Category: Musings

William deBuys, The Parching of the West

Once again, a powerful essay from the TomDispatch blog.

Quick introduction.  Tom Engelhardt, of TomDispatch, has given me a blanket permission to reproduce his essays.  As always, I am indebted to his generosity.  This particular essay is extremely timely coming after my Post yesterday about extreme weather.

Tomgram: William deBuys, The Parching of the West

Posted by William deBuys at 6:02pm, December 4, 2011.

The good news? While 2010 tied for the warmest year on record, 2011 — according to the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) — is likely to come in 10th once November and December temperatures are tallied. In part, this is evidently due to an especially strong La Niña cooling event in the Pacific.  On the other hand, with 2011 in the top ten despite La Niña, 13 of the warmest years since such record-keeping began have occurred in the last 15 years.  Think of that as an uncomfortably hot cluster.

And other climate news is no better.  A recent study indicates that Arctic ice is now melting at rates unprecedented in the last 1,450 years (as far back, that is, as reasonably accurate reconstructions of such an environment can be modeled).  As the Arctic warms and temperatures rise in surrounding northern lands — someday, Finland may have to construct artificial ski trails and ice rinks for its future winter tourists — a report on yet another study is bringing more lousy news.  Appearing in the prestigious science journal Nature, it indicates that the melting permafrost of the tundra may soon begin releasing global-warming gases into the atmosphere in massive quantities.  We’re talking the equivalent of 300 billion metric tons of carbon over the next nine decades.

Recently, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, suggested that, by century’s end, the planet’s temperature could rise by a staggering 6º Celsius (almost 11º Fahrenheit).  International climate-change negotiators had been trying to keep that rise to a “mere” 2º C.  “Everybody, even the schoolchildren, knows this is a catastrophe for all of us,” was the way Birol summed the situation up.  If only it were so, but here in the U.S., none of the above news was even considered front-page worthy.  Nor was the news that, in 2010, humans had pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than at any time since the industrial revolution began: 564 million more tons than in 2009 to be exact.  We’re living today with just less than a degree of those six degrees to come, and the results in extreme weather this year should have made us all stop and think.

If you want to focus in on damage here in the U.S., consider Rick Perry’s Texas, where, according to scientists, “daily temperatures averaged 86.7° in June through August — a staggering 5.4°F above normal.”  According to the WMO, that’s the highest such average “ever recorded for any American state.”  And still global politicians yammer on and do little; still, the U.S. shuffles its political feet, while Canada’s government has announced that it will make no new commitments and may even be preparing to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, and countries with booming developing economies like China, India, and Brazil hedge their bets when it comes to action.

In the meantime, nature doesn’t care whether or not we do anything.  It’s on its own schedule.  And when it comes to the American Southwest, that schedule looks daunting indeed as William deBuys makes clear.  His new book, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, is the definitive work on the subject of water and the West (and, as with all of his work, a pleasure to read). So get yourself a glass of water while you still can and settle in for a dose of the Age of Thirst. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which deBuys discusses the water politics of the American West, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

The Age of Thirst in the American West
Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the History of Civilization 
By William deBuys

Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres),biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).

The fires were a function of drought.  As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat.  It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.

Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)

And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.  No kidding.

If that gets you down, here’s a little cheer-up note: the end is not yet nigh.

In fact, this year the weather elsewhere rode to the rescue, and the news for the Southwest was good where it really mattered.  Since January, the biggest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, backed up by the Hoover Dam and just 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas, has risen almost 40 feet. That lake is crucial when it comes to watering lawns or taking showers from Arizona to California.  And the near 40-foot surge of extra water offered a significant upward nudge to the Southwest’s water reserves.

The Colorado River, which the reservoir impounds, supplies all or part of the water on which nearly 30 million people depend, most of them living downstream of Lake Mead in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Tijuana, and scores of smaller communities in the United States and Mexico.

Back in 1999, the lake was full. Patricia Mulroy, who heads the water utility serving Las Vegas, rues the optimism of those bygone days.  “We had a fifty-year, reliable water supply,” she says. “By 2002, we had no water supply. We were out. We were done. I swore to myself we’d never do that again.”

In 2000, the lake began to fall — like a boulder off a cliff, bouncing a couple of times on the way down. Its water level dropped a staggering 130 feet, stopping less than seven feet above the stage that would have triggered reductions in downstream deliveries. Then — and here’s the good news, just in case you were wondering — last winter, it snowed prodigiously up north in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

The spring and summer run-off from those snowpacks brought enormous relief. It renewed what we in the Southwest like to call the Hydro-Illogic cycle: when drought comes, everybody wrings their hands and promises to institute needed reform, if only it would rain a little. Then the drought breaks or eases and we all return to business as usual, until the cycle comes around to drought again.

