Notes

Introduction

1. Release is a phase that complex systems go through after periods of growth and conservation of resources, in which a major threshold is crossed, structure is lost, and conserved energy is released. In severe cases, it is when a system collapses. I argue that we should see our society as in the late stage of the conservation phase moving toward release.

2. Martin E. P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Atria Books, 2012).

3. Valerie Tiberius and Alexandra Plakias, “Well-Being,” in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. John Michael Doris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ed Diener, “Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 34.

4. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, repr. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

5. See for example Amartya Sen, “Capability and Well-Being,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), and Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). Well-being is a close cousin to flourishing and is usually explained in the same way.

6. This kind of view of flourishing or well-being is typically called an objective list theory. For a rigorous defense of this view see Christopher M. Rice, “Defending the Objective List Theory of Well-Being,” Ratio 26 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12007.

7. Current measures of well-being include questions relating to financial security and health. These are one way of assessing whether someone has basic needs met. See Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska et al., “Psychometric Properties of Flourishing Scales from a Comprehensive Well-Being Assessment,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021), https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.652209.

8. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 16 (1973), https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747308601682. For a solid overview of deep ecology see Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2007).

9. Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (New York: American Psychological Association and Oxford University Press, 2004).

10. Situationists have argued that stable global character traits rarely exist and do not explain behavior; see for example John M. Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics,” Noûs 32 (1998). I have been convinced by numerous responses that these arguments are not telling; see for example Eranda Jayawickreme et al., “Virtuous States and Virtuous Traits: How the Empirical Evidence regarding the Existence of Broad Traits Saves Virtue Ethics from the Situationist Critique,” Theory and Research in Education 12 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878514545206.

11. Philosophers will recognize this book fits squarely in the virtue ethics tradition, which has had a tremendous resurgence in the last thirty years. I am deeply indebted to many authors writing on environmental virtue ethics, but I will rarely use the term “virtue,” and I will avoid discussion of philosophical issues associated with virtue theory. I intend the phrase “beneficial skillful habit” to be the rough equivalent of “virtue,” but I hope it will be less daunting to a general audience. Virtue ethicists may think that by highlighting skills I am placing insufficient emphasis on the inclination to use the skills in ways that are good. I agree that this inclination is important, but one of the best ways to foster such inclinations is to cultivate enough relevant skills that their successful application increases the inclination to use the skills. Directly trying to change people’s inclinations often seems like manipulation and can foster backlash. I will address this point in more depth in the last two chapters of the book.

12. In chapter 1 I will provide a more extended treatment of resilience.

13. Kathryn M. Connor and Jonathan R. T. Davidson, “Development of a New Resilience Scale: The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC),” Depression and Anxiety 18 (2003), https://doi.org/10.1002/da.10113.

14. Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans, eds., Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 5.

1. The Problem of Flourishing in Our Times

1. David Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019).

2. James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Grove, 2006).

3. Byron Williston, The Anthropocene Project: Virtue in the Age of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 58.

4. Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (London: Penguin, 2019).

5. Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (New York: Harper, 2020).

6. I use behavior change in a very broad sense, which includes participating in systems change (governance participation, activism, and volunteering), not just beneficial environmental practices like recycling and buying green products. We will need to change systems structures—economic structures, policies, and social norms—in order to enable large-scale behavior changes. I am not suggesting that the combination of lots of individual initiatives is sufficient for addressing our challenges adequately.

7. Robert Ruiter et al., “Sixty Years of Fear Appeal Research: Current State of the Evidence,” International Journal of Psychology 49 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12042.

8. Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1259855. See also Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009), and Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (2018).

9. Rather than provide references for every challenge described in this section, I summarize key resources for our challenges and their implications in this bibliographic endnote. For a thorough though somewhat dated account of ecological challenges see the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reports available at https://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.html. For more recent assessment of climate change challenges see the IPCC 2023 AR 6 synthesis report, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/, and the “Fifth National Climate Assessment,” https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/. In addition, reports and books that describe a wide range of challenges we will face in the near future and which have influenced my analysis include the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2040 (2021), https://www.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home; Richard Heinberg, Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown (Corvallis, OR: Post Carbon Institute, 2023); Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (New York: Henry Holt, 2019); Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Alec Ross, The Industries of the Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017); and Darrell M. West, The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2018).

