This Sustainable Life

My notes I read from: What I did: Kathryn Garcia in Washington Square Park Farmers market (compost, oregano) Ride to Brooklyn Grain de Sail sail boat Visit with friend Calisthenics by candlelight Wake up, no clock Think, reflect, calm Meet to pick up garbage Notes on no power: 29 to 30 hours since recording last episode, 26 with circuit breaker for apartment disconnected Less of a big deal than I...

Here are the notes I read from for this post: --- I posted the other day an exercise to think about going twenty-four hours without using electrical power. To clarify, that exercise was to think about it. I don’t think many people would do it. Even orthodox Jews leave their refrigerators plugged in, as well as clocks. The meters to their homes would register power being used. I’m talking about the...

Jonathan and I have a good rapport. We joke around. I love his expressiveness as an artist. I think he values stewardship more than he's behaved so far in life, so I hear him enjoying aligning his behavior with his values. In this episode we review his leading his kids and wife in The Spodek Method from last time. You'll hear touching family interactions. The I teach the second interaction with gu...

I’ve taught a half-dozen people the technique I use in this podcast---the hosts of the other branches of the This Sustainable Life podcast. They started calling it The Spodek Method, so now I do too. It's enabled me to reach amazing people , many of global renown, who enjoy the experience. It doesn't alone solve all the world's problems, but it works. The Spodek Method leads a person to share and...

Jon is famous for bringing people together and creating community, see the New York Times article on him below. He invited me to a few of his events before the pandemic and they lived up to the reputation. His latest book, You're Invited: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence comes out the day I'm posting this conversation, May 11. We talk about how the book came to be. We're both geeky and...

This episode is really two. Remember that he started art late in life, so the first two-thirds talks about art. Also his experience with his kids and family picking up trash. You'll enjoy hearing his and his family's joy doing it. I imagine you'll also feel sober about his unpleasant surprise at how much trash there was to pick up. I hope you'll feel inspired to pick up trash too. I think you'll f...

Our world values cheap and disposable---in food and doof packaging, furniture, cars , and near the top of the list, clothes, especially fast fashion . The world is paying for it in the sense of overfilled landfills, plastic disrupting endocrine systems of animals including us, oil wells everywhere, garbage patches in the ocean, and so on. I see us paying the price. We're always craving. Stuff alwa...

Today’s guest, Richard Rothstein, is one of the experts on how the law has clearly and explicitly kept freedom, prosperity, longevity, opportunity, and more from people based on their skin color. This is no hard-to-believe conspiracy, tenuous claim, or cancel culture labeling. He shows laws in black and white the law says you can’t rent to blacks. Across the country in many spheres of life for gen...

What's the Earth's carrying capacity? If we're above it and we choose to lower it, what happens to the economy? I've wondered these questions. I know the mainstream view gets it wrong because humans have lived sustainably. Their models say it's impossible, so they're wrong. They must be missing something, at least. Rapid population growth leads to poverty. It might be a party on the way up, but it...

Started thinking of book when I worked on initiative but put in background, expecting podcast to improve That's been the case. Started getting serious about a year ago. You may have noticed a lot of guests with backgrounds in abolition: Eric Metaxas, Adam Hochschild, Manisha Sinha, Andres Resendez, Richard Rothstein (more on racial injustice) That's because abolition became major issue, then Georg...

I saw a TEDx talk on population where the speaker spoke thoughtfully and persuasively on overpopulation. I consider the topic among the most important on the environment, yet nearly no one talks about it, so I had to find out who she was and invite her to the podcast. She turned out to be a huge celebrity. Most people who talk about population are academics, at least in my experience. They know th...

Though I haven't actively practiced physics since defending my thesis in 1999, it felt great to talk science with the author of a book named one of the best non-fiction books of all time. The conversation stayed where nonscientists could understand, but we spoke, I think, how physicists do, though I'm out of practice. We talked about values, the difference between theory and experiment, the beauty...

