The information that saturates our modern world should increase our ability to address the many critical environmental challenges demanding our attention. But new psychological studies suggest that all this information may be more debilitating than helpful. The plethora of facts, opinions, news items and scientific data enveloping us from a persistent and pervasive barrage of electronic, print and auditory media may be overwhelming our ability to decide and act.

Researchers analyzing the effects of such information overload are able to track its impact on our brains by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to actually observe “the activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions” (Newsweek, Mar. 7/11). Too much information and too many choices causes this portion of the cortex to stop functioning in a condition termed “information fatigue”. People in this condition either fail to make decisions or the ones they do make are less reasoned and sensible. Mistakes and procrastination cause frustration and anxiety to soar.

When this psychological phenomenon is applied to the complex environmental issues confronting us, we can begin to understand why decisions are so difficult to make and why corrective measures seem to proceed so slowly. Many people are simply confounded by the number and complexity of choices confronting them. Is buying a new and fuel-efficient car better than keeping an older and less efficient one? Should the car option be abandoned in favour of a bicycle or public transit? When flying has such a high carbon dioxide impact, should international travel to vacations and relatives be abandoned? Given the greenwashing that takes place in marketing, what products can be trusted as ecologically benign? When pesticides, pollution and processed foods seem ubiquitous, how do we choose healthy and safe diets? As energy demand increases, what sources do we condemn and endorse? Or should we just wait for the arrival of a saving technology? What are the practical limits of a philosophy of “refuse, reuse and recycle”.

While the information that saturates our world presents us with innumerable dilemmas, it also informs us that each individual decision we make is important because the cumulative effect steers the direction of industries and markets, ecologies and climate, even civilizations and history. Indeed, each decision we make is imbued with influence and power.

In analyzing our decision making processes when we are overwhelmed with information, psychologists have identified four distinct effects (Ibid.). First is a “failure to decide”, a consequence of the information load being “debilitating”. Marketers have discovered that too many choices of toothpaste, breakfast cereal or snack foods so immobilize consumers with options that they choose nothing. So, too, people can be so overcome by the complexity of the environmental issues before them that they are immobilized.

The second effect of information overload is “diminishing returns”. The human memory has difficulty working with more than about seven items at a time. Further information has to be stored in long-term rather than short-term memory, a process that impairs decision making. Add the continual and rapid arrival of new information to decision making and the experience can be overwhelming. “The ceaseless influx [of new information] trains us to respond instantly, sacrificing accuracy and thoughtfulness to the false god of immediacy,” writes Sharon Begley in her Newsweek article. And whenever we do make decisions, they can be invalidated by the instant arrival of more current information, a disquieting effect that further impairs decision making.

The third effect of information overload is “recency” over “quality” – because we are wired “to notice change over stasis”, we tend to give greater weight to the most recent information we receive. “We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality. What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important,” notes Eric Kessler in Begley’s article. Indeed, we are psychologically inclined to give equal weight to all information we receive. Impulse buying operates on this principle. In the salmon farming controversy now occupying so much attention on the West Coast, the phenomenon of recency explains why the industry always responds to every reasoned criticism or scientific study questioning the environmental wisdom of growing fish in open net-pens – the last impression, no matter how trivial or irrelevant, always carries a disproportionately high influence.

The “neglected unconscious” is a fourth consideration Begley explores. We need time to process information if we are to arrive at creative and wise decisions. This requires a retreat from the complexity and constant influx of new input so the “subconscious” can sort, process and integrate the collected information. Some must be ignored. Urgency and hurry subverts this valuable process – “Act now or miss this incredible opportunity!” is an invitation to a bad decision. The sensible ecological and economic principle of protecting a park is eroded by a tempting business proposal. The 2008 gasoline panic that rushed the decision to make fuel by converting valuable food products such as corn into ethanol is a model example of an ill-considered reflex to a complex energy problem.

The psychological dynamics of information overload helps to explain why we make foolish environmental decisions or why we may not even undertake necessary action. Explanations, however, are not substitutes for excuses. Even if our rapidly changing and complex world is saturated with information, this doesn’t excuse us from making helpful choices. Indeed, as environmental threats intensify, almost any thoughtful choice will be helpful.

The complicated relationship between ice ages and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels has just become a little clearer thanks to the work of Dr. Larry Edwards and a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota. Although such science may seem esoteric, it is vital in explaining the heating effect we are having on Earth’s climate by burning massive amounts of CO2-emitting fossil fuels. Dr. Edward’s work also helps to explain the cyclical arrival of ice ages and how our Industrial Age is impacting these cycles (New Scientist, May 22/10). With such insights, we can better anticipate the consequences of our behaviour and take corrective measures.

