I heartily agree!  Excellent post!  Bill McKibben wrote a very good article along the same line recently.  

I do have a question about travel:  Since travel almost always requires the inputs of fossil energy, does travel fall into the category of consumption?  And since enjoying nature is one of the reasons many of us travel, is there not some inherent conflict here?  If enjoying nature is a real source of happiness, how do we resolve this conflict without sacrifice?  

It really does take some thinking but it is going to be challenging to reconcile the convenient with the inconvenient and not feel some guilt about being happy.  What is my happiness footprint?  

Both McKibben's ideas and the ones expressed here are very encouraging in that they show that a sustainable society and individual happiness would be mutually self-reinforcing.  Showing how social goals and individual goals can form a virtuous cycle was one of the achievements of Adam Smith, and helped propel the idea of the utility of a market economy.  By combining happiness with sustainabilihty, we may be able to do for society and the biosphere what Adam Smith did for economics.

However, that still begs the question -- how do we construct a society that moves towards greater happiness?  I think it can be shown that when people live in walkable communities, in town centers and urban centers, in which they are in constant contact with fellow human beings and can easily meet with each other and enjoy cultural activities, that people can be higher up in the "happiness" categories.  Is this what the authors are envisioning?  

What about if we got most of our food from local farmers that we interact with at the farmer's market, as McKibben discusses?  How would we move toward such a system?  I think that there needs to me more discussion of concrete social systems, and how we would get there.

Why must we assume that "nature" is "somewhere else"? Can we not find both nature and happiness within footfall of where we are, as countless generations have done before us?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Walkable communities and farmers markets might be part of this, but probably working less is also a big part of it. If you don't need excessive income to spend on "stuff," then you don't need to spend so much time at work, and people would have more time for everything else they're just trying to squeeze in around work and housework. Why do people work so much, if not for more money? The economy would have to be entirely restructured to serve us again, instead of us serving it, working over a third of our hours just to spend what we earn in off hours to keep the system grinding on and growing. The biggest obvious problem is at the lower income end of the spectrum. The poor are working full-time and can barely make ends meet, especially single parents, so there's no room to cut back hours. This is all related to simple living and the slow movements, which sometimes (sometimes not) just have ecological benefits as a side effect.

Haven't seen any. But lets stick to the actual evidence that you cite, Al Gore's movie.
The main evidence is in the form of three climate reconstructions. The first based on the historical climate network is a generalized temperature graph which portrays the world as one temperature over the course of time since the invention of the thermometer. Up until the 1950's we had three temperature stations for the whole continent of Africa, eight for South America, zero for Antarctica, intermittent readings from China, Russia, Canada; so pre 50's observations of temperature boil down to the European and American temp record. How can you (or Gore) claim that fifteen percent of the land surface is representative of the whole world?
Even the modern record is a derivative of speculation, with most of the surface stations in non compliance with NOAA siting standards and subject to a plethora of micro site violations.
The sorry fact is we haven't even learned how to take the worlds temperature accurately, much less plot any changes.

The second of Al Gore's evidences is a 2000 year climate reconstruction, which shows the smallest little anemic peak labeled "Medieval Warm Period", and an enormous rise in the 20th century all highlighted in angry red.
The problem is when this reconstruction is subject to a time reversion by the computer simulations, the sun is forced to be a negative forcing in order for the models to recreate the graph as Gore presents it.
Sorry but the sun doesn't suck energy  from the atmosphere in any real life senario.
Here's another thing about  the 2000 year graph, Gore portrays it as a Thompson Ice Core reconstruction. But how could this be, when all of Robbie Thompson's ice core drilling  were in the mountain glacers of Chile? These cores couldn't be extrapolated as surface temperature of the northern hemisphere - and yet there it is bold as a lie labeled "Northern Hemisphere".
Turned out after some investigation that Al Gore's 2000 year climate reconstruction wasn't a Thompson ice core at all. By carefully recalibrating Micheal Mann's "hockeystick" MBH99 from a 30 year smoothing to a ten year, Steve Mac of Climate Audit found out that Gore had disguised MBH99 and used it in his movie inspite of the hockeystick being discredited.
A lie within a coverup of a falsehood, used to popularise a dangerous dogma.

The third reconstruction is a hundred thousand of years comparison between co2 and temp, based on Greenland and Antactic ice cores.
Fortunately it isn't necessary to look too hard into it provence (which isn't provided by the book or movie) because the graph itself shows temperature determines co2 content - not the other way around as climate changers  would have it.

If Al Gore's movie is not clear on it's own evidence and doesn't remotely describe reality, then we will have to see some of that mountain of other evidence, because as of right now you folks haven't proven anything.

