No Impact Man

True success Part 2

Yesterday we pondered the meaning of real success. Thank you Julie for leaving this in the comments:

Success

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived;

This is to have succeeded.

--Ralph Waldo Emmerson

What does success mean to you?

A friend told me of an experiment today.

He said that a researcher would leave a four-year-old in a room with a marshmallow and tell the kid that he would be gone a few minutes. The kid was allowed to eat the marshmallow, but if it was still there when the researcher got back, the researcher said, then the kid could have two marshmallows instead.

Here's what happened. The kids that delayed their gratification in order to get the second marshmallow were more likely, later in life, to get better SAT scores and have higher grades in school. They were more likely, as my friend said, to "be successful."

But it struck me. What does it actually mean to "be successful." Does it mean to make more money? Does it mean to get more stuff? Does it mean to climb higher on the career ladder? These are all economic goals that are associated, on many levels, with consumption and resource use (the more money you make, the more you spend, the more resources get used up).

The point here is that if these things are what make a successful human being, then the resource use is perhaps justified. But what if they don't define the real success of a human? Perhaps real success is how much we've loved or been loved or given.

Two questions for you:

1. What do you think success really means?

2. Can it be predicted by whether or not you hold out for a second marshmallow?

What comes around goes around

Here is some old wisdom truth about harming the shared habitat that we all depend upon for our health, happiness and security.

Our sages taught:

A man should not move stones from his ground to public ground.

A certain man was moving stones from his ground onto public ground when a pious man found him doing so and said to him, “Fool, why do you move stones from ground which is not yours to ground which is yours?”

The man laughed at him.

Some days later, the man had to sell his field, and when he was walking on that public ground he stumbled over those stones.

He then said, “How well did that pious man say to me, ‘Why do you move stones from ground which is not yours to ground which is yours?’ ”

—Talmud Bavli, Masekhet Bava Kama 50b

Do you have any other old wisdom references that support our need to take care of creation? Please leave in the comments.

The problem with corporate structure

One of our culture's big challenges is the corporate structure, of course.

The problem is that the owners of the corporations--the shareholders--stand to benefit from from their actions but, because of the principle of limited liability, cannot be held accountable for their crimes.

Shareholders can never be held personally accountable for their corporation's environmental and social malfeasance. On the other hand, the shareholders do benefit from the malfeasance if the corporation profits by it.

CEO's of corporations, therefore, must make profits but need never worry about insulating the owners from how those profits are made.

Make a single-skinned oil-tanker good and cheaply and shareholders benefit from the reduced cost through increased profits. Crash the cheap tanker and spill millions of gallons of oil on the beach and the shareholders grumble about lost profit but no one can hold them responsible for damage done by their property.

This structure makes environmental and social problems caused by corporations hard to solve. The owners have unlimited upside but limited downside. That's a structure that can't even be considered to be based on free-market economics because the market indicators are stymied. There's an artificial floor on the shareholder's losses.

Maybe it's time we found a different ownership structure for business, one where owners were considered responsible for damage done by their property.

Anyway, I'm reading a book called Life, Inc by Douglas Rushkoff. It's a history of corporations. He has a brilliant quote when talking about the birth of the chartered corporation. He says:

[With the birth of the chartered corporation] the emphasis of business would shift from the creation of value by people to the extraction of value by corporations.

Watch Rushkoff explaining the origins of the corporate structure below:

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Why bother saving the planet?

First of all, I wanted to remind you all that there is a sneak peak at the No Impact Man documentary in New York tonight (Thursday). Click here for details. I hope I'll see you there. It'll be outdoors if the weather is nice and indoors if it's not, so rain or shine! Now, onwards...

I am sitting in the lobby of my hotel which is the only place I can get an internet connection. Behind the couch I'm sitting on, the hotel keeps a little radio playing that is tuned to a classical station. The music makes me think of Isabella, the four-year-old girl who is the heart of my life, my daughter. Isabella always makes me stop turning the radio dial when she hears classical music. She loves classical best of all.

