You cannot solve problems with the same thinking used to create the problems.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
What good is an extremely rich and all-powerful nation full of unhappy people? An enlightened human society, as we have seen, must provide an appropriate way of life for the present generation by alleviating poverty, and at the same time serve future generations by staving off the planet’s destruction. According to this philosophy, growth is secondary to establishing a balance between everyone’s aspirations and a “sustainable harmony” that factors in the fortunes of generations to come, and which is only conceivable in a context where altruism and cooperation prevail. Only the realization of these two goals will allow us to overcome the challenge outlined at the beginning of this work and reconcile the demands of prosperity, quality of life, and environmental protection, in the short, medium, and long term. Nowadays, we are better advised to pursue qualitative growth based on better living conditions than a quantitative growth based on ever-increasing consumption.
The majority of contemporary economists define growth in terms of wealth increase—or more specifically wealth increase as an aim in itself—and exploitation of natural resources. Yet this sort of growth is no longer suited to the realities we face today. Natural resources have satisfied our needs until now, but in the present circumstances they are limited. Even so, the very idea of limiting growth is met with incredulity by most economists and politicians, and, as the English economist Partha Dasgupta highlights, “Nature is treated like any other part of the capital stock whose purpose is to be exploited for humanity’s interest.”1 In the eyes of the politician Anders Wijkman and environmentalist Johann Rockström, there can be nothing more perverse than an economy that grows at the expense of the raw materials that allow it to exist: “The world’s population is growing. Consumption is growing. The only problem is that the Earth is not growing.”2 He points out that the only truly unlimited natural resources are the wind and the sun—the ones we use least.
In short, as the English-born American economist Kenneth Boulding said: “Those who believe that economic growth can go on forever are either mentally deranged or they are economists.”3 Fortunately this does not apply to all economists. Some have now realized that we need an economy that cares for the poor and cares for future generations.
But that’s not all. By choosing to carry on encouraging growth as though it were “business as usual,” mainstream economists are loading the odds against future generations. The report published by one of their most eminent members, Sir Nicholas Stern, showed in convincing fashion that the economic cost of inaction toward climate change will essentially be far higher than the investment needed to control or prevent the warming.4 Stern and others predict that more than 200 million people will be displaced by 2050 because of climate change.
Herman Daly, a professor at the University of Maryland, estimates that the current environmental costs linked to economic growth exceed the profit it generates: beyond a certain threshold, economic growth, which neglects to factor in the harm it causes as an item on its balance sheet, actually makes us poorer instead of richer.5
We are facing a serious dilemma. In essence, neither economic growth, which in its current form and at its current rate is unsustainable in terms of the natural resources left to us, nor economic decline, which would harm the poorest, constitute suitable ways of managing the present situation. This is the view expressed by the British economist Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, in his book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet.6 Jackson identifies three reasons why current growth cannot continue: firstly, the present economic model takes it as given that wealth is an appropriate indicator of prosperity. This is of course a highly narrow and reductive vision of what constitutes quality of life, by virtue of the fact that massive growth often runs contrary to popular well-being, leading to what Jackson calls “social recession.”
Secondly, the profit that comes from growth is distributed very unequally, disproportionately benefiting those who are already rich. Let us not forget that 5% of the world’s population pocket 75% of global income, while the poorest 5% receive just 2%. In a system that entrenches inequality instead of reducing it, Jackson underlines, “you could grow the world economy for a million years and still not make poverty history.”7
Thirdly, unlimited economic growth is quite simply impossible because of the planet’s ecological boundaries. People living in the second half of the twenty-first century will pay dearly for the selfishness and excess of today’s citizens.
Jackson is not an advocate for decline, which would bring instability to society by provoking unemployment and, yet again, causing most harm to the poorest people, who as a result would have even less chance of accessing the basic services we have in developed societies. The author does not offer a miracle cure, but demonstrates that the blind pursuit of ever increasing consumption is extremely damaging to the future of humanity.