One of the better books for helping people live a more environmentally light-footed life is called "Get a Life: You don't need $1 million to retire well."

By Ralph Warner, founder of Nolo Press, after he did research on well-being among the elderly and found it only barely correlates to financial health.  What he found will surprise no one who has dealt with old people -- the happiest are those who have health, good relationships with others, a purpose in life, etc.  In other words, people who work like crazy during their "earning" years tend to be the least happy, because the thing they devoted their lives to is now gone.

This book is valuable for environmentalists because it gets at the fear that drives so many to stay on the consumption--earning--consumption treadmill, the implicit belief that only by stacking up big piles of cash can one avoid eating dogfood in old age.

No denying that some money is required in old age, particularly if you live in a barbaric nation that believes people are only worthwhile if they contribute to the upkeep of that great god GDP, but the research Warner talks about shows that the necessary amount is reasonably low.

What financial planners have taken to doing is to assume that you want to maintain the "lifestyle" of your earnings years in retirement (meaning maintain your pace of consumption), which requires that you work like a pack animal to save enough to have 80% of your pre-retirement income in pensions.  How nice this works for the suits who want everyone slaving away to promote economic growth.

Of course, no post on this subject is complete without reminding people of "Your Money or Your Life," a very important book.  The technique advised in that book may no longer work exactly as described, but the overall approach sure does.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

James Mayeau doesn't believe Al Gore's interpretation of that Inconvenient Truth apparently and wants to see some of the other mountains of evidence of Global Warming.

Use the computer you have in front of you to check out, for instance, the Northwest Passage in the Arctic.  Look at the pictures of the ice from season to season, year to year, and try to convince your own eyes that nothing is happening.  Flip around to views of the glaciers all over the world and look at their accelerating rate of retreat evidenced by tourism photos over the past century  -  The Snows of Kilimanjaro are now passing into history.  Look at the pictures of the devastation of the lodgepole pine of the western U.S and Canada; if Global Warming isn't allowing the pinebark beetle eggs and larvae to survive over winter, then what is?  How come robins are now making an appearance in the arctic for the first time in inuit history?  Why are seaside houses in Alaska, built many years ago, now succumbing to melting permafrost and sliding into the oceans?   If all of us aren't subject to the imminent disasters inherent in Global Warming, then just who is?

Des Emery

You WERE just joking, weren't you, with that Amazon.com page of how-to books on finding happiness?  : )

Happily, one title on the page is not a how-to book at all, at least not directly and obviously so.  It is a work of fiction -- thank God for Art! -- , which just happens to have "happiness" in its title, and which happens also to belong to a very happy series, by all accounts very happily happifying:

 <<
 Blue Shoes and Happiness (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Book 7) by Alexander Mccall Smith (Paperback - Mar 13, 2007)
Buy new: $12.95 $10.36    102 Used & new from $4.47
 >>

So this book at least we can recommend.  But read Books 1 to 6 first.

Actually, the opening of the Amazon.com page was not the first time that the gag reflex was set off.  That happened when I read these words in the guest essay, the opening words of the fourth paragraph:

<<
Scientists are discovering a convenient truth: ...
>>

Gevalt!  Like, nobody knew about this truth, about happiness's essential independence from the enjoyment of material goods, until scientists discovered it?  Or, does the fact that scientists are discovering it make the truth truly true?  Are Costanza & Company, a very well educated bunch apparently, really without knowledge of the work of philosophers and wise people of many pre-scientific traditions, from millennia ago?  Or do they know about all that, but dismiss it as unworthy of the attention of us up-to-date sophisticates?  : (

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

Tell me how many of you could live in the middle of hundreds of square miles of corn and soybeans and not feel the need to escape?  I live in the biggest sacrificial landscape in the United States.  Every day I live here is a sacrifice.   Tell me I should not escape to places that do not destroy the soul of the nature lover.  I created an oasis of native biodiversity on my property that provides some happiness but it is no substitute for the happiness I derive from wild places.  

What is worse, living here in a developed landscape and traveling to the wild on occasion, or moving to a wilder area and contributing to develop the shit out of it?  I don't fly.  I have not built a vacation cabin in the woods.  My travel is limited to within my state and a couple of adjacent states -- mainly canoeing and camping.  

I don't justify my impact but just relating how one person lives out conflicts between finding happiness and attempting to live more sustainably.  

Nothing new for me since I became aware of this in the '60s when this very same discussion was very much alive in the minds of young idealists.  I hope it does not escape its new founders as they find their niche in the machine and struggle with compromises.        

" I don't fly.  I have not built a vacation cabin in the woods.  My travel is limited to within my state and a couple of adjacent states -- mainly canoeing and camping."

