This Sustainable Life

Here is the text I read from for this post: My environmental role models Why my role models? Because people keep saying what I do is inaccessible. That it's too much or extreme. That they need to balance. Well everyone believes they're balanced. I have to balance too. My difference is that I keep moving toward my values. Instead of letting Americans, the most polluting people in history, be my com...

People littering is creepy, like a tick or other parasite. It gets under my skin. I don't like it, but if I want to help people stop their parasitical, tick-like behavior, I feel it helps to understand them. Leadership rests on empathy, which sometimes means understanding the feelings and motivations of people who do things you consider disgusting or creepy, like buying coffee in disposable cups k...

Here are the notes I read from to make this episode, sometimes diverging from them. Why I don't call our environmental situation a crisis. People think scientists will solve something or engineers will create a solution and we can go back to before. We will never return to this lifestyle, which, by the way, is a tremendous advance if you value happiness, stewardship, enjoying what you have, and co...

I've been sharing the sentiment of how people today seem to think of our times versus how people from other times would see now. I expect they'd view us with horror, disgust, and disdain. Today's post reprises that perspective. Here are the note I wrote that I worked from: People say homeless live better than kings before. TVs, fly around the world, any fruit or vegetable any time of the year, mus...

Since recording this episode, Michael has become Google's Lead for Circular Economy. Michael took on a challenge many people consider: biking to work for a month. He challenged himself amid product releases at work and family obligations as his wife traveled, so he couldn't just start. He had to plan and work at it. Even so, he created cheerleaders of his riding at Google among his coworkers. He l...

When we pollute, we think we act for the reasons in our minds that justify that behavior, but those reasons generally come after we choose, motivated to justify behavior we consider wrong. Most environmental analysis looks at the science of what pollutes more or less. Today I look at the mental processes and emotions behind choosing polluting behavior. Almost always pollution results in separating...

Brad identified the problem of people acting or not as our emotions and behavior, which many forces contribute to. We also talk about media and scientists. This refinement of the understanding to emotions points to what to work on that I see few environmentalists unaddressing: emotions, feelings, and community, not technology, innovation. Almost the only emotions they evoke are fear, panic, and wo...

I believe many people believe we live in an age of wonder and that people from any other time would envy us. I believe future generations will not look at our flying and pollution not with envy but with horror, as we look at slave holders and people who didn't resist Hitler. The sooner we get that into our thick skulls, the sooner we'll enjoy life with less craving, excuses and acting like spoiled...

People keep describing my environmental actions as praiseworthy. I think they do it to make it seem harder and less accessible to do themselves what they expect will be hard, deprivation, sacrifice, and not what they want to do. Making what I do sound good makes what they do normal. I prefer to see not polluting as normal and polluting as abnormal and worth changing. I feel that praising someone f...

A few words on growth and how people misunderstand it, especially economists. I start by talking about my window garden cherry tomato plants and how the inability of the insects eating them to regulate their growth and up destroying the plants and thereby their own population. Can we outdo bugs? I'm not sure. An educated friend showed surprise to me that his having four or five kids is one of the...

Today's episode with guest Brad P, a dating coach and guru---well, former, since he's moved on, as he'll share---partly reveal a major part of my social and emotional development as an adult. He was in a sense my boss when I coached mostly men but a few women on dating and attraction skills, which I did before coaching executives, entrepreneurs, and so on on leadership, initiative, entrepreneurshi...

Polio terrorized the world. People died and became paralyzed and there were no defenses to it. Science understood it and eventually Jonas Salk found a vaccine. Just having a vaccine wasn't enough. They needed massive global public projects to disseminate it. Is the connection to our current environmental problems obvious? As I see it, our behavior is causing the problems. If I'm not too full of my...

People commonly misunderstand the goals of this podcast. I tried in this episode to clear up two common misunderstandings: They mistakenly believe my goal is individual change---to influence one person at a time. They mistakenly believe I act on my environmental values to lead people by example. On point 1, this podcast focuses on leading people through community. You may hear me leading one perso...

