Wales is pioneering a radical approach to sustainable development that links climate change with other kinds of social change. It chimes with Buddhism’s holistic view of wellbeing
The Wellbeing of Future Generations
Global warming was on the agenda at the Davos gathering yesterday with contributions by David Attenborough and the remarkable Swedish 15 year-old, Greta Thumberg, who has inspired protests by schoolchildren around the world. She recently told the UN. Conference on Climate Change: ‘You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.’
In Wales, where I live, these protests resonate with a piece of legislation that deserves to be much better known. The Wellbeing of Future Generations Act of 2015 states that, for the sake of our children, every public body in Wales must operate according to sustainable development principles.
Reducing carbon emissions is just the start. The Act states that policymakers must think longterm, work collaboratively and involve ordinary people in their decisions. Every government action must take account of the need to create a more prosperous and healthy society with a thriving culture because the wellbeing of humanity as a whole cannot be separated from the wellbeing of individuals and communities. And all this means fundamentally changing how the government operates.
I can’t vouch for the Act’s success, and people in the Welsh Government tell me that that implementing it is challenging at every level; but I applaud its ambition and the strength of the commitment to making it work.
It also resonates with what Buddhism teaches me about wellbeing. According to Buddhism, human beings are typically driven by unconscious emotions that focus on short-term gains at the cost of our longterm interests.
Everyone wants to be happy; but when we look for happiness in immediate pleasures or prioritise our own interests over others, we turn happiness into an object that we think we can grasp. But Buddhism suggests that the grasping mentality is itself an important part of what makes us unhappy. If that’s true of individuals, it’s also true of society. In either case the alternative is fostering the conditions that support our longterm wellbeing.
Greta Thumberg, the Swedish teenager, is admirably impatient and rightly demands that we recognise climate change as a crisis that requires urgent action. But acting in ways that are effective in the long term means recognising that we need to think freshly and think big.
Perhaps we can’t change human nature, but what’s happening in Wales shows that at least we can attempt to rethink our activities in a considered way, even on the level of a government, to create the conditions for lasting change.
