The Right Way to Flourish

I’m just back from a weekend conference close to home in Cambridge, sponsored by the Global Sufficiency Network. I was invited to participate in a panel moderated by Lynn Twist, author of The Soul of Money. Our panel focused on the connection between sufficiency and sustainability, a very challenging conversation because neither term is well understood. Those in the audience that talk about sufficiency didn’t have a clear idea about sustainability and vice versa, even though we we all concerned abut the same issues and the need for action. I went in with a view of sufficiency colored by past… Read More

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Continuing on the “happy” theme I have been on, I just read an article entitled, “How to Build a Happy Company,” in the latest issue of Newsweek. While the article is interesting, the headline is nonsense. How can a company ever be happy? I have never seen one and won’t ever–no more than I can ever expect to stumble over a happy rock. Only people can be happy. This kind of metaphor is not helpful even to the kind of companies the article points to. Attributing human possibilities to non-human things, except perhaps in poetry, produces at least two bad… Read More

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Maybe it’s the spectacular weather of the past few days. Days in early April that outdo the best of mid-summer weather. The ladybugs are coming out of winter hibernation and the green sprouts seem to have grown 4 inches overnight. I’m finishing a syllabus for a course I will lead next trimester at Marlboro College Graduate Center’s MBA in Managing for Sustainability on the general topic of the [new] economics of sustainability. That’s part of my recent focus on economics-related issues. Even without my current lens, I am running into an unusually large number of articles on this general subject.… Read More

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I can’t tell if it’s my mental filters or something out there, but I am seeing a lot of stories about happiness these days. Most question the connections between the way human beings express their reflections about how life is going and about some objective measure that is supposed to correlate with these feelings. Yesterday I wrote about the growth model of human well-being. Before that I was pointing to David Brooks’s op-ed piece on the failure of economics to account for the existential or emotional side of [well-]being. Today here’s yet another article I came across–this one while I… Read More

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Newsweek has only part of the story in a short article telling about the rise of no (economic) growth studies out of Europe in recent months. While the growing interest in no-growth is clearly evident, the reasons Newsweek gives for its rise are not the primary impetus. Newsweek says: Take the worst economic crisis in 60 years. Combine it with the erosion of the West’s predominance. Add apocalyptic warnings of climate change. What you’ll get are some radical new ideas. . . One of those now swirling through the European zeitgeist turns out to be a very old one, albeit… Read More

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David Brooks is beginning to get it. His last column [I fixed this link] is a critique of economics, but I see it as having much deeper implications–the issue of the very way we interpret and act in the world. His argument is that when we fail to understand the whole story about what it is to be human we make serious mistakes in any ‘science’ that rests on that understanding. He writes that we will have to rewrite the story we tell about economics. Act I in this history would be set in the era of economic scientism: the… Read More

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I have been trying hard not to complain every day about the terribly sloppy use of the term “sustainability,” but I could not pass this one by. GreenerDesign carries a story today headlined, “New Tool Assesses Chemical Sustainability.” It’s hard to find a poorer use of the word. Just what can chemical sustainability be? The tool generates a sustainability-based score, based on metrics taken from the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry, including health and environmental impact of raw materials and products, energy use, waste generation, safety of processes and more. At best, a tool like this can only point to… Read More

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In the last few days, I have had a peak intellectual experience. On successive evenings I heard Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi David Wolpe argue over God and morality, followed by Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein discuss “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Morality, and the Arts.” This afternoon, I listened again to the first of 24 podcasts by Hubert Dreyfus from his popular course at Cal/Berkeley on Heidegger, and finished off by watching a video of a recent TED presentation by atheist Sam Harris called, “The Price in Human Suffering of Being Open-Minded.” I am teaching a course at my Institute for… Read More

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Today’s Boston Globe carried a [front page story](http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/03/23/cohousing_building_momentum_in_mass/?page=full) about cohousing, a word I suspect very few people know or understand. Cohousing developments are somewhere between a kibbutz and a condominium. The units are owned by the inhabitants with expanded common facilities owned in common. These development are also called intentional communities because the residents make a conscious choice to join a community-oriented living place. The attraction to many is the extended family they become part of. Neighbors step in when someone becomes ill and cannot do simple tasks like walking pets. They may provide baby sitting. The group can buy… Read More

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The central critique of my book, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture, is that modern cultures create an unconsciousness in three domains essential to flourishing and thence to sustainability. Without bringing these three back into individual and collective consciousness, the culture will keep on trucking, producing a lot of road kill on the way to empty promises and the accumulation of more and more meaningless stuff. All three are forms of caring, separated only to make analysis, discussion, and action more direct. Recognizing they overlap, the three are consciousness (care) for oneself, other humans, and… Read More

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