- Ken Ilgunas
- Apr 23, 2016
Updated: Mar 2, 2022
I’m in the New York Times this morning!
My piece introduces the idea of bringing European walking rights (in which citizens are legally permitted to walk over private land) to the U.S.
If you’ve read the article and would like to learn more, here are a few lines and thoughts that didn’t make it into the final cut.
Americans don’t walk enough
This is no surprise to anyone. Our towns and cities have not been planned well and do not promote good civic, spiritual, and healthy lifestyles. Let’s just focus on the healthy thing for a second: It’s recommended that folks should be walking 10,000 steps a day (an Amish person gets 18,000 steps a day, I believe), but we Americans only walk an average of 5,117 steps a day, far fewer than the averages of the other countries the researchers studied, including Australia (9,695), Switzerland (9,650), and Japan (7,168). [1]
The United States of Private Land
By my count, America is 72 percent privately owned, the great majority of which is off limits to walkers. Even many of our public spaces, like national parks, are unroamable since we’re often forced to keep to trails and designated campsites. Therefore, America, home of the free, is ultimately unroamable. An American right to roam law — that properly balances concerns for the privacy and property of landowners — could open sections of our nation’s 614 million acres of grassland pasture, 408 million acres of cropland, and approximately 444 million acres of privately owned forest. [2]
Walking in the woods is better for you than walking on roads
This is obvious to anyone, but it’s important to point to good research that legitimizes common sense. In a pair of studies published in 2015, Stanford graduate student Gregory Bratman found that volunteers who were directed to walk through a green section of the Stanford campus had less anxiety, better memory, and experienced less “morbid rumination” than the volunteers who walked alongside heavy traffic in Palo Alto. [3]
The Right to Roam Society
What’s next for the presently-nonexistent “right to roam” movement in the U.S.? It makes sense to me to create a Right to Roam Society, or an American chapter of the U.K.’s “Ramblers.” The Ramblers are a walking advocacy group in the U.K., which is influential and powerful and which fights for the walking rights of ordinary citizens. A similar organization ought to be developed in the U.S. that would bring together folks who ought to think about ways we can throw our weight around. There’s absolutely no chance for a national law anytime soon. But there are plenty of battles to be won on the state level, like with opening up private coastlines so that the public can access them. Right to roam activists and lawyers and writers could work together on winning these battles and opening up the country, albeit in a piecemeal fashion
Would a right to roam law even work in the U.S.?
One of the things I don’t address in the piece are the challenges (outside of the constitutional challenges) that might get in the way of a successful American right to roam program. When you look at the countries with generous right to roam systems (Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland), you can’t help but notice that these are countries that have achieved something close to “democratic magnificence.” These countries don’t have the same disparity of wealth problems that we do. They’re impressively egalitarian. And they have strong social safety nets. There just isn’t the same abject third-world poverty in these countries that we find in parts of the U.S.
So perhaps a country first needs to satisfy the basic needs of its countrymen and women before it can think about a national right to roam law. Having walked through an impoverished section of Oklahoma, I acknowledge that a right to roam system simply wouldn’t work there. There’s already too much theft and guns and crime and paranoia. There, a right to roam system wouldn’t make any sense.
You can also argue that American towns and cities and suburbs have been built in such a way that many citizens wouldn’t get to take advantage of a right to roam law since there are no worthwhile green spaces within walking distance. What green spaces are there for your typical suburbanite, who’s surrounded by nothing but more suburban homes and backyards. City dwellers, too, would be largely unaffected by such a law. It’s sad to say, but a right to roam law would do a lot of nothing for a great many Americans.
Other right to roamers
There are very few Americans talking about the right to roam. As far as I can tell, my piece is the first in the mainstream press. There are, however, several law scholars who have written about other countries’ right to roam laws, and who often make the case that we should consider the possibility of bringing it to the U.S. Here’s a little bibliography of essential works:
1. Jerry Anderson is a Drake University Law Professor. He wrote a nice overview of the English and Welsh roaming law while commenting on it’s feasibility in the U.S. “Britain’s Right to Roam: Redefining the Landowner’s Bundle of Sticks.”