Suspicion began as early as 1864 that Earth’s changing tilt may have something to do with ice ages. More serious work was done in the early 20th century by Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian engineer who spent decades examining variations in Earth’s orbital cycles and the tilt of its axis from 22 to 24 degrees and back again every 41,000 years. Milankovitch theorized that the angle and intensity of sunlight striking our planet could have an effect on the warming and cooling that seem to cause the rhythmical advance and retreat of ice ages – an ice age could be initiated by a cooler summer sun allowing a gradual accumulation of polar snow and ice. A more serious examination of Milankovitch’s work began in the late 20th century as global warming and climate became a puzzle of greater scientific interest.

But climate science is rarely tidy. The arrival and departure of ice ages didn’t always correlate to Milankovitch’s tilt model. Besides, polar ice only appeared on our planet about 30 million years ago. If his model were the sole explanation, then ice ages should have occurred regularly throughout Earth’s history.

The hidden variable was carbon dioxide. Scientists now know from studying marine sediments, ice cores, coral and stalagmites that atmospheric CO2 levels began to gradually fall about 30 million years ago, causing a cooling trend that, by about 2.5 million years ago, eventually brought the temperature level low enough for the axis cycle to have its effect. As expected, minor ice ages occurred every 41,000 years until about 1 million years ago. Then the ice ages began “missing a beat” and became major. Neither CO2 levels, tilt nor Earth’s other orbital irregularities could explain the magnitude of these more extreme ice ages. Some other dynamic was causing them. Complicating the explanation was the fact that CO2 levels were rising and falling simultaneously with the advance and retreat of the ice sheets, not ahead of them. If changing CO2 levels were coincidental, they were not causal. What was happening?

The new explanation is that ice ages are partly responsible for their own demise. As they get larger and heavier, they depress the planet’s crust, thus lowering their elevation and causing melt from higher temperatures. Additionally, the foundations of the ice sheets may sink below sea level, allowing warm ocean water to undermine and destabilize them. When Earth’s axis shifts enough to cause additional summer warming, then the ice age ends.

But what explains the increased levels of carbon dioxide that rise and fall simultaneously with the ice ages? The answer resides in the effect of the melting ice.

Melting ice releases huge amounts of fresh water, overlaying the northern oceans with a surface of reduced salinity and density. This shuts down “the Atlantic overturning circulation – the great ocean current that carries heat north, then sinks and flows back along the bottom of the ocean.” The south-and-north distribution of heat stops and the southern oceans become warmer. Since warmer water holds less dissolved gas, huge quantities of CO2 are released into the atmosphere causing additional warming, more melting and less oceanic heat distribution. This process continues until the ice is melted, an equilibrium re-establishes, and the system waits for the cycle to begin again.

The relevance for us today is that our industrial burning of fossil fuels is emitting enough carbon dioxide to alter this cycle. If conditions were normal, we would be entering one of the 41,000-year cooling cycles. But rapidly climbing CO2 levels – they have exploded in geological time from 280 to 390 parts per million in an incredibly brief 250 years – are quickly returning us to conditions that preceded the first polar ice of 30 million years ago. Our climate is “currently on course to become like that of the Miocene 10 to 15 million years ago, long before the ice age cycle began, when it was 6°C warmer and sea level was up to 40 metres higher” (Ibid.).

The solace in this news is that our fossil fuel emissions are preventing an oncoming ice age thousands of years hence. The disquieting news is that these same emissions are causing an almost instantaneous temperature rise and a destabilizing impact on the stable inter-glacial period that allowed us to develop our civilization. We will soon be confronting climate conditions that are entirely new to our human species. The rapidity of this new climate change permits no time for species and ecosystems to adapt. And, as adaptable as we like to think we are, it presses us to adjust our agriculture, relocate our settlements, modify our water use, alter our resource consumption, shift our energy sources, and prepare our huge and diverse global population for dramatic changes.

We have learned a huge amount about ice ages and climate change since serious study began less than a century ago. We still have much to learn about our effect on Earth’s climate, how we will mitigate the changes we are unleashing, and how we intend to adapt to these new circumstances.

Historians have noted that one of the greatest threats to the survival of societies is not adversity but cynicism, the pervasively negative attitude that defeats the possibility of finding solutions to recognized challenges. Cynicism undermines the viability of societies by summarily discrediting personal initiative, communal effort, adaptive innovation, technological ingenuity and collective wisdom.

