Muslim Sportswomen Gain Standing in Beijing.
Thursday 07 August 2008

by: Aline Bannayan, Women’s eNews
 http://www.truthout.org/article/muslim-s…

The Beijing Olympics starting Friday will showcase the varying degrees to which Muslim countries are warming up to women’s sports. The United Arab Emirates and Oman are sending women for the first time.

Amman, Jordan - Even before the Beijing Summer Olympics begin on Friday, Habiba Hinai is tasting victory.

For the first time, her country is sending a female Olympian to the games. Buthaina Yaqoubi, 16, will compete in the 100-meter dash and either the long jump or the triple jump.

Hinai, one of three women to represent Oman by bearing the Olympic torch during the relay earlier this year, is vice-chair of Oman’s Volleyball Association, the highest position for any woman in the country’s sports scene.

For 18 years she has advocated for the advancement of women’s athletics in her country, seeing it expand from an activity only available in schools in 1993 to the formation of national women’s volleyball, tennis and table tennis teams in 2004.

Now that her country is sending female competitors to the games, Hinai says she can start looking forward to the day when more Muslim women join the International Olympic Committee and Olympic Asian Committee. “That’s the only way to develop sports in the Muslim world.”

The 135-member International Olympic Committee, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, has 15 female members. Two are former Olympians from Arab Muslim countries: Morocco’s 1984 track-and-field 400-meter star Nawal El Moutawakel, the first Arab woman to earn a gold medal, and Egyptian swimmer Rania Elwani, who competed from 1992 through 2000.

Nine men from Arab and Muslim countries also serve on the committee, which organizes the games and represents its 205 national members.

Warming Rates Vary

Muslim countries are warming up to women’s Olympics by varying degrees.

North African nations dominate in Muslim women’s representation. Among them, Tunisia is a particular standout, with women competing in track and field, canoeing, fencing, judo, table tennis, tennis, tae kwon do and wrestling.

The 11 women in Morocco’s 38-member delegation include 30-year-old Olympic 800-meter track champion Hasna Ben Hassi. The country’s many promising young competitors include 24-year-old Meriem Alaoui Selsouli, a potential gold medalist in the women’s 5,000-meter event, who faces fierce Ethiopian competition. The country is also sending Khadija Abbouda, the Olympics’ first Moroccan female archer.

Algeria’s female volleyball players, All Africa Games champions, will compete in that sport for the first time. “It’s extraordinary. We can meet the world’s best teams. And we’re setting an example for women’s sport in Algeria,” said team captain Marimal Madani. Algerian women will also compete in judo and athletics, where Nahida Touhami will compete in the 1500-meter event.

Jordan’s seven-member delegation includes four women. Among them Nadine Dawani, a tae kwon do competitor, and Zeina Sha’ban, a table tennis champion, have the honor of carrying their nation’s flag in the Aug. 8 opening ceremony.

First Women From Oman and UAE

Among the socially conservative Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates joins Oman in sending its first women to the games. Sheikha Maitha Mohammad Rashed Al-Maktoum, the daughter of Sheikh Mohammad, will compete in tae kwon do. Her cousin and another member of the ruling family, Sheikha Latifa Bint Ahmad Al-Maktoum, will take part in equestrian show jumping.

Muslim Women in Olympic History

1964: Iran sent its first female athlete to Olympics.

1984: Morocco’s Nawal El Moutawakel became the first Arab woman to win a gold medal when she came in first in the women’s 400 meters at the Los Angeles Games. She is now minister of sports.

1992: Hassiba Boulmerka of Algeria won a gold medal in 1,500-meter race. She often trained in Europe after being castigated in her own country for competing in a vest and shorts. That same year Susi Susanti became the first Olympic athlete to win a gold medal in badminton for Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

2000: Jordan’s Princess Haya, the sister of King Abdullah, became the first female Arab flag-bearer at an Olympic Games, the first and only Arab woman to compete in equestrian events and the first member of an Arab royal family to compete in the Olympics. In 2006, she became the first Arab woman to lead an international sports federation when she was elected president of the International Equestrian Federation.

2004: Women from Iran won medals in pistol shooting. That year Afghanistan-which had ended Taliban rule only three years earlier-sent two female athletes to compete; one in track and field and one in judo. Bahrain sent Ruqaya Al-Ghasra as their first-ever female competitor.

Iran, Pakistan and Bahrain, which usually have predominantly male delegations, are sending a limited number of women.

