Amanda Gelder has a great interview with Jeremy Rifkin at Culturelab. What I find most intriguing are the connections Rifken draws among psychology, politics, and economics. We find ourselves in a pickle of historic proportions at the moment at least in part because of errors in thinking about these things.

I’ll try to pull together a couple of threads to focus on economic thinking and its relationship to the global crisis we face:

The Enlightenment view is that human beings are rational, detached agents that pursue our own self-interests and our nation states reflect that view. . .

A lot of interesting new discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, child development, anthropology and more suggest that human nature might not be what Enlightenment philosophers suggested. For instance, the discovery of mirror neurons suggests that we are not wired for autonomy or utility but for empathic distress; we are a social species.

* * *

Geopolitics is an extension of the Enlightenment view of human nature, the idea that we pursue our utilitarian pleasures and individual self-interests. In geopolitics, the nation-state becomes a macro view of that. Nations deal with nations by being rational, detached and calculating, pursuing self-interests, excercising power and acquiring more capital and wealth. That’s why Copenhagen failed. The world leaders weren’t thinking biosphere, they were thinking geopolitics. Everyone was looking out for their nation’s self-interest.

* * *

A lot of business people would say that you can’t be empathic in the market. But the market is a secondary institution–it’s an extension of culture. The real invisible hand of the market is trust, which is the result of empathic engagement. The only way you can have a market is if you have a shared narrative. The market is not a utilitarian frame of reference, it only exists by the social trust that allows people to engage in anonymous settings and believe that their engagements will be honored. When that trust fails, markets collapse and that’s what is happening now.

Rifken thinks the new world of distributed knowledge and distributed energy means we’ve moving from Homo sapien to Homo empathicus. His vision is attractive. I wish I could share his optimism. Still, we too often forget that philosophy does not live just in acedemia – it has real world implications. The “market” we have come to deify today is really nothing more than a myth, a powerful one that has turned destructive and threatens to consume civilization itself.

Rifkin has just published a new 600-page book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, in which he expands on the ideas explored in the interview. I recall in my college days (note we were flower children of the 60s) reading books about evolving human consciousness.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s  The Phenomenon of Man. Lancelot Law Whyte’s The Next Development in Man. Remember Charles Reich’s The Greening of America? Answer: not without some embarrassment.

So count me skeptical. My remaining aspirations are much less ambitious than forging a new human consciousness, rather just to eat well and live warmly in an increasingly uncertain world.

Solastalgia:  the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault; a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’; symptoms include anxiety, despair, numbness, a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless, grief.

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003. It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change. Solastalgia is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment

Wikipedia explains:

As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home – “solastalgia” is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative affect that is exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.

An article in the New York Times quotes Albrecht:

There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease.’ People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.

Albrecht has found that this “place pathology” isn’t limited to natives or to the displaced. People can be despairing and depressed without being forced from their homeland. The land changing around them can bring about the same sense of mournful disorientation.

The researchers could have found evidence of solastagia by looking at me in Sacramento, California in the ’70s, as the paradise I was born and grew up in was devastated by rampant and uncontrolled “development.”  It got so bad I fled in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of sanity. The Seattle area in Washington proved little better. When at last I found a real home again here in Oregon, that traumatic experience provided the impetus to do everything in my power to prevent a repeat of the California and Washington experience.

In California, things have gone from bad to worse; it is now what Sasha Abramsky in an article in The Nation calls the “west coast wasteland.” California’s population has exploded from a little over 10 million in 1950 to about 37 million today. But as many have warned (including Eben Fodor in his landmark 1998 study “The Cost of Growth in Oregon“), growth costs a lot and doesn’t pay for itself. After 60 years of growth, the bills have come due.

As Abramsky observes, what was a gorgeous state with a terrific infrastructure built up over the past century now has no money or political will to keep the place running properly. Paradise is broken and in a perennial state of fiscal crisis as California threatens to become a failed state. And California is not alone.

