Welcome to Silver Donald Cameron’s blog! Dr Cameron is the author of 19 books and of many plays, films, magazine articles, radio and TV scripts. He is currently the host and executive producer of TheGreeninterview.com and of its feature documentary, Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World. In 2019, he was appointed the first Farley Mowat Chair in Environment at Cape Breton University, where he earlier served as professor, dean and writer-in-residence. He currently teaches an on-campus/online course called Green Rights.
I recently finished re-reading – overnight, almost in one sitting, and mostly on my phone – John McPhee’s wonderful book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. I first read it around 40 years ago, soon after its publication in 1973. Like much of McPhee’s work, it has stayed with me not as a book but as an experience, an evergreen literary memory.
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Shrinking traditional print markets and dropping fees are making it harder for many freelancers to earn a living. One veteran Canadian journalist shares how he’s learned to capitalize on deeply-researched content by expanding into multiple media formats with partners experienced in radio, television and the web.
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This Special Presentation began as an interview with the Honourable Jigme Yoser Thinley, the first elected Prime Minister of Bhutan, whose government aims to entrench and extend Bhutan’s long-standing goal of expanding Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. To put the interview in context, we prepared an original half-hour documentary film, using footage of Bhutan shot by Silver Donald Cameron and by Nova Scotia film-maker Kent Martin.
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Here is a simple way to save the earth. Exterminate the populations of North America, Japan and Western Europe.
Probably not a plan. Hard to make it fly politically. But it’s a thought that flickered through my mind as I reviewed the numbers in GPI Atlantic’s recent publication.
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I’m a huge fan of the TED talks, 18-minute nuggets of wisdom, insight, fun and stimulation. If you don’t know them, you have a treat in store at www.ted.com. So I was thrilled when I was invited to speak at a TEDx event in Halifax last June – a local, self-organized occasion licensed by TED to bring people together to share a TED-like experience.
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But first: Bhutan!
Nearly 40 years ago, the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan famously declared to a visiting journalist that Gross National Product was not as important as Gross National Happiness. At the time, Bhutan was a feudal monarchy without highways, hospitals, a postal system or a national currency.
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I just delivered a profusely-illustrated keynote speech called “Bhutan: The Pursuit of Gross National Happiness” at a 300-person conference of the Canadian Organic Growers, Toronto chapter. The reaction was really gratifying. People found the talk both fresh and inspiring – someone, somewhere is doing things right!
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How can it be that I can know the right thing to do, do the wrong thing instead, and still consider myself an intelligent being? We’ve all had that experience. I shouldn’t eat any more of those fattening canapes, we think.
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“The ecological footprint is a very simple measure, and it’s intended to measure one thing,” says Bill Rees. “How big would the little planet required to support Silver Donald Cameron be?
“You eat food, you drink water, you deposit waste back into the environment.
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And now for some good news. David Cameron – not my brother, the guy in No. 10 Downing Street – has been musing aloud that maybe the Gross Domestic Product, a narrow financial measure developed during the economic maelstrom of the 1930s, doesn’t adequately describe human life in the globalized 21st century.
In these musings, Cameron echoes French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who in 2008 commissioned a panel of eminent economists to seek a better measurement than GDP.
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