2. John Lovett is a Loyola Law Professor. He wrote a solid background of the Scottish roaming law. “Progressive Property in Action: The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003.”
3. Brian Sawers is a scholar in residence at Emory University. He wrote a piece on the history of roaming rights in the U.S. “The Right to Exclude from Unimproved Land.”
4. Malcolm Combe is a law scholar from Scotland and one of the foremost experts on the Scottish right to roam. He has a blog here.
Citations in this blog post
[1] “Pedometer-Measured Physical Activity and Health Behaviors in U.S. Adults.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise: October 2010 – Volume 42 – Issue 10. (Page 1822-23).
[2] “Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2007.” USDA. http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/188404/eib89_2_.pdf (Page i)./ “Forest Resources of the United States, 2012.” USDA. http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_wo091.pdf (Page 6).
[3] Gregory N. Bratmana, Gretchen C. Daily, Benjamin J. Levy, James J. Gross. “The benefits of nature experience: Improved affect and cognition.”Landscape and Urban Planning 138 (2015). http://spl.stanford.edu/pdfs/2015/Bratman%20LUP.pdf (Page 41).
[4] “Statistical Report of State Park Operations: 2013-2014.” National Association of State Park Directors. (Page 9) The table compiled acreage from states including state parks, recreation areas, natural areas, historic areas, among others. / “Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data.” Congressional Research Service. December 29, 2014.
- Ken Ilgunas
- Dec 17, 2015
Updated: Mar 13, 2022
501 Minutes to Christ by Poe Ballentine
A collection of personal essays that chart the life of a real-life American itinerant. Ballantine doesn’t take us to grand places on his journey. These are the places in between: the ones we always see but never go to: crummy factory jobs, motel rooms, bus rides across the Midwest. One closes the book taken with the weird authenticity of it—there’s honesty here, and Ballantine refuses to resort to the “lessons learned” and schmaltz typical to the memoir genre. Sometimes there’s no meaning or purpose behind his tales, but this only enhances the book’s rare rawness. The chief impression the book leaves us with is that this guy’s been around.
“I can’t count the number of times I have officially assembled the equipment to take my life: a knife, a handgun, a plastic bag, a bottle of codeine and a fifth of vodka. My motivations are never quite clear: perception of failure, futility, a sense of irremediable isolation, MTV–nothing everyone else hasn’t suffered through. Yet I tend to magnify my gloomy outlook into a drive-in picture of the end of the world. I can’t seem to remember that despair is a temporary state, a dark storm along the highway; that if I can just stick it out, keep the wipers going and my foot on the gas, I will make it through to the other side.”
Ross Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall, 1783-1787 by Winston Graham
Graham manages to match the elegance of 19th Century British prose despite writing from the mid-20th. Consequently, his themes are a bit darker, a bit more sophisticated. Why he’s unknown is a mystery to me, as it’s clear his writing is as good as or better than the greats.
“And Ross again knew himself to be happy—in a new and less ephemeral way than before. He was filled with a queer sense of enlightenment. It seemed to him that all his life had moved to this pinpoint of time down the scattered threads of twenty years… Someone—a Latin poet—had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come. He thought: if we could only stop here. Not when we get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming at my side.”
High Fidelity & About a Boy by Nick Hornby
I write a few sentences about every book I read. For both of these I wrote, “Lovable characters” and “Believable growth.” I’m reluctant to read authors who pump out a lot of books, especially current authors. But Hornsby’s quality doesn’t go down with quantity. And he’s just a master of dialogue. He builds his characters from it. It’s often funny and it’s never cheesy. Plus, his focus (and illuminating touch) on thirty-something relationship quandaries gives the book, for me, special relevance.