Cynicism seems to be the temper of our times. We know what our challenges are and, in most cases, we know how to move toward solutions. But we are in danger of adopting a dismissive indifference, a perverse reluctance and a defeatist resignation that fails to address these challenges with adequate resolution and vigour. When the challenges invite us to be brave and assertive – “Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows,” Shakespeare advised – our heroism is crippled by cynicism. If we don’t believe that we are capable of surmounting our difficulties then we commit ourselves to be victims of our own failings.

This failure is illustrated wonderfully in a recent Scott Adams Dilbert cartoon (Globe & Mail, Mar. 29/11). Aside from the inclination of Dilbert to be somewhat cynical anyway, this one is particularly so. Dogbert in the cartoon is typing at a computer. “I’m writing fake press releases for imaginary new green energy technologies,” he says to Dilbert. “Scientists say that by 2040 you will be able to power your entire home with the breeze from your refrigerator door.” So Dilbert asks Dogbert, “Now how will I know which green breakthroughs are real?” And Dogbert replies, “Seriously? You think there are real ones?”

Such cynicism is insidiously destructive because it fails to see hope and, therefore, fails to see options and solutions. Many of the changes we need are not technologically onerous; they can be made by simple administrative means. Reducing the intense impact of industrial ocean fishing by international agreements would save bluefin tuna from imminent extinction and end the population collapse of other large fish species. Enforcing no-whaling protocols would spare endangered cetaceans from crisis conditions. Designating Marine Protected Areas and limiting catch sizes would ensure perpetual fish stocks in fishing areas.

The terrestrial equivalent of MPAs are parks. Beyond providing environmental protection and ecological security, they stabilize climate, counteract species extinction, educate people, generate employment, and are a source of local, provincial and national pride – surveys show that Canadians identify themselves more strongly with national parks than with hockey.

The growing anxiety about food production can even be addressed by low-tech means. A UN report on Agro-Ecology and the Right to Food (March 2011) found that developing countries could produce 80 to100 percent more food by practicing ecological rather than industrial agriculture. An organic system of careful planting would reduce the debilitating costs of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, make soils more drought resistant, buttress food self-sufficiency and also store vast amounts of carbon. In The Climate Challenge, Guy Dauncey argues that if 1.5 billion hectares of the world’s agricultural land were farmed organically, soils would sequester enough carbon dioxide to reduce atmospheric CO2 by an astounding 11 percent.

Conserving energy is the cheapest way to energy sufficiency. If we can accept this fact and be aware of the energy consumption of our appliances, gadgets, homes, vehicles and travel habits, then we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification, harmful pollutants and the cost to ourselves, our society and our environment. If we take the cynical position that our individual actions are unimportant, that it’s too late to stop the slide into environmental Armageddon or that ecological problems do not exist, then inaction ensures that the possible becomes the inevitable.

Even without the revolutionary technological innovations that will hopefully solve all our energy needs and save us from the fossil fuel conundrum, we can control greenhouse gas emissions by carbon taxes that can then be directed to research and projects to reduce the effects we don’t want. A price on carbon can have the multiple benefits of providing a cost incentive to reduce emissions, of inducing a price structure that will encourage innovation while providing funds that can be directed to carbon reducing projects. Ironically, because the business community hates uncertainty and anticipates the inevitability of some form of carbon tax to control greenhouse gas emissions, it actually wants them sooner rather than later.

Consumers guide the marketplace and voters elect governments. In modern, industrial, democratic societies, people get what they deserve. A cynical public with cynical views abdicates the right to determine the products it can buy, the safety it expects and the destiny it imagines. Cynicism thwarts collective involvement and action. It disempowers the individual and transfers authority and control to those who function in self-interest. It invites victimization and exploitation, the very processes that create cynicism. Individually and collectively we make the world we want, a task that can be as easy as making thoughtful choices.

So many of our environmental problems can be addressed by simple changes in attitude. Recent sociological studies have indicated a worrisome rise during the last two decades in the use of “I”, “me” and “mine” instead of “us”, “we” and “they”. This unhealthy trend can be counteracted by thinking in terms of our human community and the environment that sustains it. On a planet where everything is connected to everything else, obsessive self-interest is ultimately unfulfilling and self-defeating. Indeed, if being cynical about everything means that not even cynicism can be trusted, then we can all find better options.

