Happiness, Well-being and Sustainability

A Course in Systems Change

Laura Musikanski, Rhonda Phillips, James Bradbury, John de Graaf, Clinton Bliss

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000074123
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Scienze biologiche
• Thema: Ecologia

Happiness, Well-being and Sustainability: A Course in Systems Change is the first textbook bridging the gap between personal happiness and sustainable social change. The book provides a guide for students to increase their skills, literacy and knowledge about connections between a sense of well-being and systems change. Further, it can help students live a life that brings them happiness and contributes to the well-being of others and the sustainability of our planet.

The book is presented in seven chapters covering the subjects of systems thinking, personal and societal values, measuring happiness, human needs, ecological sustainability and public policy. In addition, each section includes engaging exercises to empower students to develop their own ideas, prompts for group discussion, suggestions for additional research and an extensive list of resources and references. The book is written in the context of systems thinking with a style that is approachable and accessible.

Happiness, Well-being and Sustainability provides essential reading for students in courses on happiness, social change and sustainability studies, and provides a comprehensive framework for instructors looking to initiate courses in this field.

A website to support the professors teaching the book is available at: https://www.happycounts.org/coursebook.html

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license."

1
SYSTEMS

Systems learning objectives

The objectives of this chapter are for students to be able to:

• Gain an understanding of what a system is.
• Gain an understanding of what interdependence is.
• Gain an understanding of what leverage points are.
• Understand there are linkages between personal happiness and social systems.

Preliminary questions

• What is the point of life?
• What is the purpose of the government?
• What is the purpose of the economy?
• What is the purpose of school (i.e. education)? Would your answer be different if there were no access to formal education for you?
• What is a system?
• What is systems thinking?
• How is systems thinking different from other types of thinking?
• When would systems thinking be appropriate?
• When might it not be a good idea to use systems thinking?
• How much money do you need to be happy?
• What do you need to be happy?
• Can you make a difference in your own life?
• Can you make a difference in the world?

Introduction to systems

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence” is a statement Aristotle made over 2,000 years ago. The intent of this coursebook is to empower you to explore what happiness is for you personally and for the world you live in through a systems thinking approach and to live a life that is truly happy. The first step of realizing this intent is understanding what systems thinking is.

Intuitively, you probably already know what a system is. Donella Meadows, whose work in systems thinking influenced the sustainable development movement, defined a system as “a set of elements or parts that is coherently organized and interconnected in a pattern or structure that produces a characteristic set of behaviors, often classified as its ‘function’ or ‘purpose’” (Meadows, 2008, p. 188). Everyone’s body is a system. A person has a family system. For students, the campus is a system, and for employees, the work-place is a system. Your neighborhood, town and city are systems. The economy, climate and society operate as systems. Systems are dynamic and complex, and when any element of a system changes, the change has an impact on the system. Understanding systems will help build capacity for intentional and impactful system change in your own life and in the world around you.

Systems and elements

To understand systems change, let’s first understand what a system is. Donella Meadows defined a system as “a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time” (Meadows, 2008, p. 2). The components of a system are called elements. A system can have many independent elements, such as a child or parent in a family or a river in a landscape. The elements interact. When a child leaves home to go to college, start a job or otherwise live independently, or when a river floods, changes course or is dammed, there is an interaction with some or all of the other elements in the system. Each element has a role to play to keep a system healthy (or unhealthy), to change the system or to end the system. The interactions of the elements in a system help define what a system is as a whole.

HIGHLIGHT: URBAN OR RURAL PLANNING

Urban or rural planners work with towns, cities, counties or regions to help guide land use and other related development decisions about what will happen in that area in the near and distant future. They use tools such as zoning, incentives and policies to gauge where residential, commercial and industrial buildings will be built; what parts of an area will be kept green; where parks will be established; and where to expand or build airports, public spaces, roads, schools and other public infrastructure. While many aspects of planning are physical in nature, planning also impacts social, cultural, fiscal and other dimensions related to living in communities. There are many other elements of an urban or rural system they must consider, some of which are systems in themselves, such as distribution, energy, information and communication technology, sewage, water supply, waste and recycling systems. The impacts of interactions between the elements of an area and changes in climate, the economy, tourism and other aspects are part of urban or rural planning. Planners may work in government, the private sector (such as housing or development firms) or academia. For most planners, the goal of planning focuses on improving quality of life, which is very similar to goals of happiness and well-being.

Some places are planning for climate change by entirely relocating or buying land to flee to if their land if flooded (Edmond, 2017). Sweden’s plans for zero waste includes changes to taxes and energy sources and integrating the concept of a circular economy into policy (Sweden, n.d.). Dubai is integrating artificial intelligence into its banking, education, justice, health care, police and water systems (Smart Dubai, n.d.). Singapore’s plans to be a green and sustainable city included zoning laws and educating and engaging youth, resulting in the city transforming from being known for pollution to a model green city with buildings serving as human and plant homes (UN Environment Programme, n.d.).

