Excerpts from Keynote Speech to the Animal Grantmakers Conference, October 23, 2023
Beth Allgood
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product counts air pollution and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
These are not my words; They were the words of Robert F Kennedy from a 1968 speech at the University of Kansas. Hear a recording of the speech here:
This message resonated so profoundly when I first heard it in 2009. After working in conservation for a decade at that point, I was feeling a little hopeless. Climate change, poaching, and the cruelties of big animal agriculture – are all byproducts of the pursuit of more – more profit, more stuff, more, more, more. I felt that my work in conservation was only stopping leaks in a dam, but the dam’s collapse was inevitable. Eco-grief is real!
Around that same time, I learned that there are alternatives. I learned about Gross National Happiness in Bhutan, which measures and prioritizes the well-being of the Bhutanese over simply growing the economy of Bhutan. I realized there were alternative paths – from “business as usual” to measuring and improving what matters in life. I began to see that we can do conservation better, too.
I founded OneNature to help catalyze a shift from “ conservation as usual” to an inclusive well-being approach for animals and people. OneNature measures and promotes human well-being as a complement and alternative to purely economic and biological approaches to measuring project impact.
I have seen the positive impact of conservation work on the ground and at the highest levels of decision-making. I have also seen that there are weaknesses in traditional conservation approaches.
Indeed, traditional conservation approaches have often excluded local communities from decision-making. This has created problems, including wasting money and time implementing projects that communities didn’t want and don’t sustain, structuring projects to provide communities with what project implementors think the people want or should want, and even violating human rights (in extreme cases.) All the while, the biodiversity crisis continues to accelerate.
There is a very important movement to center communities, especially Indigenous communities, in conservation decision-making. There is a call to push more money directly to communities and a push towards completely locally-led initiatives.
More and more, I am struck by the seemingly binary choices in our world: animals vs people, global north vs. global south, the wisdom of elders vs. the energy and activism of youth, and conservationists vs. communities. These are not real choices. We are all in this together and must bring together all the perspectives, experiences, and approaches to create solutions. No one has it completely figured out, and excluding different views from the conversation is not helpful or productive; it is just more “business as usual” and doesn’t get us to the transformation we need.
So how do we get there? We can start by measuring what matters to the people living with wildlife and supporting them in co-creating projects with the best outcomes for wildlife and people. One project at a time.
OneNature and our partner, the Happiness Alliance, have developed an approach that measures the well-being of people involved in conservation projects. We call it “Wild Happiness.” The core of this approach is a data-driven well-being survey instrument.
The Happiness Alliance is a leading expert in data-driven well-being measures. A million data points have been collected from people worldwide who have taken this well-being survey. Together, OneNature and the Happiness Alliance have adapted this global survey for use in conservation projects. We can compare responses in the surveyed communities to global responses and – even more importantly – compare changes in the well-being of communities throughout the life of a conservation project. It is the foundation of our participatory well-being approach.
In the last few years, I have been asked whether we can trust or rely on community perception data. Some people dismiss the idea of using information about how people feel about their lives, partly because – well, let’s be honest, many people are not well-informed about many things.
But no matter what they know or don’t know about the world – they are the only experts on how they feel. And the only way to know how they feel is to ask them. Their feelings about their lives matter to them and lead them to their decisions and actions. Their feelings about their lives should matter to us if we want our projects to be successful and sustainable.
In his 2022 book Blindspot, the CEO of Gallup, Jon Clifton, writes about the importance of asking people how they feel about their lives.
He cites examples of how the consequences of the global rise of unhappiness and dissatisfaction are more predictive of political unrest, extremism, populism, and even war and revolution than economic measures alone. Clifton provides examples from the Arab Spring, Brexit, and even elections in the US. Not knowing that people are unhappy can create “blind spots” in which people SEEM to react to events randomly and unexpectedly. This can happen at a national level, as Clifton describes, and it is true in communities like those in conservation projects as well.
Obviously, the need to protect wildlife is urgent. Habit loss, pollution, zoonotic diseases, and exploitation of wildlife and other animals are increasing. The climate is changing rapidly – making finding meaningful, sustainable, and transformative solutions even more urgent.
Partnering with communities to co-create transformational solutions to these problems is critical. Not just in theory but through implementing practical tools and approaches that measure and support this shift.
In the introduction to the book Animals Manifesto Dr. Jane Goodall writes:
Today we stand at a crossroads. Will we continue with “business as usual” in the mistaken notion that there can be unlimited economic development on a planet with finite natural resources and growing populations of humans and their livestock? Or, shall we choose to get together and develop a new relationship with the natural world? A new relationship with other animals? A new and more equitable and sustainable, “greener” economy? It will not be easy but I truly hope we do.
I think we can bring Wild Happiness to the world… one community at a time.
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