Iran’s 53 athletes include three women, who will compete in rowing, archery and tae kwon do.

Two women are among Pakistan’s 21 athletes. They are 22-year-old Sadaf Siddiqui running the 100-meter dash and 18-year-old swimmer Kiran Khan. Pakistan first sent female athletes to the games in 1996.

Bahrain is also sending two women, including Ruqaya Al-Ghasra, 24, who won the 200-meter event at the 2006 Doha Asian Games and the 100-meter dash at the 11th Pan-Arab Games in 2007. She has qualified for both the women’s 100-meter and 200-meter races in Beijing. Her countrywoman, Maryam Yusuf Jamal, will compete in the 800-meter.

Iraq has one female sprinter, Dana Hussein, 21, among its four qualifiers.

Somalia’s Samiyo Yusuf will run in the 400-meter and 800-meter events as the only female athlete representing the war-torn nation.

Brunei and Saudi Arabia will not be sending any women. Both countries bar women’s sports for “cultural and religious reasons” and do not allow women to participate in the Olympics.

Qatar and Kuwait will also not be sending any women to Beijing. Both countries allow women’s sports, but are opting to send male athletes with what they consider better competitive chances.

Post-Barcelona Push

Women’s participation in the Olympics has been a particularly sensitive subject since 1992.

That year, 35 countries - half of them Muslim - sent no female athletes to the Barcelona Games.

To lower those numbers two French advocates, Annie Sugier and Linda Weil-Curiel, founded a group called Atlanta Plus to work on requiring countries to include women in their Olympic delegations.

Weil-Curiel, a lawyer, says all-male delegations contravene the Olympic charter’s prohibition against all forms of discrimination. She has been lobbying the International Olympic Committee for years to impose sanctions on nations that bar women from competing.

Based in Paris, her organization now calls itself Atlanta-Sydney-Athens Plus and can happily point to the shrinking supply of all-male delegations.

Thirty-five all-male Olympic teams competed in Barcelona in 1992 compared to 26 in Atlanta in 1996, 10 in Sydney in 2000 and five in Athens 2004. There are at least four all-male delegations sent to Beijing, but a tally is not yet available.

Women came closer to parity during 2004 when they competed in 135 events and represented 44 percent of all participants.

Sports officials in Arab countries contend that women’s limited participation is not restricted to their countries and point to the limited number of women in the International Olympic Committee’s decision-making bodies.

In March 2008, during the fourth International Olympic Committee conference on women and sports, held in Jordan, 600 participants endorsed the Dead Sea Plan of Action. It calls for gender equality in national teams, their leadership and technicians, and also encourages female sports reporters to actively cover the events. Attendees included the world’s top sporting officials, including International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge, many Olympic medalists and King Abdullah and Queen Rania of Jordan.

Women were barred from competing in the first modern games in 1896 but four years later they were permitted to participate in the “ladylike” sports of tennis, golf and croquet.

In Beijing, female athletes will compete in nearly every Olympic sport, including wrestling, which was opened to women for the first time at the Athens Games. The Japanese are expected to be the dominant force with the Americans, Bulgarians and Chinese expected to pose a threat in their quest for Olympic gold.

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Aline Bannayan is a reporter and editor based in Amman, Jordan. A former national basketball team player, she has covered sports for the Jordan Times as well as the AP in Amman since 1991.

The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org www.happyplanetindex.org

Download the reports
Download the Happy Planet report (2006, pdf)
Download the European Happy Planet report (2007, pdf)

See the Global HPI map:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm

Let the diplomatic Beijing Games begin… but which leaders are taking part?
The Independent - Thursday, 7 August 2008.

(Photo) Torchbearer Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets basketball team holds the torch as he runs through the Tiananmen Gate during the 2008 Beijing Olympics torch relay.

WHO’S COMING!

*George Bush

A quiet confirmation from the White House on Independence Day helped turn the tide for China. Mr Bush is believed to have accepted a personal invitation from his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao, and Japan and Russia quickly followed suit. He said a snub would insult the people of China. Covering his bases, Mr Bush got his criticism of Beijing out of the way yesterday.

*Sonia Gandhi

When it came to its rival developing superpower, China did not send an invitation to either the Indian head of state Pratibha Patil or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, inviting instead Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born head of India’s Congress Party and widow of the assassinated prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. She wasted little time in accepting.

