This Sustainable Life

Two of this podcast's top goals areTo bring leaders to share and act on their environmental values, from any area, but especially polluting fieldsTo help change culture from expecting sustainability is a chore or burden to expecting joy, lightness, freedom, and reward. Both happened in this episode.On the second, you'll hear when I invite Scott to act, he had something in mind (he knows This Sustainable Life!). It sounded extrinsically motivated so I asked if it connected with the values he had just shared. As we spoke, more personal things emerged. Do you hear a different level of interest and depth of motivation for his second task? Does it sound intrinsic and more motivating?I heard between the two commitments the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic, between leadership and management. Most of what passes for motivating people on sustainability in the media sounds to me more like coercion, implying people don't want to do it.On the first goal, Scott is the CEO/Founder of a company that sells fossil fuels. He chose to change his company. I haven't evaluated the effectiveness of his change. Plenty of companies and people, even with the most sincere intentions, mean to reduce pollution but don't. I'm only looking at him for leading his organization. How hard is the change? How easy? What does it take? How can we motivate more people and organizations polluting less?One lesson: companies want to follow consumer demand. If they don't hear it from you, they don't know to act. It helps no one for consumers to stay silent about their interest to pollute less. Communicate your interest so power companies can hear.He's taking risks and trying. He sounds like a role model.I would have liked more emphasis on reducing use. Nothing keeps fossil fuels in the ground like not taking them out in the first place. Here's my last electric bill:$1.44 for the customer charge. The rest is fixed fees I can't do much about. On life values, I'm as healthy and happy as anyone I know. I couldn't have imagined lowering this much, but now it's normal. Since systemic change begins with personal change, this change allows me to help others achieve it.If a power company had helped, I could have lowered long ago. Could IGS help consumers and businesses live healthily and happily consuming less, like most of the rest of the world? Are power companies motivated to help consumers reduce consumption? How many Americans realize that less power will improve their lives?While I'm at it, here's my evolving footprint compared to the U.S. and world.I see power companies as able to influence consumer behavior. Is it in any of their interests to motivate people using less? A lot less? If so, how? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cassiano's first episode led to more listener comments than most. People loved his enthusiasm. I find guys who know martial arts tend to speak with a security. The opposite of insecure or desperate. So I think people found him accessible and engaging.I think you'll find him more so this episode. Of course, we talk a bit about his world record for burpees. As you can tell from this episode's title, he fulfilled his commitment by buying a banzai tree. He loved it! He shares his experience buying it, caring for it, and designing it, or grooming it. I'm not sure the right word.Sadly, I lost the video of the tree, but you can hear him describing it. You may remember from his first episode that he saw a missing connection to nature for humans in cities. I think you'll agree that the tree's value and effect on Cassiano transcends just something he takes care of. We talk about values and how to enjoy life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I see exactly two highest priorities for material goals to restore Earth's ability to sustain life. One is keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Down there it's safe. Above ground, it's poison and deadly. However clear and straightforward, almost no one focuses on this simple, effective, attainable goal.Katie does. Our first conversation was just starting when we had to stop. We mostly talked that time about her past, groundbreaking work. In this episode we talk about her present work with pipelines in the U.S., their disproportionate effects on communities based on class, race, and more, and her work on them.You can hear her passion in every sentence. I felt connected with someone so devoted and passionate, not waiting for others to act. This episode will rouse even the complacent among you.