So don’t be fooled.  One day, perhaps soon, Lake Mead will renew its downward plunge.  That’s a certainty, the experts tell us.  And here’s the thing: the next time, a sudden rescue by heavy snows in the northern Rockies might not come. If the snowpacks of the future are merely ordinary, let alone puny, then you’ll know that we really are entering a new age.

And climate change will be a major reason, but we’ll have done a good job of aiding and abetting it. The states of the so-called Lower Basin of the Colorado River — California, Arizona, and Nevada — have been living beyond their water means for years. Any departure from recent decades of hydrological abundance, even a return to long-term average flows in the Colorado River, would produce a painful reckoning for the Lower Basin states.  And even worse is surely on the way.

Just think of the coming Age of Thirst in the American Southwest and West as a three-act tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions.

The Age of Thirst: Act I

The curtain in this play would surely rise on the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which divided the river’s water equally between the Upper and Lower Basins, allocating to each annually 7.5 million acre-feet, also known by its acronym “maf.” (An acre-foot suffices to support three or four families for a year.) Unfortunately, the architects of the compact, drawing on data from an anomalously wet historical period, assumed the river’s average annual flow to be about 17 maf per year.  Based on reconstructions that now stretch back more than 1,000 years, the river’s long-term average is closer to 14.7 maf.  Factor in evaporation from reservoirs (1.5 maf per year) and our treaty obligation to Mexico (another 1.5 maf), and the math doesn’t favor a water-guzzling society.

Nonetheless, the states of the Lower Basin have been taking their allotment as if nothing were wrong and consequently overdrafting their account by up to 1.3 maf annually.  At this rate, even under unrealistically favorable scenarios, the Lower Basin will eventually drain Lake Mead and cutbacks will begin, possibly as soon as in the next few years.  And then things will get dicier because California, the water behemoth of the West, won’t have to absorb any of those cutbacks.

Here’s one of the screwiest quirks in western water law: to win Congressional approval for the building of a monumental aqueduct, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which would bring Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona agreed to subordinate its Colorado River water rights to California’s.  In that way, the $4 billion, 336-mile-long CAP was born, and for it Arizona paid a heavy price. The state obliged itself to absorb not just its own losses in a cutback situation, but California’s as well.

Worst case scenario: the CAP aqueduct, now a lifeline for millions, could become as dry as the desert it runs through, while California continues to bathe. Imagine Phoenix curling and cracking around the edges, while lawn sprinklers hiss in Malibu. The contrast will upset a lot of Arizonans.

Worse yet, the prospective schedule of cutbacks now in place for the coming bad times is too puny to save Lake Mead.

The Age of Thirst: Act II

While that Arizona-California relationship guarantees full employment for battalions of water lawyers, a far bigger problem looms: climate change. Models for the Southwest have been predicting a 4ºC (7.2ºF) increase in mean temperature by century’s end, and events seem to be outpacing the predictions.

We have already experienced close to 1º C of that increase, which accounts, at least in part, for last summer’s colossal fires and record-setting temperatures — and it’s now clear that we’re just getting started.

The simple rule of thumb for climate change is that wet places will get wetter and dry places drier. One reason the dry places will dry is that higher temperatures mean more evaporation. In other words, there will be ever less water in the rivers that keep the region’s cities (and much else) alive. Modeling already suggests that by mid-century surface stream-flow will decline by 10% to 30%.

Independent studies at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in California and the University of Colorado evaluated the viability of Lake Mead and eventually arrived at similar conclusions: after about 2026, the risk of “failure” at Lake Mead, according to a member of the Colorado group, “just skyrockets.” Failure in this context would mean water levels lower than the dam’s lowest intake, no water heading downstream, and the lake becoming a “dead pool.”

If — perhaps “when” is the more appropriate word — that happens, California’s Colorado River Aqueduct, which supplies water to Los Angeles, San Diego, and the All-American Canal, which sustains the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, will go just as dry as the Central Arizona Project aqueduct. Meanwhile, if climate change is affecting the Colorado River’s watershed that harshly, it will undoubtedly also be hitting the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

The aptly named Lester Snow, a recent director of California’s Department of Water Resources, understood this. His future water planning assumed a 40% decline in runoff from the Sierras, which feeds the California Aqueduct. None of his contemplated scenarios were happy ones. The Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct make the urban conglomerations of southern California possible. If both fail at once, the result will be, as promised, the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.

