What Does Environmental Happiness Mean to Students?

Abstract

The potential connection between environment and happiness is a relatively novel and understudied topic. This paper aims to contribute to this new research trend by investigating the long-term association between environmental protection and happiness by studying the correlation between the environment and students’ attitudes. There have been two types of academic interest in the relationship between the environment and happiness: first, there has been a real curiosity in how the environment influences individuals’ subjective well-being; second, there is a surge of interest in how proenvironmental actions affect individual's well-being, and how, in turn, people's emotional states can be used to prompt them into behaving in ways that are more ecologically responsible. The current concept of health is a complex interaction of environmental, organizational, and personal elements within the contexts and settings in which individuals live. Thus, broader environmental issues must be evaluated in the context of population health, as illustrated, for instance, in studies of migratory communities in which the impacts of a shifting life environment on health were shown to be considerable. Twenty-nine years ago, Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 proposed an education and sustainable development action plan. But even so, progress in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has so far been extremely slow. The authors of the paper have for precisely these reasons chose to conduct a survey amongst students of the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Serbia, with the aim of finding out what exactly do students know about environmental happiness, what are their current attitudes towards the state of the environment in Serbia, and how all of this affects their future. The questionnaire included 102 students. An analysis of the results was carried out using the SPSS 25 software package.