Human Flourishing

• “ Forget 'developing' poor countries, it's time to 'de-develop' rich countries.”
• De-developing - rich countries should slow down their consumption so that poor nations can "catch-up”.
• Peter Edward - argues that instead of pushing poorer countries to “catch up” with rich ones, we should be thinking of ways to get rich countries to “catch down” to more appropriate levels of development.
• September 2015 - the UN’s new sustainable development goals are launched in New York
• SDG- sustainable development goals
• • the main objective is to eradicate poverty by 2030
• The main strategy for eradicating poverty is the same: growth.
• Malala Yousafza - The fearless activist who took a bullet for education
• Growth - the main object of development for the past 70 years, despite the fact that it’s not working
• growth isn’t an option any more – we’ve already grown too much.
• Scientists are now telling us that we’re blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed. And the hard truth is that this global crisis is due almost entirely to overconsumption in rich countries.
• Right now, our planet only has enough resources for each of us to consume 1.8 “global hectares” annually – a standardized unit that measures resource use and waste.
• This figure is roughly what the average person in Ghana or Guatemala consumes.
• By contrast, people in the US and Canada consume about 8 hectares per person, while Europeans consume 4.7 hectares – many times their fair share.
• US:

  life expectancy is 79 years and GDP per capita is $53,000. But many countries have achieved similar life expectancy with a mere fraction of this income.
• Cuba has a comparable life expectancy to the US and one of the highest literacy rates in the world with GDP per capita of only $6,000 and consumption of only 1.9 hectares – right at the threshold of ecological sustainability. Similar claims can be made of Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Tunisia
• , some of the excess income and consumption we see in the rich world yields improvements in quality of life that are not captured by life expectancy, or even literacy rates.
• Costa Rica manages to sustain one of the highest happiness indicators and life expectancies in the world with a per capita income one-fourth that of the US.
• e we need to start calling on rich countries to justify their excesses.
• ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT - estimates the biologically productive land and sea area needed to provide the renewable resources that a population consumes and to absorb the wastes it generates.
• Your ecological footprint- Mr. Wiersma
• HUMAN FLOURISHING -effort to achieve self-actualization and fulfillment within the context of a larger community of individuals, each with the right to pursue his or her own such efforts.