Distinctly Montana Magazine

Both have the potential to be catastrophic for civilization. An exchange of warheads between nuclear powers, or terrorists getting their hands on a homemade bomb and detonating it in a crowded city is the ultimate kind of environmental disaster. Look at what just happened in Boston. Climate change is happening and with rising seas and shifting weather patterns affecting food production, potential famine will create a lot of social instability which can lead to wars and violence and the loss of law and order. * Where lies the best opportunity for environmental success — private, wealthy individuals, or public policy and management? It's both sides; government and the private sector working together that gives us the best opportunity for environmental success. We live in a country that has a good balance between rewarding those who work hard in the private sector and try to get ahead, and a government that tends to the things that the private sector can't do or doesn't do very well. Companies should be rewarded for doing well by their employees, their community, and their environment. That's part of the triple bottom line. But government has an important role. There needs to be regulation that deals with the bad players out there, especially polluters who try to pass their costs of doing business off onto others and onto our environment. They need to be held accountable; 76 the best way of dealing with environmental messes is to ensure they never happen. * At an older age, your great mentor, Jacques Cousteau, fell into despair about the prospects for the world's environment. Do you now find yourself with that same sense of foregone apprehension? I think of my grandchildren, just as Captain Cousteau was thinking of his grandchildren. I think of what previous generations did to sacrifice so that I could live in a better world. I think we're morally obligated to not leave them with problems caused on our watch that they can't fix. The Captain had a big impact on me. I credit him with convincing me that there is more to life than making money. He got pretty down at the end of his life because he thought we had doomed ourselves. But I reminded him what he told me years earlier when I was feeling down: 'Ted, even if we know the end is coming for certain, which we do not, what can men of good conscience do but keep trying to do the right thing until the very end?' * Bhutan measures the contentment of its people with an index called Gross National Happiness (GNH) while America and other developed nations use a strictly economic measure — GDP. Isn't the Bhutan D I ST I NCT LY M ONTANA • SU M M E R 2013

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