My heart still aches for what once was and is now irretrievably lost. I still can’t bear to cross the border. Unfortunately, as the symptom of climate change shows, the disease of growth doesn’t respect borders. Growth now threatens to devastate the entirety of the globe.

Earth is the only home we have, there’s nowhere left to flee. As it succumbs to the ravishes of growth, are we not destined to see solastalgia spread and become a global contagion?

Population density, not a sudden increase in human brain power, led to the emergence of modern human behavior. That’s the thrust of a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science.

High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. Complex skills learned across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behavior appearing at different times in different parts of the world.

So it’s memes, not genes, that’s primarily responsible for civilization.

The battle against dangerous climate change has been lost, and the world needs to prepare for things to get very, very bad.

That’s the gloomy message climate scientist Kevin Anderson conveyed at a high-level academic conference on global warming at Exeter University. Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, carbon emissions have soared way out of control. So much extra pollution is being pumped out that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and “dangerously misguided” at worst. It is now “improbable” that atmospheric CO2 levels can be restricted to less than 650 parts per million (ppm). At 650ppm, the world would face a catastrophic 4C average rise. And even that bleak future could only be achieved if draconian emission reductions are adopted “within a decade.”

Atmospheric CO2 levels are currently about 387 ppm, up from 280ppm at the time of the industrial revolution, and levels are rising by more than 2ppm each year. The generally accepted view is that the world should aim to cap CO2 levels at 450ppm, to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2C. The latest science suggests that reducing atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm or below will be necessary to avoid catastrophic “tipping points.”

Global warming is proving worse than even the bleakest scenarios considered by the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Economist and IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri says he is stunned at the trillions of dollar thrown at the banking crisis while funding to arrest global warming is beggared.

Sharon Astyk observes we are nearing a point at which we will no longer be able to go on as we have been, and the projects we engage in will have to change fundamentally.

We may have to admit that the hope of growing the economy again or rescuing the banks is futile – and turn our efforts, hopefully, towards mitigating suffering. We may have to concede that the planet will pass the 2 degree tipping point (and I say this with great pain), and that the best we can hope for is to not add more damage. We may have to concede that our children will be dealing with a national infrastructure designed for cheap energy – and without much of the energy, and turn ourselves to the national and world project of adaptation.

Astyk invokes the memory of Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Giesel, whose work gently teaches that not all endings are happy endings:

This is a hard lesson for children, but one that it is good to embed early – to clarify the distinction between fiction and reality. It is one that is clearly hard for many adults to grasp – thus, the fact that we desperately *want* the economy to be restored makes us see signs of restoration where none are. The fact that we want to address climate change without personal hardship makes us convinced that this is possible, that we want there to be fossil fuels without constraining our consumption means we choose to believe it. But navigating the fact that happy endings of the “Happy 100 percent” sort are mostly fictive is perhaps the life project for both children and adults.

It’s time to grow up.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is the touchstone work. As Heinberg summarizes:

Tainter saw societal complexity as a strategy for solving problems (too many people, not enough food, warlike neighbors, changing climate, and so on). But investments in complexity yield diminishing returns, so eventually the strategy always fails and the society must simplify again. This simplification typically manifests as political and economic crisis, abandonment of urban centers, declining population, or war.

One of the reasons that returns on complexity begin to decline is that growth in exploitation of energy sources cannot be sustained: soils erode, forests disappear, fossil fuels deplete, the climate changes around us.

Heinberg poses the questions that we will be forced to confront: How will that simplification occur? How simple will society become?

Heinberg says adaptation strategies are likely to be more successful if we can organize the simplification process. But as we are seeing in the reactions to the multiple crises we’re facing, our automatic response is ever more complexity:

[W]e labor instead under the belief that our current problems can be solved with ever more complexity in the forms of technology (genetically modified crops and hybrid cars) and government bailouts for failing companies.

Will we as a society continue doing what we have been doing until it simply doesn’t work any longer and we’re compelled to do something else? Time will tell.