Only Patricia Mulroy has an endgame strategy for the demise of Lake Mead. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is, even now, tunneling under the lake to install the equivalent of a bathtub drain at close to its lowest point. At a cost of more than $800 million, it will drain the dregs of Lake Mead for Las Vegas.

Admittedly, water quality will be a problem, as the dead pool will concentrate pollutants. The good news, according to the standard joke among those who chronicle Sin City’s improbable history, is that the hard-partying residents and over-stimulated tourists who sip from Lake Mead’s last waters will no longer need to purchase anti-depressants. They’ll get all the Zoloft and Xanax they need from their tap water.

And only now do we arrive at the third act of this expanding tragedy.

The Age of Thirst: Act III

Those who believe in American exceptionalism hold that the historical patterns shaping the fate of other empires and nations don’t apply to the United States. Be that as it may, we are certainly on track to test whether the U.S. is similarly inoculated against the patterns of environmental history.

Because tree rings record growing conditions year by year, the people who study them have been able to reconstruct climate over very long spans of time. One of their biggest discoveries is that droughts more severe and far longer than anything known in recent centuries have occurred repeatedly in the American Southwest. The droughts of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, of the 1950s, and of the period from 1998 to 2004 are remembered in the region, yet none lasted a full decade.

By contrast, the drought that brought the civilization of the ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, centered at Chaco Canyon, to its knees in the twelfth century, by contrast,lasted more than 30 years. The one that finished off Mesa Verdean culture in the thirteenth century was similarly a “megadrought.”

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona who played a major role in the Nobel-Prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tells me that the prospect of 130° F days in Phoenix worries him far less than the prospect of decades of acute dryness. “If anything is scary, the scariest is that we could trip across a transition into a megadrought.” He adds, “You can probably bet your house that, unless we do something about these greenhouse gas emissions, the megadroughts of the future are going to be a lot hotter than the ones of the past.”

Other scientists believe that the Southwest is already making the transition to a“new climatology,” a new normal that will at least bring to mind the aridity of theDust Bowl years. Richard Seager of Columbia University, for instance, suggests that “the cycle of natural dry periods and wet periods will continue, but… around a mean that gets drier. So the depths — the dry parts of the naturally occurring droughts — will be drier than we’re used to, and the wet parts won’t be as wet.”

Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After something terrible happens — tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes — people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is that nothing happens. By the time you know you’re in one, you’ve already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well. Drought brings out the worst in us.

After the Chacoan drought, corn-farming ancestral Puebloans still remained in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. They hung on, even if at lower population densities. After the Mesa Verdean drought, everybody left.

By the number of smashed crania and other broken bones in the ruins of the region’s beautiful stone villages, archaeologists judge that the aridifying world of the Mesa Verdeans was fatally afflicted by violence. Warfare and societal breakdown, evidently driven by the changing climate, helped end that culture.

So it matters what we do. Within the limits imposed by the environment, the history we make is contingent, not fated. But we are not exactly off to a good start in dealing with the challenges ahead. The problem of water consumption in the Southwest is remarkably similar to the problem of greenhouse gas pollution. First, people haggle to exhaustion over the need to take action; then, they haggle over inadequate and largely symbolic reductions. For a host of well-considered, eminently understandable, and ultimately erroneous reasons, inaction becomes the main achievement. For this drama, think Hamlet. Or if the lobbyists who argue for business as usual out west and in Congress spring to mind first, think Iago.

We know at least one big thing about how this particular tragedy will turn out: the so-called civilization of the Southwest will not survive the present century, not at its present scale anyway. The question yet to be answered is how much it will have to shrink, and at what cost. Stay tuned. It will be one of the greatest, if grimmest, shows on Earth.

William deBuys is the author of seven books, including the just published A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and The Walk (an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize). He has long been involved in environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which deBuys discusses the water politics of the American West click here, or download it to your iPod here. 

Copyright 2011 William deBuys

What’s the weather like, honey?

A couple of articles about our weather prospects.

Let me start with a recent report from Environmental Research Web, part of IOP Publishing.

Nov 24, 2011

Extreme weather will strike as climate change takes hold, IPCC warns

From the Guardian

Heavier rainfall, fiercer storms and intensifying droughts are likely to strike the world in the coming decades as climate change takes effect, the world’s leading climate scientists said on Friday.

Rising sea levels will increase the vulnerability of coastal areas, and the increase in “extreme weather events” will wipe billions off national economies and destroy lives, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body of the world’s leading climate scientists convened by the United Nations.

