I’ll be back on Friday. I am in the middle of moving my base up to Maine as I do every summer. Nothing I need is where I can find it.
Continue ReadingHappiness is Love. Full Stop
When David Brooks stays away from partisan politics, his columns generally make interesting reading. Brooks has become a diligent amateur sociologist (like I am), and now often writes about complexity, post-normal science, and non-Cartesian models of human consciousness and action. Today, he reports on a fascinating study that tracked some 200 Harvard men from their graduation through the rest of their lives. For the past 42 years, a psychiatrist, George Valliant has been overseeing the collection and analysis of the data. Brooks drew his column from an article about the so-called Grant Study to be published in the next issue… Read More
Continue ReadingStill Pursuing Happiness
Happiness is in the air these days. Maybe it’s just that spring has finally sprung in New England. Or maybe it’s that I spent last night in our Maine cottage for the first time since we closed up for the winter, even though the electric blanket was on high and we added an extra comforter. A few days ago I spotted [news](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia/07bhutan.html?_r=1&sq=bhutan&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print) that the government of Bhutan has officially changed their primary policy metric from the familiar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to their own, unique concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH). They are developing a system to characterize the new… Read More
Continue ReadingMelting the World’s Highest Ski Run
I don’t normally publish articles about the impacts of climate change. There is already plenty of information around already. But, being a skier, I couldn’t pass this one by. The photo shows the current extent of the snow field at Bolivia’s Chacaltaya Glacier. > [The] Glacier, once known as the world’s highest ski run at 17,388 feet, has completely melted away, serving as a vivid example of the effects of climate change on the glaciers around the globe. > Click on the link to see the changes over the years.
Continue ReadingStill on the Road
I’m still away from home at the kick-off meeting of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS). The meeting venue is in the brand new, Leeds-certified quarters of the Ross School of Business at UMich. The pleasure of seeing my former students emerge as leaders in this emergent community is hard to describe. I guess the most important sign of success for a teacher is to see one’s students excel. As I wrote a couple of days ago, the ARCS group is striving to establish sustainability ever more deeply in the curricula and research activities in schools of business.… Read More
Continue ReadingThe American Dream
The NYTimes published the results of a poll it recently ran, asking people how they felt about the “American Dream” in these bad times. The answers were paradoxical. 72 percent of the respondents expressed confidence that it was still possible to wake up to find the American Dream of becoming rich realized, but only 44 percent thought that they were already there. A similar poll taken four years ago found that only 31 percent thought they had made it. But the future outlook was down. > Compared [to an identical] poll taken four years ago, fewer people now say they… Read More
Continue ReadingMBAs and Sustainability
I’m about to leave tomorrow for a conference of business school faculty members who do research on the subject of business and sustainability. It will be a trip of much joy as the organizers include several former students who studied with me at MIT before I retired. It’s with mixed feelings that I accept my role as a greybeard in this group. When I began doing research in what was then business and the environment (sustainability was just coming on the scene), faculties at almost all the leading business schools had to keep their interest in environment under wraps. Only… Read More
Continue ReadingMaking Happiness Happen
I have just discovered a blog that is inching up on sustainability as flourishing. One of [Slate’s](http://slate.com/) blogs, [The Happiness Project](http://slate.com/blogs/blogs/happinessproject/), by Gretchen Rubin focuses on happiness. While not synonymous with flourishing, the way she talks about her topic follows my line pretty closely, with occasional lapses into reducing happiness to the outcome of following rules. Here are a few excerpts that imply that happiness and authenticity are closely related, and that happiness comes from relationships. I would say that these articles are helping to recognize that **being**, not **having** is at the roots of flourishing. > [What’s Essential to… Read More
Continue ReadingSustainability and Faith
Following a book talk I gave last week in New York, an audience member exclaimed to me that I was presenting a religious argument for sustainability. This was the third time someone had made a similar comment. Each time I struggled with a response. But after three times, I have been thinking more seriously about this. I found this Wikipedia definition helpful in reflecting: “A religion is a set of tenets and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law.” Then the law… Read More
Continue ReadingMessages from the IHDP
One of the key events in the sustainability world is the [Open Meeting](http://www.openmeeting2009.org/) of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), just completed in Bonn, Germany. One of the thematic statements from the meeting website sets the context that, although more knowledge is always welcome, the importance of action on what we already know is growing. > The increased understanding of the challenges we are currently facing has shifted the focus in yet another way, from understanding the dynamics of global environmental change to using that understanding to devise ways to meet the challenges that we see… Read More
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