Heinberg helpfully lists others who have been exploring in their works the phenomenon of collapse and what it means for us: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age; and Dmitri Orlov, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.

“If the central role of journalism is to raise the difficult questions that citizens should confront in a democratic society, journalists are not doing their jobs.”

It’s hardly surprising that journalists fail to question technology or the dogma of progress and growth. After all, journalists are as much a part of our culture and are as blind to its underlying ideology as any other occupational group. It’s rare that anyone questions the core assumptions of their society, at any time.  Why would we expect today’s journalists to be any different?

Jensen cites the example of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines. While our car-based transportation system has given us the ability to travel considerable distances, this technology also has given us traffic jams and road rage, strip malls and the interstate highway system, horrific carnage and death as a routine and unremarked fact of life. Our high-energy lifestyle has contributed to unprecedented global warming which threatens to destabilize Earth’s climate and unravel Earth’s ecosystems, of which human economies are but a fragile and dependent part.

Jensen argues that the “common response” to the social and ecological pathology of the car culture has not been to rethink the reasons and ways we transport ourselves, but rather to figure out how to replace petroleum so we can continue to drive, leading to the manic quest for “alternative fuels.” But we don’t see the car culture as pathological. In fact, we don’t see the car culture as a “culture” at all. It’s like the air we breath. We are so immersed in it that we take it for granted. It’s simply the world in which we live. We can’t imagine it any other way.

Peak oil threatens to unravel the very fabric of our reality. And it’s our response to peak oil that’s pathological. Rather than change our ways, we try to keep the car culture going at any and all cost.

Our faith in technology is just one element of our broader devotion to economic growth.  We have defined the good life as synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire more and more of increasingly sophisticated technology. So we continue to pursue progress and economic growth. We cannot see, we refuse to see, that this path leads to death and destruction.

Jensen points out that those who challenge this dogma are routinely ignored or dismissed as naïve. But, Jensen asks, who is really being naïve?

“Naïve, perhaps, but not as naïve as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely, which is at the heart of the technological fundamentalists’ delusional belief system.”

The environmental crisis consists of the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide, entailing the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea, with many species being pushed to the brink of extinction, and into extinction. People who passively allow this to happen, not to mention those who actively promote it for economic or other reasons, are already a good distance down the road to insanity.

Solving the global environmental crisis requires that we regain our psychological balance, our humanity.

“The solution to the global environmental crisis we face today depends far less on the dissemination of new information than it does on the re-emergence into consciousness of old ideas. Primitive ideas or tribal ideas, kinship, solidarity, community, direct democracy, diversity, harmony with nature provide the framework or foundation of any rational or sane society. Today, these primal ideas, gifts of our ancestral heritage, are blocked from entering consciousness. The vast majority of modern people cannot see the basic truths that our ancient ancestors knew and that we must know again, about living within the balance of nature.”

A new study to be published in the Journal of Happiness Studies highlights a striking paradox. As the Chinese are becoming richer, they’re becoming more unhappy.

Between 1990 and 2000 millions of Chinese were pulled up out of poverty. In ten years the average rural wage in China more than tripled, while in urban areas it quadrupled.

Yet happiness hasn’t increased as expected. In 1990 28% of Chinese people described themselves as very happy, but by 2000 this figure had dropped to 12%. When asked about their satisfaction with life, the story was the same: in 1990 the average was 7.3 (out of 10), but by 2000 it had dropped to 6.5. This drop was seen across rural and urban China and in almost every income bracket.

What explains the Chinese experience of decreasing happiness and life satisfaction alongside so many being released from poverty? The answer could be the increasing disparity between rich and poor. In China, like many other societies around the world, the rich have accelerated away from the mean income level rapidly, leaving the rest of society looking on jealously. It’s just that in China it has happened very quickly and so the results are particularly pronounced. 

While many Chinese are getting richer in absolute terms, they are not getting richer in relative terms; on the contrary, relatively they feel poorer. As average income levels are pulled higher by the small minority of rich and super-rich, more and more people feel poorer in comparison. As a result they feel less satisfied with life and less happy.