The middle way between growth and decline can be found in sustainable harmony, in other words a situation that guarantees everyone a decent way of life and reduces inequality at the same time as ceasing to exploit the planet at such a drastic speed. To bring about and maintain this harmony, we must on the one hand lift a billion people out of poverty as soon as possible, and on the other, reduce the rampant consumption taking place in rich countries. We must also gain awareness of the fact that unbridled material growth is not remotely necessary for our well-being. We know, for example, that in the coming ten years, economic growth in Europe and many other countries will most likely stagnate. We are therefore better off redirecting our attention to a qualitative conception of growth based on life satisfaction and which prioritizes the protection of the environment.
According to James Gustave Speth, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and one-time administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Earth’s breakneck degradation is not merely the result of deficient policy at the national level or of simple negligence: it is due to the systemic failures of modern capitalism, which, by targeting perpetual economic growth, has led us simultaneously to the verge of plenty and the verge of ruin. In The Bridge at the Edge of the World,8 he identifies as a principal driver of environmental destruction the 60,000 multinational companies that have emerged over the last few decades and who strive for continual growth in size and profitability without any consideration for the fate of future generations. He is of the opinion that the modern capitalist system can only create an increasing environmental threat, and that this will outweigh any efforts made to control it. It is therefore necessary to change tack and commit to building from here on out a “post-growth” society based more on well-being than on economic riches.
The main change in perspective concerns the importance attached to GDP. For Amartya Sen, the economic crisis is an opportunity to think more broadly about our notions of progress and happiness, and to consider other ways of measuring it instead of GDP. For Sen, “GDP is very limited. Used on its own, it’s a disaster. Indicators relating to production or goods consumption tell us very little about freedom or well-being, which in turn depend on the organization of a society and on the distribution of wealth.”9 Why? Because, as Robert Costanza and colleagues wrote in Nature, “GDP measures mainly market transactions. It ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality.”10 We therefore need several other indicators that reflect, among other things, life expectancy, education, access to care, inequality, subjective well-being, environmental preservation, etc.
The inventor of GDP, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Simon Kuznets, showed sixty years ago that GNP (gross national product) and GDP (gross domestic product), devised to manage the crisis of 1929, only measure some aspects of the economy, and should never be used to assess the well-being, or indeed progress, of a nation: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income,” wrote Kuznets in 1934.11 He emphasized that we could not satisfy ourselves with solely examining what is increasing in quantitative terms, but on the nature of what is increasing: “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth.… Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”12 GDP quantifies total production value over the course of a year, and the wealth created by economic agents (households, businesses, public spending) resident in a country. Yet true prosperity has a number of parameters that GDP does not take into account. In particular, the way GDP is measured makes no distinction between the increase in volume of goods and services when that increase brings greater well-being and when it works to the detriment of well-being.
In the 1990s, economists started talking more and more about GDP than GNP, which further diminished the correlation between a nation’s theoretical wealth and the well-being of its people. GNP corresponds with the annual production of wealth created by a country, whether this took place domestically or abroad. Yet if a country’s products are largely exported, which is generally the case with mineral and oil reserves, GDP goes up, while the GNP could decrease if the citizens do not see any of the profit generated by these resources—either because they are exploited by foreign companies, or because an unscrupulous ruling elite keeps hold of them. In other circumstances, GDP might increase greatly while quality of life decreases as a result of environmental damage and conflict linked to seizing control of mineral resources, as has happened in Congo. As the psychologist Martin Seligman points out:
At the time of the industrial revolution, economic indicators were a very good approximation of how well a nation was doing. Meeting simple human needs for food, shelter, and clothing was chancy and satisfying these needs moved in lockstep with more wealth. The more prosperous a society becomes, however, the worse an approximation wealth is to how well that society is doing. Basic goods and services, once scarce, became so widely available that in the twenty-first century, many economically developed nations such as the United States, Japan and Sweden experience an abundance, perhaps an overabundance of goods and services. Because simple needs are largely satisfied in modern societies, factors other than wealth now play an enormous role in how well these societies are doing.… Today the divergence between wealth and quality of life has become glaring.13
We cannot expect quality of life to be a mere by-product of economic growth, since the two things are not based on the same criteria. It would be more appropriate to introduce the concept of “gross national happiness,” an idea conceived of by the little Himalayan country Bhutan a few years ago. For three decades they have used a scientific tool to measure various aspects of life satisfaction and its correlation with other extrinsic (financial resources, social standing, education, levels of freedom, violence in society, political situation) and intrinsic factors (subjective well-being, optimism or pessimism, egocentrism or altruism).14
Almost forty years ago, when he was running for the US presidency, Senator Robert Kennedy made the following visionary declaration:
For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts Napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our city. It counts Whitman’s rifles and Speck’s knifes and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
“Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play; it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile.15
No nation wants to feel that its prosperity is in decline, and any fall in GDP is concerning and leads to a sense of failure. But if a country’s prosperity were measured in terms of economic performance, well-being, and environmental integrity, then leaders and citizens could enjoy annual growth in the last two indicators, even if GDP were not going up. Detailed below are several initiatives that, with the support of numerous influential economists16 and politicians, have attempted to integrate these three elements into a coherent framework.
