Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse -- And How We Can Create a New Kind of Eco

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/149552/vision:_8_reasons_global_capitalism_makes_our_lives_worse_--_and_how_we_can_create_a_new_kind_of_economy_/

Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse -- And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy

A new film explores how globalization has resulted in crises of the economy, the environment and the human spirit -- and points the way to a new path.

To many of us, a society where no one goes hungry, where there is no unemployment, where people are happy and they have spacious homes and lots of leisure time seems like fantasy. But it's not a fantasy for Helena Norberg-Hodge -- she saw it firsthand in the tiny Himalayan region of Ladakh, a remote mountain community that borders Tibet.

During the course of 35 years there, she also saw what happened when Ladakh was suddenly thrown open to the outside world in the 1970s and subsidized roads brought subsidized goods to the region. The local economy was undermined, the cultural fabric was torn apart. Unemployment, pollution and divisiveness emerged for the first time.

"This was Ladakh's introduction to globalization," says Norberg-Hodge. The "story of Ladakh can shed light on the root causes of the crises now facing the planet."

The account of Ladakh's transformation opens the new film, The Economics of Happiness, created by Steven Gorelick, John Page and Norberg-Hodge, the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture. As Bill McKibben says early on in the film, according to a poll conducted every year since the end of World World II, happiness in the U.S. peaked in 1956. "It's been slowly downhill ever since," he says. "But in that time we've gotten immeasurably richer, we have three times as much stuff. Somehow it hasn't worked because that same affluence tends to undermine community."

Our consumer culture, driven by the engine of globalization, has resulted in an economic and environmental crisis -- and, the film's creators say, a crisis of the human spirit.


MORE at the link ---

[dkf]

1. To me this just says ignorance is bliss.

Once you start wanting what everyone else has and knowing what the rest of the world knows, you turn into a consumer.

It's a lot more than what the movie makers pinned it on.

[mdmc]

2. ..