He quotes economist Jeffrey Sachs:

“Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”

In sum, cap-and trade hasn’t worked, as we pointed out in this blog posting. But god forbid we should question our addiction to “growth.” In fact growth is our god, and economists the priesthood.

So what is Revkin – or as he carefully puts it in his article, what do “others” – suggest? A Manhatten Project-like commitment to and investment in “new technologies.”

Joseph Romm says that we don’t have time to wait for some unknown techno-fix and disagrees that we can’t stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at acceptable levels (below 450 ppm) using existing technologies.

Existing technologies – including, for example, solar thermal can provide sufficient energy to support people around the globe at decent and equitable levels of existence. We know from long historical practice – before the auto age – how to construct aesthetically pleasing and equitable communities that don’t rely on ravaging the Earth and poisoning the atmosphere. And we can probably avert catastrophic climate change if we just stop burning coal.

Global warming is a symptom of a too-large ecological footprint.  But it’s not the only symptom. Peak oil, to be followed by peak natural gas and peak coal, are other symptoms. Other resources – soil, water, rare earth metals, forests, fisheries – are reeling from the relentless assault of “growth” as well.

Global warming and other consequences of stress on Earth’s sources and sinks require much more than a technological fix.  They require that we topple the false idol of growth, along with its priesthood.

The solution to global warming isn’t technical – it’s spiritual.

The survey’s core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues. People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level.

Americans are clearly most concerned about pollution issues that might affect their personal health, or the health of their families.

The survey also revealed stark differences in people’s environmental attitudes, depending on their political leanings. Democrats and political liberals clearly express more desire for governmental action to address environmental problems, while Republicans and ideological conservatives disdain government intervention.

“My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.”

And what is that “underlying source”?

“[T]he hierarchal structure of human civilization. Hierarchy demands growth. Growth is a result of dependency. The solution to the problem of growth, then, is the elimination of dependency.”

He points out that the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth isn’t a problem that can be solved through a new technology – all that does is postpone the inevitable reckoning with the limits of a finite world.

The fact that surplus production equates to power, across all scales, is the single greatest driver of growth in hierarchy. And the structure of human society selects for growth – any group that did not create surplus – and therefore grow – would be out-competed by groups that did. As political entities became more sophisticated, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. Hierarchies must grow, and human dependency is what sustains these hierarchies. Dependency, then, is the root cause of the problem of growth.

His solution? The “rhizome”:

The first principle of rhizome is that individual nodes—whether that is family units or communities of varying sizes—must be minimally self-sufficient. “Minimally self-sufficient” means the ability to consistently and reliably provide for anything so important that you would be willing to subject yourself to the terms of the hierarchal system in order to get it: food, shelter, heat, medical care, entertainment, etc. It doesn’t mean zero trade, asceticism, or “isolationism,” but rather the ability to engage in trade and interaction with the broader system when, and only when, it is advantageous to do so. The corollary here is that a minimally self-sufficient system should also produce some surplus that can be exchanged—but only to the extent that is found to be advantageous.

and rhizome networks:

“How should rhizome nodes interact? Most modern information processing is handled by large, hierarchal systems that, while capable of digesting and processing huge amounts of information, incur great inefficiencies in the process. The basic theoretical model for rhizome communication is the fair or festival. This model can be repeated locally and frequently—in the form of dinner parties, barbecues, and reading groups—and can also affect the establishment and continuation of critical weak, dynamic connections in the form of seasonal fairs, holiday festivals, etc. This is known as the “small-worlds” theory of network. It tells us that, while many very close connections may be powerful, the key to flat-topography (i.e. non-hierarchal) communications is a broad and diverse network of distant but weak connections.”

How do we create rhizome-creating and rhizome-strengthening institutions? The general principles is that cultural institutions should reinforce decentralization, independence, and rhizome, rather than centralization, dependency, and hierarchy.

Vail doesn’t pretend that this can happen overnight, but he lays out the conceptual framework for the gradual, incremental, and distributed integration of these ideas into the customized plans of individuals and communities preparing for the future.

