🌱 Gross Domestic Regeneration

Hi 👋

Ask a farmer how a field is doing and you'll get a number: tonnes per hectare.

It's a good number, honestly earned, and it took generations of experimentation and hard work to know how to improve it. But it says nothing about the hedge along the bottom of that field, nothing about the worms working the soil underneath it, nothing about whether the soil will still be there in thirty years, let alone the quality of nutrition.

That's the trouble with numbers. Whatever we agree to measure becomes the thing we chase, and often, everything else quietly falls away.

Now picture another field, a long way from here, in a town in the foothills of the Himalayas, where a girl of five is playing. Later that year the glacier above the town will melt faster than anyone living has seen, and the water will become a landslide that shoots down the mountain, taking her field with it.

That field was never measured. There was no tonnes-per-hectare for it. But it was just as real as the one down the road from you and me, and it disappeared completely.

The metric we use to measure the performance of whole countries has the same blind spot, but on a much larger scale.

In 1934, in the middle of the Depression, an economist called Simon Kuznets gave the American Congress the first national income figures. He built them as an emergency measure, to help a broken country see itself recover. In the very same report, he warned that the welfare of a nation could hardly be read from them. Every government since has gone right ahead and ignored his warning.

GDP became the metric, and the metric became the goal.

When the girl from the mountains began asking what had happened to her field, she received the kind of answers that adults give children when the real answer is too complex. In Dharamsala, a Tibetan town in exile, she was confused and left feeling her loss. It wasn't until tenth grade, that she heard the words "climate change" for the first time, and understood, all at once, that this was the name for what had happened to her field. Her name is Tenzin Seldon.

Chasing GDP is a kind of madness, because it's a target that's always in motion, a goal we can never actually hit. Growth is a process, not a destination, so the goalposts renew themselves every quarter, forever. Has any government ever set out a goal at which it would say, 'okay, this is enough'?

Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is Citizen Potawatomi, tells a story in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, about a figure called the Windigo: a person who was forced into cannibalism during the hungry end of a very hard winter. Their heart was turned to ice and they grew ever hungrier the more they eat with a gluttonous spirit of endless consumption. Kimmerer says its footprints are all over an economy built on endless growth. Most people would think we have to fight this spirit. But her answer to the Windigo is gratitude, a flowing heart for what has been given to us, and we should give something back in return.

Tenzin's mother won a place in the American immigration lottery, and after joining her, she went from the top of her class at Stanford to becoming, in 2011, the first Tibetan-American Rhodes Scholar, studying mathematics and climate policy at Oxford. She went to work at the United Nations offices in Thailand, where everyone understood exactly how much danger the two billion people who drink the Himalayan meltwater were in. Yet, nothing changed. So she left policy and went to business, then business to finance, seeking the means to affect the powers that be.

On 18 September, her fund, Pulse Fund, announced $63 million investment to back young climate companies, and two nights later, at a gala in Manhattan called Water Is Life, she stood up and laid out her idea for how we should score the performance of a country.

Her answer is Gross Domestic Regeneration. Does a country restore its natural systems? Does it hold its communities together and narrow the gap between rich and poor? Can its economy absorb shocks and still pay people?

Her idea is still a seed. It's early. Essentially, it's three questions but one day, they could become the source of a universally applied metric.

On Thursday evening two friends of mine, Tom Ludwig and Sam Chevallier, are showing their first film at the BFI on the South Bank. It's called The Evenlode Blueprint, about a farmer-led nature recovery project in a river valley in Oxfordshire, and it asks a related question: can private finance be a solution to biodiversity loss?

Unfortunately, I'm not able to make their show, but I'll be here in Cornwall, thinking of the two of them, knowing that all these questions are the start to us finding some answers.

Talk soon,

Rob

PS: Here's Robin Wall Kimmerer reading her short letter "The Windigo", from the anthology Dear America.

PPS: And Tenzin's own column on Gross Domestic Regeneration, from the Aspen Daily News.