It’s no secret Donald Trump benefited from rural voters. But Democrat or Republican, they usually tell Katherine Cramer – who has spent a decade visiting residents of small-town Wisconsin – the same thing: it’s the cities that get all the breaks, and then have the gall to look down on them, too
In this beautiful essay, naturalist Paul Rosolie reminds us that it’s not just about ecosystem accounting. It’s about individual, intelligent animals. It’s about tapping into our compassion and empathy. It’s about the suffering in the world, and how we could choose to reduce it.
Whenever I come face to face with wildlife, especially in when it is something like a family of elephants, it strikes me how we depend on euphemistic terms to soften the truth. When we learn that since 1970 half the wildlife on earth has been ‘lost’ or that species are ‘vanishing’ so rapidly that A Great Silence is Spreading Over the World, the language used in communicating these abstract ideas neglect what Dr. Jane Goodall wisely notes: “It’s not just a species facing extinction, it’s massive individual suffering”.”
These are amazing beings with whom we share the beauty and wonder of this world. They have complex and fascinating lives. They are different from us, but that does not mean that they are incapable of thinking and feeling. We have the choice to use our unique human gifts of elaborate foresight, language, imagination and abstract reason to find ways to help them thrive. Doesn’t that behoove us to use our gifts on their behalf?
Charles Eisenstein has a thoughtful little post about the terms and meanings of capital, property and ownership – how we construct these in the current money culture, and how that might be transformed.
…if we define capitalism as the private ownership of the means of production, and post-capitalism as ending that private ownership, we are still reifying “ownership” or property as an absolute category. But in fact, ownership like money is nothing but a social agreement, a system by which society allocates certain exclusive rights to decide how capital is used. [read more]
One hundred years ago, the once mighty species Ectopistes migratoriuslost its final survivor. Alone in the Cincinnati Zoo, on 1 September 1914, Martha was found dead at the bottom of her cage, the last of the passenger pigeons which had outnumbered humans more than 3-to-1 a century earlier (by some estimates)[1]. Her kind had vanished from the wild fourteen years earlier [2].
So take a moment on September 1st to contemplate the loss of this bird: fleet and gregarious flyer, shaper of continental ecosystems, a feathered message penned with a last breath a century ago.
RIP Martha | ca. 1900 – 1 September 1914
Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know. ~ Aldo Leopold, 1947
In her recent, brilliant (as usual) video, “The Story of Solutions,” Annie Leonard admonishes that we should stop relentlessly working toward MORE and start emphasizing BETTER.
Trouble is, how do we locate BETTER? How do we know if we’re moving toward or away from that goal? How do we get the feedback we need, in a way that will be convincing to people across the ideological spectrum? In other words, how do we measure our progress in ways that allow for useful comparison? Here’s what Donella Meadows had to say on the subject:
Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live.
If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don’t let it pass. Don’t be stopped by the “if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it” ploy. No one can precisely define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can precisely define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist. [from D. Meadows, “Dancing with Systems” 2002]
And yet, I’m a science nerd. I ♥ numbers. Can we get numbers, even with fuzzy definitions, just to give us some way to compare over time or across cultures? If natural selection works by amplifying positive deviance, and we seek to emulate this most successful biological process, then we need a way to recognize those bright spots on the fitness landscape, so that we can foster them and encourage their replication. We need feedback to know if we’re moving toward our goal of BETTER. And, to quote Meadows again:
If the goal is defined badly, if it doesn’t measure what it’s supposed to measure, if it doesn’t reflect the real welfare of the system, then the system cannot possibly produce a desired result. Systems, like the three wishes in the traditional fairy tale, have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce. (Thinking in Systems: A Primer, p. 138)
There are several indices out there that purport to measure something about our well-being and progress. I’ve written before about the idea of Gross National Happiness. I’ve been investigating other available measures in relation to my current project to promote Education for Sustainability in the sixteen countries that represent half the world.
What is it that could be BETTER in this vast and complex system? I’d venture almost everything in the nested sets of human economic, social and environmental interactions.
These interdependent and interpenetrating systems interact in complex ways (go ahead, say that three times fast). As discussed previously, economic aspects of these systems tend to be the first ones measured, because money is by its very nature quite amenable to counting. There have also been some interesting attempts to measure global environmental health, and even to express environmental health in economic terms. And there are some widespread attempts to measure things like social well-being, especially in terms of freedom. No such index is without controversy; all have limitations in terms of data validity, not to mention the challenges associated with trying to quantify important qualitative values (basically attempting to scrute the inscrutable). Nonetheless, they are a place to start, so I’ve started there with my attempts to compare the current status of my sixteen countries. Below are my tabulated results, with color coding to help our primate optics detect patterns more readily. Click the link or image for the Excel spreadsheet.