Later on the article includes this,

Simon Brown, climate extremes research manager at theHadley Centre, the climate research unit of the UK’s Met Office, said: “This focus of the IPCC on extremes is very welcome as less emphasis has traditionally been given to these phenomena which are very likely to be the means by which ordinary people first experience climate change. Human susceptibility to weather mainly arises through extreme weather events so it is appropriate that we focus on these which, should they change for the worse, would have wide-ranging and significant consequences. This review will be very helpful in progressing the science by bringing together a wide range of studies – not just on the physical weather aspects of climate extremes but also on how we might adapt and respond to their changes in the future.”

Now I turn to last week’s Economist newspaper.

Climate change

The sad road from Kyoto to Durban

The latest UN climate summit says much about why the world is failing to tackle global warming

Dec 3rd 2011 | from the print edition

IN HARD times governments are consumed by short-term problems. But this does not mean the archetypal long-term problem, climate change, has gone away. Science continues to support the case for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions so as to minimise the risks of catastrophe. Meanwhile it is clear how wretchedly the world is failing to do so. Even if countries honour their promises, the UN reckons that by 2020 emissions will exceed the trajectory for keeping warming under 2°C by up to 11 gigatonnes. That is equivalent to more than double the emissions of every car, bus and truck in 2005.

The concluding paragraph reads,

No one should imagine such a deal would turn the tide on climate change. That tide will rise, and countries will need to adapt to a lot of warming. But by acknowledging that everybody has a responsibility to act, it would represent progress.

‘Countries will need to adapt to a lot of warming.’  Tomorrow, I will publish a recent essay on TomDispatch.  As a taster the opening paragraph is,

The good news? While 2010 tied for the warmest year on record, 2011 — according to the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) — is likely to come in 10th once November and December temperatures are tallied. In part, this is evidently due to an especially strong La Niña cooling event in the Pacific.  On the other hand, with 2011 in the top ten despite La Niña, 13 of the warmest years since such record-keeping began have occurred in the last 15 years.  Think of that as an uncomfortably hot cluster.

We live in interesting times.

The power of truth

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

The above is a quote attributed to the Buddha.  It is perfect as an introduction to today’s piece.

When I sat down at my PC yesterday afternoon I was planning to finish off a Post about the BBC’s fabulous Frozen Planet TV series.  But a check of my email changed all that.  Because there was an email from Merci O., someone in Payson that Jean and I know well.  Merci had sent me an email with a link to the following YouYube video.

Watch and be moved.

This is a non-commercial attempt to highlight the fact that world leaders, irresponsible corporates and mindless ‘consumers’ are combining to destroy life on earth. It is dedicated to all who died fighting for the planet and those whose lives are on the line today. The cut was put together by Vivek Chauhan, a young film maker, together with naturalists working with the Sanctuary Asia network (www.sanctuaryasia.com).

Content credit: The principal source for the footage was Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s incredible film HOME http://www.homethemovie.org/. The music was by Armand Amar. Thank you too Greenpeace and http://timescapes.org/

First message in a bottle

So what advice would you offer to the next generation?

One of the biggest differences between Homo sapiens and Canis lupus familiaris is that the latter is such a master of living in the present that, one assumes, the issue of worrying about the next generation is largely irrelevant.  Definitely not so with us humans.

A few weeks back I was chatting to a good friend of mine, Peter McCarthy, whom I first met when I undertook a sales and marketing project for one his companies.  That was many years ago but Peter and I have stayed in touch.  One of the many attributes about Peter that I have admired over the years is his instinctive and thoughtful approach to entrepreneurism.  Peter is still an active entrepreneur.

Anyway, Peter and I were talking about the sorts of qualities that enable some young people to take a risk-based entrepreneurial approach to life.  Peter gave me the links to three videos that he thought were especially relevant to the notion of achieving success in life.  So over the next few days I want to share those videos with you, dear reader.  To me, these videos are, indeed, the essence of the messages that any person, especially those the wrong side of 60, would wish to leave in a bottle floating down the river of life.

So to the first.  The address by Steve Jobs to the University of Stanford’s 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.  Already watched at the time of writing this by 12,690,731 persons!

The fabulous, loyal ‘seeing-eye’ dog

A beautiful story of dog loyalty – to another dog, to another blind dog.

I first received this lovely story last Sunday from Dan G., dear friend of over 30 years.  As is my want, did some research to discover the source of the story.  It appeared on the website of Ross Parry Agency on the 22nd October, 2011 (note the pics are copyright rossparry.co.uk)  But I have taken the liberty of reproducing the story as it appeared in the UK Daily Mail online site, on the same date.  Enjoy.

