Manufacturing in this country is never as high as during wartime, but that doesn t mean the quality of life is better. It s easy to see how the GDP is divorced from real well-being. In fact, real wages declined nearly 14 percent between 1973 and 1995, while the GDP rose 55 percent during the same period. As Peter Montague writes in one of his Rachel s Environment And Health Weekly bulletins, GDP treats pollution as a double positive it is counted as a gain when it is first created as a byproduct of some other activity, and it is counted as a gain again when society pays to clean it up. In essence, Montague writes, the GDP is like a giant calculator with no subtraction key.
Every transaction is counted as a gain, even when society suffers a loss.
And non-paid activities, such as volunteer work, are not counted at all. So sustainability requires, first of all, a new and better way to measure the well-being of a community, nation or society. We re not just interested in dollars, says Greene. We re interested in a better quality of life. Greene says her group has not yet addressed tourism, but adds, One of the emphases of sustainability is local self-reliance.