Travel of course necessitates consumption (as, for that matter, does eating), but we can take steps to keep our consumption within mindful bounds. As you have.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I think your question about happiness footprint is a good one, Justlou. 200 years ago, most people lived in walkable communities (it's called a village) and grew their own food or knew the man that was growing it. Clothes, buildings and all other material goods were made by hand, laboriously.   Travel was slow, costly, and uncommon. Their carbon footprint was a hell of a lot lower, but were they happier? They had stronger communities but stronger prejudices. Their days were filled with more meaningful work, perhaps, but their nights were dark and cold.
This isn't to say that a return to simpler life won't make us happier, nor is it to say that the modern consumer economy doesn't have its downsides. (The downsides are becoming more and more obvious every day).
All I'd want to say is that we should be careful to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fossil fuel consumption has brought us to an age where many more people can travel and see the world and live without the fear of hunger or cold. And communicate with complete strangers via websites, for that matter.

In New England's early years, when a new village was established by a group of responsible individuals, each was expected to maintain their share of the road, their share of the common fences, their share of the common fields.  Personal property was limited to a small home lot and vegetable garden.  Yes...sounds like a commune, doesn't it?  Anyways, when someone decided to pull up roots and head further out into the wilderness as the community grew, the members of the community got together to decide what to do with the house and lot.  The individual didn't "own" his house and lot in the way that we own them today.  When an individual tried to sell his holdings to a new person wanting to move into the community, the town selectmen had to approve the sale.  The maintained this power to keep absentee owners out.  That's right, second home owners were not welcome in early New England communities.  You would never know that to travel through Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire today.  In Rangeley, Maine, where I lived for a year, 85% of the homes are not lived in for most of the year.

The environmental impacts of second home ownership are obvious.  The fact that second home ownership drives up real estate prices and keeps the working class as renters and poor is conveniently overlooked by many.  The growing divide between the rich and the poor in this country is the reason why we can't have universal healthcare.  

Maybe Bush and his cronies should edit the constitution.  "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" should be, as it was in the beginning "Life, liberty, and property."

Shu pas a vende.

not the Constitution.

Shu pas a vende.

Like Noah, many who read this site are aware of our tenuous reliance on a hydraulic civilization -- for us built on the unsustainable flow of fossil fuel vs. irrigation water in his time.  We return to the same questions posed to man since the  beginning of his journey from hunting and gathering.  We converge upon a broad, raging and rising river and seek a passage through a narrowing and unknown canyon.    

We are all drifting on uncharted waters with dreams of establishing a sustained means of living.  Unlike Noah, who founded in wild nature, we can no longer look to the wild to plant our seed, to blunder upon new shores of undiscovered territory to found new colonies.  Our only hope is to resurrect something useful out of the beast that brought us here, to use the beast to destroy its maladaptive nature, to use oil and coal to get us off oil and coal, and to break it into many more adaptive parts upon which each of us can help found a new way of living with earth based on old ways with twists of the new.  And with us, most importantly, we need to bring as much wild nature -- our true foundation -- as possible.  Or, if this is much too centered on us, let us hope that wild nature brings as many of us with it as possible.  

Live simply and be rich in wonder. Hold on!  

Out there,
Lou

I recommend a book I just borrowed from the library:  'Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution' by Woody Holton, 2007

from the back cover:

"It turns out that average Americans from the 'unruly mob' had more to do with insuring the personal liberties we Americans now hold dear than did the Framers we so revere.  Woody Holton's fascinating and energetic new book has clear implications for the role that citizen's out to play today in reforming American democracy: If the establishment won't change the system, the people can.  They've done it from the beginning."  Larry Sabato, Director Center for Politics, University of Virginia

"If Americans today find our national politicians entrenched in office, out of touch with their constituents, and responsive to lobbyists for the rich, they will understand why after reading this compelling book."  Robert A. Gross, author of 'The Minutemen and Their World'

It's not consumption or even travel that causes the problems.

It's carbon intensive energy use that releases carbon dioxide that is the problem.  

We just have to replace carbon intensive energy use for non carbon intensive energy use.  We can still consume, just not fossil fuel.

Actually if all we wanted to do was sit there we would have the problem 1/3 rd solved.  It's that we don't want to just sit there, we want to move around build bigger and wider and taller and then go home to something far away from it.

If only what we did was just sit there this would be easier.

There are people who need for a route of ONE mile their cars. Sorry, but those people are not only lazy but braindead.
What about your feet or a bicycle?
Well, everybody gets what he/she deserves. In this case it's a heart attack due to too much fat in their veines.
 

Never stop using your brain!