10. Glenn Albrecht et al., “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change,” Australasian Psychiatry: Bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 15 (2007), https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288.

11. Jennifer Ortman, Victoria Velkoff, and Howard Hogan, “An Aging Nation: The Older Population in the United States,” https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2014/demo/p25-1140.html.

12. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973), https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730.

13. Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling, eds., Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).

14. Brian D. Fath, Carly A. Dean, and Harald Katzmair, “Navigating the Adaptive Cycle: An Approach to Managing the Resilience of Social Systems,” Ecology and Society 20 (2015), https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07467-200224.

15. The study of civilization collapse might be used to bolster apocalyptic interpretations. See for example Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), and Robert Costanza, Lisa Graumlich, and W. Steffen, Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). We need more research on cultural transformation after release to balance our picture of potential outcomes.

16. See Richard Heinberg, “The Big Picture,” https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-12-17/the-big-picture/, for an eloquent argument that we are in the late conservation stage of the adaptive cycle.

17. Timothy M. Lenton et al., “Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0705414105.

18. A notable exception to my generalization about failures of international organization to keep us away from key thresholds was the creation of the Montreal Protocol that created a very effective international agreement to reduce use of chlorofluorocarbons and thereby avoid further decline of the ozone layer.

19. “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts,” Travis Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project (blog), March 21, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/03/21/public-sees-an-america-in-decline-on-many-fronts/.

20. Fath, Dean, and Katzmair, “Navigating the Adaptive Cycle.”

21. Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012), 3.

22. Fath, Dean, and Katzmair, “Navigating the Adaptive Cycle,” 24.

23. Annie Gowen, “The Town That Built Back Green,” Washington Post, October 23, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/10/22/greensburg-kansas-wind-power-carbon-emissions/.

24. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (New York: Orbit, 2020).

2. Collaborating Well in a Competitive Culture

1. Barack Obama, speech to Planned Parenthood Action Fund, filmed on July 17, 2007 (video of part of speech, at 1:43), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXFrAvoO3vk.

2. Kathryn Abrams, “Empathy and Experience in the Sotomayor Hearings,” Ohio Northern University Law Review 36 (2010).

3. July 13, 2009, Judiciary Committee hearings, quoted in Abrams, “Empathy and Experience,” 267.

4. Sonia Sotomayor, “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” Berkeley La Raza Law Journal 13 (2002): 92.

5. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco, 2016).

6. Joshua Rosenberg, “Teaching Empathy in Law School,” University of San Francisco Law Review 36 (2002), https://repository.usfca.edu/usflawreview/vol36/iss3/4; Martin Hoffman, “Empathy, Justice, and the Law,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 230.

7. Barbara Gray, “Conditions Facilitating Interorganizational Collaboration,” Human Relations 38 (1985): 911–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/001872678503801001.

8. Bryan G. Norton, Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change: A Guide to Environmental Decision Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

9. Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).

10. Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (New York: Penguin, 2019).

11. Fath, Dean, and Katzmair, “Navigating the Adaptive Cycle.”

12. “Trust and Distrust in America,” Pew Research Center, https://www.people-press.org/2019/07/22/the-state-of-personal-trust/.

13. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhouse, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post Environmental World” (2004), www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf.

14. Norton, Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change.

15. Julia Marie Wondolleck and Steven Lewis Yaffee, Making Collaboration Work: Lessons from Innovation in Natural Resource Management (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000).

16. Paul Sabatier et al., eds., Swimming Upstream: Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

17. Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World, repr. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 126.

18. Heather Battaly, “Is Empathy a Virtue?,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press), 277–301.

19. Abrams, “Empathy and Experience.”

20. Bloom, Against Empathy; Jesse Prinz, “Against Empathy,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.2011.00069.x.

21. Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, NY: Anchor / Doubleday, 1976); Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, repr. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2005).

22. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987).

23. Sotomayor, “Latina Judge’s Voice.”

24.Abrams, “Empathy and Experience,” 271.

