Friday, 10 Oct 2003

SEATTLE, Wash.

Two days ago, I made the not-particularly-controversial claim that GDP and the Dow Jones Industrial Average don’t do a good job of representing people’s well-being and have virtually no bearing on the integrity of nature.

“Hold on, fancy boy,” you may be saying to yourself, “do you think you can do a better job?”

Maybe so. Lots of people have in the past. Among government agencies and nonprofit institutions there is an entire cottage industry devoted to creating indicators that are more revealing than GDP. At Northwest Environment Watch, we spent a few months combing through many of these reports, compiling lists of all the different indicators that have been used so effectively by others. We were looking for: <![CDATA[

• Data that was reliable, and available for free or at reasonable cost
• Trends that covered most of the Pacific Northwest, including Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and British Columbia
• Trends that were reflective, in a broad sense, of some critical facet of human or natural well-being
• Trends that varied significantly enough that it was possible to detect change every year or two
• Trends that were interesting and intuitively compelling

Many alternative-indicators projects, for all their strengths, have failed to catch on because they overreach. They’ve tried to track so many trends that the intended audience — the media, political leaders, or the general public — get overwhelmed by the swirl of information.

So we committed ourselves to finding just five to 10 indicators that really worked. The question was, which ones?

We listed nearly a thousand indicators, settled on about 100 that were promising candidates, and then narrowed the field to about 40 that we felt were most likely to meet our criteria. That list covered a wide gamut of social and environmental issues. For one reason or another, we had to eliminate most of them: high-school graduation rates (school districts tend to lose track of kids); crime rates (police reports don’t match crime victimization surveys); indicators based on public surveys (margins of error are too wide); and a whole array of promising ecological indicators (simply not enough data).

Eventually, we settled on seven indicators: life expectancy, an excellent proxy for overall human health, and one that’s both statistically robust and based on reliable data; toxics in our bodies, as measured by original research on human breast milk; deforestation rates as captured by satellite imagery (clearcuts, essentially); sprawl, as measured by census and housing-permit data; energy use, as measured by consumption of gasoline, diesel, and electricity, which are the best-tracked forms of energy; population, which turns out to be a good proxy for human impacts on nature; and economic security, a mini-index of poverty rates, unemployment, and income trends for the middle class.

There you have it: the seven trends that make up the Cascadia Scorecard.

Now, we’re not claiming that this is the perfect list. There are things we’d rather measure if the data were available. But in filling in some of the gaps that GDP simply doesn’t cover, these do pretty well.

Now that our research on these trends is nearing completion, our toughest task will be convincing the media that they should pay attention to them. You see, these trends change slowly — sometimes by just a percentage point or two a year. But the media, particularly in the Internet age, is addicted to a fast news cycle: Yesterday’s news is too old to cover, and last year’s is all too often seen as irrelevant.

But as it turns out, it’s the slow news that counts most. Though our seven indicators move slowly, their changes tend to be cumulative. They are the tortoise in the proverbial race. Slowly and steadily, changes in lifespan, pollution, sprawl, population growth, energy, and the economy have radically altered our lifestyles and landscapes over the course of just a few generations. And these trends will have far more influence on the future of our place than the economic burps (Buy! Sell!) and personality stories (J.Lo! Ben!) that dominate our daily information diet.

Ultimately, measurement does matter. To a surprising degree, we gauge the success of the entire human enterprise from just a handful of economic metrics. And we organize our lives and institutions to mete out those things that make those yardsticks improve — to deliver rising stock prices, confident consumers, the grossest domestic product we can muster. But conversely, we do not get what we don’t count: thriving, secure communities living amid vibrant, healthy nature.

Let’s change that.