Anyway. The hotel where I am is in Washington, DC.

I began writing this post with the point of telling you why I'm in DC, but I can't help it--I want to write a little something about my little girl. Do you mind if I stop to tell you that she has the most amazing blue eyes? Also, she is incredibly brave. We went to a petting zoo the other day and she fed all the goats and cows and sheep. A pig bit her by mistake. When she went to school, she showed her thumb to a teacher and said, "A pig bit my thumb."

"A what bit your thumb?"

"A pig."

"A what?"

"A pig."

This went on for a while. There not being too many pigs in New York City, the teacher was having a hard time believing her ears. Isabella was quite pleased. It may have hurt when the pig first bit her, but Isabella was still the only kid in school who could point to a boo boo and say a pig caused it.

You know what I think about when I think about how much I love Isabella? I think about how everybody else has someone they love too. I think that we all have someone who makes our hearts ache with love and how since we all have that then we must be essentially the same.

We're all the same. How can I live my life with enough compassion to bear out this tremendous truth that we all have an Isabella, that we are all the same? If we are all the same, shouldn't we understand how much we all feel joy and sorrow and be moved to treat each other with tremendous kindness?

Personally, I am moved to treat everyone with tremendous kindness. The sad news is that, moved though I may be, I don't actually do it. I get mad or selfish or controlling or small minded. Then I get mean. Honestly, I am at times so disappointed in myself, in my own humanity. Then I realize that that happens to everyone else too. We all feel disappointed in ourselves sometimes, no? We have that in common, too.

Which brings me back to the fact that we're all the same.

We're none of us perfect, right? But most of us, I think, are doing our best.

Anyway.

I'm in Washington, DC because tomorrow I am meeting--along with the associate director of the new No Impact Project and some other colleagues--with representatives from a group of environmental non-profits to discuss how the No Impact Man book and film might best be used to help engage people in environmentalism.

Lots of ideas are being thrown around. A don't-drink-bottled-water campaign. A stop-eating-beef campaign. A ride-your-bike-more campaign. All based around aspects of the No Impact Man year. It's amazing to have come to the place where the No Impact Man year might actually be used to help engage citizens in environmentalism.

But one thing I don't want to lose site of is this: that, for me, whether it is less meat or bike more or whatever the campaign might be, the whole reason for doing it is to make the planet--our habitat--more livable for people I may not even know.

And why do I want to make the planet more livable for people I don't know? Because those people love an Isabella, just like me. Because those people want to do the right thing but their personalities get the better of them just like me. Because everyone bleeds when they're cut and will die when we're old, just like me.

We're all the same. It's so sad and wonderful, but it's true. We're all the same.

PS Can I tell you something that brings tears to my eyes? That up in the bedrooms of this hotel are a whole team of people who are gathered here to help promote the values espoused by the No Impact Man year. People try so hard. So many of us are searching to try to do what is right. We're the same in that way too, don't you think?

Consumerdom ain't making women happy

We talk a lot here about whether our consumption-based economy and culture makes people happy. Because, since consumption of resources is the root cause our planet's woes, it would be an awful shame if it turned out that we were wrecking the planet without even increasing human happiness.

And it turns out, by the way, that this may be exactly the case. I've written before about how, in spite of a growing economy and commensurate increased resource use, American life satisfaction has flatlined.

Now a new study out of Wharton, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows that women's happiness in the developed world has not just stalled, it is actually going down. Under the title "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," authors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers point out:

By most objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved dramatically over the past 35 years.  Moreover, women believe that their lives are better; in recent polls asking about changes in the status of women over the past 25 or 50 years, around four in five adults state that the overall status of women in the U.S. has gotten better (and the remaining respondents break two-for-one towards “stayed the same” over “worse”).22  Additionally, the 1999 Virginia Slims Poll found that 72% of women believe that “women having more choices in society today gives women more opportunities to be happy” while only 39% thought that having more choices “makes life more complicated for women.”  Finally, women today are more likely than men to believe that their opportunities to succeed exceed those of their parents.