25. This section of the chapter is adapted from Paul Stonehouse and William Throop, “Coping with Climate Despair: Cultivating the Skills of Hope and Tranquil Resolve,” Journal of Sustainability Education 28 (2023).

26. Adrienne Martin, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

27. Victoria McGeer, “The Art of Good Hope,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592 (2004).

28. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World, repr. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 4.

29. Williston, Anthropocene Project.

30. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 4.

31. C. R. Snyder, “Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Nurturing Hope,” Journal of Counseling & Development 73 (1995): 357–58, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.1995.tb01764.x.

32. McGeer, “Art of Good Hope.”

33. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” speech presented at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington, DC, August 26, 1963, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mlk01.asp.

34. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

35. Williston, Anthropocene Project; Allen Thompson, “Radical Hope for Living Well in a Warmer World,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9185-2.

36. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

37. Robert C. Solomon and Fernando F. Flores, Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

38. Solomon and Flores, 64.

39. McGeer, “Art of Good Hope.”

40. Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). Putnam and Garrett use the General Social Survey, as well as other surveys and demographic datasets, to provide measures of different components of social capital. They triangulate among multiple questions to make claims about the decline of trust.

41. Gallup, “Confidence in Institutions,” https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.

42. Solomon and Flores, Building Trust, 57.

43. Roy J. Lewicki and Chad Brinsfield, “Trust Repair,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 4 (2017).

44. Roderick M. Kramer and Roy J. Lewicki, “Repairing and Enhancing Trust: Approaches to Reducing Organizational Trust Deficits,” Academy of Management Annals 4 (2010).

45. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 91.

46. Sotomayor, 138.

47. Sotomayor, 226.

48. American Association of Schools and Colleges, “Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal Education and the Future of Work,” https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/LEAP/2018EmployerResearchReport.pdf.

49. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 356.

50. Sotomayor, 357.

3. Recovering Humility and Softening Conviction

1. Robert T. Pennock, An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Character of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).

2. David Barker, Ryan Detamble, and Morgan Marietta, “Intellectualism, Anti-intellectualism, and Epistemic Hubris in Red and Blue America,” American Political Science Review 116 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055421000988.

3. Michael P. Lynch, Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture (New York: Liveright, 2019).

4. Lynch, 57.

5. Robert P. Abelson, “Conviction,” American Psychologist 43, no. 4 (1988), https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.43.4.267.

6. Michael D. Slater, “Reinforcing Spirals: The Mutual Influence of Media Selectivity and Media Effects and Their Impact on Individual Behavior and Social Identity,” Communication Theory 17, no. 3 (2007): 281–303, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00296.x.

7. Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (2002): 175–95, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9760.00148.

8. Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2 (1998), https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175.

9. P. C. Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12 (1960), https://doi.org/10.1080/17470216008416717.

10. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” Poetry Foundation, 1919, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming.

11. Lynch, Know-It-All Society, 23.

12. Steve Schwartz pointed out to me that this kind of account might imply that many fundamentalist religious people are intellectually arrogant. Having strong religious beliefs that are part of one’s identity is not sufficient for arrogance, but if one adds having epistemic certainty about those beliefs and the view that all other religions are mistaken, then one approaches arrogance. Sometimes people confuse strong emotional commitment with certainty, but in my experience once we draw this distinction clearly, many fundamentalists espouse commitment rather than certainty regarding their religious beliefs. To be clear, having some convictions can be good.

13. In drawing the hard/soft conviction distinction, I am influenced by Imre Lakatos’s distinction between the hard core of a scientific research program, which is unmodifiable, and the soft core, which may be altered. I am not suggesting, however, that Lakatos’s distinction is a matter of degree of conviction. Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91–196, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139171434.009.

14. Kenny Walker and Lynda Walsh, “‘No One Yet Knows What the Ultimate Consequences May Be’: How Rachel Carson Transformed Scientific Uncertainty into a Site for Public Participation in Silent Spring,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2012), https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651911421122.

15. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 40th anniversary ed. (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), quotations respectively on 23, 211, 211, 22.

