Book Review: An Ecology of Happiness by Eric Lambin

In An Ecology of Happiness, Eric Lambin asks us to consider that there may be no better reason to value and protect the health of the planet than for our own personal well-being. Lambin draws on research in the fields of geography, political ecology, environmental psychology, urban studies, and disease ecology, among others, to answer such questions as: To what extent do we need nature for our well-being? How does environmental degradation affect our happiness? What can be done to protect the environment and increase our well-being at the same time? This book is a fresh contribution, as well as a welcome change of tone, to the most important conversation in our world at the moment, finds John Cullen.

Many of the contemporary cultural products which attempt to provide some form of eco-friendly curriculum do so with a distinctly ‘be-green-or-else’ attitude. Think of the graphic images of tsunamis crashing over the Tibetan Himalayas with the ominous tag-line ‘we were warned’ that advertised 2012, the urgency contained within the title of The Day After Tomorrow, or the unrelenting bleakness of what can happen to us, humankind, in The Road. Although such attempts by the mainstream to create a sense of impending

crisis about climate change have their hearts in the right place, for those who believe that we have waited too long to take action to protect and preserve our natural environment the result can be one of downright negativity. James Lovelock’s pronouncements that humans are too stupid to understand and prevent climate change, to the dreariness of the cover image of John Urry’s otherwise excellent Climate Change & Society all create the impression that safeguarding the ecological is something that must, rather than should, be done.

Eric Lambin’s An Ecology of Happiness tries to remove the idea that protecting our eco-system is a necessary chore and instead can be a significant contributor to human happiness. This is an attractive approach which appeals to our self-interested search for pleasure. Lambin takes on the obvious contradictions to this from the outset: life-expectancy, average income, and general health have improved since the middle of the twentieth century; a time when economic growth began to be ‘bought’ at the cost of

large-scale environmental degradation. The separation of rich and poor countries and the ensuing division between human beings and nature is emphasised in the first chapter and becomes something of a leitmotif throughout the text. Having quickly disposed of claims of necessary progress, Lambin clarifies the central theme that the text engages with:

how can protecting and preserving the biosphere sustain happiness for humans? We have become so accustomed to the hegemony of consumption, that we can scarcely imagine life without it. We can show shocking pictures of melting ice-caps abroad and endure increasingly erratic weather at home, but the fact remains that many will not change the way they live their lives because they imagine that it will come at some cost to their personal welfare.

Lambin begins by assessing the evidence that having a relationship with nature as something one is part of, rather than something one consumes or uses, has a positive impact on well-being. He then explores the impact that rapid rates of environmental degradation have had on the world, before considering some economic development policies of Vietnam, Costa Rica, and Bhutan, which all have strong environmental aims. Lambin reports that Vietnam has experienced significant economic growth since the mid-1980s, which has resulted in the some pollution. However, because reforestation is an integral part of Vietnam’s rural development policy, the net result is that the country has experienced overall reforestation. Costa Rica, a country which has made massive achievements in terms of social progress and reaping the benefits of investing in renewable sources of energy (95% of energy consumed in that country comes from environmentally-friendly sources) has also experienced many benefits from protecting its natural forests, not least of which are the economic gains from eco-tourism. Perhaps, most interesting, is the small landlocked Kingdom of Bhutan, which appears to have developed its policies within a Buddhist framework that prioritises happiness and the natural world.

Interestingly, the countries which have developed ‘national policies that have been put in place to reconcile a quest for happiness with a preservation of the integrity of nature’ (p. 134) are not ‘rich’. This is one reason why the example that they set to the rest of the world is particularly intriguing. Another is the fact that the approaches that they have applied are so diverse. Lambin, however, is careful not to present Vietnam, Costa Rica and Bhutan as utopian enclaves within an unsustainable geo-political order, and emphasises the internal and external challenges which the policies adopted in these countries face.

Citing Charles Darwin on the need for popular treatises, Lambin writes: “This book offers a synthesis of recent original research from very different specialized areas which are very rarely examined alongside one another. And yet, all of these areas of research deal more or less directly with various dimensions of happiness” (p. 9). By the time the reader reaches the conclusion, Lambin has managed to demonstrate the connection between happiness and the environment via evidence from a range of social scientists and economists. The varied forms of contribution mean that this, the central argument of An Ecolology of Happiness, can be utilised in a number of different educational settings and the potential for including the thesis of connecting environmental anthropocentric selfishness with the protecting of the natural environment in future debates very clearly. In concluding, Lambin presents us with five choices that humans have if we wish to reconcile the search for happiness with protecting our natural world.

