EQUALSHOT

It would be hard for a reasonable person to deny that our planet is in crisis (see the Litany List below if you want a refresher). But what would it take to turn this around?

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Gus Speth, a distinguished environmental leader and Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. He was speaking at the think-tank Demos about his latest book, “The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability.” 
I find Dean Speth’s suggestion radical in its simplicity: The environment would benefit if people focused on what really makes them happy: relationships with others, giving instead of getting, genuinely engaging in politics and community.
We need a fundamental cultural shift in which we examine what holds meaning. The answer to happiness does not lie in the materialism and over-consumption that are destroying the planet.

So called “positive psychologists” know that money affects happiness only to a point. According to one recent article in The Week (Dec. 5, 2008), one study found that the “happiness benefits” of money peaked at the modest income of $20,000. Middle-class and affluent people who seek more wealth are often struck on what psychologists call a “hedonic treadmill” – a perpetual pursuit of material goods, which reduces the available time for personal relationships and yields minimal emotional rewards.

Speth’s thinking fully supports the notion of social capital - not just warm and fuzzy feelings, but a wide variety of quite specific benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks.
Along with this realization, Dean Speth points out that we need a new narrative in our country. A real change in consciousness. A “national conversion” experience stemming from the confluence of several factors, including the positive handling of some sort of catastrophe.

Kathrina was that type of cataclysmic event. And when a similar storm or environmental tragedy happens again, as it certainly will at this rate, we need wise leaders who can talk to and motivate the American people, linking our traditional values with a new direction we need to go in. At the same time, we need this new narrative backed up continuously with sophisticated social marketing and consciousness raising. Only then can achieve momentum and a real change in values.

Follow this link to read a mind-blowing list of 150 things you can do make yourself happier and more optimistic, redeem a social condition and, as a major benefit, improve the environment.

And a plug for a book that will get you thinking by my friend and noted positive psychologist: Jon Haidt “The Happiness Hypothesis”.

All we have to do to destroy the planet for our children and grandchildren is to continue doing all of the below at the rate that we’re doing them today.

• We’ve eliminated about half the temperate forests of the planet
• We’ve eliminated half the tropical forests of the planet
• We’re eliminating today tropical forests at a rate of 1 acre per second
• Half the planet’s wetlands are now gone
• 90% of large predator fish in the ocean have been eliminated
• We’re overfishing or fishing at capacity about 75% of ocean’s fisheries
• 40% of world’s coral is gone or severely threatened
• Species are disappearing at a rate of about 1,000 times the rate which they normally disappear
• We all carry scores of toxic chemicals in our tissues with effects not yet known
• We’ve increased greenhouse gas concentrations – 33% in the case of carbon dioxide, the principle gas factoring into global warming
• Ice shields are melting at unprecedented rates
• Hundreds of dead zones in the oceans because of over-fertilization
• We are withdrawing over half of the fresh water on the planet for human consumption
• Many rivers never make it to the ocean any longer during dry seasons: Nile, Ganges, Colorado, Yellow Rivers
• 6,000 acres a day of open space are lost a day in the U.S.
• Half of our lakes and 1/3 of streams in the U.S. don’t meet water quality standards of the 1972 Clean Water Act