This episode is two thoughtful, intelligent people sharing environmental thoughts. I think the thoughts we share are what a lot of people think but don't share enough. We cover action, leadership, motivation, caring, beliefs, integrity, and Adam's challenge on "imperfect" (which I put in quotes since I prefer non-supermarket apples) apples. I suspect you'll hear things you've thought about but may...

Between insects, kelp, vertical farming, lab-grown meat, and other clever options, why didn't we think of them before? Because we had better options! Few meat eaters choose crickets over steaks and hamburgers, but we've squandered what was once plenty with overpopulation. We've become more efficient, but we've lost abundance. With a lower population we could keep abundance. Hosted on Acast. See ac...

Here are the notes I work from for this episode: From climate march Went 3 times: Before lunch to participate in organizing group, went to Foley Square. Seemed like tens of thousands, maybe six figures. On my way to a meeting, walking on lower Broadway After my meeting, just ending Didn't hear speakers. In fact, I shared with my sister the impressions you're about to hear and she said the speakers...

Not often do I hear something in a podcast conversation that's a new habit I'm going to try. This conversation with Michelle led to two. I recommend them both and I'll try to find a way to report back how they go. Plus she shares how her book, the Connector's Advantage , keeps growing, now internationally. We talk environmental leadership. She shares her experience with plastic bags, something a l...

I share thoughts in today's episode I didn't have the heart to share with family on their way to vacationing in France. In my lifetime I've seen the world change and our understanding of it change from we can't really raise sea levels to knowing with certainty that it's underway and we're causing it. People younger than m used to think and hope that we'd slide by, missing out on the worst, hoping...

A friend told me the other day that while I could reduce flying, business people couldn't. It's not so easy for them, actually impossible. Did he forget that I have an MBA? That I started a business with an 8-digit valuation, that operated on four continents? That nearly everyone I know flies as a matter of course? Did he not imagine the work I turned down? More likely he didn't think about it. Th...

Adam studies brilliant people and leadership. There are many leadership coaches and researchers. If you like me and my way of doing things, which is geeky, you might be geeky yourself. You probably like leadership too. We get to his research results about halfway through the conversation. He focuses on helping people like you and me understand and improve leadership. In this conversation we focus...

We start talking about how to learn---you have to practice. This is one of the most important things to get, not just in learning but in life. Too many people read and analyze, expecting to learn. If you don't change your behavior, you aren't learning, which I took a long time to learn. If you read and analyze, you behave impersonally---that is, you don't learn social and emotional skills. Then we...

When was the last time you went without a cell phone for more than a few hours? Jeremy went longer than he expected, but as chance favors the prepared mind, he was ready to take advantage of an opportunity. It sounds to me like he enjoyed using less power, however modest the reduction, he did it and discovered fun and improved relationships. Once we created machines to save labor. Now I see we cre...

Bugs will infest a plant until they kill it, then when it dies, they die. It's happening to the fig tree and cherry tomato plants in my windowsill garden. If they could keep their population low enough to avoid killing the plant, they could live longer. We seem to be doing the same with Earth's non-renewable resources. From a species perspective, what benefit do we get from fast cars and cell phon...

I don't like my world being full of junk "food," litter, and pollution, but if it is, I'd rather see it for what it is and feel a disgust that motivates me to change it than to keep myself in denial and passively, complacently accept it. Yesterday's stop at a highway rest stop reminded me how we dump garbage onto the world and into ourselves. Today's picking up litter reinforced it, though I do it...

What's the difference between burning rain forests for someone's livelihood and family in the Amazon and paying for people to drill oil that we squander in the rest of the world? I'm not asking to accuse. I see some differences, but not big ones. If you're easily offended I recommend not listening to this episode. Letter from Birmingham Jail excerpt Joshua Becker's book The More of Less Hosted on...