*Nicolas Sarkozy

Unsurprisingly he has been the one to generate the most controversy. First flirted publicly with a boycott before thinking harder about the true cost of such a snub. Later realised that selling the Airbus and nuclear technology were greater priorities – whatever his human rights critics said. And he’s curried favour by shying away from meeting the Dalai Lama during the Games.

*Kevin Rudd

The Australian Prime Minister has told the Chinese some awkward truths in their own language. The former diplomat and Mandarin speaker called on Beijing to engage with the Dalai Lama in March and followed it up with a candid visit in April. He stopped short of boycotting the opener in a move which might have threatened trade links.

———————

Who’s not going:

*Gordon Brown

He is a realist over relations with China, having agreed fresh trade deals with Beijing this year, but he was unable to resist the temptation to hint at dissent and opted to stay away from the opening ceremony after the crackdown in Tibet. Mr Brown insists the two are not connected. For a politician in his parlous situation, he might regret opting for the closing ceremony instead.

*Angela Merkel

The most straightforward of Europe’s leaders on issues that China finds uncomfortable, she risked the ire of Beijing by welcoming the Dalai Lama to Berlin last year – something her predecessor Gerhard Schröder hadn’t dared to do. She has been equally blunt in pointing out that the Olympic opener clashes with her holiday, so she will not be attending.

*Stephen Harper

Canada’s prime minister appeared to be swimming with the mainstream when he confirmed in April that he would not attend the Bird’s Nest show. Looking around the G8 he had the Italians, Germans, Brits and, he thought, the US with him. A few months later the snub looks more costly and Canada’s trade minister has been forced to assure the public that it won’t hit exports.

*Hans Gert-Pöttering

The president of the European Parliament is the only leading political figure to formally boycott the ceremony. Without a trade portfolio to defend – or at least with others to do that job, he felt free to take a stand over China’s treatment of the Dalai Lama. It remains a moot point whether the invitation list ever included the German politician.

———————–

And who wasn’t welcome !!!!

*Robert Mugabe

The embattled Zimbabwean leader got his refusal in first, saying that talks to resolve the political crisis prevented him from going. However, Beijing had already made it clear in private that he was not wanted. While Mr Mugabe does not usually do as he is told, he was not willing to embarrass his Chinese backers, at a time when he needs them more than ever.

*Omar Al-Bashir

While he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court, he has not been invited by Beijing. The Sudanese leader can count on Chinese support so long as he keeps the oil exports coming, but his is not a friendship Beijing wants to project. Darfur has been rivalled only by Tibet as a negative factor in China’s international image.

*Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The unpredictable Iranian leader was among the few leaders the rest regard as a pariah who was offered a seat at Beijing. He politely refused the invitation in May but said he might show up for the Paralympics. Despite Tehran’s insistence to the contrary, some sources insist that China had made an offer it wanted the man in Tehran to refuse.

*Kim Jong-Il

It’s hard to know whether the North Korean leader’s decision to stay at home has been greeted with greater relief in Beijing or Washington. A public encounter with Kim was not a prospect to thrill the White House – or his South Korean counterpart. Instead, his right-hand man Kim Yong Nam will be a “guest of honour”.

Libya Preaches to Durban II on Racism Against Maids, as Qaddafi Jr. Arrested for Beating Maids
Published by UN Watch - August 7, 2008
Many newspapers over the past few weeks have reported on Libya’s hostile measures against Switzerland and its citizens. Few, though, have noted the irony of it all, a part of which relates to the United Nations.

The Incident

The conflict began after Hannibal, the youngest son of Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi, and his wife Aline were arrested by Geneva police in their luxury hotel, which is situated next to the UN human rights office. Two of their servants, a Moroccan man and a Tunisian woman, had complained of being beaten with a belt and coat hanger, causing hotel staff to call in the authorities. (The desert despot’s 32-year-old son has a long record of violent run-ins with the law across European capitals.)

The couple were charged with assault. Hannibal spent two evenings in detention while his wife, who came to Geneva to give birth, was transferred to a maternity unit. Released on $500,000 bail, they flew back to Libya escorted by doctors from Geneva’s main hospital.
Qaddafi’s Revenge

The outrage has ebbed, but the crisis remains. Today’s Tribune de Geneve reports that Foreign Minster Micheline Calmy-Rey may head on a special mission to Libya. Which bring us to the irony of it all.