Human societies do not behave rationally. This is the conclusion reached by Robert Prechter, an American financial guru and social theorist who outlines his ideas in a 1999 book, The Wave Principle of Human Social Behaviour and the New Science of Sociometrics (New Scientist, May 22/10).

Prechter argues that societal moods swing from optimism to pessimism – so called Elliott Waves – and these swings control the movement of financial markets, investment strategies, consumer purchasing patterns and even popular trends such as fashions, films, books and music. “Positive moods” are reflected in such words as “unifying”, “liberating”, “joining” and “tolerant”, whereas “negative moods” are indicated by “fragmentation”, “separation”, “restricting” and “bigoted / xenophobic”.

According to fellow scholar, John Casti, the last great “megachange” that buoyed optimism was the official beginning of globalization in 1975 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (Ibid.). This positive mood lasted until 1999 when the real value of money, as measured in gold, peaked. Since then, Casti argues, globalization has created a deepening pessimism. Its very foundations of “income balance, free movement of labour, reduction or removal of trade tariffs, and the like”, have failed. Income disparity and protectionism are increasing, not decreasing.

But the pessimism is rooted more deeply than in commerce and social justice. Casti cites the work of John Petersen, a non-profit think-tank founder whose “predictive modelling” coined “megachanges”. His modelling also identified other unsettling trends linked to globalization, including “the collapse of the global financial system, the end of oil, serious climate change, dramatic rises in food price, and more.”

The ideas of Prechter, Casti and Petersen all identify a generally negative mood coursing through human society. While globalization has brought many promises of prosperity and some clear benefits, beneath the superficial hue of optimism are systemic flaws that are creating a deepening and pervasive apprehension.

The paradox of globalization is that it offers connectivity and cooperation while its size and complexity highlights our individual powerlessness and precariousness. Economic, political, social and environmental globalization also means interdependence and vulnerability – whatever happens anywhere on the planet affects everyone elsewhere. The effect is a feeling of being overwhelmed by information and forces beyond our personal control.

The earthquake and subsequent damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is just the most current example. As a consequence of events in Japan, British Columbians are compelled to monitor local rain and seaweed for radiation levels. Rotating electrical outages in Japan have broken the global supply chain for auto manufacturing, one of the world’s most complex. Of the 3,000 parts that go into a car or truck, “each of those parts is made up of hundreds of other pieces supplied by multiple companies. All it takes is for one part to go missing or arrive late, and a vehicle can’t be built” (Globe & Mail, Mar. 29/11). Consequently, auto plants in North America are shut down and workers are laid off. An interruption in the supply of Japanese computer chips and other digital components has the same global effect.

The integration of the world’s financial system into a global network of interconnections creates another kind of precariousness. The ramifications of relaxed lending and investment policies in the US culminated in a 2008 seismic shock to world banks and economies that is still being felt. Consequent debt in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Iceland and Portugal all reverberate around the planet, affecting employment, exchange rates, savings, retirement plans and our individual sense of security.

Terrorism causes global edginess. The unrest generated by a burgeoning human population creates humanitarian, political and military complications that affect all countries. Global food supplies are tight enough that crop failures in Australia, Ukraine or Russia force up the price of bread in Canada. A radical Islamic group in Afghanistan or a deranged dictator in Libya produces global disturbances. A fundamentalist preacher ceremonially burns a Koran in Florida and enraged mobs kill innocent United Nations’ employees in Kandahar.

But the most important influence of all occurs with Earth’s biosphere, the living environment that enwraps our planet. Emissions from coal plants in China or tar sands in Canada bathe the entire world with pollutants. Melting ice in Greenland raises oceans everywhere. Diseases and exotic species spread easily with our global transportation systems. Because communication and media connect instantly to every part of the planet, everywhere becomes local. A round Earth provides no escape.

If the global mood of pessimism is to change to optimism, then our governments must think beyond trade agreements to environmental protocols that protect our atmosphere, oceans, fisheries, forests, soils and climate. Ecological security is primary. Everything depends on it. Although such security can never be guaranteed, at the very least we should have some sense that the deteriorating conditions on our planet are being reversed.

To regain our feeling of individual empowerment, we need a paradigm shift from spending and exploiting to conserving and caring. We also need awareness and initiatives that will counterbalance globalization with localization. These are rational things we could do to improve our mood.

David Suzuki’s presence at the March showing of his biographical film, Force of Nature, guaranteed that the Quadra Island Community Centre would be packed. The film itself was both informative and poignant, an artful blending of one of Suzuki’s most powerful and eloquent environmental speeches with scenes from his childhood, his rising profile as a geneticist, his ascent as an internationally known broadcaster – his television program, The Nature of Things, has been running for decades – his media status as a world-acclaimed environmentalist, and now his additional role as a senior citizen and a grandfather. Suzuki’s personal and reflective comments about his life were insightful, honest, brave and inspiring.

