https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/want-to-avert-the-apocalypse-take-lessons-from-costa-rica/2017/11/06 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Mon, 06 Nov 2017 17:02:32 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/want-to-avert-the-apocalypse-take-lessons-from-costa-rica/2017/11/06/comment-page-1#comment-1580108 Mon, 06 Nov 2017 17:02:32 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=68475#comment-1580108 The vast majority of Costa Ricans (Ticos) choose to live in its central capital city to have access to global advantages and avoid the hot humid weather of tropical rainforests and tropical coasts. Most of the rest are connected to agriculture in a country that was once the most deforested on the planet and still is missing a third of its forests. And yet, CR tops the HPI because of small per capita ecolgical footprint, because it’s officially conserved a lot of what remains, population has soared so per capita footprint shrinks, and because its extraordinarily mountainous landscape combined with tropical humidty allows it to produce almost all its eclectricity through hydro – although at a heavy cost to the local ecosystems where dams have been built. Ticos self-report high wellbeing because, as Ticos put it, small country, large family. The “universalist” social policies involve a lot of patronage, which is problematic, and the environment is increasingy devastated by climate change and ever-advancing globalization. Can CR hang on to its lead on happiness? I’ve spent most of the last several years here with that question in mind, and I’m skeptical because he poulation may already exceed the environmental carrying capacity. And what matters more, imho, is that most of the population chooses to live in a modern city, which, like almost all cities, is a place where almost everything has been killed and most of the land covered with cement and tar or otherwise “developed”. Most of the world’s population now lives in such environments so most of its children are learning to live in these barren largely lifeless landscapes. The result here, like everywhere else, is the worst kind of poverty, unreflected in GDP or per capita income, and yet the percentage of persons concerned about that is tiny, and dwarfed by the number of persons who write about our brighter future while dreaming of independent wealt from crypto ponzis and such.

]]> https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/want-to-avert-the-apocalypse-take-lessons-from-costa-rica/2017/11/06/comment-page-1#comment-1580090 Mon, 06 Nov 2017 08:36:34 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=68475#comment-1580090 Excellent article.
In addition, there are a few other places you could mention. In terms of human development indicators, even Cuba is performing well in spite of the embargo. And comparing nation states only makes sense when it comes to centralized services such as health coverage. For other issues it might be better to talk about bioregions and culture/language communities.

]]>