The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), used by the Californian organization Redefining Progress, calculates people’s economic input by factoring in domestic and voluntary work, and subtracting pollution and social inequality. In the years 1950 to 2002, the rate of life satisfaction bore no resemblance to that of GDP in the United States, but was much more consistent with that of GPI trends.
The Human Development Index (IDH) published by the UNDP covers quality of education, life expectancy, and GDP. It does, however, have the downside of not having an environmental criterion.
Since 1987, two American sociologists from the Fordham Institute, Marc and Marque-Luisa Miringoff, have calculated an Index of Social Health (ISH) comprising sixteen criteria, including infant mortality and child poverty, child abuse, teenage suicide and drug abuse as well as high school dropout rates, unemployment, income inequality, access to affordable housing, crime rates, poverty among those aged 65 and over, and life expectancy.17 It should be noted that these criteria do not include any evaluation of subjective well-being, which is an indicator of life satisfaction levels among citizens.
At the same time, the economists Herman Daly and John Cobb, in their book For the Common Good, developed an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) with the aim of addressing the most obvious limitations of GDP.18 For example, they take GDP and subtract activities that are harmful to sustainable development—first and foremost, pollution and environmental degradation—and add activities that improve the state of the environment. Daly and Cobb observe that, up to a certain point, rising GDP goes hand in hand with increased well-being, especially in poor countries. Yet beyond a certain level, rising GDP results in decreased well-being and environmental degradation because of the harm caused by excessive consumption.
The Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, who took part in the gross national happiness (GNH) talks in Bhutan, has for his part proposed a model that incorporates nine fundamental human needs, including not just typical material requirements, but also the need for protection, freedom, participation (in society), and affection. His model is based on six principles:
• The economy is to serve people and people are not to serve the economy;
• Development is about people and not about objects;
• Growth is not the same as development and development does not necessarily require growth;
• No economy is possible without the ecosystem’s services;
• The economy is a subsystem of a larger and finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible;
• Under no circumstances whatsoever can an economic process, or interest, take precedence over the reverence of life.
In the United Kingdom, following a 2012 report on the people’s well-being, Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of worrying about problems that were of minor importance to the country, to which he issued the following response: “To those who say that all this sounds like a distraction from the serious business of government, I would say, that finding out what will really improve lives and acting on it is actually the serious business of government.”
The most promising aspect of the GNH proposed by Bhutan is that it engenders a long-term vision. As such, it is attracting the attention of a growing number of economists, sociologists, and politicians. In contrast to the indices mentioned above, GNH is closely linked to subjective happiness, and has honed a set of criteria by which to measure and assess it, but it also factors in social wealth indicators (voluntary work, cooperation, etc.) and natural wealth (e.g. valuing unspoiled natural heritage) as a complement to economic prosperity, which ceases to be the sole priority.
The Kingdom of Bhutan, which recently became a constitutional monarchy, is a country in the Himalayas roughly the same size as Switzerland, with a population just over 700,000 people. It entered the age of sustainable development directly from the Middle Ages, skipping the phase of overexploiting natural resources that has so affected most other countries. Their track record is an inspiration: contrary to all other Asian countries (with the exception of Vietnam), where the coverage of natural habitats such as forest, wetlands, prairie, glaciers, etc., has decreased, in Bhutan it has increased over the past twenty years, rising from 60% of the country’s area to 70%.