Yet trends in self-reported subjective well-being indicate that happiness has shifted toward men and away from women.  This shift holds across industrialized countries regardless of whether the aggregate trend in happiness for both genders is flat, rising, or falling: in all of these cases we see happiness rebalancing to reflect greater happiness for men relative to women.  This finding of a decline in women’s well-being relative to that of men raises questions about whether modern social constructs have made women worse off, or alternatively about the interpretability of subjective well-being data analyzed over long-time periods.  Despite findings of higher well-being among women in countries with less gender discrimination (Bjørnskov, Dreher and Fischer 2007), the decrease in gender discrimination since the 1970s has not improved the (subjectively perceived) lot of women. 

These are just two paragraphs, of course, from a 45-page paper. Stevenson and Wolfers discuss many potential reasons for the potential drop in subjective well-being amongst women.

But my reason for mentioning this study is that it points to the failure of long-standing governmental policy that puts at its center the idea that increasing economic--and therefore resource--throughput will bring increased happiness. If it worked, why would the larger half of our adult population be unhappier. Maybe there should be different policy emphases?

Because if women--for whatever reason--have grown more unhappy over the last 30 years then, to my way of thinking, we have yet more evidence for the fact that we are trashing the planet for a way of life that doesn't even make us happy.

Trash the planet. Trash women's happiness.

What do you say we start looking for a way of life that makes both the planet and the people happier?

Meanwhile, what are your thoughts on the relationship of our way of life and women's happiness?

Photo courtesy of The Week.

Are we just a green bubble that has burst?

Recently, The New Republic published an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute calling the trend towards lower consumption coupled with the search for meaningful life no more than a public opinion bubble that has burst. They argue that individual lifestyle change--of which I am one of the chief national proponents, according to them--is meaningless as our culture attempts to grapple with the environmental crises.

Here is my reply:

Nordhaus and Shellenberger run a firm called American Environics that studies public opinion. They are, in other words, top-notch experts in determining what is politically possible. The problem, in the case of our climate crisis, is that we cannot content ourselves with the goal of doing what analysts like Nordhaus and Shellenberger tell us is politically possible. Instead, we need to change public opinion so that we can make possible what is scientifically necessary.

To wit, NASA’s top climatologist tells us that to avoid the most cataclysmic effects of the climate crisis, the human race must reduce atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million (ppm) by the end of the century. We are already at 387 ppm. The rub is that, because of the rate of societal and infrastructure change required to achieve this goal, most anybody in the know will tell you that 350 by 2100 may not be politically possible—yet.

But let’s take a step back in history. In the 1950s, opinion analysts might well have said that it was crazy to imagine that Americans would embrace the civil rights movement. Pollsters might easily have disparaged the actions of Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger: “You need to be more aware of the public opinion backlash your actions cause.” But Rosa Parks didn’t care about polling data. She cared about what was right and that integrity of belief and action helped inspire a grassroots movement that changed the country.

Sixty years later, modern-day pollsters Nordhaus and Shellenberger are making the mistake of trying to dismiss another grassroots movement—the kind that could also change the country. The kind of movement that will not follow public opinion but will help lead it. The kind of movement, in fact, that may well help make politically possible the climate mitigation measures we need to take (huge investment in new energy technology, carbon capping, and—yes—lifestyle change).

That movement is “just another green bubble,” Nordhaus and Shellenberger tell us. What Nordhaus and Shellenberger have missed is that the surge is not only a “green” movement but also a “quality of life” movement. Its members are asking, Is it just possible that we can develop systems that are both better for the planet and better for the people? Because without caring for the habitat we depend upon for our health, happiness and security there can be no real quality of life for people.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus rest their entire thesis on the idea that public opinion will never embrace planetary happiness over human happiness. They are right. Where they err is in conflating human happiness with the ever-increasing societal throughput of energy and material—economic growth. They fail to consider the possibility—embraced by the burgeoning quality of life movement—that human happiness is not entirely dependent on throughput and resource use.

