Harvard Chan School’s SHINE aims to help employees flourish
What good is a sustainable environment if it leaves people unhappy, unhealthy, and broke? As the calls for sustainability practices grew louder in recent years, Eileen McNeely thought the conversations were ignoring that important point. Too close a focus on the environment — and on the starvation, disease, and heat stroke that climate change is expected to inflict — and you miss the idea that humans might actually flourish in a sustainable world, she said. And that’s a problem. “Unless people are flourishing, they’re not going to care about the environment,” said McNeely, an instructor in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Exposure, Epidemiology and Risk Program. “That’s always been a challenge for the environmental movement: How do you make a distant reality pertinent for the present? Flourishing is really [about] the quality of life every day.” To find a solution, four years ago McNeely and her colleague Greg Norris, now...