The country as a whole absorbs four times more carbon than it emits, and the few chemical fertilizers used in a handful of places are to be banned in the next five years. Nowadays, only 5% of farmers use chemical fertilizers and 2% use pesticides. Recently, Bhutan sent several tons of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to Switzerland to be incinerated.
Hunting and fishing are illegal throughout the country,19 as is the sale of tobacco. Bhutan is also the only country in the world where advertising is banned. Education and health care are free. What’s more, inspired by its Buddhist culture with its emphasis on inner peace, the state has decided to make the pursuit of happiness its absolute priority. The Bhutanese are entirely aware of the fact that they still have a lot of responsibility for improving the quality of life in their country, and that GNH is not some magic formula, but they have the merit of having chosen priorities that are conducive to bringing about a prosperity based on four fundamental pillars: sustainable development, environmental preservation, cultural preservation, and good governance.
The former prime minister of Bhutan, Lyonchen Jigme Thinley, emphasizes the degree to which it is essential to have a long-term future vision. When he asked some of his foreign counterparts what their vision of their country’s future was in fifty years’ time, he was shocked to notice that they often seemed to be “groping around in the dark.”20
This adventure began in 1972, when, following his accession to the throne, the country’s fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck,21 declared in a famous speech that “gross national happiness is more important than gross national product.” When this concept was first introduced at international conferences, Bhutanese representatives were greeted with wry smiles. Since then, however, this new prosperity paradigm has gained ground and attracted the attention of some of today’s biggest economists. As Joseph Stiglitz comments:
When Bhutan took up GNH, some people said that it was because they wanted to take attention away from lack of development. I think quite the contrary. The crisis has made us aware of how bad our metrics were even in economics, because US GDP looked good, and then we realized it was all a phantasm.22
In July 2011, a resolution entitled “Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development,” tabled by Bhutan and cosponsored by 68 countries, was unanimously adopted by the 193 member-states of the United Nations. In April 2012 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, a full day, which I attended, was set aside to implement this resolution. On this occasion, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made the following declaration:
While material prosperity is important, it is far from being the only determinant of well-being.… Bhutan has recognized the supremacy of national happiness over national income since the 1970s. It has famously adopted the goal of Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. Such thinking is now gaining ground in other regions. Costa Rica is well-known for being the “greenest” country in the world—an example of holistic environmentally responsible development. Compared to other countries with similar income levels, it ranks higher in human development, and it is a beacon of peace and democracy.23
That day, at a preparatory meeting organized by The Earth Institute, which is directed by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, three Nobel Prize–winning economists, scientists, philosophers,24 and representatives from several countries (including the president of Costa Rica and a large Brazilian delegation) implemented an action plan. Since that moment, the movement has not stopped gathering momentum. Besides Bhutan and Costa Rica, the governments of Brazil and Japan have now taken measures to include gross national happiness in their political agenda. The province of Alberta in Canada has also established a “Canadian well-being index,” along with relevant tools for measuring it.
The European Commission has launched its “Beyond GDP” project, while the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), represented at the United Nations by its chief statistician, Martine Durand, has also drawn up its own guidelines for measuring well-being.
GDP only takes into account the market’s monetary transactions. When forests are flattened and the oceans emptied of all life, the results show up as positive growth on the GDP balance sheet. There is a double perversion here, since not only does this system fail to consider the value of natural goods, but also it allows their degradation to represent economic profit.25 As Lyonchen Jigme Thinley explains:
If we were to cut down all our forests in Bhutan, GDP would mushroom, because GDP only counts the timber value of our forests once they are cut and sold at market. GDP takes no account at all of the resources we leave behind, and so it entirely ignores the value of our standing forests.… Because those values are invisible in GDP, it’s no wonder the world has accumulated a massive ecological debt that appears in no country’s national accounts.26
The sociologist Dominique Méda agrees wholeheartedly: “By driving this logic through to its conclusion, it could be argued that a society that destroys itself completely, that consumes and devastates itself, will get richer and richer, up until the point it has nothing left to sell.”27
If a country has more crime, pollution, war, and disease, GDP increases as a result of financial transactions relating to expenditure in prisons, policing, weapons, and health care. This increase enters the accounts as a positive indicator of a growing economy, even though it represents a decline in well-being. In addition, Jigme Thinley says that:
GDP entirely ignores a whole range of productive economic activity that genuinely does contribute to well-being—ignoring it simply because no money is exchanged. And so, volunteer work, community service, and the vital unpaid work done in households count for nothing in GDP, and the precious free time that we need to meditate, garden, and socialize with family and friends is completely value-less in GDP.
