soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

indicators can continue to progress in the face of growing
discontent and unrest. At the Symposium Richard Nixon was
quoted on this matter: "In the next ten years we will
increase our wealth by 50%. The profound question is: does
this mean that we will be 50% richer in any real sense, 50%
better off, 50% happier?" Ted Gordon, President of the
Futures Group presented some startling data regarding the
values and priorities of the American people, many of which
apply in Australia. His data were based on analyses of polls
taken over the last 25 years. These polls indicated:
a There is growing cynicism and distrust of government.
a Optimism about the future is declining.
6 Cultural and political views are becoming uncoupled.
A better standa'rd of living remains at the top of the
personal hopes list.
. Owning a house is still the number one goal of Americans.
We have seen that the quality of life concept is by no means
precisely defined. The multidimensional nature of the concept
limits the usefulness of it in a practical sense but the
Symposium agreed that there was some need for making an
attempt at quantification of it. Two schools of thought
developed over this - one that you cannot do it, and the other
that you should not do it. The first school felt that there
are so many parameters involved and that the term relates so
much to the individual, that it was impossible to project this
to describe the Quality of Life for a group. Concern that you
should not do it relates to the apprehension of sublimation of
the individual to group statistics. It was felt that a
Quality of Life index could be put to harmful use.
The first step in an attempt to quantify the Quality of Life
is the definition of what the concept actually means. Even
this step proves extremely difficult although there is a big
literature on parameters useful for measuring the state of
society.
The Airlie Symposium participants were asked to list the
conditions they felt were appropriate for Quality of Life
under the. following- headings :. .
1. economic environment
2. political environment
3. physical environment
4. social environment
5. health environment
6, natural environment.