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Sustainable Happiness New ways to nurture hope in a time of environmental despair By Elin Kelsey and Catherine O’Brien E


NVIRONMENTAL EDUCATORS tend to be nice folks. We’re the first to encourage a child to join us on a hike, and the last to leave a party when there are


recyclables that need to be sorted from the garbage. A love of life drew many of us to this profession: a love for bugs and birds and early morning canoe trips or muscle-burning mountain hikes. The irony, of course, is that much of what we teach is


depressing. Global climate change, endangered species, habitat destruction, plastics pollution: our job is to chronicle the destruction of the very things we care most deeply about, and to raise the alarm to others. All too often, we end up being unwitting harbingers of doom and gloom. Is this the most effective way to inspire engagement? What if we could return to our jovial roots? What if exploring happiness and all those things that make our heart sing, rather than the threat of demise, turns out to be the best way to inspire greener lifestyles amongst our students and other educators? We’ve been investigating these questions as new findings from environmental psychology, positive psychology and


resiliency research provide fresh understandings about the way we engage with sustainability issues. The result is an innovative field that links happiness with sustainability: Sustainable Happiness. Happiness is at the heart of who we are and turns out to


be an ideal entry point for underscoring the interdependence of all life on the planet. For the group of student teachers attending the first course in Sustainable Happiness at Cape Breton University last spring, spending class time exploring why some people are happier than others, or the links between happiness and health, was intriguing but unfamiliar territory. Who would you choose, for example, if asked to interview the happiest person you know? Happiness is a universal desire. But in a consumer society,


where consumption and happiness tend to be inextricably linked, it is easy to confuse the “path to the ‘good life’ as the ‘goods life’.1 And in most industrialized countries, our pursuit of happiness is often at the expense of other people and the natural environment. Here’s the intriguing and optimistic news. Research


suggests that “authentic happiness” is associated with posi- tive health and well-being.2 Authentic happiness is derived


GREEN TEACHER 93 Page 3


Illustrations by Tom Goldsmith


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