This Sustainable Life

Wolfgang Lutz is one of the world's experts in projecting global population levels and demography. I contacted him to help understand the differences between projections based on demography like his and the United Nations' versus systemic ones like in Limits to Growth . He gave a comprehensive overview of who projects and how, at least as much as can be covered in under an hour. Some highlights: W...

I was very curious to learn more about the Kogi and Alan's interactions with them. Alan is deeply involved with their joint project to learn to restore nature as they have shown they can. "Restoring nature" doesn't do justice for what they are doing. They are also sharing different ways of seeing and interacting with the world, which, as I understand from Alan, is not how they see the world. Alan...

The International Society of Sustainability Professionals invited me to speak to their New York Chapter. Here is that recording. We "whooshed" out the participants' words, so it's just my speaking. Their mission is "ISSP empowers professionals to advance sustainability in organizations and communities around the globe." I described my work, my path to get here, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivatio...

Roz could have stopped at rowing solo across oceans to world records, awards, and national honors. She didn't. She had done those things for a purpose: helping make our world more livable, less polluted. They gave her greater skills to appreciate her purpose and implement it better. As with most people, the challenges looked insurmountable to her. But unlike most people, she had once made a list t...

One of the most famous supermodels, Paulina needs no introduction. She's here because mutual friends introduced us and her recent book, No Filter , that tells a different story than you'd expect of the once-most-highly-paid model. It deserves the positive reviews from the  New York Times and elsewhere. As she describes in our conversation, she spent formative years behind the iron curtain, in...

I bring leaders from all areas to sustainability. The challenges to changing culture to sustainability aren't in technology, science, journalism, activism, or politics, though all those fields are relevant. Their practitioners generally aren't skilled in what changes culture: the social and emotional skills of leadership. Most people don't know that living more sustainably improves their lives, no...

Oliver's book Four Thousand Weeks deserves the incredible praise it gets. I've recommended it to many friends and can't for the life of me put into words how he refines and changes how I look at time, priorities, how to choose what to do, why, and how to feel about it. The best I can come up with is that instead of worrying what I'm missing or craving doing what I can't, which leads to a life of f...

My passion for the possibility of doing for pollution what abolitionists did to slavery: transform it from something normal, as if part of nature, to forever seen as wrong. The more I learn the difficulty of conceiving of the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery, let alone passing it, the more possible a parallel amendment on pollution seems. Jim and I continue our conversation on abolition's his...

Bringing back Chris for first time since five years ago. Since then, his last book got big, as we briefly discussed. We started talking about meditation and at a high level, framed the conversation to come on how the mind works, outside our control, though we don't notice. More framing: we talk about intention and action, meaning and purpose. The topic of his new book How to Calm Your Mind is inte...

Last night I had trouble falling asleep because before getting in bed, I noticed I had to record two podcast episodes first thing in the morning but I wanted to cook some stew, the forecast was for rain all day, and didn't think my battery had enough charge to pull everything off. Plus I had lots of computer work to do, which would use more energy from the battery. I could always rely on my "cheat...

Do you want a job working in sustainability? If you want to wait for a job in the field, you're going to wait for a long time. Most businesses' models depend on growth, extraction, and exploiting resources. Many of the biggest and most profitable are built on exploiting people too. I hope I didn't surprise you with news you didn't know. Most places with positions like Chief Sustainability Officers...

What can we learn from Buddhism to understand and respond to our ecological crisis? This question is the heart of David's focus, as I understand it. We started by describing his journey from a more mainstream American childhood to Zen Buddhism and forming the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center near Boulder, Colorado. Then we talk about humanity's disconnect from nature and his work to restore...

Reading Christopher's story in the Pacific Standard, The Fallacy of Endless Economic Growth What economists around the world get wrong about the future , made me contact him. It was one of the only reviews of criticism of our culture's attempting to grow the economy and population forever that didn't prioritize growth dogma over understanding. The article centered on the book Limits to Growth , it...

The only was I can see how we can avoid environmental disaster leading to human population collapse is by changing our culture---every unsustainable culture but America most, as the most polluting per capita large nation. Can we do it in time? Humanity has changed on a global level within a few generations at least once before. Slavery was legal, normal, and seen as good around the globe since bef...

Every step I take toward sustainability leads me to learn how much humans have figured out how to live sustainably. I'm far from living sustainably, though I've come a long way. We are wiping out the cultures living sustainably these cultures, now hanging on by threads. Besides practices and viewpoints, I'm learning humility. We don't have all the answers. Far from it. They may not either, but at...

Tony turns out to live a few blocks from me. I met him at his home, where we recorded. He shared his experience knowing E. O. Wilson, who, as Tony described, conceived of the plan to protect half the Earth's land to protect biodiversity and more to sustain Earth's ability to sustain life. I'd heard Wilson describe the plan many years ago and had seen some analysis that it could protect up to ninet...

Ethno-botonist Rodrigo Cámara-Leret first describes how podcast guest Alan Ereira chose him to live and work with the Kogi, who want to share, in my language, how to stop wrecking the biosphere. He has visited them and seen behind what they show of themselves in the documentaries. Unlike typical scientific research, he will bring his family and learn beyond what they plant. The condition of their...

Nadeem committed to reducing his doof. He bravely shares the challenge. Even in Norway, he's surrounded by messages to keep consuming it. Imagine any other unhealthy addictive substance---cocaine, heroin, etc---was advertised and sold everywhere. On top of extra availability, imagine it was portrayed as like food, which it isn't. Nadeem stopped drinking alcohol long ago despite its prevalence in N...

I've said before and I'll say again that conversations like mine with Mark Mills are what I value and wish we had more of. We do our research, we have strong opinions, we agree on many things, we disagree on some things we care about. Most of all, I believe we learn from each other, respect different opinions, and try to understand the other's view and goals. In this conversation we talk about his...

I can't tell you how valuable (and entertaining) I found Daniel's video series. Regular listeners and readers may know how important I find anthropology to solving our environmental problems. If we want to change our culture, we have to know why it is this way, how other structures have worked, and how we can change. I started realizing this importance when I noticed that I had read podcast guest...

Martha Nussbaum's new book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility , looks like it's about animals, but the more I read it, I found it about us, our values, and our behavior. Regular readers and listeners will see the similarity to how I approach the environment in general. Not having eaten meat since 1990 and no animal products at all about ten years, I don't find new materials on hum...

Part 2 of the introduction shares a few stories that illustrate the Spodek Method, a leadership technique to create mindset shifts and continual improvement on the environment. The optimism girds us for a more challenging next episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Watching environmental documentaries means having seen the Tickells' work, especially Fuel and Kiss the Ground , which they did with podcast guest Bill Benenson. Bill introduced us, though we scheduled this conversation to release the day before their new movie On Sacred Ground , on the Dakota pipeline. In this conversation, they share about the process of choosing the subject, the story and its r...

Part 1 of the introduction shares a few stories to frame how I approach sustainability, then describes the outcomes I designed it to bring about, mainly to enable you to lead yourself to a more sustainable future that you'll find preferable to any alternative. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Food touches nearly all environmental issues, as well as health, social, economic, political, and cultural. Cities like New York and their governance do too. Regular listeners know I talk about food waste, doof , packaging, and related issues. I celebrate her boss, Eric Adams 's dramatic change in his diet, which tells me his motivations to bring healthier food to New York are authentic and genuin...