But the evening also had a sad and sobering edge. While Suzuki’s enthusiastic response to questions after the film revealed a passion still burning with intensity, he seemed frustrated that his tenacity, his teaching, his warnings, his TV programs and his profile as an advocate for the sanctity of nature had not translated into significant environmental reform. Indeed, from Suzuki’s perspective as a scientist, our collective human behaviour is plunging our planet into ecological crisis, with little more than token efforts to avert a looming catastrophe. And Canada, his home country, has a government so indifferent – sometimes even obstructionist – as to be an exasperating embarrassment.

Suzuki attempted to attribute his failed influence on the character of television itself, a medium with shrinking units of concentration and rising levels of superficiality that seems to translate even dire subjects into entertainment and passivity. But a much better explanation for his failure may come from the ponzi scheme that allowed Bernard Madoff to bilk billions of dollars from usually thoughtful investors. This is a subject that Margaret Heffernan explores most thoughtfully in Why We See No Evil (Globe & Mail, Feb. 19/11). If Heffernan is correct, the forces that allowed Madoff to operate for so long are also allowing the environmental degradation of our planet.

Heffernan argues that people have “a preference for the familiar”, a trait that keeps them doing what they usually do, whether it be investing money in an unsafe place or exploiting their surroundings beyond ecological sustainability. Just as they have an affinity for other people of the same culture, tastes and values, they also have an affinity for familiar products, attitudes and behaviour. If they are accustomed to high levels of consumption, easy garbage disposal, throw-away products, foreign holidays, high meat diets, new technology and big cars, then their inclination is to continue with this lifestyle, despite all the warnings that this behaviour may be fundamentally flawed. Just as a momentum of common acceptance, trust and opinion blinds them to a faulty investment scheme, it also blinds them to the ecological damage surrounding them.

Heffernan notes that this “willful blindness” is not a legal excuse or defence in law. People who could have known, and should have known, are treated as if they did know, and are therefore held responsible for their behaviour. Although people may feign unawareness and pretend they are not responsible for their investment strategies or environmental impact, they are ultimately culpable. At some point in the accumulation of available evidence, ignorance becomes intentional denial and is no longer available as an excuse.

This “willful blindness” also works at a “collective” level. As Heffernan notes, “the availability of others to take action blinds us to our personal responsibility and capacity” to act. Events have illustrated innumerable times that “the larger the number of witnesses to a crime or accident, the less likely it is than anyone will intervene.” This form of mass inertia begins to explain how a society is immobilized to take collective measures to rectify an environmental problem. Everyone is waiting for someone else to act. Governments wait for direction from their voting public while the voting public waits for initiatives from their governments. Meaningful change must overcome this handicap.

In a complicating twist to this process, Heffernan points out that “organizations can make themselves structurally blind by what they reward and what they don’t.” In a “strong sales culture” such as banking, scrutiny is low because the objective is to move money, not to judge it. This is why banks never exposed Madoff. Transpose this tendency to a consumer society and the environmental implications are immediately evident. Caution, restraint and sustainability are not its guiding principles. Participation in such a society is measured by spending – the latest gadget, fashion, trend or fad – but not restraint. Join in or be left out. The net result is a high-speed pillaging of the planet by a willful and collective blindness. No wonder Suzuki feels ineffective.

In the last part of Heffernan article, she points out that “seeing what is going on inside our organizations is the toughest question of all – and the bigger the business, the harder the problem.” The wider and deeper Madoff’s ponzi scheme spread, the more invisible it became and the more difficult it was to stop. The same dynamic applies to a consumer society. Recognizing its failings and steering it to sustainability is an enormous challenge. Accordingly, those who are heroic enough to warn about faulty investment schemes, precarious financial systems or collapsing ecologies are rare – and may even suspect and vilified for their efforts.

Heffernan reminds us, however, that “history is full of remarkable individuals who have proved it is possible to see better.” They invariably share the traits of being optimists, detailed thinkers, concerned for victims, seekers of fresh wisdom and eschewers of conventional leadership – all the attributes demonstrated by Suzuki in Force of Nature. But Heffernan also notes with some foreboding that such people often become disillusioned. Perhaps Suzuki – and everyone like him – should brace themselves for this prospect.

