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What does any of this have to do with the environment? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything.

A few years ago, I had a long conversation with a friend of African-American descent who was arguing that the core of the environmental message was lost on the black community because, he felt, eco-friendliness was intertwined with economic welfare. His point was that poverty limited one’s choices and made making green decisions that much harder.

I spent a very long time agreeing with him. Green living is expensive—both in time and money. To go back to my composting toilet, it cost about $1600 (as compared to about $100 for a normal toilet). Moreover, a normal toilet if used correctly requires almost no maintenance. Not so my composting toilet. And I will not make you suffer a description of the kind of maintenance it requires (let’s just say that gloves and masks and several hours of work are involved). Time and money are luxury items to anyone working three jobs just to feed their family. Thus, by extension, green living is a luxury, not easily affordable.

I’m going to ignore the entire literature tying happiness to contact with the natural environment, beyond pointing out that the literature is vast and the ties real. Instead, I’m going to back up and explain why this idea never sat right with me.

There are reams of data correlating altruism to happiness. People who give back are generally happier people. But, as Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert points out in his excellent Stumbling Towards Happiness:

When people give of themselves to others, and are recognized for it, they experience lots of happiness and increase in self-esteem. Interestingly, though, we've just done a study that shows that when people are offered the opportunity to do something selfish or something altruistic, they take the selfish option by and large. Culture has told them this is what they should do to be happy, but if you force them to take the altruistic option, they're much happier.

So why is this the case? Why does cultural programming teach us to be selfish, when so much of our society seems to be about happiness—even if that happiness is something sold in a box (like that new TV, etc.)—and we know there’s a correlation between happiness and altruism?

I have come to conclude that all of these scientists have forgotten to examine the inverse question. While we know there’s a relationship between altruism and happiness, very few people have bothered to look at the opposite: are happy people more altruistic?

This is the critical question—and the answer is an obvious yes. Here’s why. What is happiness? Well, from a biological standpoint happiness is the surety that needs are being met and will be met in the future. We never put it this way. Instead, we constantly point out things like (paraphrasing Gilbert here) people with stronger relationships are happier than people with lots of money or perfect health. There is a ton of support for such statements, but what not enough people have bothered to do is figure out why.

But the why is obvious. Health is a temporary condition. Everyone is going to age. All of us will lose our health no matter what we do to stop the process. Concurrently, money is fleeting. Certainly, our society is set up to help the rich get richer much more than for the poor to become middle class, but we also know the rich often lose everything and they do so all the time. Donald Trump going bankrupt is one example, the recent crash in the markets a second.

My point is that everyone understands that wealth (like health) can be a temporary condition. Why are rich people “greedier” than poor people (this too has been proven time and again experimentally)? Because money is volatile, because you could lose it all at any moment, and because biology teaches us to guard against future worst-case scenarios.

So why is friendship the better predictor of happiness? Simple—people with lots of solid relationships have a fallback cushion in other people. When Wayne Dyer talks about manifesting abundance, he does not tell people to imagine themselves with endless money; he tells people to imagine themselves with abundant friendship. Friendship—meaning lots of important personal relationships—is a precursor to money. You need relationships to build businesses, find new jobs, attract customers, whatever….

Moreover, when health fails, as is guaranteed, friendships/relationships/family are the fallback position—and, since everyone also knows that money is volatile, they are a more secure fallback than heaps of cash or perfect health.

This is why most people will give everything to their children—because their kids are viewed (biologically, perhaps subconsciously) as the only insurance policy against an uncertain future. If you make your kids happy, the thinking goes, this ensures that they will make you happy later, when you need it (i.e., when you’re either broke or old or both) and they can help.

Let me ask you a question—the last time you littered, were you in a good or bad mood? Or, maybe a better example, the last time you splurged on organic apples, did you do so because you were in a good mood or flush with cash? I’ve asked a lot of people these questions and the answers are always the same: when happier, they were much more likely to do something to protect the planet.

Then I asked my follow-up question: why do you think this is the case?

The answer is also always some variation of: if I’m happy then my needs are met and I can attend to the needs of others (or the planet). Thus one of the easier ways to create a greener planet is to create a happier planet, but I have yet to hear an environmentalist of note (even the eco-psychologists who should have figured this out a while ago) bring this up.

What am I really saying? That a good portion of what we call happiness is actually a kind of baseline security. You need to feel safe to feel happy. And if you feel safe (i.e.,. happy) this means that your brain believes all of your needs are being taken care of and this makes it significantly easier to care for the needs of another. Altruism produces happiness, certainly, but the inverse is just as true: happiness produces altruism.

And if we want to save the planet, it helps to remember this.

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