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Do environmentalists and governments hold back sustainable lifestyles
Tom Levitt and Kara Moses, The Ecologist
Misguided images of sacrifice may be putting people off living more sustainable lifestyles. But reversing that may require policymakers to start encouraging wider metrics of success and happiness
Who wants a sustainable lifestyle? Well actually quite a lot of people, apparently. Far from being a niche concept, a major new study on sustainability from the UNEP says the idea is ‘misunderstood as a rich nation choice’.
While the desire to enjoy western living standards is strong, the study picks out a range of sustainable living ideas being developed across the world. It says one of the biggest barriers to more people achieving them may be how we celebrate and communicate these ideas.
Most definitions of sustainable lifestyles talk about three key areas; minimal environmental impact, not undermining the carrying capacity of resources (i.e. using only those that are renewable or replaceable over time) and helping people interact with the communities and places in which they live.
But, as the UNEP study points out, ‘people will only change their lifestyles in exchange for a better one’, so perhaps a fourth point could be just as important: making them desirable…
(4 August 2010)
We’ll be happy when we’re old—if civilization survives
Mason Inman, Failing Gracefully
Old people are happier than young people, a new study found—so the researchers and journalists alike think that must mean that “happiness may come with age,” as the New York Times headline puts it. Sounds great to me.
Whoops. Forgot about climate change, peak oil, and all that other stuff about the planet going to hell under our feet.
The basic problem with this study is that it assumes the world isn’t changing. They called up a bunch of people at one point, getting a snapshot, the Times says: “The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.”
Then they use this snapshot to say what it’s like to age: “On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, aka the Black Swan guy, pokes a big gaping hole in this kind of analysis in his book Fooled by Randomness. This applies even when we’re looking at a stretch of the past, and not just a snapshot. He writes (page 113): “We take the past as a single homogenous sample and believe we have considerably increased our knowledge of the future from the observation of the sample from the past.” But, he asks, “What if things have changed?”…
(20 June 2010)
Happy Cities for the Global South: Interview with Enrique Peñalosa
Jay Walljasper, Yes! Magazine
It feels a bit strange to be sitting in the middle of one of the world’s wealthiest neighborhoods and to be so thoroughly engrossed in conversation about the prospects of poor cities across the planet. But here, in an office building at New York University on the island of Manhattan, is where former Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa is working on a book about how life can be improved for people in mega-cities of the developing world. That is, when he’s not in Beijing or Delhi or Dar es Salaam or Jakarta or Mexico City sharing his visionary plans with local leaders.
Peñalosa’s ideas are a beacon of hope for cities of the Global South, which will absorb much of the world’s population growth over the next half-century. These are places with the usual complications of rapid urban expansion—pollution, public health, slums, crime, unemployment, sprawl, corruption, traffic—all of which are aggravated by the fact that most of these cities’ citizens live in deep poverty. Based on his experiences in Bogotá, however, Peñalosa believes it’s a major mistake to give up on these places, no matter how out-of-control their problems appear.
“If we in the Third World measure our success or failure as a society in terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the end of time,” declares Peñalosa. “With our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success. This might mean that all kids have access to sports facilities, libraries, parks, schools, nurseries.”
This is exactly what Peñalosa set out to do as mayor of Colombia’s capital city. And the results were impressive enough that Colombia finally got international press about something other than drug trafficking, guerrilla kidnappings, or bloody civil war. Indeed, some observers claim that this city of 6.6 million offers practical lessons not just for helping poor cities, but for upgrading the quality of life in Western cities…
(2 July 2010)
Teaser photo credit: Rick Hall