A new study published in the journal Science reports that buying stuff doesn’t make people happy. Regardless of income level, those people who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not.

This result is consistent with those of other researchers around the world who have reported that reported “happiness” levels have stayed flat even though real income has surged.

The researchers found that happiness didn’t correlate with personal spending – but happiness did correlate with how much they gave away.

Professor Ruut Veenhoven, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said the study showed that the economic view of human motivation was incorrect.

“This may come as a surprise for economists who have learned that humans are essentially egoists.”

So why don’t people give more money away to make themselves even happier?

“Often people don’t know what really makes them happy. Doing nice things to other people isn’t so bad after all.”

It’s pretty lengthy, so I’m just going to quote a bit. I urge you to visit her site and read the whole thing.

“It is now far too late,” he says, “to prevent our looming petro-collapse and all of its environmental consequences. Like the Titanic approaching the iceberg, collision with our attractor is now both inevitable and imminent. The difference is that, unlike the Titanic, we are actually speeding up as we approach our ‘iceberg’.” (34)

“This paragraph is so momentous, so poignant that the reader must ponder it carefully. Please let it sink in: We cannot prevent catastrophe, the pace with which we are plummeting toward it is accelerating. When the impact of these two statements sinks in, how can anyone reading these words assume that his/her own or the planet’s “business as usual” can continue?

“But the author does not leave us there because he quickly adds:

“However, it is possible for many of us to survive the catastrophe and to sow the seeds for civilization to be renewed with all of the learning of past ages relatively intact. This is because at the very center of it all are the ordered patterns of memes from which our minds emerge and interact with the minds of others. We can ensure that the lessons learned from this impending collapse are firmly incorporated into the minds and culture of our successor civilization’s citizens and into their institutions and laws.”

Why? Opposition from utilities and industry interests, who are concerned that any reporting scheme would surely be followed by regulation. And of course that’s the purpose of the bill – to set the stage and gather the information necessary to implement the Western Climate Initiative and adopt a cap-and-trade scheme.

This lack of recognition that we’re in a crisis that requires drastic and immediate action is evidence that we’re still in the “denial” stage of our response to climate change. And here in Oregon, peak oil – outside of Portland and its Peak Oil Task Force – isn’t even on our radar.

John Michael Greer in an article at the Energy Bulletin (and his own Archdruid Report) comparing our response to peak oil with the five stages of grief outlined by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

We can’t expect to arrive at acceptance – of either global warming or climate change – all at once. Individually and as a society, we’ve got to work our way through, step by step, all the way to acceptance.

We still fantasize that we can figure out a way to continue living our lives in something like the way we do now. This refusal to let go is the single largest obstacle in the path of a reasoned response to the predicament of peak oil and global warming. The hard reality we have to face is the fact that the extravagant, energy-wasting lifestyles of the recent past have led us to the brink of climate catastrophe. And the realities of peak oil, soon to be followed by peak gas and peak coal, combined with the EROEI and scaling realities of alternatives, dictate that our profligacy cannot be sustained by any amount of bargaining or any number of grand projects.

Eventually we’ll have to face up to the reality that our way of life is over – and that the alternative will be okay. As Greer points out, if we redefine the situation in terms of managing a controlled descent from the giddy heights of the late industrial age, the range of technological options widens out dramatically.

There are still many (like CERA) who are in denial of peak oil. Anger is seen in our invasion and occupation of the remaining vulnerable oil producing provinces. How dare terrorists and Muslim fanatics deny us of our oil?

We see anger in the climate change context as soon as anybody actually proposes to do anything meaningful. Why do you suppose a carbon tax, the preferred tool of global warming activists and economists, isn’t even on the table? Because it could actually be implemented quickly and comprehensively, without offering the opportunity for entrenched interests to game the system. A carbon tax would actually force us to do something meaningful, now – it would actually accomplish something. We’re not quite ready for that, yet. Bargaining? We can begin to talk about that.

