Brazil imports GNH from Bhutan
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25 November, 2008 – As Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) continues to draw international attention, its most recent destination is Brazil, one of the largest and most populous countries in South America.
Last month, when a team from Bhutan visited the country to attend a conference on GNH, they were greeted with an overwhelming response. GNH found its place in the hearts of Brazilians, or so the coordinators say.
“GNH seeds are planted in Brazil. Now we have to water it with care,” said a psychologist and educator Dr Susan Andrews, the founder of the Future Vision Ecological Park, who coordinates GNH in Brazil.
“There is a tremendous yearning in people’s hearts for an integrated solution to problems and GNH shows a systematic approach to all of them. People want to work together towards that,” said Dr Andrews, who was in the capital to attend the GNH conference scheduled to begin next week.
“More and more people in the world are material-oriented but there is also a yearning of the human soul beyond material possession, that’s why GNH has touched so many hearts,” she said.
According to her, Brazil today was becoming one of the superpowers in the world with vast resources of water, energy, food and forests, but had reached a threshold where they had to choose a path to follow.
“Will it follow USA where Gross National Product increased three times in the past 50 years but people are less happy? Where community vitality has been extremely degraded, number of people who don’t visit neighbours increased by four times, violence tripled, one in every 100 people jailed and one in every four people unhappy or depressed,” she said.
“Or should Brazil become like China, a country where a recent earthquake killed thousands of people but the count was less than the number, who died of respiratory diseases caused by pollution every year,” she said.
She said that one Chinese environment minister recently admitted that, even though their GNP increased by 10 percent every year, the same percentage was spent in cleaning environmental problems created by development every year, so there was no progress.
“Now is the time for Brazil to follow a new formula and GNH offers the most complete set of indicators for true progress,” she said, adding that even their mayors were interested to apply GNH in their cities and eagerly awaiting the GNH survey to be implemented in their areas.
She suggested that GNH, being a process of empowering people to do something for their own integrated progress, should come from within the people and not only from top-down.
“Here in Bhutan, many are talking about it but heard that only a few really understand it, so it’s important to involve Bhutanese people in the process,” said Dr Susan Andrews, who has plans to develop a Brazilian version of questionnaires and put them into practice as soon as she returns.
Meanwhile, she said Bhutanese had to be very aware that more people from outside were expecting a lot from them and really wanted to see Bhutan as a GNH country and that was a great responsibility.
“We hope you won’t disappoint us,” she told Kuensel.
By Kesang Dema (Kuenselonline)