After all, we know that 40% of growth in GDP ends up in the hands of the richest 1% of the people. We need, therefore, something much more nuanced than plain old growth to help the global underprivileged. Meanwhile, according to the excellent work by Dalton Conley, quoted by Nordhaus and Shellenberger themselves, even the wealthy are suffering under the current paradigm—they’re making more money but questioning whether the quality of life sacrifices are worth it.

So let’s return to that backyard vegetable gardener who is part of this quality of life movement and who Nordhaus and Shellenberger disparage as ecologically insignificant.

The question is, what if, like Rosa Parks, the gardener believes—to hell with the public opinion analysts—it’s important to do what is right? And what if, through his or her dedication to looking for a better way to live, the gardener’s friends and family begin questioning, too? What if, in our questioning, we all begin to wonder whether planetary human well-being might be achieved directly instead of as a spin-off of how much we shop and use resources? Wouldn’t that represent a big step forward?

Nordhaus and Shellenberger skillfully but erroneously use the tools of rhetoric to dismiss the individual actions of this burgeoning movement’s membership. But we know from chaos theory that the flap of a butterfly’s wings can start a hurricane. We know from Rosa Parks that an individual action can be the falling domino that starts the chain reaction. So what if this quality of life movement helps people believe that a happier planet makes for happier people?

Whatever Shellenberger and Nordhaus tell us about the center of the bell curve of public opinion, the tail of the bell curve is thickening. None of this is to undermine the contributions that Nordhaus and Shellenberger make to the environmental discourse. It is to say that they should not deploy their rhetoric against a swelling grassroots movement that may help shift public opinion to make politically possible what is scientifically necessary. It is to say, in other words, that Nordhaus and Shellenberger should, for all their fancy words and naysaying, join in and pick up a hoe.

Why each person's personal choices matter

Sometimes people say to me that what they do can't affect the whole planet's health so why should they even try? But if all us tried, well, that would make a big difference, right?

So the other day, I was standing at the crosswalk with quite a crowd. The sign said don't walk but there were gaps in the traffic and I was in a rush so I jogged across.

What I hadn't counted on was the fact that, seeing me step into the street, without checking the traffic or the don't walk sign, about five other people behind me stepped into the street, too. Just at that moment a car came and the result was the sudden squeal of brakes.

Someone could have got hit because I didn't realize that how I act affects how other people act.

What I do matters. It affects how other people act. The choices we make in life affects the choices of everyone else.

Using resources for what's important

I always go on about the fact that sustainability 2.0 means not just using fewer resources but using resources in ways that improve human quality of life. If we're not using the resources to improve life, then why are we using them at all?

In other words, what's important?

Well, it's spring. The below video (starring my daughter Isabella, her friend Sofie and Frankie the dog) shows what's important to me. Either that or this whole post is just a poor excuse for me to show off my little girl!

Does life have meaning?

In Tolstoy's A Confession (the autobiographical account of his crisis of meaning I wrote about the other day), he argues that, if what we seek to achieve does not endure after our death, then our life itself has no meaning. As Tolstoy's reasoning goes, since everything he strived for in life--riches, fame, pleasure--would ultimately disappear when he died, life was essentially meaningless.

But then he reverses himself:

I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer -- an evil -- was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life, while I had referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. And really my life -- a life of indulgence of desires -- was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, "Life is evil and an absurdity," referred only to my life, but not to human life in general.

In other words, Tolstoy determined that his life the way he lived it was meaningless because the achievement of his life goals--riches, fame and pleasure--died along with him. That did not mean that everyone's life was meaningless, he realized. He admired people whose goal it was to be of service to the rest of life. Since the service that they did to the rest of life endured beyond their deaths, their lives had meaning.

When we use planetary resources, in the service of what do we use them? When we live our lives, in the service of what do we live them? Are we using our resources and living our lives meaningfully? Or are we wasting both?

Because if you agree with Tolstoy, whether or not our lives have meaning is determined only by what we use them for.