Meet the blind Great Dane in need of a home (but you’ll need to make space for HER huge guide dog)

By NADIA GILANI

Last updated at 1:01 PM on 22nd October 2011

When illness forced vets to remove Great Dane Lily’s eyes, the prospects of a fulfilling life didn’t look good.

But then no one had reckoned on her pal Maddison stepping in to turn guide dog.

The pair have been inseparable for years but now find themselves looking for a new home because their owner could no longer cope.

The catch for anyone interested is that the Great Danes come as a package. They have been waiting at the Dogs Trust re-homing centre in Shrewsbury since July.

Homeless: Blind Great Dane Lily and her kind-hearted canine carer Maddison
Forever friends: Lily, left, being guided while walking with Maddison right. The pair have been inseparable since Lily lost her sight

Manager Louise Campbell said: ‘Maddison is Lily’s guide dog. If they are out and about, for the majority of the time Maddison will lead and Lily will walk nearly touching her so she knows where to go. It’s lovely to watch. Maddison is always looking out for her.’

Lily, six, was barely a puppy when she was struck down by a condition that caused her eyelashes to grown into her eyeballs, damaging them beyond repair.

It was after this traumatic event that her relationship with seven-year-old Maddison developed as she took her under her wing.

The best buddies lived together until their owners decided they couldn’t look after them any more.

Miss Campbell said: ‘With her lack of sight, Lily’s other senses have heightened so although we don’t split them up often she can tell if Maddison is nearby.

‘They curl up together to go to sleep and they are very vocal with each other.

‘We haven’t analysed their different barks but if Lily wants to go forward and Maddison is in her way, the bark will have a different pitch.

‘They are very close to one another and enjoy each other’s company‘.

Playful: Lily's lack of sight has heightened her other senses so she can often tell if Maddison is nearby without the pair touching

Miss Campbell said that Lily does all the things normal dogs do and if you saw her from a distance you wouldn’t realise she had anything wrong with her eyes.

She added: ‘They are really happy with life, the glass is always half full with these two.

‘They have been with us for a considerable amount of time but they are quite happy and go about their daily routine – they are very affectionate.’

She believes the dogs’ size and advancing years, as well as the fact they have to come in a pair, may have put off potential owners and she warned that anyone contemplating taking the dogs in should look at their lifestyle and think of the responsibility involved.

‘They are not gigantic when you see them outside. These are two lovely big girls who deserve to live out the rest of their lives together in comfort‘, she said.

Dogs Trust cares for around 16,000 stray and abandoned dogs every year through a network of 17 re-homing centres.

The Great Dane is seeking an owner who would be willing to give both her and best friend Maddison a new home

Back to me.  Must say that it was just fortuitous that Dan’s email came in to me a little while after I posted yesterday’s article by Robert Holden, The Gift of Happiness.  Indeed, shortly after I had written, “Perhaps the art of happiness is yet another thing we can learn from dogs!”

Anyone in the UK who wants to contact the Dogs Trust click here.

The Gift of Happiness

A fascinating article by Robert Holden, Ph.D

Let me offer thanks to Resurgence Magazine for the written permission to reproduce this article in full, see terms at the end of the article. More background information about Robert Holden may be obtained from his own website and, finally, the Happiness Project website is here.

——————————-

Robert Holden

The Gift of Happiness

Robert Holden was at the forefront of ‘Happiness’ research. Here, he reflects on how that topic – initially laughed off the agenda – has gained credibility and explains why happiness is important

When I set up The Happiness Project, in 1994, the original goal was simple: talk happiness. In my training in psychology, philosophy and psychotherapy my teachers didn’t talk about happiness. We focused solely on the causes of unhappiness. This didn’t feel right to me. After all, how can you know what the causes are if you do not know what happiness is?

My goal, then, was to stimulate a conversation, so as to deepen our appreciation of what happiness is, its benefits, what enables it, and what blocks it. One conversation I focused on was the question of whether happiness is learned and whether it can be taught. To investigate this further, I created an eight-week happiness programme (which still runs today) called Be Happy.

Today happiness is a much more popular conversation than when The Happiness Project began. We are all talking more about happiness than ever before. The conversation is alive and well. Universities, hospitals, economists and governments publish new studies on happiness every week. So, what we have learned? And where does this conversation about happiness need to go next?

