of English. It could be a stressful struggling to communicate and I never quite stopped trying to speak louder to the person opposite me or to try to say the same thing in different ways.

One evening, my Japanese counterpart answered the phone. The caller from another hostel spoke fast in English and when he asked her to repeat it, she spoke increasingly louder until eventually my colleague finally handed me the phone. He didn’t need her to speak louder. He needed her to speak slower and to repeat exactly what she said so that he could put more of it together to understand it. Instead she phrased her request differently which only gave him more work to do to understand her.

My observations are that although this may be obvious, it is not easy to put into practice. The first thing that most of us do when we are not understood or not heard is to assume that we need only to speak louder and the problem will be solved. Alas, speaking louder can actually prevent your message going across at all in the wrong situation! It can be useful to speak loudly to a deaf person or to speak slowly to them. To someone who speaks a different language, slower will make a difference, louder won’t. In a crowd of noisy people, speaking may not be the best way to communicate although observations indicate that most of us just try to yell louder than everyone else. In a crowd of foreigners, it may be most effective to hire the services of a translator and to use a completely different language. It is often as effective to say less rather than more. As I found when I was teaching, better to get a small amount across well than to put lots across badly.

This seems all self evident and yet it is clear that people are great at filtering information before it gets anywhere near our brain if it is irrelevant or just perceived as noise. Rather unfortunately, that noise can stop the useful information getting through!

As Bickerstaff and Walker (2002: 2175) note, “there is now a myriad of awareness raising campaigns urging members of the public to take responsibility for improving their environment.” As they note, these campaigns have not been very successful. Such campaigns assume that people will passively soak up information and then become actively responsible for simple changing their own behaviour in line with that information. At best this is somewhat contradictory! At worst it misses completely the complexity even of making relatively simple changes.

New Scientist article on economic growth

I spoke to an economist at the conference last week and asked him about steady state economies. He (and he is an economist who works in the same environmental science institution as me so I found this pretty depressing) dismissed the idea - positing the idea that we can grow the economy through the knowledge sector.

I"m not so sure and even less sure now, given the New Scientist (18th Oct. 2008) article I've just read called 'Beyond Growth'. In the end the basis of our economy is consumption and actually from the point of view of the sustainability of our society in a world that has shown time and again that it has limits, consumption is something we have to cut.

I suppose from a positive point of view the economic crisis that looms might offer some ways for us to look hard our our economic system (after all, it has already made governments throw out the idea of not intervening in the market!) and to find some new ways of providing for our needs. Or of course, it might not.

What of holidays in a post peak oil world?

I"ve just returned from a tourism research conference up in Hanmer Springs. Overall I enjoyed the conference - it gave me the opportunity to meet and talk with some very interesting people.
One of them was Ian Yeoman a futurologist with a tourism focus, who, as he put it, gets paid to "make stuff up" - although it does appear that there is quite a lot of interesting thinking behind the er ... stuff! It struck me that "futuring" is something that really benefits from integrating the information and knowledge from a very wide range of stakeholders.

I guess as someone who spends quite a lot of time thinking of the future in terms of environmental sustainability and who has a head full of books/ information like Jared Diamond's "Collapse," Rob Hopkins' "Transition Handbook" and of course Chris Martenson's Crash course, (amongst others) I would say Dr Yeoman is perhaps more positive about the future of tourism than I am ... (although to be fair he talks in terms of scenarios but I do note that people travelling a lot less did not seem to be one of them!).

I would hope, for example, that we don't have space tourism because something like that would indicate to me (and this is just an opinion here!) the likelihood of a an unstable society in which the gap between rich and poor is just massive (when in my opinion it is already too big).

Personally I'd much prefer to live in a stable and happy society in which people know and appreciate each other and there is a more even spread of opportunity across the population of the world. Such a society could work together constructively to cope with the changes that face them - whether they be positive or negative. And , I suppose, to those ends I remain interested in the question of how we create the positive futures we want.

Looking at this I guess I could seem like a bit of a grump who doesn't want to to create fantastic tourism futures. I suppose I would prefer to work toward seeing a more even spread of opportunity across the population rather than preparing for amazing opportunities for a priviledged few. In the end, like any decision or use of intuitive processes, it's all a matter of what and how you prioritise information and principles.

;-) CH

Could a recession be good?

Well maybe.

Nicholas Stern has suggested that recession is a good time to build a low carbon future in this article although he doesn't seem to be suggesting that perhaps we should be looking at how to reach some kind of steady state economy. I suppose that I still think it is a bit of a mistake to think only in terms of climate change which I think may be what Stern is doing. Still, he may be right that a time of crisis can actually make it easier to change.

But what should I do about all this? I keep coming back to the need to work at community level to build whatever I can to support and develop resilience so that when people do change it is more likely to be constructive rather than destructive. To me resilience means knowing where to locate skills and resources, being able to work with the people who can supply those things to make things happen. And when I look at this I see with some surprise that it implies that we need to foster strong "service" leadership at different levels.

:-)

Londoner with a tiny carbon footprint

Now here is someone a little different - I guess you could call her an integrated scientist - practicing what she preaches - the ultimate urban sustainable living. And of course right now we'd have to worry about what it would do the world economy if we all lived this way - but then that's another story.

New Government, Economic Recession, New Directions?

Well we have a new government here in New Zealand. More right wing if we are to judge by coalition partners although it is good to see the Maori party in there to - to maybe temper the influence of ACT!

Still, it's got me thinking because all the talk is now about fostering economic growth (admittedly not something I think that would have been any different if a more left wing government had got in). I wonder about that. How will promoting more consumption (because that is what economic growth relies on) help us meet the challenges of peak oil, the increasing gap between rich and poor, food security, climate change and diminishing resources that are all symptoms of a finite world?

Where is the work on fostering our capacity to change and adjust to meeting the limits of our lifestyles? Where is the work on developing community resilience? The whole focus is on our economic system and on short term fixes, which, it seems possible are only going to make the situation worse further down the track! What of the work around moving towards a steady state economy? Where are the people that really care about the lives of their children and grandchildren?

Could this economic recession be an opportunity for fostering some change in approach here? How might we as a nation and as a number of communities tap into that opportunity?