The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The report, published by the Earth Institute and co-edited by the institute’s director, Jeffrey Sachs, reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteria for government policy. It reviews the state of happiness in the world today and shows how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

World happiness report

One in a while, every twenty years perhaps, a book appears that makes one see a whole area of human experience in a new light. Once pointed out, the new insights are sp obvious that one cannot understand how one could have missed them before. In the broad area of the political economy of western society, J.A. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was one such book. So, with all its faults, was J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1957). Fred Hirsch's Social Limits to Growth (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977) is another.

Social limits to growth

Links between wellbeing and environmental factors are of growing interest in psychology, health, conservation, economics, and more widely. There is limited evidence that green or natural environments are positive for physical and mental health and wellbeing. We present a new and unique primary research study exploring the relationship between momentary subjective wellbeing (SWB) and individuals’ immediate environment within the UK. We developed and applied an innovative data collection tool: a smartphone app that signals participants at random moments, presenting a brief questionnaire while using satellite positioning (GPS) to determine geographical coordinates. We used this to collect over one million responses from more than 20,000 participants. Associating GPS response locations with objective spatial data, we estimate a model relating land cover to SWB using only the within-individual variation, while controlling for weather, daylight, activity, companionship, location type, time, day, and any response trend. On average, study participants are significantly and substantially happier outdoors in all green or natural habitat types than they are in urban environments. These findings are robust to a number of alternative models and model specifications. This study provides a new line of evidence on links between nature and wellbeing, strengthening existing evidence of a positive relationship between SWB and exposure to green or natural environments in daily life. Our results have informed the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA), and the novel geo-located experience sampling methodology we describe has great potential to provide new insights in a range of areas of interest to policymakers.

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Happiness is greater in natural environments

A huge research literature, across the behavioral and social sciences, uses information on individuals' subjective well-being. These are responses to questions--asked by survey interviewers or medical personnel--such as, "How happy do you feel on a scale from 1 to 4?" Yet there is little scientific evidence that such data are meaningful. This study examines a 2005-2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System random sample of 1.3 million U.S. citizens. Life satisfaction in each U.S. state is measured. Across America, people's answers trace out the same pattern of quality of life as previously estimated, from solely nonsubjective data, in one branch of economics (so-called "compensating differentials" neoclassical theory, originally from Adam Smith). There is a state-by-state match (r = 0.6, P < 0.001) between subjective and objective well-being. This result has some potential to help to unify disciplines.

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Objective confirmation of subjective measures of human well-being: evidence from the U.S.A.

Happiness, geography and the environment ☆

Life satisfaction and air quality in Europe

Natural hazards, such as major flood events, are occurring with increasing frequency and inflicting increasing levels of financial damages upon affected communities. The experience of such major flood events has brought about a significant change in attitudes to flood-risk management, with a shift away from built engineering solutions alone towards a more multifaceted approach. Europe's experience with damaging flood episodes provided the impetus for the introduction of the European Floods Directive, requiring the establishment of flood-risk management plans at the river-basin scale. The effectiveness of such plans, focusing on prevention, protection, and preparedness, is dependent on adequate flood awareness and preparedness, and this is related to perception of flood risk. This is an important factor in the design and assessment of flood-risk management. Whilst there is a modern body of literature exploring flood perception issues, there have been few examples that explore its spatial manifestations. Previous literature has examined perceived and real distance to a hazard source (such as a river, nuclear facility, landfill, or incinerator, etc.), whereas this article advances the literature by including an objectively assessed measure of distance to a perceived flood zone, using a cognitive mapping methodology. The article finds that distance to the perceived flood zone (perceived flood exposure) is a crucial factor in determining flood-risk perception, both the cognitive and affective components. Furthermore, we find an interesting phenomenon of misperception among respondents. The article concludes by discussing the implications for flood-risk management.

Finbarr Brereton

Papers

Happiness, geography and the environment ☆

Life satisfaction and air quality in Europe

The Impact of Perceived Flood Exposure on Flood-Risk Perception: The Role of Distance.

Ranking quality of life using subjective well-being data

The economic contribution of public bike-share to the sustainability and efficient functioning of cities