The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 2

His Royal Highness, Charles, Prince of Wales

If you were Charles, Prince of Wales, do you think you would just avoid rocking the boat, or would you take on big issues like the environment?

His Royal Highness (I'll stick to "HRH" for brevity's sake) has done the latter, in spades. His 2010 book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World is evidence of that.

HRH tells us precisely why we need to save Nature from our own depredations. The book is both a sweeping indictment of our present anti-Nature economy and culture and a font of information about how we can change our mindset ... and exactly what mindset we need to change it to.

Why do we need to change at all? Because, says HRH, in our present way of doing things, we use a fallacious measure of (hopefully) rising economic prosperity: GDP growth. The Gross Domestic Product measures the value of all the goods and services produced in a year, and if GDP goes up from one year to the next, that's supposedly great news.

But it isn't, really. GDP fails to take into account the harm we do to the natural environment en route to generating greater economic "success" for ourselves.

Here's a telling example that HRH gives:

We have inadvertently created economic signals and measures [such as GDP] that regard many natural forms of capital as valueless ... . For example, some 75 per cent of the electricity produced in Brazil comes from large hydro-power dams.

The Itaipu hydroelectric facility on
the the Paranã River that lies between
Brazil and Paraguay. It is the largest
power station on Earth.

[These hydroelectric power facilities] are totally reliant on rain which, in the main, is produced by the rainforests of the Amazon basin.

I'll Interrupt HRH briefly, because that last point deserves some explanation. The explanation comes from another passage in the book, one that talks about images taken from space by NASA satellites and edited into a film sequence:

From a vantage point in space, [the film] shows the annual pattern of cloud formation over rainforests. As the trees and other vegetation breathe and grow, so they exhale water vapour. Around twenty billion tonnes [a "tonne" or "metric ton" equals 1,000 kilograms] of water are released every day by the Amazon rainforests alone, and this condenses into great swirls of white cloud that then produce rain.

Here's a picture of the clouds that the rainforest produces:

Now, back to the original quotation from HRH's book:

Yet the forests have been cleared in pursuit of economic growth, and [the cost of having less rainfall in the Amazon basin] has not been factored into the future price of producing electricity. In other words, the short-term value of deforestation [in producing new farmland] is not set against the slightly longer-term rises in the price of power it will cause ...

Put more succinctly, our slanted GDP is a measure which fails to take into account the hidden economic value of such things as the rain clouds that fail to materialize when we wantonly cut down the trees of the Earth's rainforest!