Hello and welcome you are listening to an upstream interview which is part of the economics for transition project

Today I'll be speaking with Dr. Ha Vin Toe the Toh, the Program Director of the Gross National Happiness Center in Bhutan, and a co-facilitator of the

Right Livelyhood Program at Schumacher College. Toe is also the founder and chairman of the Eurasia Foundation,

a humanitarian non-governmental organization,

a visiting fellow at several international universities and a Buddhist teacher in the tradition of Vietnamese Zen Buddhism.

Welcome Dr. Toe. Thank you.

Dr. Toe, can you describe a little bit more about your background and particularly how you came to work at the

Gross National Happiness Center in Bhutan?

Maybe I'll just speak about the work I was doing just before going to

Bhutan because obviously I've done quite a lot of different things so that would take too long

But for several years before going to Bhutan I was working with the International Committee of the Red Cross

which is the part of the Red Cross, Red Crescent Movement that works in the monomic system has an inherent violence.

It is profoundly unjust, inequitable.

And the other root cause is connected with climate change and environmental destruction.

So I really experienced that although religious or political or ideological reasons are put in the foreground, they are not really the main reasons.

The main reason are much deeper.

So if I give you an example, I was in Darfur several times.

And Darfur is West Sudan.

There's been a very violent conflict. Over 2 million people died in Darfur.

And Darfur was actually a conflict originally over water resource.

Because of climate change, the water resource has diminished.

And you had two population, you had farmers and herders, nomads, and both of them needed water and there was not enough water for both.

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