16. Walker and Walsh, “No One Yet Knows,” 25–26.

17. Walker and Walsh, 26–27.

18. Dennis Whitcomb et al., “Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94, no. 3 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12228.

19. Whitcomb et al., “Intellectual Humility.”

20. Todd Kashdan et al., “The Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale: Capturing the Bandwidth of Curiosity and Identifying Four Unique Subgroups of Curious People,” Journal of Research in Personality 73 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JRP.2017.11.011.

21.See for example Jim Collins, “Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve,” Harvard Business Review 79 (2001).

22. William Throop and Matt Mayberry, “Leadership for the Sustainability Transition,” Business and Society Review 122 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12116.

23. Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (New York: Paulist, 1977).

24. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, eds., The Psychology of Gratitude, Series in Affective Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

25. Everett Worthington, Don E. Davis, and Joshua N. Hook, Handbook of Humility: Theory, Research, and Applications (New York: Routledge, 2016); Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780199283675.001.0001.

26. Robert Jonathan Cabin, Intelligent Tinkering: Bridging the Gap between Science and Practice (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011).

27. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1st Ballantine ed. (New York: Sierra Club / Ballantine, 1970), 190.

28. Cabin, Intelligent Tinkering, 199.

29. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

30. Aristotle’s views on the role of friendship in character building are quite complex. For an excellent treatment of this topic see Diana Hoyos-Valdés, “The Notion of Character Friendship and the Cultivation of Virtue,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 48 (2017): 66–82.

31. Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964, ed. Martha E. Freeman (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 20.

32. Robert Cabin, personal communication with the author, January 24, 2020.

4. Technological Fantasy and Frugality

1. Parts of this chapter are adapted from William Throop, “Frugality and Resilience: A Pragmatist Meditation,” in Pragmatist and American Philosophical Perspectives on Resilience, ed. Kelly Parker and Heather Keith (New York: Lexington Books, 2019), and used with permission.

2. Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972).

3. Techno-optimists include Andrew McAfee, Steven Pinker, Christine Lagarde, Eric Schmidt, and Larry Summers.

4. Lydia Saad, “Socialism as Popular as Capitalism among Young Adults in U.S.,” Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capitalism-among-young-adults.aspx.

5. Joshua Yates and James Davison Hunter, eds., Thrift and Thriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.

6. David Bentley Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017).

7. Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths. They do have a chapter on self-regulation, but the chapter does not address consumptive practices, which give rise to the importance of frugality as a resilience virtue.

8. Terrence H. Witkowski, “A Brief History of Frugality Discourses in the United States,” Consumption Markets & Culture 13 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1080/10253861003786975.

9. Bruce Piasecki, in Doing More with Less: The New Way to Wealth (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012), makes a strong case for Franklin’s being the exemplar that business needs to motivate frugality.

10.Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Ormand Seavey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 81.

11. Most of these proverbs were collected in Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, originally published in the 1758 issue of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Some were borrowed from earlier authors and later used in more familiar forms, like “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

12. See Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). Franklin’s motivations for his own early frugality were undoubtedly mixed. Though his published advice often focused on the self-restraint necessary to achieve later wealth, he was also deeply influenced by his Quaker friends in Philadelphia whose motivations for frugal lifestyles were more spiritual and in line with constructive frugality.

13. W. Mischel, E. B. Ebbesen, and A. R. Zeiss, “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972), https://doi.org/10.1037/h0032198.

14. Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Philip K. Peake, “The Nature of Adolescent Competencies Predicted by Preschool Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988), https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.4.687.

15. Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths.

16. Rachel Kaplan and Ruby K. Blume, Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living (New York: Skyhorse, 2011).

17. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2020).

18. The increasing use of school gardens to teach science and nutrition is a notable exception; see chapter 7 for more detail on this important development.

19. Luk Bouckaert, Hendrik Opdebeeck, and László Zsolnai, Frugality: Rebalancing Material and Spiritual Values in Economic Life (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

20. Juliet Schor, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (New York: Penguin, 2010).

21. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: The Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius [and] Marcus Aurelius, ed. Whitney Jennings Oates (New York: Random House, 1940).

