Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Happiness and materialism far apart

"At present, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP" Paul Hawken (2009)

As Club of Rome releases its historical Limits to Growth in the United States in 1972, the same year the term "gross national happiness" (GNH) is coined in the Kingdom of Bhutan. In pursuit to build an economy that would promote Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values, the emperor of this landlocked Himalayan country of less than one million (746,500 people today) introduced a five-year planning based on GNH. 
Slogan about Gross National Happiness in Thimphu's School of Traditional Arts

Since then, for over 40 years, the kingdom of Bhutan is placing environmental concerns and spiritual wellbeing over rampant capitalism. As Paul Hawken further states: "working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is to be rich".


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