First up, the oh-so-quantifiable economic measures. The classic and deeply problematic way of representing the economic status of a country is its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). To even begin to be a useful basis of comparison, this must be expressed in some kind of per capita way (otherwise, the fact that China’s GDP is so much bigger than Brunei’s is almost entirely attributable to the fact that there are over 3000 Chinese citizens for every single Brunei citizen). But as we move into the relationship between economic and social factors, another glaring discrepancy becomes obvious: the distribution of the wealth represented in the GDP is far from equitable. Just how far is indicated by another index: GINI, utilized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). A higher GINI coefficient indicates a more dramatic difference between the few rich and the many poor in each nation (Wikipedia is a good starting place for not only the definition and calculations, but also the limitations and controversies). Also, GDP and GINI notoriously neglect certain aspects of what are usually considered important goals in economic development (e.g. health, education). So UNDP factors those into another measure, the Human Development Index, which can then be further adjusted for inequality, to give some sense of progress (or lack thereof) toward the Millennium Development Goals.
The above economic indices are also, of course, measures of social relationships in some sense. The following data and rankings move more explicitly into the social and political realm. (One could argue that HDI more properly belongs in this set.) I’ve included a quick-and-dirty summary description of each country’s political system (thanks Google), and some indices related to freedom, as a shorthand for some of the crucial social systems at the national level. Sadly, Gross National Happiness has not yet been measured for most countries. There are lots of other things I could include here (dominant religions, years since independence from colonial powers, etc.); feel free to suggest other useful comparisons in the comments.
These are ratings that are more specifically connected to the human impact on the rest of the biosphere. As they are in the realm usually investigated by the natural sciences (e.g. population biology, forestry and ecology), they are again more quantitative. One particularly interesting rating is the Happy Planet Index, an attempt to measure the environmental efficiency of human well-being.
If you happen to be in Singapore and you can make it by on the 30th…
The Environment and Sustainability Research Cluster of HSS cordially invite you to a seminar by Dr Michelle Merrill, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Environment and Sustainability Research Cluster. Her topic is Education for Sustainability: What Every College Student Should Know.
Education for Sustainability: What Every College Student Should Know
It is easy to find evidence for unsustainability. Almost everyone has heard about the problems (climate change, air pollution, water scarcity, soil degradation, biodiversity loss…) and it is not difficult to imagine scenarios in which multiple converging crises precipitate devastating social, economic and political shocks. Most would agree that, even without such doomsday scenarios, solving these unsustainability crises is an obligation we have to future generations; intergenerational well-being demands that we learn to be good ancestors and leave a world that works for our descendants. While most sustainability problems actually have solutions that could be implemented without waiting for tomorrow’s technology, the solutions are often dismissed as “not feasible,” with the clear implication that leaders in industry, government and academia do not really know how to resolve these interdependent problems. Sustainability requires not just new technologies and industrial processes; it also requires new attitudes and mindsets, especially the ability to consider how consequences travel through interconnections in complex adaptive systems. Colleges and universities are where tomorrow’s leaders should gain the skills to wisely address these challenges.
Education for sustainability is essential for intergenerational well-being and the long-term viability of society. It also provides an ideal platform for students to learn and apply interdisciplinary critical thinking. This talk will investigate strategies for promoting interdisciplinary education for sustainability in tertiary education. Concepts and pedagogies that were implemented at Cabrillo College (California, USA), and preliminary results regarding their efficacy will be addressed. The talk will review some of the organizations and strategies for promoting professional development in education for sustainability around the world. Plans for fostering a strong network of sustainability educators across colleges and universities centered in Southeast Asia will be presented.
Michelle Y. Merrill Biographic Sketch:
Michelle Y. Merrill (Ph.D.) studies teaching, learning, cultural evolution and culture change. Since 2004, her focus has been on the application of those concepts to sustainability: how we can connect with, learn from and teach one another to co-create a resilient, regenerative future. She is particularly interested in applying principles, examples and metaphors from ecology and evolutionary biology in solving human design problems in both the social and technological arenas, especially systems thinking and biomimicry. Before embarking on her current research project on sustainability and pedagogy at NTU, she worked at a community college in California, developing sustainability-themed courses, advising student clubs, and supporting college efforts to enhance institutional and community sustainability and social justice. She won the 2013 John D. Hurd Award for Teaching Excellence at Cabrillo College.
Dr. Merrill’s previous research was on the evolution of primate behavior, giving her a broad grounding in tropical ecology, primate and human evolution, social networks, cooperation, learning and communication. She studied wild orangutans (Pongo abelii) on Sumatra, and bonobos (Pan paniscus) in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) and at the Language Research Center (Decatur, Georgia, USA). Her doctoral dissertation in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy from Duke University (2004) was on Orangutan Cultures: Tool Use, Social Transmission and Population Differences. Her experiences in tropical rainforest fieldwork inform her current approach to sustainability, emphasizing the need to address social and economic development along with environmental conservation to protect and preserve endangered great apes and other species, including our own.
wonder of this world. They have complex and fascinating lives. They are different from us, but that 