22. Edward Abbey, Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 153. For more on finding beauty in nature see Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013), and Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World (New York: Vintage Books, 2009). Allen Carlson’s Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 1999) is an excellent philosophical treatment of the topic.

23. Williams, Finding Beauty.

24. In an earlier paper on frugality, I identified a third kind of frugality—integral frugality—which I identified with touching the world lightly: William Throop, “Frugality and Resilience: A Pragmatist Meditation,” in Pragmatist and American Philosophical Perspectives on Resilience, ed. Kelly Parker and Heather Keith (New York: Lexington Books, 2019). In the current chapter it seems clearer to combine constructive and integral frugality.

25. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. R. B. Blakney (New York: Signet, 2007).

26. Emrys Westacott, The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More—More or Less (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

27. Fath, Dean, and Katzmair, “Navigating the Adaptive Cycle.”

28. Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice.

29.“Real Personal Consumption Expenditures [PCECCA],” US Bureau of Economic Analysis, retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCECCA.

30. Mark J. Perry, “New US Homes Today Are 1,000 Square Feet Larger Than in 1973 and Living Space per Person Has Nearly Doubled,” American Enterprise Institute, https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/.

31. Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, and Edouard Mathieu, “Technological Change” (2013), published online at OurWorldInData.org, https://ourworldindata.org/technological-progress.

32. Jean Twenge et al., “Age, Period, and Cohort Trends in Mood Disorder Indicators and Suicide-Related Outcomes in a Nationally Representative Dataset, 2005–2017,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 128 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000410; NORC, “Historic Shift in Americans’ Happiness amid Pandemic,” 2020, https://www.norc.org/PDFs/COVID%20Response%20Tracking%20Study/Historic%20Shift%20in%20Americans%20Happiness%20Amid%20Pandemic.pdf.

33. Helga Dittmar et al., “The Relationship between Materialism and Personal Well-Being: A Meta-analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037409.

34. Shimon Saphire-Bernstein and Shelley E. Taylor, “Close Relationships and Happiness,” in The Oxford Handbook of Happiness, ed. Susan David, Ilona Boniwell, and Amanda Conley Ayers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

35. Robert Waldinger, “What Makes a Good Life: Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness,” TED talk, 2015, https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/.

36. Schor, Plenitude.

37. Bill McKibben, Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families (New York: Plume, 1999).

38. John R. Ehrenfeld, “The Roots of Sustainability,” MIT Sloan Management Review, January 15, 2005, 23.

39. Schor, Plenitude.

40. David A. Crocker and Toby Linden, eds., Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Clive Barnett, Philip Cafaro, and Terry Newholm, “Philosophy and Ethical Consumption,” in The Ethical Consumer, ed. Rob Harrison, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw (London: Sage, 2005).

41. “U.S. Environmental Footprint Factsheet,” Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan, pub. no. CSS08–08, http://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/U.S.%20Environmental%20Footprint_CSS08-08_e2020.pdf.

42. Andrew McAfee, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next (New York: Scribner, 2019).

43. Willard Cochrane, Farm Prices: Myth and Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958).

44. Andrea Nightingale et al., “Beyond Technical Fixes: Climate Solutions and the Great Derangement,” Climate and Development 12 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2019.1624495. This article explores in more detail how our focus on technological fixes prevents us from seeing deeper changes that we must make, such as reframing our relation to nature and highlighting the social justice issues that make our current responses untenable.

45. Steven Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism and Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

46. Franklin, Autobiography.

47. Sotomayor, My Beloved World.

5. Learning to Think Like a Mountain

1. Terence J. Centner, America’s Blame Culture: Pointing Fingers and Shunning Restitution (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2008).

2. Nathanael J. Fast and Larissa Z. Tiedens, “Blame Contagion: The Automatic Transmission of Self-Serving Attributions,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.10.007.

3. Leopold, Sand County Almanac.

4. John Holland, “Studying Complex Adaptive Systems,” Journal of Systems Science and Complexity 19 (2006), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-006-0001-z.