In the energy context, Greer sees bargaining in our rush to futile and destructive projects, like biofuels and nuclear. I would add tar sands and the chimerical “clean coal” to that list.

Given the political impasse, we cannot stand by helplessly.

We can make immediate changes in our own lives to minimize energy usage. Change our light bulbs. Insulate and seal our homes. Drive less. The list is endless. Tiny actions, multiplied many times, add up to something that matters. while saving money.

Even more importantly, the actions of individuals send critical messages to others and help to establish new social norms that tell everyone around us (our neighbors and our children) what “good” or “ethical” environmental behavior is. Social norms are powerful.

It’s critical that we push from the bottom up to get something happen at the state and federal levels. Governments set regulations and policies that affect what we all do in our individual lives. Doing something about global warming requires not just a rational, cognitive response. It needs an emotional response, even a spiritual response, certainly a deep shift in our values. The deeper the social change, the harder, and the longer it will take to bring about. Values and social and cultural norms take generations to change.

And herein lies our dilemma: we don’t have generations, or even decades. If we are to avoid climate catastrophe, if we are to transition to a low-carbon economy, we have to act now. Even tomorrow is too late.

The concept of history implicit in our mythology of progress is a straight line without branches or swerves, much less dead ends. But since the 80s our political leadership has made a series of disastrous choices, enabled by a temporary and one-off plunge in energy costs. For the last quarter century, people throughout the industrial world have become accustomed to economic, social, and personal arrangements that only work if energy is basically free. Delusional economics led to millions of Americans buying poorly insulated, shoddily built new houses a three-hour drive from jobs and shopping. Globalization and the throwaway economy – both made possible by cheap energy, represented “progress” which was both inevitable and irreversible.

Greer concludes the end of the era of cheap energy makes the path we chose a dead end – but that we’re still in denial:

“In hindsight, I suspect, the entire period from 1980 to 2005 will be seen as one of history’s supreme blind alleys. A great many of the economic arrangements, infrastructure, and personal and collective habits that grew up in response to that age of distorted priorities will have to be reworked in a hurry, no matter what the cost, as energy prices rise to more realistic levels. At the same time, the grip of the myth of progress on the industrial world’s imagination remains unshaken.

“The possibility that the only way forward out of the present blind alley may require going back to less convenient and more costly ways of doing things is nowhere on our collective radar screens just now.”

“Buddha, Spinoza, and Jesus all came to a similar conclusion about despair — quite a different one than that reached by the modern mental health establishment. Although each described it differently, Buddha, Spinoza, and Jesus concluded that the source of our misery is avarice, material attachment, and self-absorption. While each used different language, they all provided a path away from torment and toward wellbeing. Buddha taught how to release oneself from narrow self-interest and craving. Spinoza taught how to liberate oneself from greed and other irrational passions. And Jesus taught, very simply, about love.”

He points to Eric Fromm’s contrast between the “having mode” (greed, acquisition, possession, aggressiveness, control, deception, and alienation from one’s authentic self, others, and the natural world) versus the “joyful being mode” (the act of loving, sharing, and discovering, and being authentic and connected to one’s self, others, and the natural world).

The United States has become a nation of consumers rather than citizens. But as Levine reminds us,

“when we accept the whole of our humanity, we are often rewarded with greater joy — and almost always receive increased wisdom about life.”

“That means gearing up now to make the most ambitious changes we’ve ever had to make in our economy, and in our personal habits. It’s going to be difficult; much of the world is using more fossil fuel all the time. It’s a test for human beings, and hopefully not a final exam.

“For the first time in human history “more” is no longer synonymous with “better.”

“A recent sampling of Forbes magazine’s “richest Americans” showed they have identical happiness scores with Pennsylvania Amish, and are only a whisker above Swedes taken as a whole, not to mention the Masai hunters in Africa.

“As we got more affluent, we lost a lot of our social connections and communities. We moved to the suburbs, built big houses and filled them with screens to stare into. It’s no wonder the average American has half as many close friends as 50 years ago.”