Let’s start with what happiness researchers refer to as ‘static happiness’. In a recent US study, it was found that when people in the 1940s were asked, “How happy are you?” the average score was 7.5 out of 10, whereas today the average score is 7.4 out of 10. In other words, in spite of all the ‘progress’ we appear to have made in the last 50 years or so, our happiness levels have remained mostly static. This tells me we need more conversations to clarify what real happiness is. For instance, we need to discern between pleasure, satisfaction and joy; and on my eight-week happiness programme we always begin by asking people, “What is your definition of a happy life?” and, “Are you living it?”

Happiness researchers have also found that most of us are only semi-happy. In 2006, I participated in a BBC documentary called The Happiness Formula. It reported, “the proportion of people saying they are ‘very happy’ has fallen from 52% in 1957 to just 36% today.” Clearly, research like this is questioning our most basic assumptions about what happiness is, and what we think will make us happy. That’s a good thing. An honest inquiry into happiness is an opportunity to rethink your life. It is one of the gifts of happiness.

Do you really know what makes you happy? This is the question both psychologists and economists are asking now. The evidence suggests we do not know. For instance, many of us believe that more money will make us happier. Some money does help, especially to cover the basics of food, rent, clothing, etc. After that, the correlation between more money and greater happiness is vague. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychology Association, and one of the founders of the Positive Psychology movement, concludes most forcibly: “The change in purchasing power over the last half century in the wealthy nations carries the same message: real purchasing power has more than doubled in the United States, France and Japan, but life satisfaction has changed not a whit.”

An inquiry into happiness challenges you to rethink everything. For example, almost everyone agrees with the idea that if their life circumstances improve, their levels of happiness will increase. This is the basis for almost every political and economic strategy the world over. And yet scientific research into happiness tells us this is wrong. New Zealand researcher Richard Kammann reports, “Objective life circumstances have a negligible role to play in a theory of happiness.” The same research concludes that your attitude and personal choices have a far greater influence on your happiness levels.

Another popular theory is that a better education will make our children happier. This has resulted in more tests for preschool children, more focus on regular exams, and more money spent on private education. Surely this increases happiness? “Sorry, Mom and Dad, neither education nor, for that matter, a high IQ paves the road to happiness,” states Claudia Wallis, who compiled a report called The New Science of Happiness for TIME magazine.

Happiness challenges us to rethink what is a “better education” for our children. I support the idea of happiness lessons for children at school, as pioneered at Wellington College by psychologist Nick Baylis and college Master Anthony Seldon [read his thoughts on this important topic in his article Stillness in Schools]. One opposing argument for happiness lessons at school is that children should not be “taught” happiness, but that they should be allowed to think about happiness for themselves. However, this is precisely the aim of these happiness lessons. The approach is inquiry, not dictation.

People who attend my happiness programme are always telling me, “I wish I’d learned this at school.” It’s time then for more conversations about happiness in school, and at home with our children. I encourage all my students and clients to talk more about happiness with their families. Why? Because one of the ways we evolve is through conversation. Drawing happiness with our children or talking about happiness with our partner helps us to clarify things, to heal, to come together, and ultimately to live a happier life.

And now, even governments and politicians want to talk about happiness. In Britain, David Cameron has commissioned a new survey called Measuring National Well-being. A new organisation called Action for Happiness [see what founder Richard Layard says about this new movement in his article A Better Way of Life] is working closely with the government to help create better social change in society. Again, some people are concerned that governments should not “tell us” how to be happy. I agree with this, but I don’t think governments are trying to tell us. Like us, they are simply trying to understand what happiness is, and how we can be happier.

In my latest book, Be Happy, I have written: “Your definition of happiness will influence every significant decision in your life.” It is essential, therefore, that individuals and governments alike keep happiness on the agenda because, more than ever before, humanity needs a better understanding of happiness. We have learned so much, about atoms and galaxies and other things, but we still do not understand ourselves very well; we still go to war too often, and there is still too much suffering.

I remain deeply committed to talking about happiness. Why? Because I believe that happiness is our true nature (it is the natural state of our Unconditioned Self), and for that reason happiness brings out the best in us, both individually and collectively. Happiness research has found a strong link between happiness and altruism, for instance. In a recent study by a Charities Commission, it was reported that the highest predictor of generous giving is not your income level: it’s your happiness level.

Good things come from real happiness. Happier people make better choices, which is good for society and the planet. Your happiness is a gift to the world. I believe this with all my heart.

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Robert Holden is director of The Happiness Project. His latest book, Be Happy;, is published by Hay House. For more about the eight-week happiness programme visit: http://www.happiness.co.uk

The Gift of Happiness features in Resurgence issue 269, November/December 2011.