Swiss Ironies

But it’s more, more than just oil, investments and trade. It’s political and moral support. In the past year, Calmy-Rey and her diplomats worldwide waged a massive campaign to elect her Geneva friend Jean Ziegler — the 1989 co-founder of the “Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize” — as a senior adviser to the UN Human Rights Council. When the vote was won, Swiss UN ambassador Blaise Godet literally embraced his colleague from Cuba’s Castro regime, Ziegler’s other favorite government, thereby revealing another unholy alliance.

This week in Geneva the council’s advisors feted Ziegler at their inaugural session, while choosing as their chair the Cuban Alfonso Martinez — whose long record on a predecessor UN body included killing a resolution for the Kurdish victims gassed by Saddam in Halabja. When the current stand-off was ignited in July, Swiss newspaper Le Matin suggested Ziegler as a natural mediator. “I think Qaddafi appreciates me as a writer and intellectual, because he reads my books which are translated into Arabic in Cairo,” Ziegler told the newspaper. “There is a relationship of mutual respect and listening between us,” said Ziegler, from his place of vacation in Calabria, Italy.

However, the newspaper noted, “the sociologist categorically refuses to comment on the current crisis between Switzerland and Libya.” Nor did Ziegler ever say a word — or lift a finger – over all the years that the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor were cruelly held hostage in Libyan jails.

Durban II: Libya Pledges to Confront “New Form of Racism Related to Maids”

Perhaps the greatest unspoken irony is that of Libya’s role. The country currently chairs the planning of the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, the UN’s next world conference against racism and intolerance. In advance of an African preparatory session later this month, Libya has just submitted a UN questionnaire on its policies and practices.

Here we learn that the sixth principle of Qaddafi’s Green Charter “defines Libya’s society of non-discrimination.” And that the penal code “does not discriminate between local or foreign workers in Libya.”  And that Article 420 prohibits “all forms of slavery” and “forced labor.” Finally, “Libya does not only not practice racism but we combat the practice of regimes against the African people.” How? By confronting — get this — a “new form of racism related to house helpers (maids).” No less.

Yes, over the next year the world shall look to the Guide of the Revolution to guide us all on how to treat foreigners, how to practice tolerance, and — as its most shining example — how to treat house helpers and maids.

Meanwhile, in Libya, the mother of the abused Moroccan servant has been thrown into jail, and his brother forced into hiding.

Eventually, a deal will be struck, Calmy-Rey will kowtow before Qaddafi, the criminal case will be closed. Hannibal will then be free to return to his beloved Lake Geneva playground.

As Libya’s leading expert on how to address what it calls a new form of racism — how to treat house helpers — why not have Hannibal Qaddafi take the place of the current Libyan represenative and personally head the UN’s Durban II process? More than anyone, he will appreciate the job’s diplomatic immunity.

Q&A: ‘Israel In a Weak Parallel with Apartheid’ -
An IPS Interview with Judge Dennis Davis, High Court Judge in Cape Town.

JERUSALEM, Jul 31 (IPS) - In Israel’s control of Palestinian movement, Dennis Davis sees a “stark” parallel with the old, apartheid South Africa of which he was an outspoken critic. But Davis, a Justice of the High Court in Cape Town and a prominent member of the South African Jewish community, strongly rejects those who “run from that into an immediate conclusion” that Israel is an apartheid state.

Davis, who was also involved in drafting the constitution of post-apartheid South Africa, recently visited Israel and the Palestinian territories as part of a delegation of prominent South African civil rights activists. In its closing statement, the group said it had not come “to bring solutions, or to spend our time here debating solutions,” but that it wanted “to learn, and to witness first-hand the suffering, pain, anger and human rights abuses.”

Davis, who is a former chairman of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and a former head of the Centre for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, spoke to Peter Hirschberg from IPS about the “apartheid” parallel and about the political impotency that he senses on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

IPS: Israel has been accused of adopting policies that are reminiscent of apartheid South Africa. Is this a fair comparison?

Dennis Davis: I think the only issue is with the movement of people. This is remarkably similar to certain forms of influx control (in the old South Africa). And it’s so much more sophisticated. We didn’t have computers. And the separate roads and separate number plates (for Palestinians and Jews in the West Bank) is unquestionably a more sophisticated form of restriction of movement of the kind that we had. The fact that you’ve got those definitions at some of those controls, of what constitutes an Israeli and what constitutes somebody else, is not entirely unreminiscent of what we had. I was deeply disturbed by that because I hadn’t realised how stark that parallel was.

