Opinions
British Green activist Richard Douthwaite interviewed a person who remembers once saying that "in some societies, very high levels — virtually First World levels — of individual and public health and welfare are achieved at as little as sixtieth of US nominal GDP per capita and used Kerala as an example". Richard Douthwaite states that Kerala "is far more sustainable than anywhere in Europe or North America". Kerala's unusual socioeconomic and demographic situation was summarized by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben:
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Kerala, a state in India, is a bizarre anomaly among developing nations, a place that offers real hope for the future of the Third World. Though not much larger than Maryland, Kerala has a population as big as California's and a per capita annual income of less than $300. But its infant mortality rate is very low, its literacy rate among the highest on Earth, and its birthrate below America's and falling faster. Kerala's residents live nearly as long as Americans or Europeans. Though mostly a land of paddy-covered plains, statistically Kerala stands out as the Mount Everest of social development; there's truly no place like it.
Read more about this topic: Kerala Model
Famous quotes containing the word opinions:
“For some natures, changing their opinions is just as much a requirement of cleanliness as changing their clothes: for others, however, it is merely a requirement of vanity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age—I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)