(The second priority is outside the scope of Katie and my conversation: returning global population to a level Earth can sustain through voluntary, noncoercive means such as practiced at national levels by several nations all others could emulate.)The Equation Campaign Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I've meant to record this episode for a while, as the idea of saying "fuck it," not trying, forgetting about the future and my effect on others, and enjoying what our society offers seems everyone else's choice.So I'm going full snarky. A rare unedited episode, starting from these minimal notes:Reasons not to careMoneyClothesTravelUnderstandingDisgust, can look awayDisposabilityKids: was going to say I couldn't look them in the eyeSales and marketingGet credit anywayShowersCarsEat anythingCommunitySociety is for youReasons to careHelp other people you don't know and aren't bornAnimalsWhy I can't not careI lack the privilege of scientific ignorance  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mike and I are in an online writing group together. For a while I knew him as the funny and diligent guy whose books have thousands of reviews online. Then I read his big one, Profit First. I know entrepreneurship from living it, so I expected to skim it, but two things. His writing is as funny and engaging as he is and what he wrote was new and valuable. Those who have read it know what I mean when I share that I set up my five accounts right after finishing it.Next I read Fix This Next and loved it too. I couldn't skim it because it also contained richness that I couldn't just gloss over. Plus it's fun, funny, and vulnerable. Both books covered values and acting on them. I invited him to the podcast and he loved the idea.I don't know if he realizes how relevant his approach to entrepreneurship is to sustainability. Like previous guest Steven Pressfield's, The War of Art, I could copy Mike's books switching entrepreneurial things like profligate polluting for sustainability things lik profligate spending and humanity suffering for just family suffering. Other areas with parallels:Chasing growth mindlesslyIgnoring costsShame keeping you from change (also hopelessness, futility, community)Imbalance, not knowing or prioritizing valuesUnthinkingly applying old way that seems like it should work but it worsensDelaying what you really want, never getting it (profit / clean air)DesperationMonster destroys family and communityDenialSince I see him often online, I've heard little clues that his commitment from this episode is creating meaning for him. Listen to hear it. I wonder if it will lead him to apply his approach to sustainability.Mike's home page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This talk gets to the root of what I see destroying Earth's ability to sustain life and our health and happiness in the process.Here is the audio a recent talk I gave on doof, building up to what we can do to get rid of it, and improving our world in the process. I compare its effects with those of heroin, crack, and other addictions. I examine what makes something doof, like if it's advertised, packaged, fiber-removed, or the big one: if the manufacturer engineered it to create craving.I consider this audio a great talk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Katie is the sort of role model I do this podcast to bring to the world. Her challenges are huge, but her passion and determination greater.I can find a million people who say they care about the environment. They probably do. I can find some who act on this caring. I can find a few who do things that sound great like starting companies to do well by doing good. Of them, many are helping restore Earth's ability to sustain life.Then there's Katie. She's devoting everything she's got beyond just cleaning some area. She's going to what I consider as near the root of our problems, and the most effective solution: keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Most "solutions" like renewables, recycling, offsets, and what makes the news, in my view mostly just shuffle pollution around after we already brought fossil fuels out from underground where they were benign.When we recorded, she was in the middle of helping stop a pipeline, working with the local community. We talked about her current work and her past groundbreaking work with Doe v. Unocal and cases that followed its precedent.But I want most to comment on our conversation's tone. I loved talking with her as someone else who saw our problems and dove in to solve them, not dip around the edges, and she's succeeding. I love talking with someone not justifying or making excuses, but enthusiastic.How we feel depends on what we give relative to our potential. I've learned not to judge myself for things outside my control. I loved talking with her because I felt a bond over devoting ourselves to a great cause and giving all we have.https://earthrights.orghttps://earthrights.org/case/doe-v-unocalhttps://youtu.be/FUzG8xfjsWo on Bill MoyersPipeline through the heart: A Black neighborhood’s uphill battle against oil developers shows mapActivists Have Shut Down a Memphis-Area Pipeline — But Their Fight Isn’t OverKatie and Ka Hsaw Wa’s Speech at BioneersKatie’s TedX Talk: What Makes Us HumanTotal Denial Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Rebanks' first massively bestselling book, The Shepherd's Life, and the images of that life he posts online, at first make you think he hails from another time. It describes a life both almost unimaginable to most city dwellers like myself and more than half the Earth and traditional, going back centuries or even millennia. He illustrates his relationships with his father and grandfather, the land, the sheep, and history.But he also shows that he is from now, not another time. I sensed myself out of touch with humanity and nature with plastic and not knowing what trees and birds live near me. In his second book, Pastoral Song, also a massive bestsellr, he describes more his conflict and struggle with the invasion of modernity into his life, his foray