IPS: So you feel the comparison is valid?

DD: It is unfortunate that people now run from that into an immediate conclusion that this is an apartheid state. We met Israel’s Chief Justice and what is clear is that there is a pretty relaxed form of (judicial) standing by which Palestinians can petition the High Court of Justice in Israel. That’s impressive. That obviously didn’t exist in South Africa. And within Israel itself, there aren’t zones the way we had group areas (for blacks and whites). Arabs who live here can also vote and have rights of citizenship.

This is not so much a discrimination based on ethnic identity in the broad sense of Arab versus Jew. It does seem to me to be a very intricate form of social control.

IPS: Apartheid was based on racial superiority.

DD: There’s no racial superiority here. There’s no pervading ideology that confirms the inferiority of Palestinians.

Both sides play the victim. There is tremendous competition over who the victim is. When you have a notion of victimhood what you tend to do is to dehumanise the other. I think there is a lot of dehumanising of the other on both sides. If I was a Palestinian I’d probably be very, very angry. If I was an Israeli who had suffered suicide bombings I’d be incredibly angry as well.

The one group that impressed me most of all was the Parents Circle (made up of bereaved parents on both sides). I was incredibly moved by them. That sort of group and others perhaps are the beginnings of what in South Africa became a much more non-racial movement. In South Africa, the prefiguring of the society in which whites and blacks could live together began a very long time ago. The Communist Party. The trade unions. There’s much less of that here. There is such an absence of integration here.

When you separate populations like this and lock them into an almost fatal embrace then there’s a dehumanising aspect to it. What’s good about the Parents Circle is that it does show there is at least some movement toward seeing the humanity in the other. I look at the soldiers. I look at these kids. It’s got to dehumanise them. You can’t be policemen at border posts like this, having to question people, and not have your humanity affected. I cry for them.

But I think it’s incredibly unhelpful to say you can simply take this to be apartheid and therefore the South African struggle is the same and the South African solution is the same. That’s a very lazy form of reasoning.

IPS: One of the problems for Israel with the apartheid analogy is that its own leaders use it, albeit with very different intentions to those who challenge the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has invoked the comparison, warning Israelis that if they don’t relinquish the territories they will find themselves in a South Africa-type situation in which a minority of Jews rules over a majority of Palestinians, and that will spell the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

DD: But the paradox of it for an outsider is this: that argument is very compelling but also bizarre, because at the same time that you’re making it, you then drive through the West Bank and you are struck by the permanency of settlements. So what worries one is that successive Israeli governments have made it more difficult to get to a two-state solution.

For somebody who really wants the state of Israel not only to exist but to flourish, which is me, I’ve got to say that I’m deeply disturbed by the fact that they’re trying to keep two contradictory balls in the air at the same time. It doesn’t work. If you continue to strengthen West Bank settlement for another five years, lord alone knows what will happen. You can’t do that and talk the demographic game at the same time.

IPS: When it comes to finding a way to unlock the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, can the South African paradigm be applied?

DD: If you are going to work within the paradigm that’s being argued at present in Israel, which is the two-state solution, then you are dealing with a divorce, whereas in the South African context you were dealing with a marriage. So in the South African context the entire struggle was about the terms of a marriage, whereas here it seems to be about the distribution of property after the divorce. That inherently puts you in an entirely different business.

But there is one parallel. I really do believe that if an Israeli prime minister had the courage tomorrow morning to say ‘Fine, we are going to talk about a comprehensive two-state solution and we’ll even deal with the refugee problem through compensation,’ then I think what you’d notice in the South African experience is that at some point the momentum is too great to claw it back.

When De Klerk unbanned the ANC in 1990, no way did he say there would be an ANC government. He hoped he could unban the ANC, normalise politics and cobble together a coalition that would enable him to retain power. At some point it became clear to him that he wasn’t going to be able to do it. It was too late to put the genie back in the bottle. I think that’s possible here as well. But where is this impetus going to come from?

IPS: With Olmert embroiled in a corruption scandal that seems to have ended his term in office, the current Israeli government doesn’t have the political will to take such a dramatic step?

DD: No, the government doesn’t have the political will. And the Americans (aren’t pushing). Unless there is going to be a dramatic change with Obama, if he gets in. And your economy isn’t suffering. So where is the impetus to do this? And given the divisions amongst the Palestinians at the moment, Israel could happily see them off for years to come.

This is not South Africa 1985. This is not a situation where you can say, ‘Sanctions are biting and the resistance is showing no sign of dying down.’

But it can’t work when you reach the point when you’re actually suppressing the majority of the population. How ironic it would be if all my (South African) friends who live here will then be living under something they sought genuinely to escape from.

IPS: Another difference between the two situations is that unlike the ANC, Palestinian leaders seem hopelessly ineffective when it comes to galvanising their people around a single vision and crafting a coherent political strategy.

There’s no broader vision. There’s no sense of political vision. Both Fatah and Hamas are pretending they’re totally in control and that the other one isn’t. What Hamas is able to show is that if you deal with the social question — not that they’ve done it very well — you can grab hold. But is there anything that cements and holds the Palestinian people together as the ANC did in South Africa? No.

Why your happiness matters to the planet: Surveys and research link true happiness to a smaller footprint on the ecology.

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor / July 22, 2008
From New York, Reporter Moises Velasquez-Manoff discusses the correlations between happiness, material goods, and ecological footprints.

Overall, people around the world have grown happier during the past 25 years - this according to the most recent World Values Survey (WVS), a periodic assessment of happiness in 97 nations.

On average, people describing themselves as “very happy” have increased by nearly 7 percent. The findings seem to contradict the view, held by some, that national happiness levels are more or less fixed.

The report’s authors attribute rising world happiness to improved economies, greater democratization, and increased social tolerance in many nations. Along with material stability, freedom to live as one pleases is a major factor in subjective well-being, they say.

But the survey, based at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor, also underscore that, beyond a certain point, material wealth doesn’t boost happiness.

The United States, which ranked 16th, and has the world’s largest economy, has largely stalled in happiness gains – this despite ever more buying power.

Americans are now twice as rich as they were in 1950, but no happier, according to the survey.

Other rich countries, the United Kingdom and western Germany among them, show downward happiness trends. For psychologists and environmentalists alike, these observations prompt a profound question. Rich countries consume the lion’s share of world resources.

Overconsumption is a major factor in environmental degradation, global warming chief among them.

Could a wrong-headed approach to seeking happiness, then, be exacerbating some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems? And could learning to be truly content help mitigate them?

In the past decade, a cadre of psychologists has directed its attention away from determining what’s wrong with the infirm toward quantifying what’s right with the healthy. They’ve christened this new field “positive psychology,” and what they’re discovering perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprising. At the core, humans are social beings. While food and shelter are absolutely essential to well-being, once these basic needs are fulfilled, engagement with other human beings makes people happiest.

For Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the problem in the US is not consumption per se, but that as a society we consume in ways that don’t make us happy. He divides the pursuit of happiness into three categories: seeking positive emotion, or feeling good; engagement with others; and meaning, or participating in something larger than oneself.

People, he notes, are often happiest when helping other people, when engaged in “self-transcendent” activities. What does this mean?

Rather than making a gift of the latest iPhone, buy someone dancing lessons, he says. Instead of taking a resort vacation, build a house with Habitat for Humanity.

“The pursuit of engagement and the pursuit of meaning don’t habituate,” he says, whereas trying to feel good is like eating French vanilla ice cream: The first bite is fantastic; the tenth tastes like cardboard.

By definition, happiness is subjective. And yet, scientists find measurable differences in people who describe themselves as happy. They’re more productive at work. They learn more quickly. Strong social networks – a large predictor of happiness – also have health effects, researchers say.

One study found that belonging to clubs or societies cut in half members’ risk of dying during the following year. Another found that, when exposed to a cold virus, children with stronger social networks fell ill only one-quarter as often as those without.

For psychologists, social networks explain one of the seeming paradoxes of WVS findings: While relatively rich Denmark took the top spot, much less wealthy Puerto Rico and Colombias are second and third. In fact, relatively poor Latin America countries often score high on WVS rankings. This may underline the value of community, family, and strong social institutions to well-being.

Scientists say this need for community may be a result of humanity’s long evolution in groups. Living together conferred an advantage, they say. In the hunter-gatherer world, relatedness, autonomy, curiosity, and competence – the very things that psychologists find make people happy – “had payoffs that were pretty clear,” says Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester in New York. “Aspiring for a lot of material goods is actually unhappiness-producing,” he says. “People who value material good and wealth also are people who are treading more heavily on the earth – and not getting happier.”

High consumption fails to make us happy, and it comes at a cost. According to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) 2006 Living Planet Report, humanity’s ecological footprint now exceeds earth’s capacity to regenerate by about 25 percent.

Furthermore, with only 5 percent of the world’s population, North America accounts for 22 percent of this footprint. The US consumes twice what its land, air, and water can sustain. (By contrast, WWF calculates that Africa, with 13 percent of earth’s population, accounts for 7 percent of its footprint.) America’s outsize footprint results in part from its appetite for stuff – what psychologists now say is the wrong approach to lasting well-being.

“The pursuit of happiness can drive environmental degradation, but only a degraded type of happiness pursuit leads to that outcome,” says Kennon Sheldon, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in an e-mail. “The standard western focus upon economic utility as the highest good (exemplified by the US) seems to encourage that kind of degraded pursuit.”

Worse, so-called “extrinsic” values (wealth, power, fame), as opposed to “intrinsic” values (adventure, engagement, meaning), seem to go hand-in-hand with more environmentally destructive behavior.

Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has found that people who are more extrinsically oriented tend to ride bikes less, buy second-hand less, and recycle less.

Nations with more individualistic and materialistic values also tend to be more ecologically destructive.

“The choice of sustainability is very consistent with a happier life,” Professor Kasser says. “Whereas the choice to live with materialistic [values] is a choice to be less happy.”

The idea that what’s good for humanity is also good for the planet is central to environmentalist Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy.” His prescriptions for lowering carbon emissions – living closer together, relocalizing food production, consuming less – line up with what psychologists say promotes happiness.

In fact, although painful in the short term, high fuel prices may result in happier Americans in the long run, says Mr. McKib ben. This year, Americans drove less than they did the year before – probably for the first time since the car was invented, he says. They also bought double the vegetable seeds this year compared with last. “These are signs of a new world,” he says by e-mail.

For their part, psychologists are advocating that policymakers use indicators other than the Gross National Product (GNP) to make decisions. What’s the purpose of an economy, they ask, if not to enhance the well-being of its citizenry?

“It’s because growth for growth sake” says Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Well-beong at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in London. It’s got its own internal logic, but it’s not serving humanity. So why are we doing it?”

Bhutan uses Gross National Happiness as a measure of its success. Although small and undeveloped, the largely Buddhist nation is the happiest in Asia, according to BusinessWeek.

Psychologists also have specific recommendations to promote national happiness, based on their findings about what makes people happy. Insecurity fosters a materialistic approach to life, they say. Policies that combat insecurity – universal healthcare, say, or good, affordable education – promote happiness. Many link social policies like these to Scandinavian nations’ consistently high happiness rankings.

Kasser has more ideas: Limit – and tax – advertising, he says. To promote consumption, ads foster insecurity, he says. That hinders self-acceptance, which is another predictor of lasting well-being.

NEF’s Happy Planet Index (HPI), meanwhile, has developed a new measure of a nation’s success. How efficiently does it generate happiness? HPI takes a country’s happiness and average life span and divides it by its ecological impact to measure how much it spent in achieving its well-being. On this scale, the Pacific archipelago nation of Vanatu comes in first place, Colombia second. Germany is twice as efficient at producing happiness as the US, which ranks 150th by that measure. Russia, with its low happiness scores and relatively low life expectancy, is 178th. And Zimbabwe, plagued by poverty and political turmoil, is the least efficient at producing happiness on Earth.

How The HPI is calculated:

The HPI reflects the average years of happy life produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of planetary resources consumed.

Put another way, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.
The Global HPI incorporates three separate indicators: ecological footprint, life-satisfaction and life expectancy. Conceptually, it is straight forward and intuitive:

HPI = [ (Life satisfaction x Life expectancy) /(Ecological Footprint + α) ] x ß

(For details of how alpha and beta are calculated, see the appendix in the full Happy Planet Index report)

The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org www.happyplanetindex.org

Download the reports
Download the Happy Planet report (2006, pdf)
Download the European Happy Planet report (2007, pdf)

See the Global HPI map:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm

The article appeared in The Christian Science Monitor - http://features.csmonitor.com/environmen…

It’s not genetics that makes Danes happy and Russians gloomy, according to the World Values Survey which, for thirty years, has been sending out questionnaires to people in 95 countries to ”know how others experience the world”. (NEWSCOM)