Benchmarking our decision-making

The dominant culture in today's Alberta politics and institutions is prone to justify our individual and collective decision-making based on a set of rather narrow and sometimes contradictory premises. Why do we barrel full steam ahead with non-conventional hydrocarbon exploitation when it is directly pushing certain species to the brink of extinction and jeopardizes the health of our land and water supply? Why is it possible for a high-school dropout to move to Ft. McMurray, start driving a monster motion machine for a fossil fuel company, and make many times the wage of a student nurse in a municipal hospital or caregiver in an old age home?

The logic of how we gauge 'progress' is flawed; with an incomplete equation informing a bias that has its root in the human desire for simple solutions, our society propels itself into the future with an inadequate indicator at the helm: GDP.

Gross Domestic Product became widely used in an attempt to gauge the industrial (and thus, military) capacity of warring nation-states during World War II. The history of GDP as an amoral indicator of economic output is demonstrated in how maximization of production and mobilization of tanks, battleships, machine guns, and ration packs took precedence and the application of such production was externalized. For those who first began to measure GDP and base their decision making upon it, there was no time, no room, to ask questions pertaining to the ethical, environmental, or cultural ramifications of needing to increase indices of production and consumption; they needed more bullets to kill more people, quicker.

The problem for us is that the logic of a war-time economy never left the paradigmatic impulses of our social design. Instead of transitioning to methods of integral socio-economic management, we myopically shifted our mining, production, and manufacturing from producing war materielle to producing consumer goods and inordinate amounts of fiscal wealth for a small minority of human beings. Pushed by corporate media, advertising firms and an investment class that found a way to extend the windfall of war-time profits, our elected representatives and academic institutions did little to question long-term implications of post-war planning. And so, instead of redirecting our creative energies and critical thinking to the task of building economic institutions that bolstered democracy, improved local resiliency, and accounted for the unintended and unseen of externalities, we have steadily degenerated into a deluded culture of comfort-loving primates that go to extreme measures to uphold a broken metre stick.

In provincial politics, the time for the adoption of an alternative progress indicator has come. From the pioneering work of local ecological economists and non-profits to the revolutionary pursuits of global movements and institutions, concerned citizens have a vast sample of thought and action to draw upon in coming up with alternative models of measuring and evaluating wealth, health, and natural capital. There are many options available to us in this regard; we can:

- engender a provincial ecological footprint monitor as a crown corporation or branch within an existing government agency for policy pursuit and the establishment of limits to harmful forms of development.

- seek to integrate the data and pursuits of different ministries into a government-funded Alberta Genuine Progress Indicator that offers the public and government transparent annual summaries of social, economic, and environmental parameters for progress benchmarking.

- endeavour to increase citizen participation in the direction and review of municipal and provincial matters through adaptation of direct democracy and feedback mechanisms. Citizen surveys, participatory budgeting, and the evolution of systems that allow citizens to direct the focus of society's progress are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how we can simultaneously revitalize democracy and deepen the notion of what 'progress' means.

As a provincial election looms on the horizon, I am reminded that our role as citizens must grow to encompass a larger definition of what a 'life well lived' and a 'civilization well built' entails. If we support the candidates that are open to and proponents of revising the progress indicators we use on a day to day basis to judge whether we are doing the right things, I have little doubt that the future we get will much more accurately reflect the one that we, and future generations, would want.

जय सच्चिदानन्द

-KSE