5. I recommend to the interested reader four excellent books that introduce systems thinking to a nontechnical audience: Peter M. Senge, a prominent management consultant, wrote the classic application of systems theory to business, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2006). Donella Meadows, known for her early work on the limits to growth, published a distillation of her understanding of systems thinking in Thinking in Systems: A Primer, ed. Diana Wright (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008). Brian Walker and David Salt apply systems thinking to the resilience of socio-ecological systems in Resilience Practice (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012). David Stroh provides an admirably clear guidebook for applying systems thinking to social problems in Systems Thinking for Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2015). Also, for a very strong review article on systems-thinking skills see Ross D. Arnold and Jon P. Wade, “A Complete Set of Systems Thinking Skills,” Insight 20 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1002/inst.12159.

6. Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 97.

7. Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, 37.

8. Stroh, Systems Thinking for Social Change, chap. 4.

9. Kim A. Kastens et al., “How Geoscientists Think and Learn,” Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 90 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1029/2009EO310001.

10. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001).

11. For an excellent discussion of kinds of thresholds and how we can improve our ability to identify them see Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, chap. 1. See also Brian Walker and Jacqueline Meyers, “Thresholds in Ecological and Social-Ecological Systems: A Developing Database,” Ecology and Society 9 (2004).

12. Niklas Boers, “Observation-Based Early-Warning Signals for a Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation,” Nature Climate Change 11 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01097-4.

13. Meadows, Thinking in Systems, chap. 6.

14. Meadows, 146. For a discussion of weak and strong leverage points for the sustainability transition see David J. Abson et al., “Leverage Points for Sustainability Transformation,” Ambio 46 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-016-0800-y.

15. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 262.

16. In the history of the social sciences, the classical debate between Émile Durkheim and Max Weber reflects the competing approaches to understanding groups. In ecology, there has been a much greater focus on holist explanations, though early debates between Frederic Clements and Henry Gleason regarding plant associations mirror some aspects of the social science debates.

17. Putnam and Garrett, Upswing.

18. Putnam and Garrett acknowledge numerous complications in their simplified picture of the I-We-I arc. For example, Black people and women were largely excluded from the early twentieth-century “We.” The book’s broad generalizations about social norms apply only to the aggregate population, not to all subpopulations. Michael McGerr further complicates the picture of individualism during the Progressive Era. He notes that the wealthy were highly influenced by individualism, while the urban poor never had the privilege that enabled individualism. Poor people needed a community focus to survive. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Any claim about the dominance of individualism today also requires careful qualification, since emphasis on elements of individualism varies considerably across different social groups.

19. Andrew Dobson, “Environment Sustainabilities: An Analysis and a Typology,” Environmental Politics 5 (1996): 401–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644019608414280.

20. Heather M. Farley and Zachary A. Smith, Sustainability: If It’s Everything, Is It Nothing?, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2020).

21. Simon Kirchin, ed., Thick Concepts, Mind Association Occasional Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

22. Julian Agyeman, “Toward a ‘Just’ Sustainability?,” Continuum 22 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310802452487; Julian Agyeman, Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning, and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2013).

23. Scott D. Campbell, “Sustainable Development and Social Justice: Conflicting Urgencies and the Search for Common Ground in Urban and Regional Planning,” Michigan Journal of Sustainability 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.3998/mjs.12333712.0001.007.

24. Sander van der Leeuw and Carl Folke, “The Social Dynamics of Basins of Attraction,” Ecology and Society 26 (2021), https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12289-260133.

25. Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Cambridge: Green Books, 2014).

6. Barriers and Stepladders

1. Noah J. Webster, Kristine J. Ajrouch, and Toni C. Antonucci, “Sociodemographic Differences in Humility: The Role of Social Relations,” Research in Human Development 15 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/15427609.2017.1414670.

2. Angelos Stamos, Efthymios Altsitsiadis, and Siegfried Dewitte, “Investigating the Effect of Childhood Socioeconomic Background on Interpersonal Trust: Lower Childhood Socioeconomic Status Predicts Lower Levels of Trust,” Personality and Individual Differences 145 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.03.011.

3. Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, and Dacher Keltner, “Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy,” Psychological Science 21 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610387613.

4. Igor Grossmann and Justin Brienza, “The Strengths of Wisdom Provide Unique Contributions to Improved Leadership, Sustainability, Inequality, Gross National Happiness, and Civic Discourse in the Face of Contemporary World Problems,” Journal of Intelligence 6 (2018): 22, https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence6020022.

5. Justin P. Brienza and Igor Grossmann, “Social Class and Wise Reasoning about Interpersonal Conflicts across Regions, Persons and Situations,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1870.

6. I am indebted to Steve Schwartz for advancing a powerful version of this concern (personal communication, July 26, 2021).

7. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

8. “Senator Hawley Delivers National Conservatism Keynote on the Left’s Attack on Men in America,” Senator Josh Hawley, https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-delivers-national-conservatism-keynote-lefts-attack-men-america.

9.Janet S. Hyde, Elizabeth Fennema, and Susan J. Lamon, “Gender Differences in Mathematics Performance: A Meta-analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 107 (1990), https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.107.2.139.

10. Ashley E. Thompson and Daniel Voyer, “Sex Differences in the Ability to Recognize Non-verbal Displays of Emotion: A Meta-analysis,” Cognition and Emotion 28 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2013.875889.

11. Daniel Lerch, Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience (Corvallis, OR: Post Carbon Institute, 2015).

12. Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2018).

13. Reeves and Deimler argue that adaptability is the most promising new source of advantage in business competition. Martin Reeves and Mike Deimler, “Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage,” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2011/07/adaptability-the-new-competitive-advantage.

14. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Presumption,” in The Essays (1580), quoted in and translated by Ward Farnsworth in his The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual (Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2018), 26.

15. Hawken, Blessed Unrest.

16. Andreas Karelas, Climate Courage: How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America (Boston: Beacon, 2020).

17. Putnam and Garrett, Upswing, summarized in chapter 5.

18. “Positive Character Traits Education,” Texas Education Agency, https://tea.texas.gov/academics/learning-support-and-programs/positive-character-traits-education.

19. This section is adapted from William Throop, “Flourishing in the Age of Climate Change: Finding the Heart of Sustainability,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 40 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1111/misp.12062.

20. Valerie Tiberius, “Value Commitments and the Balanced Life,” Utilitas 17 (2005): 28, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0953820804001384.

7. Education and Culture Change

1. Parts of this chapter are adapted from William Throop, “Learning Our Way toward Resilience,” in The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval, ed. Daniel Lerch (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2017) and used with permission.

2. Anthony Biglan and Dennis D. Embry, “A Framework for Intentional Cultural Change,” Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science 2 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2013.06.001; David Sloan Wilson et al., “Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X13001593.

3. For an insightful account of different kinds of educational programs see Donald Mocker and George Spear, “Lifelong Learning: Formal, Nonformal, Informal, and Self-Directed,” Information Series 241 (Columbus, OH: National Center, 1982).

4. Tim Kautz et al., “Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success,” OECD Education Working Papers 110 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1787/5jxsr7vr78f7-en.

5. James J. Heckman and Tim Kautz, “Hard Evidence on Soft Skills,” Labour Economics 19 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2012.05.014.

6. Lorea Martínez and Hanna Melnick, “How One Elementary School Integrates Social-Emotional Skills in the Classroom,” Greater Good Magazine, May 21, 2019, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_one_elementary_school_integrates_social_emotional_skills_in_the_classro.

7.“What Is the CASEL Framework?,” CASEL, https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework/.

8. Joseph A. Durlak et al., “The Impact of Enhancing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning: A Meta-analysis of School-Based Universal Interventions,” Child Development 82 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x.

9. “How Learning Happens: Supporting Students’ Social, Emotional, and Academic Development,” Aspen Institute, 5, https://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/learning-happens-supporting-students-social-emotional-academic-development/.

10. Claire Lampen, “What Is the Conservative Beef with ‘Social-Emotional Learning’?,” Cut, April 19, 2022, https://www.thecut.com/2022/04/conservative-backlash-social-emotional-learning.html.

11. Paul Tough, “What If the Secret to Success Is Failure?,” New York Times, September 14, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html.