McKibben says we have to move beyond “growth” as the paramount economic ideal and begin pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment.

They argue that a more effective successor to Kyoto (which expires in 2012) will require a much more radical rethink – and that a solution requires a “silver buckshot” rather than Kyoto’s “silver bullet.” They make a few suggestions: concentrating on the economies that are big emitters rather than treating all nations as equal partners in negotiation, a massive “wartime footing” increase in R&D, “bottom-up” emissions markets, increased spending on adaptation, and an experimental, multi-level governmental approach to the problem.

As I see it, there are two obvious objections to the approach outlined.  First, they simply dismiss the possibility of a carbon tax as having “severe political obstacles.”

More importantly, their solutions assume the continued existence of the system that has resulted in the problem.  They recognize that global warming is best understood

as a symptom of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply-system of fossil energy. Together they form a complex nexus of mutually reinforcing, intertwined patterns of human behaviour, physical materials and the resulting technology.”

It follows that any solution requires choosing a path other than the “particular development path” we are on.  But that’s off the table: rather, their “solutions” assume we can continue down this path but reach a different destination, through negotiation, new technology and markets, and our inherent cleverness.  I suggest that a solution requires a really radical approach – one that, as long as we’re still in the bargaining stage of grief and loss, we’re not yet ready to contemplate.

It is unequal because, though our economy has been growing, most of us have relatively little to show for it. The median wage in the United States is the same as it was thirty years ago and the real income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has declined steadily.

Even if we found the political to spread wealth around more evenly, that would not solve the problem of sustainability. We are using up all of the fossil fuels, especially oil, that power our current growth economy while imperiling our lives on this planet through the build up of carbon in the atmosphere – which is produced, of course, by burning all those fossil fuels in the first place. Even if we liked the economy we have now, we have little chance of keeping it.

And the growth economy and its avalanche of stuff has not made us any happier – instead, it has made us decidedly unhappier. Up to a certain point – for those living in poverty, for example – “more” increases aggregate and individual levels of happiness. After that point, though, happiness becomes subject to the laws of diminishing returns, until the returns become losses and “more” actually correlates with unhappiness. We work longer hours to buy more things to make ourselves more miserable instead of doing what does make us happy: spending time with our families and in our communities.

McKibben argues that the solution to all these economic ills – inequality, sustainability, and happiness – lies in revitalizing local economies and local communities.

Dr. Cialdini talks about the remarkably powerful role social norms play in directing human action and producing socially desirable conduct. In the context of energy and the environment, studies show that (1) energy users severely underestimate the role of social norms in guiding their energy usage, (2) communications that employ social norm-based appeals for pro-environmental behavior are superior to those that employ traditional persuasive appeals, and (3) even though these highly effective social norm-based appeals are nearly costless—requiring no large technological fixes, tax incentives, or regulatory changes—they are rarely (and sometimes mistakenly) delivered.

What’s this got to do with the property rights debate? Measure 37 succeeded in getting 61% of Oregon’s population to endorse a new social norm – that any reduction in property values due to regulation for the benefit of all was unfair. Now the proponents of Measure 49 is asking those who opposed Measure 37 to join in and affirm that it’s perfectly alright to demand compensation from the government when regulations deprive a property owner of windfall profits – and that, when that happens, it’s perfectly alright to ignore a law that applies to everyone else. How can reaffirming a social norm that is logically and legally nonsensical, historically inaccurate, and socially dangerous be “pragmatic” if it destroys the most powerful tool we have to encourage socially desirable conduct?

Cialdini says,

[O]ne of the fundamental lessons of human psychology is that people follow the crowd. I am concerned that this point is being missed in our attempts to communicate the importance of environmental protection and energy conservation within our communities.

Laws work because almost everyone obeys them voluntarily – they embody social norms. Society can then police the occasional scofflaw. The same is true of regulatory schemes – most people voluntarily comply, making it possible to deal with occasional transgressions with a monitoring and enforcement program. That’s the role land use activist organizations have traditionally played in Oregon.

