SPIRITUALITY AS THE FOURTH BOTTOM LINE Spirituality as the Fourth Bottom Line Sohail Inayatullah, Professor, Tamkang University, Sunshine Coast University, Queensland University of Technology - www.metafuture.org Invariably, at the end of a lecture on paradigm change, new visions or community capacity, there is always some one in the audience who asks: but what is the bottom line? The “bottom line” question asserts that argument, visions and language display are all interesting but ultimately unimportant. For any speaker focused on gender, community, health, cultural or spiritual issues suddenly there is very little to say, since, well, it is not about the bottom line but everything else. Times have changed In Australia, Westpac Bank recently issued an expanded approach to traditional accountability standards. The triple bottom line movement has taken off. Second, CEOs are part of this value shift. Even nations are following suite. But where there may be a subtle shift toward the spiritual, can it become the 4th bottom line?
Gross National Happiness Commission - The Planning Commission of Bhutan, Development for Happiness Human Needs: The Human Givens Approach To Physical & Emotional Needs The principles behind the human givens approach grew out of the work of a group of psychologists and psychotherapists who were trying to bring greater clarity to the way people who become depressed, anxious, traumatised or addicted are helped, as well as making such help more reliably effective (read more). THE HUMAN GIVENS APPROACH is a set of organising ideas that provides a holistic, scientific framework for understanding the way that individuals and society work. This framework encompasses the latest scientific understandings from neurobiology and psychology, as well as ancient wisdom and original new insights. At its core is a highly empowering idea – that human beings, like all organic beings, come into this world with a set of needs. To get our physical and emotional needs met, nature has gifted us our very own internal 'guidance programme' – this, together with our needs, makes up what we call the human givens. References 1]. What are the Human Givens? Emotional needs include:
Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth | Environment Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry. The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered. "It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all", said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. But the abstract new laws are not expected to stop industry in its tracks.
KPI Library United States How’s Life? The United States performs very well in overall measures of well-being, as shown by the fact that it ranks among the top countries in a large number of topics in the Better Life Index. Money, while it cannot buy happiness, is an important means to achieving higher living standards. In the United States, the average household net-adjusted disposable income is 38 001 USD a year, more than the OECD average of 23 047 USD a year. In terms of employment, 67% of people aged 15 to 64 in the United States have a paid job, slightly above the OECD employment average of 66%. Having a good education is an important requisite for finding a job. In terms of health, life expectancy at birth in the United States is almost 79 years, one year lower than the OECD average of 80 years.
Parker J. Palmer • Center for Courage & RenewalCenter for Courage & Renewal • Biography • Books • Events • Podcasts • Speeches & Interviews • Videos • Writings Follow Parker J. & OnBeing.org Parker J. Parker holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as eleven honorary doctorates, two Distinguished Achievement Awards from the National Educational Press Association, and an Award of Excellence from the Associated Church Press. He is the author of nine books, including several best-selling and award-winning titles: Healing the Heart of Democracy, The Heart of Higher Education (with Arthur Zajonc), The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, Let Your Life Speak, The Active Life, To Know As We Are Known, The Company of Strangers, and The Promise of Paradox. His latest book, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, was chosen by Spirituality & Practice as one of the best books of 2011 on contemplation and social activism. A member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker), Dr.
A World Without People - In Focus For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have recently evacuated or otherwise abandoned a number of places around the world -- large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to vanish from the planet altogether. Collected here are recent scenes from nuclear-exclusion zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence, unsold developments built during the real estate boom, ghost towns, and more. [41 photos] Use j/k keys or ←/→ to navigate Choose: A tree grows from the top of a chimney in an abandoned factory yard in Luque, on the outskirts of Asuncion, Paraguay, on October 2 , 2011. A bust of Confucius rests at an abandoned workshop in the town of Dangcheng in Quyang county, 240 km (150 miles) southwest of Beijing, on December 7, 2011. Ivy grows over a street in Tomioka town, Fukushima, northeastern Japan, on August 19, 2011.
smartKPIs.com - KPI examples, KPI definitions, KPI reporting, templates, advice and smart performance resources How Happy Is Bhutan, Really? Gross National Happiness Unpacked Mandy/CC BY 2.0 If you haven't already read, in the run-up to the Rio+20 environmental conference (the event roughly six weeks away now) the UN has been highlighting the importance of moving beyond GDP as the end-all-be-all measurement of national progress. Towards that it's highlighting the World Happiness Report, with the research done by the folks at Columbia University's Earth Institute. Hidden away at the end of that report (the entirety of which is worth reading, for those of the appropriately wonky inclination), is a case study of Bhutan and its development of the Gross National Happiness metric. Here at TreeHugger we've mentioned this many times, in cataloguing all the better and greener ways of measuring the economy than GDP, and GNH has a certain cache within the green movement and social justice movement more broadly. As far as how GNH is defined, the report says that though there is no single definition, the most widely used definition is: So what's the tally?