Perhaps the pursuit of happiness was never such a good idea. But, in 1776, this objective from the French Enlightenment seemed to be convincing enough that it was incorporated into the Constitution of the newly formed United States of America as a founding principle.

Happiness as an objective should have been suspect from the beginning. The serious pursuit of it arose out of the emotional exuberance of 18th century Baroque that then became the decorative frivolity of Rococo. Justification for creating these two aesthetic styles in Western civilization seemed more closely related to extravagant indulgence than temperate responsibility. The music of both periods was sublime – Bach evolved into Mozart – but the pursuit of happiness itself came from the apex of decadent aristocratic life, before its privileges were shaken by the seismic revolutions in America and France, and the subsequent political shocks that radically altered Europe’s social structure.

This history is the primary reason why happiness should be doubted as a founding principle for any country. Happiness is essentially frivolous, superficial and ephemeral. It is not as profound, solid or reliable as contentment, tranquility or cooperation. As an objective, happiness is restless, uncertain and fickle, hardly suitable for a new America that prided itself as the living political embodiment of the Enlightenment’s high principles. But this obsession with happiness does begin to explain the present financial dilemma facing the United States and those other countries that have modelled their economies on the naive optimism underlying the dubious ideals of unfettered capitalism and boundless consumerism.

One of the financial legacies of the unrestrained pursuit of happiness is debt. The US budgetary deficit for 2011 is $1.6 trillion. Its national debt is $14.3 trillion and counting. The US government’s budgetary strategy is frozen in a stalemate between two mutually incompatible paths to happiness: the Republicans refuse to increase taxes to reduce debt while the Democrats refuse to relinquish the social programs that are too costly for the present tax regime. Unless this impasse can be broken, the annual US deficit is expected to increase to about $10 trillion by 2021. By then, the US will have spent as much as $200 trillion on miscellaneous programs and entitlements that can only be financed by borrowing. The burden of debt will eventually become more than the country can bear and the result will be financial and political collapse. Traces of this process are already occurring in many US states.

In The Empire of Debt, Jason Kirby (Maclean’s, Feb. 14/11) refers to the Harvard economic historian, Niall Ferguson, who notes that in recent centuries the empires of the Spanish, French, Ottoman and British all collapsed under the weight of excessive debt. When the cost of servicing their debt reached 50 to 60 percent of revenues, and when interest rates rose as investors lost confidence in the security of their loans, the collapse of these empires occurred as quickly as 15 to 20 years.

A survey of 26 of the major industrial economies of the world – excluding only China – indicates an epidemic of ascending debt. Recent massive infusions of cash to Iceland, Ireland and Greece have avoided default on loans and averted a global financial crisis. But from Australia at 40 percent of its GDP to Japan at 210 percent, the debt situation of the world’s major economies looks gloomy – the US sits at 100 percent of its GDP while Canada, at 83 percent, is burdened with record high consumer debt. Japan owes $11.98 trillion, just short of 1 quadrillion yen. Its economic structure, the third largest on the planet, is described as a “Madoff scheme” that is doomed to fail.

The seriousness of all this debt is usually excused by the argument that expanding economic activity reduces the debt-to-GDP ratio, thereby decreasing the seriousness of any deficits – if the economy continues to expand faster than the debt then the burden of debt seems to shrink.This is the thinking used to justify deficit and debt. But such logic fails when considering that any particular economy could contract, a clear possibility given that countries exist in competitive relationships with each other, that global financial structures are inherently unstable, and that finite natural resources are not perpetually available to fuel ever-expanding economies.

This is the darkening shadow that hangs over the entire global financial system. Our economies and our lifestyles are founded on the monetary security of a system built entirely on precarious trust and rash optimism. When stresses such as political unrest, oil shortage, crop failure or climate catastrophes are added to the unstable intricacies of globalization, then the prospects seem increasingly uncertain and sobering.

Many human aspirations are laudable – if the aspirations are wise. But the pursuit of happiness may be the most elusive and empty of all aspirations. Indeed, the root cause of the multitude of crises we are now encountering – from financial to environmental – may be this superficial aspiration. Our imaginations have linked the unfulfillable quest for happiness with materialism and consumerism, an association that the machinery of economics is obligingly exploiting to its own impersonal ends. The result for us is frenzied effort, perpetual restlessness, eternal dissatisfaction and the mindless exploitation of Earth’s biosystems beyond sustainability.

Perhaps we should accept that the pursuit of happiness has overreached the reality of limits and utility, and that we urgently need a replacement that is more nourishing, substantial and promising.