A lot of us resonate with this phrase, so we see it in religions and self-help books

that money can't buy happiness.

And I want us to get to it and in fact that's wrong.

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Since the first Earth Day in 1970, electricity consumption per capita in the US,

per capita has gone up 70%.

Solid waste generation per capita has gone up 33%.

The homes and the lots on which they sit have gotten 50% or more larger in this period,

yet even with these larger homes and larger lots, they're too small to accommodate all our accumulating possessions.

One result of this has been the emergence of the self-storyed industry.

It didn't begin until the 1970s, but it has grown so rapidly that its buildings, if you could pull them together,

would now cover the entire island of Manhattan and the entire city of San Francisco in the US.

I will look forward to the Canadian version of that statistic.

So we have this disease, this affluenza, and we need a speedy recovery from it.

Well, the good news is that more and more people sense that at some level there's a great misdirection in life's energy.

We focus too much of our lives on material things, on getting and spending, and we know that at some level,

we're sliding the things that make life truly worthwhile, and that's borne out again in our statistics.

We sense, I think, that we are hollowing out whole areas of life, of individual and social autonomy and of nature,

and that if we don't wake up soon, we're going to lose the chance to return,

...