This article is reprinted courtesy of Resurgence magazine – at the heart of earth, art and spirit. To buy Resurgence, read further articles online or find out about The Resurgence Trust, visit: http://www.resurgence.org

All rights to this article are reserved to Resurgence, if you wish to republish or make use of this work you must contact the copyright owner to obtain permission

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One final note from yours truly.  Perhaps the art of happiness is yet another thing we can learn from dogs!

A smile from ear to ear!

Your call is so, so important to us!

A delightful trawl by Neil Kelly through the call centre industry.

Picture by Neil Kelly

Are there any more annoying phrases in the English language than “your call is important to us“, or “we are experiencing particularly high call volumes“?

In 2007 companies worldwide spent some $280 billion on outsourced call-centre services, according to NASSCOM, a call-centre trade group in Delhi. Much of India’s call-centre industry, which employs roughly 300,000 agents, is located outside the ring road that encircles Bangalore, in a string of smart new business parks with tidy lawns and private security. Were it not for the stray dogs, a visitor could be forgiven for mistaking the area for Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile in Australia …

Meanwhile …… back in Wales in the United Kingdom … listen to this call centre handling a complaint from an ASDA customer – listen right to the end!

Thanks to David from neatorama.com I was able to put together a medley of hold music and without resorting to The Four Seasons!  Hope to have The Top Twenty Hold Music Songs out in time for Christmas.

Click on this link hold music medley to listen to that medley.

Finally, you may be interested in reading Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit by Laura Penny which is available as a free eBook here.

More on this new era

Some reflections from Herbert Marshall McLuhan

In a sense this piece today connects with the conclusions from my review of David Kauders’ new book The Greatest Crash; that we are transitioning into a new era.

That’s why I was fascinated to come across a long essay about Herbert Marshall McLuhan written by Michael Valpy and published in the The Globe and Mail last July.

Marshall McLuhan in the 1970s

WikiPedia has a comprehensive description of Mr. McLuhan.

Let me quote some extracts from that article to illustrate why I made the connection with my book review.

The University of Toronto professor of English credited with foreseeing the Internet 30 years before it was invented and broadcasting scores of ideas about how electronic communications media was changing the way humans think has been redeemed from labels of McLuhanacy and psuedo-scientific charlatanism.

His work no longer is described, as it was in one erudite journal of the 1970s, as “a hoax so gigantic that it shows every sign of becoming an international intellectual scandal.”

Later on in the article,

Deciding recently to pay a visit to the McLuhan coach house, she wrote: “To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of McLuhan until I moved into residence at SMC, and accidentally stumbled into the book and media studies program. But as I quickly learned, Marshall McLuhan is kind of a big deal. You know that phrase that you hear everywhere: ‘The medium is the message?’ Yeah, that was McLuhan.”

And McLuhan’s problem – one of his problems – is that his message couldn’t escape his medium. As Douglas Coupland points out in a 2009 McLuhan biography, the wonderful, whimsical, boundlessly optimistic and imaginative sixties society that embraced him and lapped up his ideas morphed into the gloom of a change-fatigued seventies society that tired of hearing from him. Yet the brand remained strong. “You know that phrase that you hear everywhere: ‘The medium is the message?’” Ms. Kellogg asks us. “Yeah, that was McLuhan.”

Think of his intellectual history as a journey between two mountain peaks passing through a shadowed valley.

When one thinks of the power of the many new tools we lump under the title ‘social media’ then it’s easy to think that the way that humans are now communicating will have profound implications.  Even this humble Blog was read by over 31,000 in the month of October.  Back to the article,

McLuhan believed that each new technology created a new human environment and thus a new way of thinking. The medium-is-the-message meant that the content of electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment. In other words, it wasn’t what we were seeing on TV that was important; it was the fact that we were watching TV (and not doing other things) that altered our brains.

And because, as Prof. Francis points out, McLuhan saw humans as essentially communicative animals, he believed it was the technologies of communication that were primary in shaping who we were, what we thought, and how we acted, with effects that often were subliminal and therefore not recognized.

Finally, the article concludes thus,

To truly understand McLuhan and his ideas, says Prof. Scheffel-Dunand, students have to read him.

Most students of McLuhan today, she says, read scholars who write about McLuhan rather than read McLuhan himself. Which is a mistake, she says, because McLuhan wrote as a poet: he wrote metaphorically, aphoristically, he wrote in what he called “mosaics.”