“See, I’ve always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things. I know you don’t know how you feel about me, but I do know how I feel about you. I know I want to stay with you and I keep pretending otherwise, to myself and you, and we just limp on and on. It’s like we sign a new contract every few weeks or so, and I don’t want that anymore. And I know that if we got married I’d take it seriously, and I wouldn’t want to mess about.”
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Smart, superb, patient storytelling that respects the reader’s intelligence. It more than stands the test of time. I tried to read Asimov’s other works, but nothing’s grabbed me like this one.
“It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?”
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
As a memoir writer, I pay special attention to style. Eating Animals is a combination of wonkish research, personal history, philosophical reflection, and random longish testimony-essays from farmers and vegans and such who appear as characters. Amazingly it all flows together. I intend on mimicking his style in future works.
“Even among writers who deserve great praise for bringing factory farming into public view, there is often an insipid disavowal of the real horror we inflict. In his provocative and often brilliant review of [Michael Pollan’s] The Omnivore’s Dilemma, B. R. Myers explains this accepted intellectual fashion: ‘The technique goes like this: One debates the other side in a rational manner until pushed into a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended it. The irreconcilability of one’s belief with reason is then held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties.’ There is one other rule to this game: never, absolutely never, emphasize that virtually all of the time one’s choice is between cruelty and ecological destruction, and ceasing to eat animals. It isn’t hard to figure out why the beef industry won’t let even an enthusiastic carnivore near its slaughter facilities. Even in abattoirs where most cattle die quickly, it’s hard to imagine that any day passes in which several animals (tens, hundreds?) don’t meet an end of the most horrifying kind. A meat industry that follows the ethics most of us hold (providing a good life and an easy death for animals, little waste) is not a fantasy, but it cannot deliver the immense amount of cheap meat per capita we currently enjoy.”
The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion by Matt Taibbi
Taibbi viscously takes down the 9/11 Truth Movement and pokes a lot of fun at Christians while going undercover as a devout Christian at an Evangelical retreat. Despite pulling no punches, he manages to come across as likable. This may be because he has moments of empathy for his subjects (as misguided as they are), and, at bottom, he’s on an intellectual quest to understand what’s making Americans so crazy and conspiratorial. His findings don’t disappoint.
“The message of all of this was that Americans were now supposed to make their own sense of the world. There was no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea. This coincided with an age when Americans now needed to understand more of the world than ever before. A factory worker in suburban Ohio now needed to understand the cultures of places like Bangalore and Beijing if he wanted to know why he’d lost his job. Which, incidentally, he probably had. Now broke, or under severe financial pressure, with no community leaders, no community, no news he can trust, Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him. What story is he going to tell?”
After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene by Jedidiah Purdy
Purdy’s book lays out the reasons why we need a new “environmental imagination” for the Anthropocene—an era dominated by climate change and factory farms and an expanding human population, all of which loom over us all. New values and aesthetics and politics will be necessary for the future that cannot thrive with the environmentalisms of the past. Brilliant and provocative.
“Bennett suggests that adopting a new animism—not exactly as metaphysics, but as a moral attitude and mode of experience—might alert people to the dangers afoot in a disrupted world (climate change as a Pandora’s box of actants). It might also dignify the widespread sense that things matter: mountains move us; the atmosphere is healthy or unwell. We know that, if these perceptions are to move us in the Anthropocene, when everything has changed, we must admit that what moves or frightens us is partly what we have created: the timeless mountain and the unchanging atmosphere are myths that we have lost and temples that we have broken.”
A Bone to Pick: the good and bad news about food, with wisdom and advice on diets, food safety, GMOs, farming and more by Mark Bittman
A good refresher on everything from factory farms, to organics, to GMOs, to why we’re all getting fat. Bittman isn’t afraid to suggest something radical or politically impossible (which are joys to read) because his ideas are always well-grounded in solid research and good sense.
