We cannot meet human needs for all in ways that undermine the ecological systems that are the ultimate determinants of our health, writes Trevor Hancock. ADRIAN LAM, TIMES COLONIST Last week, I suggested that true prosperity is doughnut-shaped, but I did not define what I mean by true prosperity, nor what Doughnut Economics means for this region. I will explore the first of these topics this week and the second next week. One understanding of true prosperity can be found in many faiths, where it is not primarily about material wealth but about mental, social and spiritual wealth. For example, Paramhansa Yogananda, the first Indian yoga master to live and teach permanently in the West, wrote in 1939 that true prosperity is “being able to supply your mental and spiritual needs, as well as the physical,” and that it involves having “at your command the things that are necessary for your existence.”
Fast-forward 35 years and we find isolation and loneliness have become a significant social and health problem, even before the COVID-19 pandemic made the creation of these important connections much more difficult. So I was happy to be involved in an online event put on recently by the City of Victoria’s Neighbourhood Team. They showed The Great Disconnect, a one-hour documentary made by Tamer Soliman, an Ottawa-based health practitioner, and released in 2018. I was one of the experts featured in the film, which I am happy to say recently won the Best Feature Award at the Better Cities Film Festival. The city invited Tamer, his partner Sarah (who was the writer and editor) and me to discuss the film after it was shown.
Shockingly, the report notes that while Canada ranked 12th on the HDI internationally in 2016, the Registered Indian population as a whole would have ranked 52nd out of 189 countries (the same as Bulgaria, Montenegro and Romania that year), while the on-reserve population ranked 78th, the same as Grenada and about the same as Thailand, Brazil or Colombia. So it is more than a bit ironic that in his Dec. 2 speech on the state of the planet, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres discussed the important role of Indigenous people in protecting nature and helping us move toward a healthy, just and sustainable future.
One recent UN report helps us chart this new course, in part by addressing one of the challenges Mr. Guterres noted: “More and more people are recognizing the limits of conventional yardsticks such as Gross Domestic Product, in which environmentally damaging activities count as economic positives.” The UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report began in 1990 “precisely as a counterpoint to myopic definitions of development,” as the 2020 report puts it. Specifically, it offers the Human Development Index (HDI) as an alternative to the GDP, one grounded in human rather than economic development, reminding us that “economic growth is more means than end.”
It’s worth quoting in full the litany of problems he laid out, because this is the challenge we face throughout the 21st century, and especially in the 2020s: “Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction. Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes. Deserts are spreading. Wetlands are being lost. Every year, we lose 10 million hectares of forests. Oceans are overfished and choking with plastic waste.
“The carbon dioxide they absorb is acidifying the seas. Coral reefs are bleached and dying. Air and water pollution are killing nine million people annually more than six times the current toll of the pandemic. And with people and livestock encroaching further into animal habitats and disrupting wild spaces, we could see more viruses and other disease-causing agents jump from animals to humans.”