Challenging assumptions about sustainability

What’s the relationship between happiness and our consumption patterns? Are suburban and rural areas more or less sustainable than urban ones?

These are not idle questions at a time when climate change is inspiring people to revisit their lifestyles. Recent research conducted by Jeff Wilson, a recent Dalhousie graduate, argues that not only are adjustments needed, but that we can begin by changing our approach to our economic system and its patterns of high consumption.

Wilson (pictured left) just graduated from the Interdisciplinary PhD program at Dalhousie, working primarily with the School for Resource and Environmental Studies and the College of Sustainability. His research had several different areas of focus, but looked broadly on the idea of measuring environmental impact in urban and suburban areas, while applying an ecological perspective to the economy.

“We need to start thinking about the economy differently,” he says. “It needs to be based on the recognition that we have limits to economic activity.”

Understanding relationships

Wilson’s work is attention grabbing because it challenges some long-held assumptions about sustainability. Wilson used Halifax Regional Municipality as a case study, with data collected through the Halifax Space Time Activity Research project. One of his projects measured the relationship between various socioeconomic and well-being factors, and greenhouse gas emissions of individuals. The other measured the relationship between where someone lives in HRM and his or her greenhouse gas emissions.

In his first study, one of Wilson’s findings was that people with lifestyles that resulted in higher greenhouse gas emissions (wealthier people with higher patterns of consumption) did not report being happier than those with lower greenhouse gas emissions (and lower incomes). In effect, since greenhouse gas emissions are a surrogate of wealth, it implies that consuming more doesn’t equal happiness.

“We’ve bought into a culture where we assume if you have more stuff…you’re going to be happier,” says Wilson. “But in fact, what our data is telling us is that there’s no relationship between that stuff and your level of happiness.”

In his second study, Wilson looked at levels of greenhouse gas emissions in urban, suburban and rural HRM. He discovered that, contrary to commonly held beliefs about sustainability, there is not much difference between the carbon footprint of urban HRM and that of suburban HRM. While urban regions generally tend to have lower greenhouse gas emissions, in HRM’s case our relatively low urban density combined with the older, larger homes on the peninsula balance out the increased travel time of those in the suburbs. This results in a similar amount of emissions.

Rethinking our systems

For Wilson, however, the broader point is that we still have much to learn about sustainability, and that the need to approach our economic system differently grows increasingly urgent each year.

“[My research] is really a critique of the economic growth model, and that we’ve bought into a model that doesn’t work. We’ve bought into a model that has no ecological bearing. And so the larger issue that I was trying to communicate is that we can’t keep growing. The costs of growing, in terms of social implications and ecological implications are starting to outweigh the benefits.”

Wilson notes that the idea that there are ecological limits to growth is becoming more widely accepted, though it represents a huge shift from the dominant growth model, adopted in a time when the population of the earth was smaller and fewer resources were being consumed.

“I think we live in a different reality and we need an economic model that reflects that,” he says.