Although this topic was prescribed to me, it was a wonderful opportunity to revisit the concept of hauora which I was introduced to in high school, and discover links between it and the Hispanic concept of buen vivir.

Introduction

Sustainability and the good life: I think most people would agree these are two ideals which they aspire towards. But how they are defined varies from person to person. Therein lies a problem, because if either of these ideals requires collective effort to achieve, how will we do it if we cannot agree on the outcome?

I begin by outlining current ideas of sustainability and the good life. Following this, I cover the concepts of wellbeing, hauora and buen vivir to see how they might help us to better understand sustainability and the good life.

Sustainability

Whatever sustainability may be has been overshadowed by the term ‘sustainable development’. Ever since its seminal mention in the Brundtland Report, sustainable development has succeeded in fusing the concept of sustainability with a desire for economic growth. The report explains it in the following way:

Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits - not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities.

In my view, the focus on the needs of humans, the framing of the environment as nothing more than a host of resources, and the expectation that the biosphere is responsible for dealing with the consequences of our actions are all questionable. This twisting of sustainability seems to prioritise development over the environment. Our relationship with the environment is reduced to what we can take from it; from a Lockean viewpoint, its only value is financial, and “unproductive nature is mere wasteland” (Ellis 2022: 87).

When looking at sustainable development, one cannot avoid the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I think these come closer to a more balanced view of sustainability, however their purpose and power must still be questioned. While their aim is to build “an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for people and planet”, they are doing this “for the well-being of individuals and societies”, implying the health of the environment is only important insofar as it impacts our ability to flourish (UN, n.d.: sec. “Frequently Asked Questions”, emphasis added). Besides, the UN admits the SDGs are nothing more than a “compass” for countries to follow if they wish, without being legally binding (n.d.: sec. “Frequently Asked Questions”). There is certainly a place for such guidelines, but are they sufficient?

The good life

“You’re not going to get rich sitting on welfare,” admonished opposition leader Christopher Luxon (Radio New Zealand 2022: para. 4). Ignoring the welfare debate and focusing on the inherent assumption that everyone’s goal is to get rich, this says a lot about what the good life means to many. It is a life of consumerism and materialism, coinciding with the perception of sustainability as being resource-centred.

Our desire for infinite development has fuelled a cycle of consumerism which is accessible, at least for those in the West. While most Westerners can now afford a comfortable life where all their needs are easily met, this comes at the expense of the environment (Alexander 2011). In fact, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit’s Agenda 21 labelled this cycle “the major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment” (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, cited in Alexander 2011: sec. “Ecological”).

As well as being accessible, the cycle of consumerism is addictive. With each purchase we want even more, always believing the next buy will be the one that provides us with the good life. Of course, there are critics such as Syse and Mueller who see past this, noting that the cycle seems to breed discontent instead of happiness (2015). Syse and Mueller suggest that those who feel disillusioned by consumerism often seek solace in nature (2015). However, Hayward cautions that this desire “to withdraw from our rapidly degrading and disappointing world” in search of the good life is simply avoiding “our collective problems” instead of solving them (2021: 21).

It is that collective nature of the problems we face which makes reaching a consensus on sustainability and the good life so important. I find this importance poignantly summarised by Syse and Mueller, who also manage to tie together the two concepts when they write, “when we cross-pollinate ‘sustainability’ with ‘the good life’, the question of the good life becomes thoroughly anchored not only in our own mortality, but in the mortality of the Earth itself” (2015: 3).

Wellbeing

A dominant academic explanation of wellbeing splits it into two types, hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia refers to individual experiences including pleasure, satisfaction and comfort, while eudaimonia covers interpersonal and societal aspects such as our sense of belonging, adherence to etiquette and ethics, and contributing to a greater cause (Huta 2015). These terms can be traced back to Aristotle, whose idea of the good life was to focus on eudaimonia (Huta 2015).

I find it interesting that Aristotle saw eudaimonia as the key to wellbeing, as it seems most health promotion focuses on hedonia. Take for example the New Economic Foundation’s Five Ways to Wellbeing, which is the model used by our Mental Health Foundation (MHF) alongside Te Whare Tapa Whā (n.d.b). As White (2017: 126) points out, such models “aim to motivate individuals with a positive and proactive approach to take more responsibility for their own health”, which in my opinion comes across as somewhat neoliberal. Wellbeing is reduced to how we feel, and we are encouraged to change these individual feelings in a primarily individual way.

