🌱 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.