1. Do we change our values from enjoying the material, to experiencing the natural?

2. Do we continue to promote urban cultures or cultivate our biophilic tendencies?

3. Do we change our relationships with animals?

4. Do we change the way that globalization has been used to benefit the very few into a social process that delivers returns to all?

5. Do we change from being ego-centric to altruistic?

The arguments in An Ecology of Happiness are solidly presented and tied together very neatly in the conclusion, which functions as a sort of spiritual overview for the ideas discussed in this short text. “A relationship with nature is a source of realization of the self,it gives meaning to life and procures happiness. The yearning to interact with the natural environmental is inscribed in human nature. To preserve the natural world and its diversity is thus in the profound interest of individuals and of humanity. A positive perception of natures and its benefits promotes the adoption of behaviours that are in accord with sustainable development. Indeed, respect for the environment is based on an affective connection with nature, and thus contributes to human happiness” (p. 160).

The writing throughout is somewhat ‘pacy’ with each of the eleven short chapters (including the introduction and conclusion), neatly segregated into vignette-like sub-chapters, making the read of this handsome little volume somewhat pleasurable itself. An Ecology of Happiness is a fresh contribution, as well as a welcome change of tone, to the most important conversation in our world at the moment.

Scaling up Solutions for Sustainability: The Example of Tropical Deforestation

A humanidade está em uma trajetória perigosa. É necessária uma transição de sustentabilidade que alavanque os esforços de empresas privadas, governos e atores da sociedade civil. Muitas soluções para uma transição para a sustentabilidade já são conhecidas, adotadas e testadas por alguns atores pioneiros, ou estão em estágios avançados de desenvolvimento. Mas apenas uma pequena fração dos players do mercado adotou voluntariamente soluções de sustentabilidade. O upscaling dessas soluções bem-sucedidas é, portanto, um desafio fundamental. Usando o caso do desmatamento tropical, Eric Lambin identifica caminhos para alcançar transições de sustentabilidade em escala.
Os principais insights são, em primeiro lugar, que o upscaling quase sempre envolve a colaboração entre atores públicos, privados e da sociedade civil. Em segundo lugar, o alinhamento de incentivos e motivações de todos os atores relevantes é fundamental para o sucesso. Terceiro, os papéis dos atores e as interações das partes interessadas evoluem à medida que as questões de sustentabilidade mudam.

Land Use for a Globalized World: Q&A with Eric Lambin

Geographer and environmental scientist Eric Lambin sat down with Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment Director Chris Field to talk about his work in land use science. Lambin researches land use challenges and impacts, globalization, and sustainability. He splits his time between Stanford, where he is the George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professor and a senior fellow at Woods, and Université catholique de Louvain.  He was chair of the international scientific project Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) from 1999 to 2005 and is a foreign associate at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Edited excerpts and video of the Feb. 19, 2020 conversation are below.

Q: When you think about the future, do you think we’re on a sustainable path with the kind of reforestation activities that you study?

I think we are really on two tracks. Globally, of course, we are really damaging the system’s full capacity, and we develop a lot of local solutions: surface greening, campuses like this one, greening cities, trying to reconnect people with nature at very local places. It’s hard to operate at a much larger scale, hard to upscale all these small solutions that we’ve been testing and piloting in many ways. Reforestation is one solution. It’s become very popular over the last couple of years. It started as developing nature-climate solutions, so ways to mitigate that change not through technology but by using nature and trees to absorb some carbon from the atmosphere, soil to sequester some amount of carbon. But of course when you do the math, even just back-of-the-envelope calculations, if you evaluate the amount of reforestation that we require to have a significant impact on the climate then suddenly you enter into massive tradeoffs with food production or other ways of using land. That’s one of key goals of land use science is just trying to quantify how to fit all these land uses on the limited surface we have and provide all these services.

Q: One of the things that’s surprising is how reforestation in one country doesn’t necessarily result in more forests world wide. Help us understand that.

A: We started systematically studying each of these reforestation economies and we found that all of them, with no exception, as they were protecting their forests, they were also increasing their import of either food or timber, in different ways. And overall, that was more or less equivalent to 50% of the reforestation, so it’s really a glass half-full and half-empty. Half-empty because while they are protecting their territories it’s just being offshored abroad, and half-full because actually half of the forests are not being offshored and this results in more efficiency of land use.

Q: Does this usually occur in weaker, poorer states?