“If you want to plant a lawn, that’s fine, though it’s a waste of water and energy, both petrochemical and human. Nor are lawns simply benign: many common lawn chemicals are banned in other countries, because most if not all are toxic in a variety of ways. My guess is that 100 years from now, lawns will be about as common as Hummers… And small-scale suburban and urban gardening has incredible potential. Using widely available data, Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International estimates that converting 10 percent of our nation’s lawns to vegetable gardens ‘could meet about a third of our fresh vegetable needs at current consumption rates.’”
The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable contains a level of nuance, and Daum, a command of the language, that’s superior to most any memoir writing out there. She has an almost superhuman power of introspection, all of which allows her to get closer to capturing the very essence of a thought or feeling. Something to aspire to.
“What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future. The problem, I now know, is that no one ever really feels wise, least of all those who actually have it in themselves to be so. The Older Self of our imagination never quite folds itself into the older self we actually become. Instead, it hovers in the perpetual distance like a highway mirage. It’s the destination that never gets any closer even as our life histories pile up behind us in the rearview mirror. It is the reason that I got to forty-something without ever feeling thirty-something. It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.”
Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson
It’s a shame Johnson committed suicide. It’s clear from reading Big Dead Place that he could have had a long and fruitful career as a travel writer. Like the best travel writers, Johnson gets obsessed with his subject, and Big Dead Place is crammed with careful and extensive research about everything-Antarctica. He writes with a British dry wit (I thought he was British for much of my reading), ridiculing mindless bureaucracy better than anyone.
“I have never heard one person say that the most difficult thing about Antarctica is working outside, or being cold. I have never heard one person imply that Antarctica’s tough physical environment would be the main reason not to return. I have never heard of one returnee who finally quit because it’s the world’s highest, driest, coldest, or whatever. People leave because of the bullshit.”
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster
A Passion for Nature lacks the storytelling flair of a Doris Kearns Goodwin biography, but it’s a solid and comprehensive portrait of John Muir, which was precisely what I was looking for.
“[Muir] was certainly not able to draw up a clear blueprint for his life, in contrast to what he was achieving on the work floor, or to manage the conflicting advice he was getting from so many strong-minded women and men, or even to see what his end product ought to be. Inventing machines or organizing them into a coherent system of production was much easier than inventing a life or finding coherence in what one thought or believed.”
- Ken Ilgunas
- Jan 23, 2015
Updated: Feb 8, 2022
So this Saturday I’ll be publishing an Op-Ed in the New York Times!
After I put up my blog post, “The Art of Keeping Warm,” about my 45-degree experiment, I wondered if any publication would be interested in publishing an actual article about my experience. I knew the Times’s Op-Ed pages often feature quirky, first-person stuff, so they were my first choice. They responded to my pitch, saying they’d want to see the article before they agreed to publish it. To enrich my quirky experience with interesting research, I spent a week researching countries’ excess winter mortality rates, studies on the concept of “comfort,” the thermal properties of certain clothes, and a whole bunch of other strange stuff.
It always feels like I’m wasting time researching because 90 percent of what I read won’t have any impact on the piece, and the 10 percent that makes it in could very well get edited out. My Op-Ed was shortened from 2,000 words to 850, so I did in fact lose a lot (though, needless to say, I’m still plenty thrilled and grateful to make it into the Times).
I imagine a few readers will wander over to this blog after reading my article, so if you’re one of those people who wants to learn a little bit more about my experiment and my research, feel free to browse the subjects below. My sources, signified by numbered brackets (ex: [1]), are listed at the bottom of this entry.
First off: Comfort is cultural.