How do you face challenges? Not little ones like a pandemic lockdown for a year. Big ones. Regular listeners hear me talk about role models like Viktor Frankl and Nelson Mandela in the context of handling life challenges. During the pandemic, for example, I recognize there was suffering before, there will be suffering after, and there's suffering now. Our challenge is not to take on things outside...

Your blood contains PFOA, also known as forever chemicals. They cause cancer of several types, birth defects, and more. Dupont and other companies produced this stuff after learning it caused harm and dumped it into our environment. As best we can tell, they chose enormous profits over the health of their employees at first, and eventually all Americans and all humans because this stuff takes mill...

Kathryn Garcia, candidate for Mayor of New York City joined. No matter where you live, the mayor here matters. Many national trends in politics, business, culture, education, sports, and more start here. Our output in entertainment, culture, but also pollution and population affect the U.S. and world. I wanted to treat two issues: sustainability and leadership . Also hear Kathryn Garcia as a perso...

I noticed a trend among podcast guests that the people who have already acted the most on sustainability find new things fastest. By contrast, people who do less say they're already doing all they can, or at least all they can think of. That's backward, or would be if you thought there were a limited number of things you could do. The so-called experts who themselves haven't acted promote big, Ear...

We got into territory I'd wanted to talk to a religious scholar about. I would have expected being recorded would make us more tentative, but I found the opposite. I didn't keep track, but several times I said feel free not to answer. Instead he answered more, sharing what he'd thought and researched about in depth. We cover Joseph, Isaac, the Arch Bishop of Burundi, population, contraception, con...

Do you know anyone whose company pollutes more than they'd like, who wants to change things, but whose company keeps not acting? I think that situation describes almost everyone. Even the most sustainably companies aren't close to sustainable. They just pollute a bit less than everyone else, from Patagonia to Greenpeace. Maybe it describes you. Maybe it fits your elected officials, school administ...

Here are my notes I read from for this episode ------ It hit me recently that nearly nobody knows what's so bad about climate change. I've started asking people and nobody knows. Actually, of the dozens I've asked, one knew, though it took prompting for her to say it. Everyone gets sea level rise, biodiversity, loss of coral reefs. I'll grant we have to move cities. But I'll respond that after som...

Longtime listeners and readers of my books and podcast know I draw the analogy to learning and mastering a skill to learning to play piano or a sport. You start by playing scales or practicing groundstrokes. Likewise with leadership or taking initiative, acting entrepreneurially, both performance arts you can master. Also acting in stewardship. People don't get that learning to cook without produc...

I learned of John's work through his statement at Macmillan's Sustainability page while researching Ray Anderson : In 2009, after reading Ray Anderson’s “ Confessions of a Radical Industrialist ,” I decided it was Macmillan’s responsibility to lessen our impact on the earth, and in particular, to lower our carbon emissions. We created a senior position in the company and spent well over a year mea...

About six months ago the parallels started forming for me between our global economic system today that creates great suffering on the scale of hundreds of millions of people with nightmarish cruelty, but also people benefiting from it looking the other way or saying "what I do doesn't matter" or "the youth will solve it". . . And the systems of slavery. Also looking for role models who changed sy...

Here are the notes I read from for this episode How to fix Texas Just got off conference call a Texas attendee couldn't attend because her power was out. There are helpless people suffering. I empathize with them and feel compassion. I support helping them. If we want to prevent future suffering, we have to look at systems. That's not ignoring present pain or loss. It's preventing future pain and...

When they hear I take two years to fill a load of trash, people ask how I do it, what's in my trash. In this episode I share a couple stories from last week of facing things entering my life that would result in my having to take responsibility for trash---acquiring a new cell phone and acquiring bagged food. I've done things like these processes enough to know that they result in joy, community,...

No matter what you think we should do, everyone gets that there is some connection between population and sustainability. Everyone knows our population is increasing. We're consuming more than ever. How do we talk about this issue? I think most people shy away from it. I know I did, until recently feeling "what's the point in talking about something we can't do anything about?" I saw problems with...