But now we’re adopting measures that ensure the widespread dismissal of land use regulations. Why should one person be expected to respect and follow laws, when others are ignoring them with impunity?

As Cialdini says,

The secret is to avoid validating the deviant actions of a small minority of wrongdoers by making them appear the rule rather than the exception. Otherwise, we assure that a few rotten apples will spoil the barrel.

And he adds:

Within the lament “Look at all the people who are doing this undesirable thing” lurks the powerful and undercutting message “Look at all the people who are doing it.” And, one of the fundamental lessons of human psychology is that people follow the crowd.

Even if Measure 49 were to actually result in less immediate on-the-ground damage, the long-term consequences of validating anti-social behavior may be to undermine our ability effectively enforce the regulations that remain.

Cialdini has done experiments that show how important messaging is.

The door hangers carried one of four messages, informing residents that (1) they could save money by conserving energy, or (2) they could save the earth’s resources by conserving energy, or (3) they could be socially responsible citizens by conserving energy, or (4) the majority of their neighbors tried regularly to conserve energy—information we had learned from a prior survey. We also include a control group of residents in the study whose door hanger simply encouraged energy conservation but provided no rationale. Even though our prior survey indicated that residents felt that they would be least influenced by information regarding their neighbors’ energy usage, this was the only type of door hanger information that led to significantly decreased energy consumption[.]

And again:

Here’s how we tested our suspicion. With the collaboration of the management of an upscale hotel in the Phoenix area, we put one of four different cards in its guestrooms. One of the cards stated “HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT,” which was followed by information stressing respect for nature. A different card stated “HELP SAVE RESOURCES FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS,” which was followed by information stressing the importance of saving energy for the future. A third type of card stated “PARTNER WITH US TO HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT,” which was followed by information urging guests to cooperate with the hotel in preserving the environment. A final type of card stated “JOIN YOUR FELLOW CITIZENS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT,” which was followed by information that the majority of hotel guests do reuse their towels when asked. The outcome? Compared to the first three messages, the final (social norm) message increased towel reuse by an average of 34% (Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2007).

Two things are noteworthy about the results of the hotel study. First, the message that generated the most participation in the hotel’s towel recycling program was the one that no hotel (to our knowledge) has ever used. Apparently, this simple but effective appeal didn’t emerge from a history of trial and error to become a hotel “best practice.” Instead, it emerged from a scientifically-based understanding of human psychology. This points out the need to call on social scientific research in a systematic fashion to help advance sound environmental policy. For instance, in case of hotel conservation programs, the average 150-room hotel would save 72,000 gallons of water, 39 barrels of oil, and would obviate the release 480 gallons of detergent into the environment in the course of a year if guests complied with the requests.

The second notable aspect of the hotel study was that the significant increase in program participation was nearly costless. In most cases, for an organization to boost effectiveness by 34%, some expensive steps have to be taken; typically, organizational structure, focus, or personnel must be changed. In this instance, however, none of that was necessary. Rather, what was required was a presentation of the facts about the preferred behavior of the majority.

Cialdini concludes:

In sum, when communicating with the public, it is important to avoid trying to reduce the incidence of a damaging problem by describing it as regrettably frequent. Such an approach, while understandable, runs counter to the findings of social science regarding the contagiousness of social behavior, even socially harmful behavior. Moreover, often, the problem under consideration is not widespread at all. It only comes to seem that way by virtue of a vivid and impassioned presentation of its dangers. Instead, it would be better to honestly inform our audience of the environmental peril resulting from even a small amount of the undesirable conduct. Furthermore, when most people are behaving responsibly toward the environment, we’d be less than responsible ourselves if we failed to publicize that fact, as the social science evidence is plain that the information will serve both to validate and stimulate the desired action.

With Measures 37 & 49, development motivated solely by selfishness will become regrettably frequent. How then will it be possible to rekindle Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, to persuade people of the imperative to respect and honor the land community of which we are all a part?