"The most exceptional thing about Bhutan is the land itself. A majority of Bhutan’s citizens still live off the land, practicing subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry. The country’s tropical lowlands, pine forests, and alpine heights are bastions of biodiversity, populated by creatures found in few other places on the planet: the clouded leopard, the one-horned rhinoceros, the red panda, the sloth bear, the serow, and Bhutan’s national animal, a stocky ungulate called the takin, which looks a bit like a goat that’s been doing a lot of barbell work at the gym. The preservation of these ecosystems is a top priority in Bhutan, which has been called “the world’s greenest nation.” Almost all of Bhutan’s electricity comes from hydropower. Bhutan’s constitution mandates that 60 percent of its land remain under forest cover; currently, forests cover nearly three-quarters of the country’s approximately fifteen thousand square miles. All those trees have helped to make Bhutan a carbon sink: it absorbs three times as much CO2 as it emits, and is one of only two carbon-negative nations. (The other is Suriname.) An additional 4.4 million tons of annual CO2 emissions are offset by hydroelectricity exports, mostly to India, and Bhutan projects that the figure will rise to more than 22 million tons by the year 2025. The government has set ambitious goals for further progress. By 2030, Bhutan intends to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions and produce zero waste. By 2035, 100 percent of Bhutan’s agriculture will be organic. All of this has earned Bhutan a reputation as an earthly paradise, the last unsullied place. (The New York Times has called Bhutan “the real Shangri-La.”) Bhutanese officials dismiss this notion—yet they trade on it. Once, Bhutan admitted only twenty-five hundred tourists each year; today the number has swollen to one hundred thousand, with luxury resorts springing up in remote regions to lure eco-tourists. Bhutan’s official tourist slogan makes a bald appeal to the Eat, Pray, Love crowd: “Happiness is a place.” The realities of Bhutan are, of course, more complicated. On the streets of Thimphu, there are drug rehabilitation clinics and pizza joints, and when children get out of school, they discard their ghos and kiras for hoodies and skinny jeans. In 2020, the Bhutanese parliament passed a bill that decriminalized homosexuality, but gay, lesbian, and transgender Bhutanese are still stigmatized and subject to widespread prejudice. Gender equality is a work in progress. Few of the country’s elected officials are women. A 2017 study found that more than 40 percent of Bhutanese women surveyed had experienced physical or sexual partner violence and never told anyone or reported the incident. Gross National Happiness itself is entangled with troubling history. According to the official narrative promoted by the government, GNH has been national policy since the 1970s. But the scholar Lauchlan T. Munro has argued that GNH is an “invented tradition” that originated with a quip by the fourth king in a 1980 New York Times interview, and was only elevated to the status of “organizing ideology of the Bhutanese state” years later. This change, Munro says, was part of a “skillful and hard-nosed” response by the Royal Government of Bhutan (RGOB) to a series of domestic and geopolitical crises in the 1980s and early ’90s. During that period, a wave of Buddhist nationalism arose in Bhutan in reaction to the country’s rapid modernization and opening to the outside world. In an effort to appease traditionalists, and to address the social fracturing brought on by Bhutanese youth’s embrace of Western values and popular culture, the government began pushing a slew of new laws and reforms under the rubric “One Nation, One People.” These included the institution of a national dress and behavior code based on Bhutanese and Buddhist norms. At the same time, the RGOB enacted draconian measures against the population it refers to as Lhotshampa (“people from the south”), a mostly Hindu, Nepali-speaking minority in southern Bhutan. The government banned the use of Nepali in schools, forced the Lhotshampa to wear traditional Buddhist Bhutanese clothing, and conducted a census that was designed, critics assert, to delegitimize a population that had lived in Bhutan for centuries, designating thousands of Nepali Bhutanese as “migrant laborers” and illegal immigrants. According to one human rights report, “thousands of Nepali-Bhutanese were arrested, killed, tortured and given life sentences” during this period. In 1990–91, Bhutan’s army expelled an estimated one hundred thousand Nepali-speaking citizens, forcing them into refugee camps in eastern Nepal. Human Rights Watch has deemed these expulsions “ethnic cleansing”; Bhutan has been called the “world’s biggest creator of refugees by per capita.” It was in the aftermath of these events that Bhutan began touting Gross National Happiness as its official doctrine, promoting “the image of a small, landlocked, plucky country” following an “alternative path to development based on happiness, not material consumption.” It’s clear that Bhutan’s commitment to sustainable development is profound and unique; it’s clear that the antimaterialist ideals of GNH are deeply held by many in Bhutan. But it is also true that GNH has functioned as propaganda, giving a gauzy New Age spin to a policy of ethno-religious nationalism. In Bhutan as elsewhere, happiness is a goal, an ideal. A place? Perhaps not."
Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle" by Jody Rosen: https://a.co/gmfRWNI