As I point out in the article, there are cultures, like the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego, who’ve contentedly endured temperatures as low as 42˚F (5.5˚C). The Yaghan had few clothes and no access to fossil fuels [1]. On the hotter end of the dial, Pakistani office workers are comfortable in office temperatures as high as 88˚F (31˚C), which would make most any American melt into a salty puddle of goo [2]. In an essay called “Understanding the adaptive approach to thermal comfort,” researchers found that we basically determine what’s comfortable to us based on what we’re used to [3]. It’s as simple as that. No need to point out that we wouldn’t be comfortable in -70˚F (-57˚C) or 120˚F (49˚C); comfort obviously has its limits.
There are possibly some benefits to living in the cold.
It’s a custom in parts of Scandinavia for parents to leave their well-wrapped babies outside in strollers to nap in freezing temperatures. They claim that their babies sleep better in the cold [4]. Also, some researchers claim that being colder helps us lose weight through a process called “non-shivering thermogenesis.” In an essay called “The ‘metabolic winter’ hypothesis,” researchers suggest that obesity is a result of over-nutrition and constant warmth [5].
In cold countries fewer people die of cold-related causes.
This was one of my most fascinating research discoveries. At first glance it makes little sense: Why would warm countries experience more cold-related deaths? Basically it’s because the colder countries are more prepared, better clothed, and have warmer winter homes than people in warm countries.
Check out the following chart. “CSVM” (Coefficient of seasonal variation in mortality) sounds complicated, but all you need to know is that a higher CSVM indicates more cold-related deaths experienced in that particular country. Also, look at the column “Mean Winter temperature.” You’ll see that the warmer countries (Portugal and Spain) have really high winter death rates. The coldest country studied (Finland) has the lowest winter death rate of them all.
We are not thinking about the environment when managing our indoor heat.
According to a Harris poll, by 2010 only 4 percent — just 4 percent! — of households reduced their utility use to make their lifestyles more environmentally sustainable [6]. Yikes.
Why don’t we just wear more clothes to keep warm, save money, and help the environment?
It’s puzzles me why we aren’t more keen on saving money on our heating bills when we could just throw on an extra layer. Writer Kris De Decker, on his website Low-Tech Magazine, surveyed the thermal properties of clothes and calculated that putting on a pair of cotton long underwear will allow you to lower your thermostat 4.5˚F (2.5˚C) without causing any reduction in comfort, while saving you more than 20 percent in heating costs [7]. (De Decker’s essay, “Insulation: first the body, then the home,” was easily the best thing I read in all my research.)
U.S. homes are really big.
U.S. and British homes are heated similarly (nighttime bedroom and daytime living room temps are typically set between 65-70˚F (18-21˚C)). [8]. But Americans use far more energy given the size of the average American home (2,394 square feet), which is two and half times larger than the average U.K. home (914 square feet) [9].
I confess: I use fossil fuels, too.
I anticipate the argument: “How can you speak against fossil fuels when you use them.” This is the sort of senseless argument the extractivists’ screech when they don’t like it when Al Gore, who lives in a big home, talks about climate science (as if the size of his home somehow magically makes scientific fact, independent of Al Gore, discreditable). So let me come clean: I acknowledge that I use more than my fair share of computer power, gasoline, and air travel—all powered by fossil fuels. I use a lot of energy, but, really, I have very little choice as to what kind of energy I get to use, as most things like hybrid cars and solar panels and enormous wind turbines are unaffordable for the average American. To exist and function in our country — with its fossil fuel infrastructure that’s been built around us for 100+ years (well before most all of us were born) — we must use fossil fuels. The best we can do is: 1. Limit the amount of fossil fuels we do use, and 2. Publicly criticize, protest, mock, vote against, or fight the fossil fuel industry so that our culture as a whole can move on to better sources of energy. I am not dismissing the importance of fossil fuels in our lives. (I realize civilization would savagely collapse if we went cold turkey on fossil fuels tomorrow.) I’m merely arguing we need to take dramatic steps away from toxic resources, as useful as they have been.
We use way too much energy.