This point was illustrated by the American psychologist Tim Kasser at a conference on Buddhism and consumer society, which took place in Bangkok in 2008: “Today I spent a wonderful morning in the park with my son. Aside from the pure joy of being together, we discovered all manner of tropical flowers and multicolored birds, and the beauty and calm of the place did us a great deal of good. Imagine if instead I had taken my son to do some shopping at the supermarket, and then afterwards we had taken a tuk-tuk that crashed into a car. The driver would have been wounded, nothing serious, but we would have had to take him to hospital, and a fine would have been imposed on the other driver responsible for the crash: all that would have been better in terms of GDP.”
One of the first modern economists, Jean-Baptiste Say, stated in 1803 that air, water, and light are not goods that would generally come under the heading of “wealth.”28 Yet it is clear that the quality of both air and water has a marked influence on our quality of life, and that they must, along with the inexhaustible energy source that is sunlight, be considered natural capital. Wijkman and Rockström, the former a politician, the latter an environmental scientist, also direct our attention to the fact that we cannot indefinitely expect artificial goods to take the place of natural goods: a situation where wood is replaced with plastic and human endeavor with machines has its limits.29 There is no replacement for clean air, intact vegetation, and healthy, fertile land. It is therefore essential to distinguish between and calculate at fair value the different types of capital—industrial, financial, human, and natural—and grant each one the importance it deserves.
Moreover, GDP itself continues to grow for as long as an entire country gets richer, even if that represents the richest 1% that dominates the majority of wealth acquired, while GNH is incompatible with social injustice and rampant inequality between rich and poor.
Recently, some European countries, including Italy, decided to include drug and human trafficking in their GDP, even though these are clearly deeply damaging to the fabric of society. There are plenty of other examples of this absurd way of managing national accounts: according to current economic doctrine, the more fossil fuels we burn and resulting greenhouse gases we produce, the more GDP increases and the “wealthier” we become. The true negative consequences of climate change remain invisible—for the time being, at least. The example of the devastating oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico show that the real cost of petrol is never reflected in the price we see at the pump; the national accounting systems in force take no heed of ecological damage. To top off the irony, even the cost of the cleanup and the repairs to the facilities contribute to an increase in GDP.
The fact that our natural capital has sustained such considerable losses and that certain ecosystems are on the verge of becoming irreversibly degraded does not feature anywhere in the accounts. The only negative figures occasionally taken into consideration are those that pertain to wear and tear to machinery and buildings—but never to the planet.30
Economists take particular exception to considering “externalities,” a term that refers to the indirect consequences of economic activity. At no point does a forestry company that demolishes 1,000 hectares factor into its accounts the externality represented by the loss of oxygen production and CO2 absorption, soil erosion, and the loss of biodiversity triggered by the trees’ removal.
Even the word “externality” shows the extent to which the nefarious effects of economic activity are considered secondary inconveniences and undesirable irritations in the overall scheme of things. In reality, because of the severity of their impact on living conditions, these externalities have taken on such significance that they are at the point of transcending all the other central concerns of economists. We must therefore discard this notion of externality and factor the variables they represent into our economic evaluations.
In short, natural capital—the value of intact forest, freshwater reserves, wetlands, biodiversity—must be measured at its fair value and included in a nation’s balance sheet in the same way as financial returns or gold reserves, for example. It is a priceless treasure, after all, and any economy that does not incorporate this natural capital is fundamentally skewed.
In fact, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, or TEEB, a United Nations initiative, engaged in a series of investigations that laid the foundation for a national accounts system that factors in the state of ecosystems.
Back in Bhutan in 2012–2013, under the Gross National Happiness Commission directed by Dasho Karma Ura, many international experts inspired by this unique experiment lent their services to guarantee the success of this new economic data. In particular, Robert Costanza and Ida Kubiszewski carried out the first ever estimation of the value of a country’s natural capital—Bhutan, as it happened—settling on the figure of 760 billion ngultrums (the Bhutanese currency), equivalent to 11 billion euros, for the services provided by the ecosystem each year. This is 4.4 times more than Bhutan’s GDP. What’s more, the services provided by the ecosystem (forestry, first and foremost) extend beyond Bhutan’s borders, since their contribution to the regulation of the climate, carbon storage, and river basin protection benefits other countries.
Bhutan’s national accounts also incorporate social capital, including the amount of time people spend volunteering to support their fellow citizens by clearing up refuse, repairing important public buildings, fighting fires, or helping the sick, elderly, or handicapped. They also take into account negative health costs linked to alcoholism (instead of regarding alcohol and tobacco sales as positive contributors) and several other harmful consumer goods. If you sell tobacco, the GDP goes up. Then people go to hospital to be treated for lung cancer. The GDP goes up again. Finally those who don’t survive die and the funeral director is called in. The GDP goes up yet again. But according to the GNH paradigm, all this would be accounted as a loss of social capital.
This new economic paradigm therefore allows the savings made when crime reduces to be factored into the national accounts, as well as profits arising from the health care system following the ban on selling tobacco (lower mortality rates due to the decrease in lung cancer, heart disease, and respiratory problems).
As for subjective well-being, the Bhutanese, led by Dasho Karma Ura, have developed a set of questionnaires that are much more detailed and sophisticated than most surveys used elsewhere in the world to evaluate happiness. Some of the questions posed to a representative sample of 8,000 inhabitants included: “How many times have you felt jealous in the last two weeks?”; “How well do you sleep?”; “How many people could you count on if you were to fall sick?”; “How many times a day do you drop in and socialize with your neighbors?”; “Do you talk about spirituality often with your children?”; or even, “Do you practice meditation?”
According to the former prime minister: “If we can demonstrate the viability of a national accounts system based on GNH (rather than GDP) to set a course and move forward in a healthy and balanced way, then that will represent one of the greatest contributions our little country has made to the rest of the world.”
Contrary to rumors that have gone round, the new Bhutanese prime minister, Lyonchen Tshering Topgay, has not turned his back on the country’s implementation of the gross national happiness concept, which is written into the Bhutanese constitution.31 Following his election in September 2013, at the opening session of the Parliament, he declared: “Some are concerned that I do not believe in GNH. Today, I ask them to put their fears to rest. I am not only a firm believer of GNH, but a practitioner.” Likewise, in an interview with The Guardian in 2014, he stated that: “What’s changed with our government is that we believe our priority must be at home. We must remove the obstacles to GNH and be true to it within the country.… In doing business, companies will need to take GNH very seriously; your business will be respectful and add value to the good of society, respect our values and culture, add to the wealth of our environment, and help us to achieve a green economy, one that is fuelled by sustainable competitiveness.… GNH is a platform to achieve and to excel. It’s a platform to dream differently and to articulate a vision that is sustainable for Bhutan and maybe for the world.”32
We have placed a great deal of emphasis on the environment in terms of natural wealth, and on the essential importance of its preservation for the future prosperity of the biosphere. But we must also highlight the fact that the presence of a healthy natural environment has a remarkable effect on subjective well-being. In his book An Ecology of Happiness, Éric Lambin, professor at the Universities of Louvain and Stanford, presents a summary of several studies showing that despite the contingencies of modern life, we are still intimately linked to Nature.33
The Slovenian physicist Aleksander Zidansek has identified a positive correlation between the (subjective) life satisfaction of the inhabitants of a given country and that country’s environmental performance indicators.34 He has also shown that a country’s CO2 emissions are inversely proportional to the well-being of its citizens.