Biographer Philip Marchand agrees. “My suggestion for students is to begin with the articles written by McLuhan – ‘Acoustic Space’ and ‘The Effect of the Printed Book on the language of the 16th century’ and a couple others that appear in the anthology entitled Explorations in Communication. These articles are lucid, comprehensible introductions to McLuhan’s thought.”

To rejoin UpbeaT blogger Emily Kellogg on her coach house tour: “I don’t want to bore you, dear readers, but I just can’t help gushing. I dig this stuff. These kind of conversations, are the things that make an undergraduate degree worth pursuing. They’re the ones that give you an adrenalin rush because you’re thinking so quickly – and your brain kind of feels like a trapeze artist jumping from idea to idea.

There’s also something innately cool about having an intellectual conversation that ranges from iPhones to Heidegger in five seconds flat in the place that housed Marshall McLuhan as he wrote the books that revolutionized the field of media research.”

Ms. Kellogg: 2011 medium of McLuhan’s message.

Michael Valpy is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

Endlessness surrounds us and infinity is within!

Stirring the mental pot for a Friday morning!

Not too long ago, I came across the website The Big Think.  It tickled my curiosity to the extent that I subscribed.  On November 6th an essay was published with the wonderful title of ‘Consciousness: The Black Hole of Neuroscience‘.  Couldn’t resist that!  Here’s how that essay started,

What’s the Big Idea?

“By the word ‘thought’ (‘pensée’) I understand all that of which we are conscious as operating in us.” –Renee Descartes

The simplest description of a black hole is a region of space-time from which no light is reflected and nothing escapes. The simplest description of consciousness is a mind that absorbs many things and attends to a few of them. Neither of these concepts can be captured quantitatively. Together they suggest the appealing possibility that endlessness surrounds us and infinity is within.

That last sentence jumped off the page at me – hence me using it as the title of this post.

If this interests you at all, then do read the full item.  That closes like this …

Hirsch sees it more practically. Though functional imaging has not explained where perception comes from, it has important applications for unconscious patients. “The boundaries have been broken a little bit, clinically,” she says. “As we study patients with disorders of consciousness, we can probe their levels of awareness in ways that other traditional ways of asking them to respond.”

It’s no different than any other aspect of the brain that we cannot presently explain, she says:

For example, we don’t understand how the brain creates colors. That’s a perception that is very private – I don’t know that your perception of blue is like my perception of blue, for example. Smells are another one. I don’t know that your perception of the smell of an orange is like mine. These are the hard problems of neuroscience and philosophy that we haven’t made a great deal of progress on.

What do you think? Is the distinction between “hard problems” and “soft problems” useful, or reductive? Does the brain create consciousness? Will we ever empirically understand where it comes from or how it works?

This post is part of an ongoing series, The 21st Century Brain.

But that’s not the end of it.  Browsing the comments revealed a link to the Blog called NeuroLogica Blog.  The author is Steven Novella, MD.  Here’s a flavour of Steven’s competencies.

Dr. Novella is an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine. He is the president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society. He is the host and producer of the popular weekly science podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. He is also a senior fellow and Director of Science-Based Medicine at theJames Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and a founding fellow of the Institute for Science in Medicine.

The NeuroLogicaBlog covers news and issues in neuroscience, but also general science, scientific skepticism, philosophy of science, critical thinking, and the intersection of science with the media and society.

Dr. Novella also contributes every Sunday to The Rogues Gallery, the official blog of the SGU, every Monday to SkepticBlog, and every Wednesday to Science-Based Medicine, a blog dedicated to issues of science and medicine.

I couldn’t resist doing a search on Dr. Novella’s blog using the search term ‘consciousness’.  What a rich vein!  Here’s just one example of what came to light,

Subconscious Motivation

Neuroscience research has been increasingly fleshing out the fascinating and complex relationship between the subconscious processing of the brain and our conscious awareness. We all labor under the illusion that our decisions, feelings, and behaviors are all conscious. When we do something, it seems, it is because we wanted to do it. We are very good, in fact, at retrofitting a logical explanation for why we consciously did something.

But much of our brain’s decision making occurs at a subconscious level. When presented with a choice various parts of our brains make a calculation – processing the choice, weighing varying factors based upon some neuro-algorithm, and then present that choice to our conscious mind (the global workspace, if you accept this hypothesis). Research shows that if we change the subconscious algorithm, by suppressing, for example, one part of the brain, the decision-making process is altered. We are not aware of this, and we still are under the illusion that the decision was completely conscious.

Strongly recommend that you read the article in full; it is deeply fascinating.  And then laugh out loud, as I did, when you read the first comment made to that article,

I find this fascinating even though I am not conciously aware of why!