A: Well that’s where it gets interesting actually, because not always. Initially my assumption was that this offshoring was a bad thing, you just push your deforestation elsewhere, and that’s sort of the case with Cambodia and Laos. But as we get studying that, we studied Bhutan, this small interlying kingdom with a very very crude economy, and even there they’re offshoring their land use elsewhere. But they were importing most of their timber from India and that timber was coming from tree plantations that are very well managed, while in Bhutan you have these very rich biodiverse forests. So we see timber coming from India rather than from the forest in Bhutan, so in that case, from an ecological view point, it’s a good thing. And that’s of course what ecology does and what we’re trying to do. But often this calculation misses the social and the ecological impacts of some of this offshoring.

Q: I can’t help asking about the relationship between those processes and the trillion trees initiative. As a geographer and as an environmental scientist, what do you think of the trillion tree initiative?

A: I think it’s great to have these ambitious targets. They help to focus attention and focus efforts. Of course, if you do plan for a trillion trees, the question is which species in which locations. How are they going to compete? Will they survive? Do they compete against other land uses? What will be their impact on biodiversity? Are they mostly exotic species? Again, with these kind of approaches, I’d be wary of small solutions. When you try to upscale them, that’s when you have to think very deeply about what they mean at the global scale.

Q: You’ve written a lot about the looming crisis of total land availability. Help us understand what’s going on there.

A: Yes, well, when writing about land use, it’s a very vast field, and a lot of literature is quite specialized. Someone worked on forests, another one on feed plantations, someone else on tropical fires, on cropland, on biofuels, but there are very few attempts to bring all these attentions together. But in the end they all have to fit on the amount of land we have on our planet. And so at one point we did an exercise through a workshop and we just brought all the specialists around the table to try to estimate what are the most likely figures of how much land is in these different land uses and what are the projections. And as we did that, some people realized, you know actually, we don’t have that much surface land. We don’t have so much spare land that we can assume can be used. And of course if you just look at biofuels, yes there will be plenty of land. But if you look at biofuels plus more tree planting, plus more cropland because the population is expanding, that’s how you realize that they’re all trying to use this productive land. And that’s when you realize that there will be a crunch time at some point and we’ll have to be much more efficient in the way we use our land. That’s when you realize that this concept of nature planet solution can at best help imagine the goal. Really 95-98% of the solution is going to have to come from less emissions from urbanization, industry, and transportation. And of course tree plantation, better land management, better soil management to save some carbon can help save some time and remove the emissions, but frankly there is no prospect that most of the problem will be resolved through tree plantation or other means. We plant trees, it’s better for the landscape, it’s good for the climate, it helps biodiversity. It’s great that we still get enthusiastic about solutions, but at some point we need some reality checks and we need to make sure that people don’t lose sight of what the real challenge is with emissions.

【2019 Prof. Eric Lambin (Tokyo)】Scaling up solutions for sustainable land use

Éric Lambin - autor do livro A Terra Sobre a Corda Bamba

Será o sistema terrestre vulnerável às perturbações trazidas pela actividade humana? Será o planeta ainda habitável nos decénios e séculos futuros? Qual o impacte do homem sobre o destino da natureza? Devemos estar pessimistas ou optimistas acerca do futuro do nosso planeta e portanto, do futuro da humanidade? Fundamentado numa rigorosa análise científica e longe de qualquer ideologia, este livro tem por objectivo dar um sereno esclarecimento a este debate, permitindo o afinar da visão que o Homem deve ter sobre o mundo em que habita.

Resumo Biográfico

Eric F. Lambin has a PhD in Sciences (geography) from the University of Louvain. He is Professor at the Department of Geography at the University of Louvain , Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He was previously Assistant Professor at Boston University and Expert for the European Commission at the Joint Research Center (Ispra). In 2002-03, he was resident as Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California, USA.

Eric Lambin is the Chair of the « Land-Use and Land-Cover Change » (LUCC) programme of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). He contributes to many other international scientific projects and initiatives.

Eric Lambin has published more than one hundred papers and book chapters in leading scientific journals in environmental sciences, remote sensing, and geography. Eric Lambin has supervised several completed PhD theses and directs a team of fifteen researchers.He recently published “ La Terre sur un fil ”.

Investigação

The researchinterests of Eric Lambin include :

• integrated studies of human-environment systems (e.g., deforestation, desertification, environmental change and disease risk, land-use change and nature conservation);• the monitoring of land-cover change and biomass burning by remote sensing;• the modelling of land-use change;• synthesis work on causes of environmental change and conditions for a transition to sustainable development.

Eric Lambin has been involved in research projects in most regions of the world.