An award-winning documentary film, The Economics of Happiness, will be shown as part of the fifth annual Think Tank Cinema film series. The screening will take place at the Fernie Arts Station, 601 1st Avenue in Fernie, at 7:00pm on Wednesday February 29th. Advocates for Local Living, a group working to support and inspire a thriving and sustainable Fernie, and the Elk Valley branch of Wildsight, an organization protecting wildlife and wild spaces, are sponsoring the event. Olympian Ingrid Liepa and the founder of Kimberley’s Happiness Project will hold discussion after the film. Admission to this public event is by voluntary donation. No RSVP is necessary. Healthy, fair trade snacks and beverages as well as organic popcorn will be available.
The Economics of Happiness, an award-winning new documentary by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick and John Page, describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm–an economics of happiness.
Five years in the making, The Economics of Happiness is a global tour-de-force—going beyond identifying problems, it outlines realistic solutions, drawing inspiration from the emerging worldwide movement for economic localization—urban gardens in Detroit, Transition Towns, hands-on education in Japan, community farming in India, cultural preservation in Peru. The film shows that the solutions to our most pressing environmental, economic and social crises can simultaneously improve our quality of life.
The Economics of Happiness features acclaimed economists, environmentalists and scholars including Vandana Shiva, Zac Goldsmith, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Juliet Schor, Richard Heinberg, Bhutanese film director Khyentse Norbu, and the first Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, Samdhong Rinpoche.