What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming by Per Espen Stoknes

Author:Per Espen Stoknes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2015-03-23T15:34:18+00:00

The Well-Being Narrative

Martin Luther King had a choice when standing in front of the crowd gathered before him at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. As Futerra, a sustainability consultancy, pointed out in its Sell the Sizzle report, he easily could have leveled accusations and stirred the anger of his followers. The civil rights struggle had been long and hard, injustice was severe, and King and others had encountered death threats and danger. Striking back would feel just. Focusing on the bigotry, partiality, and discrimination would have been easy. The microphone was on. Silence was spreading through the crowd. Now what to say? Under immense pressure, he began with the words we all know today: “I have a dream . . .”—setting an inspiring ideal that lives on to this day.

“That’s how it works. When you’re faced with hell—you sell heaven,” concludes Futerra.20 You flesh out the story of where we need to go, in a manner that makes people really want and long for it.

Narratives like this focus on happiness rather than apocalypse, and depict the kind of society we want to live, laugh, and love in, and leave when the time comes. They are stories that emphasize well-being, social justice, and generosity as the new wealth.

Modern, industrial societies have been fabulous at generating wealth for people, and in particular for those lucky few who control most of it. Billions of humans have also been lifted out of destitution and hardship. Robert E. Lucas, Nobel Prize–winning economist, argues that the real impact of the industrial revolution was that “for the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth . . . Nothing remotely like this economic behavior is mentioned by the classical economists, even as a theoretical possibility.”21 But maybe the worst criticism you could direct against modern society is that after achieving this basic level of material wealth for some, it does not further distribute or improve the well-being of its members.22

Since the 1970s in Western societies, most measurements of happiness and quality of life show no or very little improvement. Since then we’ve doubled average income per head, and doubled it again. Still no improvement in happiness or well-being.23 All this coal-digging, forest-trashing, soil-wrecking, atmosphere-altering, ocean-acidifying frantic development, wealth accumulation, and competition . . . to what end?

Already in 1931, the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes spelled out this conundrum in the form of a hundred-year scenario to 2030, which is so well written it is worth quoting at some length:

Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day . . . Assuming no important wars . . . the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution . . . Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent

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