What Makes the Good Life?

What is the good life in the Anthropocene? For three days in July 2023, roughly fifteen environmental law professors met in Hood River, Oregon, to discuss this question. Throughout the conference, a brain trust of legal minds worked on some of the trickiest questions of our time, unpacking topics as varied as unsheltered populations in the heat to solar geoengineering. This was an ordinary academic meeting, with a typed, pre-set agenda, structured presentations, and formal meal and break times. Although they were interesting, however, it was not the conversations at the formal meeting times that interested me.

Instead, what caught my attention was what was happening outside of the formal discussions. What did people do during breaks? Where did their interests tend after hours? What were the “off-point” conversations people made? It was here, in these spaces between what we were “supposed” to be doing, that law professors—unaware that they were being observed—unconsciously revealed their preferences of what the “good life” meant to them. What came forward was observations of tactile, physical connection with the natural world. When academics aren’t performing the job of being academics, they are humans – humans on a planet spinning around the sun, one species among countless others with a thirst for contact with the natural world.

Here are some of the things I observed my colleagues doing:

• Swimming in the Columbia River Gorge at 9 pm. They submerged their bodies in lukewarm water, dark blue, framed by the hunter-green fringe of a tree line contrasting against the warm pink of a not-quite-visible subset.
• Standing in the sun between meetings, arms outstretched. “I am like a lizard, taking in the sun,” my colleague said. Her animal body wanted sunlight as a repose from the air conditioning.
• Wandering down to wild blackberry bushes and picking a few misshapen ripe berries to share with others back in the conference room. The store-bought blackberries in a plastic carton were larger and sweeter – almost double the size of the berries held in the hands. But, although a bit more bitter, the wild ones touched something in the soul.
• Sneaking off to a yarn store during a break, in purist of the texture of wool shorn from a sheep to pass through one’s hands during long hours of meetings. Knitting, fingers against the soft blue and dark blue yarn, looping over needles as voices spoke.
• Holding a colleague’s squishy, smiley little baby – tickling toes and making eye contact to elicit a smile from the tiny person. Parents whose children were grown held the baby’s back against their chest, rocking it with an instinct once gained and never lost – body to body in a gentle bouncing motion.
• Walking with dogs, bringing them to the river, and watching them bark, stretch their leashes, and pull.
• Drinking wine at a tasting at a local vineyard. Allowing the labor of farmworkers and vintners to wash over the tongue to compare different vintages and varietals.

These observations reveal people in animal bodies, interacting with space and one another in unguarded ways. But this is the good life and what we all want. It is true that without shelter or physical safety, or adequate healthcare, many cannot access the good life. But it is also true that by reducing life to things and possessions, we forget what my colleague’s actions revealed:  the good life exists in small bits of pleasure that are inexpensive, easily obtainable, and nearly universal. We like different experiences but are drawn to some physically comforting intersection between where we are in a moment.

It is easy to critique the attempt to thus broaden my set of observations as oversimplified in two ways. First, without coordinated environmental action of the type discussed in meetings, these small moments of joy will not be so joyful. Sure. If the river is polluted, people cannot swim in it. If wildfires ruin grape crops, the wine will not taste good. So, this line of critique might go. However, not all the things we enjoy are available for engagement with legal and economic structures. This is true; it does not diminish how good the heft of a baby feels in one’s arms to know that the child may grow up in a world wildly different than our own. To deny the sensual pleasure is to deny humanness, beingness. We can know one thing but physically feel another in our bodies; the physical felt-ness is not wrong, even if it is not what our intellect would have us feel.

Second, the pleasures available through yarn and wine enjoyed on a weekday reflect the privilege of professionals. There is undoubtedly privilege embedded in structural systems that allowed this group to be in a beautiful place, the carbon emissions spent flying, the social inequalities underlying long breaks on a workday. This, I think, is right. But it does not diminish the universality of the joy of place. Like music or art, one’s capacity to enjoy nature and physical connectedness to place are not the exclusive providence of the privileged or even the human. Most people know what it is to enjoy the feel of sunshine, water against the skin, and food texture in the mouth.

The good life in the Anthropocene must include connection to the physical world. It is easy to treat the body as a vehicle for shuttling about minds, but our animal bodies crave sensations and drive us to explore and experience place. We want to touch yarn with our fingers and taste warm blackberries, the sensation of water and sun against our skin, and experience with our tongue the physical manifestation of a winemaker’s gift. We are physical beings in a material world. Perhaps honing into these aspects of the good life—simple, universal, physical, felt—might reveal new answers about how we can enjoy one even in a changed, changing world.

--Karen Bradshaw