How would you plan for a city or town that supported your happiness, the well-being of others and ecological sustainability?

Interdependence

The elements in a system interact in ways that are interdependent. Interdependent means that two or more things depend upon each other. The concept of interdependence was conceived by Harold Kelly and John Thiebaut in the 1950s in relation to psychology (Psychology, n.d.) and is applied in many fields today. An example of interdependence is a child who needs food and shelter to survive and love to be resilient and happy (Brooks, 2005), which parents or caretakers provide but with varying levels of capacity and competency, or a river that needs trees and other plants on its banks, also called the riparian zone, and land to change its course, which is called the floodplain, to provide healthy water quality, habitats for animals and fish and not destroy roads or homes when it floods (Robbins, 2017). Another example of interdependence is economic interdependence between urban and rural communities and between countries. In 1999, Paul Hawkins and Hunter and Amory Lovins found that in almost all cities, most of the food is imported from farms over 1,000 miles away (pp. 200–201). More recent research shows that the average miles food travels has increased by almost three times in some areas (Hill, 2008). Without the farms to grow the food and the transportation systems to bring the food to the markets in the cities, many people would go hungry. In 2011, a tsunami hit Japan followed by a nuclear reactor meltdown, leaving the nation in devastation. The transportation system is just one of many systems that shut down. The roads were not able to be navigated, and railways were broken. Millions of people in cities and remote areas went days, even weeks, without food (Mimura et al., 2011; NBC, 2011) because the vehicles that brought them food could reach neither the farmers nor the markets. Urban people came face to face with how interdependent they were with farmers, suppliers and the transportation system and how much they need systems to function.

For the past few decades, there has been a growing interdependence between the economies of almost all countries. An example is China and the US, where the US depends on China for much of its manufactured goods, and China has depended on the buyers for goods in the US as well as some agricultural resources, including soybeans, grains, hides, pork and cotton (USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, n.d.). If trade were to suddenly end between China and the US or between any group of nations, life would suddenly be very different in many more ways than you would have considered without knowledge of the system.

HIGHLIGHT: EXPLORING INTERDEPENDENCE

Harold Kelly and John Thibaut were both social psychologists who contributed to the development of their field. Social psychology is the study of our behavior in relation to others and encompasses exploring and understanding the implications and impacts of social norms, attitudes, values and morals on a person or group’s behavior. Baron, Byrne and Suls (1989) define it as “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations” (p. 6). Kelly and Thibault wanted to better understand why people behaved the way they did in the context of relationships instead of looking at individual actions by individual people.

A famous project named The Harvard Study of Adult Development gathered data for people over the course of their lives to find out what made them happy or miserable. The study found that the most important factor for happiness is relationships (Mineo, 2017). Relationships are characterized, in part, by the interdependence of those in them. For example, how we relate and who we choose to have relationships with in our professional lives can influence our personal relationships (Shragai, 2014). In this exploration, we paraphrase and ask questions for some of the attributes of interdependence that Kelly and Thibaut identified to consider in personal relationships (Kelly et al., 2003; Kelly & Thibaut, 1978; Thibaut & Kelly, 1959):

Control

Control is one basis of relationships. There are two extremes. Dominance is when a person, group or entity has all of the decision-making power and the ability to implement the decision with or without the consent of others. Partnership is the other extreme, when all people, groups or entities cooperate and coordinate to make decisions and contribute to implementing them in a mutually agreeable way.

• How have people or groups that were dominated changed the control basis of societal relationships?
• How would you imagine a person or group that historically dominated changing the control basis from dominance to partnership?

Power

Power contributes to balance in a relationship. If the actions of a person, group or entity have no impact on others, then they have no power over them. On the other hand, if the well-being of a person, group or entity is completely influenced by the action of others, then others have power over them. A balanced power relationship is when both have power over and concern for each other’s well-being.

• What is an example of a person, group or entity changing the power another has over them from full power to no power?
• How would you imagine changing the power balance in a relationship between a person, group or entity from full power to balanced power?

Interests

Interests determine the outcome of relationships. When interests conflict and that which contributes to the well-being of a person, group or entity is harmful to others, there is competition and conflict. When all in the relationship have mutual interests, then any action by any person, group or entity can be of benefit to all and there is harmony.

• What is an example of people, groups or entities with conflicting interests, and what were the outcomes?
• How would you imagine people, groups or entities with conflicting interests arriving to a place of harmony?

Clarity of information

Clarity of information is another basis of relationships. When there is no clarity of information, a person, group or entity does not know what others care about, how they feel, what they want or how an action will impact others. When there is clarity in information, all people, gr...