Being exposed to nature (trees, plants and green space) has demonstrable positive effects on our physical health, our behaviour (including crime) and our wellbeing. Quantifying this can improve the design of our lifestyle and our cities. For instance, people with longer commutes experience less wellbeing. However house price differences underestimate the wellbeing effect of green space and other aspects of the environment (like air pollution and noise).

The quantity and quality of housing has a relatively small effect on wellbeing. This is partly because people compare their houses with those of their neighbours. But being in arrears on your mortgage of rent has a really negative effect.

Climate change is a classic public good problem, since CO2 emitted anywhere affects people living everywhere. Every country has an incentive to free ride on the costs incurred by others. Only international agreement can overcome this problem. Climate change is also a clear threat to the wellbeing of future generations. The wellbeing approach invites us to value the wellbeing of future generations as much as we value our own (subject only to a very small discount rate).

Tolstoy’s day-to-day engagement with nature shaped who he was and how he conceived of himself; it is reflected, abundantly, in what he wrote. But while the natural world remained an essential touchstone for Tolstoy for the whole of his life – a reservoir and measure of what was authentic and good – as he grew older this regard was tinged with ambivalence. He came to believe that not everything that was natural (war, violence, predation, sex) was necessarily good, and he appears to have doubted whether humans could live in a way that was at once fully natural and fully moral. This essay explores this central paradox of Tolstoy’s thinking, and focuses particular attention on the following aspects of his relationship with the natural world: the "green" creation myth that Tolstoy self-consciously fashioned about himself; the close link between nature and Tolstoy’s sense of the divine; Tolstoy’s presciently ecological conception of life in nature as a realm of both ceaseless "struggle" (war) and overarching harmony (peace); Tolstoy’s environmentalism.

Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry V, and 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI might be thought to be nostalgic simply because they are history plays, reimagining and restaging a past that is, by definition, lost. Loss is certainly one of their central concerns: the loss of France, of land, of friends and family, and of identity, especially kingly identity. Versions of a lost and longed-for Eden can be found in all of these plays, and the heroes of the past are always greater than the protagonists (and actors, and audiences) of today. But as history plays, their nostalgia is also aesthetic, both cultivating and fulfilling a desire for a consistent, coherent vocabulary of symbols, discernible, stable points of origin, intelligible relationships of cause and effect, and even readily comprehensible design choices: the histories very often come to us in red and white, blue and gold. Perhaps above all, the histories feed our nostalgia for a past that is vivid, fixed, and whole, and therefore able to be understood.