12. Marvin Berkowitz and Melinda Bier, “Research-Based Character Education,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 591 (2004), https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716203260082.

13. James J. Heckman and Tim Kautz, “Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions That Improve Character and Cognition,” NBER Working Papers (2013), https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/19656.html; Durlak et al., “Impact.”

14. “UN Decade of ESD,” UNESCO, last modified August 9, 2018, https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development/what-is-esd/un-decade-of-esd.

15. Kate G. Burt et al., “School Gardens in the United States: Current Barriers to Integration and Sustainability,” American Journal of Public Health 108 (2018), https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304674.

16. For more information about green schools see “The Teaching Building: Current Practices in Sustainability in the 21st Century Classroom,” Green Schools National Network, https://greenschoolsnationalnetwork.org/teaching-building-current-practices-sustainability-21st-century-classroom/.

17. One can acquire knowledge about system functioning without any of the skills that this knowledge might motivate. Since most sustainability curricula focus on practices that enable systems to function better, they tend to foster both the development of habits and the skills that enable us to effectively shift systems. Only with practice and evaluation of results do such skillful habits become refined, however.

18. “Mission & Values,” Common Ground School, https://commongroundct.org/about/. Information about the Common Ground School came from its website, https://commongroundct.org.

19. “HS-ETS1–4 Engineering Design,” Next Generation Science Standards, https://www.nextgenscience.org/pe/hs-ets1-4-engineering-design.

20. National Science Teaching Association, “K–12 Science Standards Adoption,” https://ngss.nsta.org/About.aspx.

21. “Character Education in Universities: A Framework for Flourishing,” University of Birmingham, Jubilee Centre for Character & Virtues, https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/userfiles/jubileecentre/pdf/character-education/Character_Education_in_Universities_Final_01.pdf.

22. Anthony D. Cortese, “The Critical Role of Higher Education in Creating a Sustainable Future,” Planning for Higher Education 31 (2003): 3.

23. “The Princeton Review Guide to Green Colleges: 2022 Edition Press Release,” https://www.princetonreview.com/press/green-guide/press-release-2022.

24. William Throop, “From Environmental Advocates to Sustainability Entrepreneurs: Rethinking a Sustainability Focused General Education Program,” in Sustainability in Higher Education: Stories and Strategies for Transformation, ed. Peggy F. Barlett and Geoffrey W. Chase (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

25. Mitch Thomashow, The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

26. See also “OECD Skills Outlook 2021: Learning for Life,” OECD, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/0ae365b4-en.

27. Courses on these topics are regularly offered by Coursera at https://www.coursera.org/. The content is typically up to date and reflects current research, though assessment of performance often requires fees and may not be very rigorous.

28. Stephen Sterling, “Learning for Resilience, or the Resilient Learner? Towards a Necessary Reconciliation in a Paradigm of Sustainable Education,” Environmental Education Research 16 (2010).

29. Putnam, Bowling Alone.

30. Norton, Sustainable Values.

31. J. T. Woolley, M. V. McGinnis, and J. Kellner, “The California Watershed Movement: Science and the Politics of Place,” Natural Resources Journal 42 (2002). See also Michael V. McGinnis, Science and Sensibility: Negotiating an Ecology of Place (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

32. “Average Annual Hours Actually Worked per Worker,” OECD.Stat, https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS.

33. Throop and Mayberry, “Leadership.”

34. Edgar H. Schein, “How Can Organizations Learn Faster? The Challenge of Entering the Green Room,” MIT Sloan Management Review, January 15, 1993.

35. Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (New York: Atria / One Signal, 2021).

Epilogue

1. Brian C. O’Neill et al., “The Roads Ahead: Narratives for Shared Socioeconomic Pathways Describing World Futures in the 21st Century,” Global Environmental Change 42 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.01.004.

2. O’Neill et al., 172. All elements of my descriptions are paraphrases of the original scenario description.

3. From Mary Oliver’s poem “It Was Early,” in Evidence: Poems, repr. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2010), 20.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 47. I am grateful to Steve Schwartz for suggesting I use this metaphor and quotation.