Way too much. The U.S. and Canada use about twice as much energy as Europe and Japan, yet there’s no clear difference in quality of life between countries that are fossil fuel gluttons and countries that are on fossil fuel diets. One of the things I wondered was: Do fossil fuels make us happier? That’s really tough to answer, but I took my best shot at it, looking at the UN’s latest World Happiness Report that ranks countries based on life satisfaction. I looked at the happiest countries and tried to see if there was any correlation between their happiness and their fuel consumption.
Below is my list. The U.S. is the 17th happiest country in the world and one of the biggest fossil fuel gluttons, consuming 17.6 metric tons of fossil fuels per capita [10] There’s one country, the United Arab Emirates, that’s happier than us that uses more fossil fuels, but all other happier countries use less. I’m not sure what to make of the statistics (as I’m sure there are countless variables), but it makes one wonder: If consuming tanker-loads of fossils fuels is not automatically making us happier, than why are we consuming so much?
List of happiest countries with their per capita fossil fuel consumption in metric tons
17. United States (17.6) 16. Mexico (3.8) 15. Panama (2.6) 14. United Arab Emirates (19.9)
13. New Zealand (7.2) 12. Costa Rica (1.7) 11. Israel (9.3) 10. Australia (16.9) 9. Iceland (6.2) 8. Austria (8) 7. Finland (11.5) 6. Canada (14.7) 5. Sweden (5.6) 4. Netherlands (11) 3. Switzerland (5) 2. Norway (11.7) 1. Denmark (8.3)
Americans use, consume, burn, and eat way more than we need to. In his book Eaarth, Bill McKibben reports that, “In 2007, the average American male had 2,600 calories worth of energy left over each day after his metabolic needs had been met.” Andrew Nikiforuk, in his book Energy of Slaves, says, “About 27 percent of edible fruits, vegetables, oils, and dairy products in North America spoil in transport, rot in the fridge, age in a grocery store, or get thrown out at home. In England, food waste may be as high as 50 percent. A University of Arizona study found that the average U.S. family squanders about $2,275 worth of food a year. The amount of energy lost through rotting or uneaten food accounts for 2 percent of annual oil and electricity spending in the United States” (p. 88-89).
I’ve wondered what this world would look like if we simply consumed only what we needed to consume. If we consumed a reasonable amount of calories, how many factory farms could we replace with forest, or smaller organic farms? If we moved into UK-sized homes and lowered the thermostat five degrees, how much fewer fossil fuels would we burn? If we stopped buying so much cheap and certainly unnecessary plastic crap, how much cleaner and less acidic would our oceans be? We talk about renewables all the time, but honest conversations about reducing consumption are far too rare.
Lastly, am I still living in a cold home?
I lived in my icebox through Christmas, then spent about three weeks in a warm home in Lincoln, Nebraska to house- and dog-sit for friends from about Dec. 26 – Jan 17. To make myself qualified for a summer job I’m applying for, I had to move to Denver, where I am currently living and enrolled in a Wilderness First Responder course. Here, the daytime temperature is set at a very reasonable 61˚F (16˚C). If I ever find myself in a house of my own again, I know from experience that I’d be plenty comfortable in a 45˚F (7˚C) home, though I can’t see myself going lower than that.
Citations
[1] Goldsmith — Use of clothing records to demonstrate acclimatisation to cold in man’, Journal of Applied Physiology, 15 (5), 776–80
[2] http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/futcom/fc_litfinal1.pdf
[3] Understanding the adaptive approach to thermal comfort — Humphreys, Michael A; J Fergus Nicol. ASHRAE Transactions104 (1998): 991.
[4] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988
[5] The “metabolic winter” hypothesis: a cause of the current epidemics of obesity and cardiometabolic disease. Cronise, Sinclair, Bremer. Metab Syndr Relat Disord. 2014 Sep;12(7):355-61.
[9] http://www.architecture.com/files/ribaholdings/policyandinternationalrelations/homewise/caseforspace.pdf (p.10). https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf
[10] http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/WorldHappinessReport2013_online.pdf & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions