This Sustainable Life

This conversation was brief, but covered the important points, particularly the challenges of changing habits. Dave didn't do everything he intended, though I thought he succeeded more than he did. The goal of the Spodek Method isn't to make big changes, though some do, but to share and act on intrinsic motivation relevant to nature and the environment. Just accessing intrinsic motivation at all c...

Adam treats dependence and addiction in some ways different and unique than past guests who have covered addiction. One way is the business side. For example, early in this conversation, he talks about how people at companies that create products designed to addict, like cell phones, tablets, and the apps and games on them, don't allow their children to use them . Yet they gleefully reach trillion...

I start by describing how podcast guest Carl Erik Fisher , author of bestseller The Urge , reviewed my upcoming book Sustainability Simplified as a subject matter expert on addiction. Carl mentioned how my book suffered from what Bruce describes as the demon drug myth . He pointed to Bruce's work as seminal, so I started reading it. I'd heard of Rat Park and later remembered Johan Hari mentioning...

I started by sharing my experience giving after reading Peter's book The Life You Can Save . I confess I only read it after our first conversation, but loved it. I feared reading a book by an academic philosopher arguing a point would be dry and boring. Instead it led me to donate to causes. Then, even though I didn't donate for recognition or personal benefit, the organizations I donated to conta...

Regular listeners know I see our relationships with many activities that are enabled by pollution as behavioral addictions like gambling or playing video games. Thus, I bring experts in addiction. Anna's book Dopamine Nation is one of the most accessible I've read. She covers the scale of addiction, how much it's increasing, how it works, her personal history with her own addiction, and the storie...

Kimberly has, by dramatically reducing her flying, improved her life, living more deliberately and consistent with her values. I met her when she was a panelist at an event on promoting hurting people less by flying less. I invited her as someone to explore her journey of reducing her flying. In our conversation, the shared how she went from learning the possibility to promoting staying grounded....

People who fly think most people fly, but it's more like a few percent. A small fraction of people fly, let alone across oceans or multiple times per year. If you fly, it's probably your action that hurts people most through its environmental impact, but you probably rationalize and justify it. Unlike many other polluting activities, most of the money you spend on flying goes to polluting, displac...

"What I do doesn't matter" is one of the more common sentiments of our time. We use it to avoid acting when we see problems. A similar rationalization not to act: "I have faith that younger people will solve our environmental problems. After all they will be affected more." People say these things to avoid acting, avoiding personal responsibility. If anyone can say she deserves to relax and not ha...

A blackout struck New York City and a large part of the U.S. northeast in 2003. It happened only two years after 9/11. How could we not first wonder if it was terrorism. I had been at work at the time. After waiting maybe an hour, we all walked down the stairs and went home. Phones worked for a while, so I called the woman I was dating and coordinated to meet at her place. I ended up hitch-hiking...

Dave and I go back years, to when we both wrote columns at Inc. I'm surprised I didn't bring him on before. He helps entrepreneurs, leaders, and aspiring leaders develop social and emotional skills, as well as college students aspiring to internships. We recorded now on the occasion of his new book, Get Over Yourself! How to Lead and Delegate Effectively for More Time, More Freedom, and More Succe...

I met Erica in a online meeting of academics who promote avoiding flying. A major perk for many academics is that universities pay for flying to academic conferences, for research, and for other academic reasons, of where there are many. In other words, they often fly for free. (As an aside, since academics learned about our environmental problems first, people flying free and often include many a...

Since recording this conversation, I've mentioned to a lot of people, "you wouldn't believe the situation with dyes and poisons in our clothes." The most common response has been something like, "Oh yeah, I've heard. It's terrible." Then I share some of what Alden shares in this conversation and they say, "Wow, I didn't realize it was that serious," and become very interested to learn more. Our cl...

I heard about Sven through the articles below about the cultural change at Northwell, a chain of hospitals around New York City. I recommend reading the Post article before listening to this episode. It may read overly positive about the food, but Sven and I ate just after recording at the hospital the regular food they serve patients. It was incredible. I would never have dreamed food at a hospit...

About fifteen minutes into this conversation, it hit me how powerfully Stephen's commitment affected him. (Sorry I took so long to catch on, Stephen!) All he had to do was volunteer around a body of water. His experience shows the impact of intrinsic motivation. Maybe observing and spending time by the water means as much to you as to Stephen. Maybe it doesn't mean that much to you. It means a lot...

Regular listeners and blog readers know I talk about litter and how much we wreck nature, especially my neighborhood's back yard, Washington Square Park. Click the links below to see some of the worst litter you've seen, in a supposedly nice part of town. Today the opposite: someone who brings joy, fun, creativity, music, and dancing to the park. Alan began playing drums in the park three years ag...

I'm searching for role models including people who changed cultures and undid dominance hierarchies, particularly people who came from status. I can think of many who came from subjugated classes, but not many who could have declined to engage, but did instead. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one. I could share more about him, but my guest today, Martin Doblmeier, made a wonderful documentary about him ava...

I have spoken and written at length how I see our relationship with polluting behavior as qualifying as addiction, a view that I think helps frame the challenge of sustainability. Overcoming addiction is harder than creating new technologies or taxing things. It takes powerful internal social and emotional skills. Just acknowledging one is addicted and harming others is a big hurdle, let alone act...

Regular listeners and readers of my blog will know my sustainability leadership workshops and one of the participants of the first, Evelyn (she's in the video on that link). After being the teaching assistant for a couple cohorts, she is leading this winter's session. Often when I talked to her about leadership, she would comment, "We do that in social work too, but we call it" . . . and she'd men...

Regular listeners know how I look for role models in similar situations to ours regarding the environment. We know our polluting and depleting are bringing us toward collapse, but instead of acting, we procrastinate on acting. We rationalize and justify our inaction. We abdicate our responsibility, capitulate, and resign to complacency and complicity. Humans behaved this way in the face of slavery...

If John's specialty in deep history weren't valuable enough to understand how our culture's dominance hierarchy formed from the material conditions of the dawn of agriculture, he also specializes in American history, including slavery from before the Revolutionary War through to the Thirteenth Amendment. We start with his sharing what drew him to the two fields. Then I introduce what led me to wan...

You'll hear Tony's story of rolling up his sleeves and doing some hard labor. You'll also hear the labor being just the start of the reward. He shares about the less tangible but not lesser results in community, emotional reward, enthusiasm to do more. Given his leadership role and experience, we talk about the Spodek Method. I took the liberty of pulling some what he said and formatting it. Liste...

I was reading Harper's magazine and Christopher's story was on the cover: Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”! It begins In the summer of 2016, a fifty-seven-year-old Texan named Stephen McRae drove east out of the rainforests of Oregon and into the vast expanse of the Great Basin. His plan was to commit sabotage. First up was a coal-burning power plant near Carlin, Nevada, a 242-megawatt facilit...

Greenhouse gas and ocean plastic levels don't rise on their own. The cause of our environmental problems is our behavior, which results from our culture. The world's dominant culture pollutes, depletes, addicts, and imperially takes over other cultures. Yet each person wants clean air, land, water, and food. How did humans create a culture that manifests the opposite of many of their values? Why d...

People complain they don't have time, money, or energy to live more sustainably, I think because marketers see the demand so come up with things to sell people to address the demand. Since neither buyer nor seller understand how nature or systems work, the offerings don't help sustainability. Meanwhile, high demand and low supply means high prices, so people associate costing time, money, and ener...

I follow podcast guest Maya Van Rossum on her work on constitutional amendments protecting a clean environment. You may have heard of the legal victory in Montana, Held versus Montana , earlier this year (yay!), Montana being one of the three states with such an amendment. Maya appeared on a panel, Securing Climate Justice Through Green Amendments: The Held v. Montana Victory , that discussed that...