If wellbeing is focused on the individual, how can it help us to tackle the collective themes of sustainability and the good life? Hall suggests that “by giving priority to the idea of wellbeing over capital, we are invited to see nature as creating value for human beings, not merely the capitalist economy” (2022: 30). However, he acknowledges that this view remains rather selfish, as it does not look as far beyond the Lockean view as to suggest that the environment may have value regardless of what it can provide for us (Hall 2022).

For another suggestion I turn to Amartya Sen, who follows Aristotle’s lead by focusing on eudaimonia. Instead of linking our wellbeing to the resources at our disposal or the feelings we experience, Sen links it to our ability to use ‘embedded justice’, which is our ability to reason and take action (White 2017, Hayward 2021). Through embedded justice we ought to sense what the right outcome of sustainability is, and how we can take action to achieve that outcome and thus attain the good life.

Meanwhile, Atkinson rejects the hedonia/eudaimonia definition of wellbeing completely, instead viewing it as the result “of mutually constitutive interactions among the material, organic and emotional dynamics of places” (2013: 138, cited in White 2017: 129). This definition has clear implications for how wellbeing could relate to sustainability and the good life. Our wellbeing, far from being an individual concern, is now intertwined with the wellbeing of the environment – a stark contrast from the common refusal to accept that the environment even possesses wellbeing. Atkinson’s view also comes close to indigenous concepts such as hauora and buen vivir, which I will now discuss.

Hauora

Defining hauora as the Māori equivalent of health or wellbeing would strip it of all that makes it so unique and insightful. To get a better picture of what hauora encompasses, we can look to Mason Durie’s influential model which has become a staple of health education in Aotearoa: Te Whare Tapa Whā (TWTW).

In my experience of high school Health class, we were taught that TWTW was, as the name suggests, a whare comprised of four walls: taha tinana, physical wellbeing; taha hinengaro, mental/emotional wellbeing; taha whanau, social wellbeing; and taha wairua, spiritual wellbeing. The first three walls are easiest to correlate with Western understandings of wellbeing; however taha wairua can be challenging, as we are often quick to amount spirituality to religion, leaving it unclear what role taha wairua could play in the life of someone who is not religious.

Therefore I found the MHF’s explanation of taha wairua both clarifying and relevant, as they write that it “explores your relationship with the environment, people and heritage in the past, present and future” (n.d.a: sec. “The parts of the wharenui”). Perhaps we could expand the meaning of sustainability to the practice of sustaining that relationship, not just as a service to the environment but as a service to ourselves and what we stand for. Likewise, according to taha wairua, the good life cannot exist in a vacuum – it requires a sort of mindfulness of your place in the world and how you interact with it.

The MHF provided another revelation for me with the addition of a fifth component to TWTW: whenua (n.d.a). Thinking about it now, it seems obvious that the four walls of the whare are nothing without the whenua on which they stand, and that just as the collapse of one wall can impact the others, damage to the whenua can also have consequences. If we are to follow TWTW, the whenua component makes it extremely clear that not sustaining and nurturing our environment will render it impossible for us to live the good life, as our remaining hauora components will also suffer.

Buen vivir

While buen vivir can be translated as ‘living well’ or ‘the good life’, it takes a very different stance to that of the materialistic manifestation of the good life which I discussed earlier. This Spanish term finds its roots in Indigenous American concepts such as the Aymara’s ‘suma qamaña’, the good life sought and lived collectively, with that collective also embracing the environment; and the ‘ayllu’, a vision of wellbeing and connections which considers the environment as sentient and equal, much like the Māori concept of whakapapa (Gudynas 2011).

In contrast to Locke’s view that the environment’s only value is financial, placing the environment on the same level as humans makes it easier for us to respect it for the other aspects it has to offer, like its cultural or spiritual contributions, and even simply its beauty (Gudynas 2011). Buen vivir reminds us that just going outside and interacting with nature can help us to live the good life, and therefore argues that in return nature is deserving of respect. As the environment offers so much to sustain us – be it financially, spiritually, or in other ways – we must honour the reciprocal relationship.

Conclusion

In a world where the focus of sustainability is on sustaining resources and the economy, and the good life equates to earning and spending more and more, the concepts of wellbeing, hauora and buen vivir can all help us to realise our current versions of sustainability and the good life may need reshaping.

The main message, I believe, is to move away from individualism and embrace the collective – a collective which includes the environment. The concept of wellbeing has the least to offer here as it is still predominantly used in individualistic contexts, however more radical interpretations are gaining momentum. Indigenous concepts such as hauora and buen vivir have much to offer if we seek to redefine sustainability and the good life, although it will prove difficult to adopt them into Western contexts without diluting them. Regardless, something must be done about the collective problems we face, and these concepts offer a collective solution.

References