Significance

It is often said that money can’t buy happiness, yet many surveys have shown that richer people tend to report being more satisfied with their lives. This tendency could be taken to indicate that high material wealth—as measured in monetary terms—is a necessary ingredient for happiness. Here, we show survey results from people living in small-scale societies outside the globalized mainstream, many of whom identify as Indigenous. Despite having little monetary income, the respondents frequently report being very satisfied with their lives, and some communities report satisfaction scores similar to the wealthiest countries. These results imply greater flexibility in the means to achieve happiness than are apparent from surveys that examine only industrialized societies.

Abstract

Global polls have shown that people in high-income countries generally report being more satisfied with their lives than people in low-income countries. The persistence of this correlation, and its similarity to correlations between income and life satisfaction within countries, could lead to the impression that high levels of life satisfaction can only be achieved in wealthy societies. However, global polls have typically overlooked small-scale, nonindustrialized societies, which can provide an alternative test of the consistency of this relationship. Here, we present results from a survey of 2,966 members of Indigenous Peoples and local communities among 19 globally distributed sites. We find that high average levels of life satisfaction, comparable to those of wealthy countries, are reported for numerous populations that have very low monetary incomes. Our results are consistent with the notion that human societies can support very satisfying lives for their members without necessarily requiring high degrees of monetary wealth.>

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11658449

Review of 2023 book: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball. ISBN9781529095999

#🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔🍠🥔

Yet again we have to debunk carnist Western scientists who promoted the myth of "Hunter Man" centuries ago and tainted the research with their male power fantasy biases.

This interview talks about pronatalism. If you're not ready to think politically about natalism without knee-jerking to a tweet-long critique, this is for you.

This discussion with science journalist Angela Saini does something that I really like: cut through centuries or thousands of years of bullshit diagonally to get to some key sets of connected truths. Her book is "The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule". I haven't read it yet, but it's going to the top of my list.

lots of animal products

This is related to the:

Overkill Hypothesis

And the article here is related to this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221330542300036X

Highlights

• Modern humans (Homo sapiens) drive late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions, with no role for climate change.
• The strong body-size bias of the late-Quaternary extinctions is also linked to modern humans, not climatic change.
• The late-Quaternary extinctions represent the first planet-wide, human-driven transformation of the environment.

easy read

Podcast about wolves returning in Europe and the livestock industry (includes extensive pastoralism) getting anxious and feeding right-wing populist clownery.

Reminder to the clowns: there's no "livelihood" on a dead planet. Biodiversity, the health the biosphere, comes before business. Unfortunately, the podcast hosts don't understand that, so enjoy this dose of "conservation centrism".

The post-lecture discussion is more interesting.

🦞

thread

This strategy seems to be working—at least when it comes to convincing policymakers and philanthropists. Technical solutions to livestock’s climate impact have emerged as the new orthodoxy in climate and agriculture circles, repeated by USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry, the government of Ireland, the new FAO report, and nine-figure philanthropic endeavors funded by groups like the Bezos Earth Fund. It doesn’t hurt that, as the British environmental journalist George Monbiot so aptly puts it, the “livestock industry’s political connections are umbilical.”

technofix

technohopium

greenwashing....

I would say astroturfing, but

astropasturing

sounds more fitting.