As for the father of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson, he talks of “biophilia” and observes the extent to which mankind has an innate emotional affinity with other living beings, the plant world, and natural landscapes. This timeless, age-old relationship with Nature, a profound part of our own biological make-up, has been the object of a particularly substantial body of scientific research. In addition, when different people are presented with photographs of various landscapes, the ones they appreciate most are those depicting vast, verdant landscapes with a scattering of trees and areas of water.35
It is quite astonishing that this preference is observed regardless of the geographical origin of the individual being asked, including among the Inuit, who have never even seen such landscapes. These reactions can undoubtedly be explained by the fact that for our ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, relatively high open spaces with a few trees for shelter would have offered an ideal opportunity for looking out for both predators, of whom they were fearful, and game, on which they relied for food. The verdant element evokes plenty, and water sources represent vital conditions for survival. Looking at such landscapes instills a sense of peace, safety, and contentment in most of us.
A study published in the journal Science by the American geographer Roger Ulrich has also shown that patients convalescing from surgery recover more quickly when their hospital bed looks out on a natural landscape—a park or a lake—than on a brick wall or a building. On average, the former left hospital one day sooner than the latter, had less need for painkillers, and the nurses found that they were more pleasant as patients.36
Similarly, in a prison in Michigan, it was observed that prisoners whose cell window looked out on an inner courtyard required medical attention 24% more frequently than those prisoners whose windows gave out onto the countryside.37
Can a capitalist company apply these principles of sustainable harmony and factor the three crucial indicators—namely material prosperity, life satisfaction, and environmental conservation—into its balance sheet? This is, in any event, the plan laid out by the company Mars, best known for its chocolate bars of the same name, even though it sells many other food products, such as Snickers, Bounty, Uncle Ben’s rice, Suzi Wan, various tea and coffee brands, and pet food (Pedigree, Petcare, Whiskas), as well as organic seeds (Seeds of Change). Mars directly employs some 80,000 people and owns 160 factories, with 35 billion dollars of capital (twenty times more than Danone, just as a point of reference). A privately held family-owned company, it can be fairly free in deciding how it orients itself.
For about the last ten years, Mars has asked a team headed up by the French economist Bruno Roche to implement a system that lets the company reconcile the three prerequisites for sustainable harmony: economic prosperity; the quality of life of everyone involved in the company’s business activities, including small producers; and protecting the environment. In order to do this, Mars had to be open to the idea of limiting its profits in order to accommodate the other two components.
And so Roche came up with the concept of “mutuality,” which, according to him, can allow businesses to meet today’s challenges relating to dwindling natural resources, environmental degradation, and the pernicious effects of social inequality.
The expression “economics of mutuality” refers to the fact that profit must be shared mutually by investors, workers, and the environment. It rests on three pillars that must be constantly respected and upheld: nature, which supplies resources and which we must take care of; work, which uses and transforms these resources, and which must be fairly rewarded for doing so; and capital, which serves to guarantee continuity for several consecutive projects. Nature, work, and capital must be “remunerated,” each in its own way, if we are to avoid shaking and destabilizing these pillars of prosperity.
As Roche has explained to me in discussions we’ve been having over the years, different schools of thought have led to an unbalanced approach to these three pillars: Marxist economics seeks to remunerate work at the expense of capital and nature; free-market economics without any regulation seeks to reward only capital; while purist ecologists focus exclusively on environmental conservation. As far as Roche is concerned, it is essential to integrate these three components constructively, since they are omnipresent in human activity.
The economics of mutuality therefore takes into serious consideration the well-being of those people involved in economic activity; it is also prepared to protect natural resources at the expense of economic gain. Mars has now launched a pilot project in one sector of its activity (coffee), and if all goes according to plan, the idea is to roll the model out across the entire company. Although the company has remained fairly discreet about this initiative, it hopes to inspire others to adopt this alternative model centering on sustainable development.
Somewhere between philanthropy, which requires a donation-based approach, and social enterprise, which takes profit and reinvests it to further a social cause without paying out a dividend to shareholders, the economics of mutuality could allow big businesses to function in a way that is more respectful of gross national happiness and the biosphere.
In his book The Third Industrial Revolution, the political commentator Jeremy Rifkin concludes:
The critical task at hand is to harness the public capital, market capital, and especially the social capital of the human race to the mission of transitioning the world in a Third Industrial Revolution and a post-carbon era.… Only when we begin to think as an extended global family, that not only includes our own species but all our fellow travelers in this evolutionary sojourn on Earth, will we be able to save our common biosphere community and renew the planet for future generations.38