into acceptance, and ultimate his joyful rejection of it.Many of us dream of rejecting the parts of modernity that stultify us but decline to act out of fear. James rejected it, not easy. You'll love his openness and experiences likely different from anyone you know. When British people talk about the Lake District, they get wistful. I've never been there. James is of that territory.James's views contrast and complement previous guest James Suzman's, who wrote about the San bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. Both speak of living in harmony and balance with nature, struggling at the first world expanding into their territory.In our conversation, James Rebanks shares his views and experience on nature, family, and his life. I mostly bring people from organizations---businesses, political office, sports teams, etc. James comes from family, farms, and England's Lake District. He shares a life unlike anyone I met but probably like thousands of my ancestors.Here is the quote I read:For weeks afterward, as we passed Henry’s farm, Dad would tell me that we were bloody fools. This news confirmed something Dad had always felt in his gut. Deep down he had never really believed in many of the changes, and with every passing year he was becoming more skeptical. We were doing these new things because we had ​to—getting more cattle and sheep, acquiring bigger machines, making these changes and meanwhile losing good people—and yet where was it all heading? If modern farming made the soil worse, and reduced it to a junkie requiring more and more hits of ​shop-​bought chemicals, then how sustainable was it? Dad couldn’t step out of it entirely, but he saw right through it. Rather than admire our friends and relatives who were creating huge new farming businesses, with enormous buildings and loads of machinery and staff, he worried for them. He thought their world was ugly, built on debt, and increasingly risky and volatile; it would all come crashing down around them someday. And when it began to, and some of the biggest farms went bankrupt, he defended them and said we had all been fools once. There was no pleasure in seeing farmers losing their farms.My father knew the truth lay in Henry’s soil. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If I measure a book's quality by how much it changes my perspective and enables me to improve my life, Dr. Farrell's The Myth of Male Power (1993) is one of the best books I've read. He's written valuable book after valuable books since, up to and including The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (2018).I grew up believing in equality between the sexes and believe so now more than ever. Dr. Farrell's insight helped illuminate and clarify ways I and society don't empathize with men or realize how men are trapped and suffer. I've written about the chip on my shoulder about how people respond to my sharing my suffering to say my suffering isn't suffering and that I'm actually causing others to suffer or that the best I can do is to shut up and listen. I knew something was missing. His work helped make things fall into place.If I measure someone's leadership by how much that person influences others through inspiration, not coercion or authoritarian means, Dr. Farrell is a great leader. My mentor, Frances Hesselbein, also says the role of a leader is to see what others don't, which he does too.Bringing things back our environment, his leadership in seeing and clearly describing what others don't resembles what I find mission in sustainability. I'll always welcome more science and reporting, but we lack leadership. We lack people who inspire by connecting with their intrinsic motivations. I believe we can learn from him and apply what he's achieved in sustainability.Warren Farrell's home page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A reader followed up on my conversations with religious figures and authorities from branches of Christianity and Judaism. He wroteYou have presented religious people with «the book». That’s good, and I hope you will find space for a muslim person/scholar and relate it to your concern about the sustainability and climate. I can recommend one person. He is, I believe the leader of Cambridge Muslim College, UK. Abdal Hakim Murad (actually British who converted to islam). He is highly and well respected and also provide guidance on the contemporary society to the community of muslims in UK and also in Europe.While I know about Islam, I don't know many Muslims, so loved the suggestion and connected with Abdal Hakim.Beyond his leadership role in Cambridge, England, his personal story and accomplishments intrigued me. The conversation was for me enlightening, especially his insider view of communities that, to the extent I've learned of them, I got a one-sided, American view. He shared of erudite sophistication. We spoke about cultures intersecting and intermingling.He also share of Islam's long history in Europe, patiently given my knowing little, so if you'd like to learn more and don't know much, I think you'll appreciate our conversation.Religion and the environmentOur conversation also reinforced my impression that religious people connect with sustainability and stewardship with emotions mine are closer to: beauty and joy, for example, more than obligation and chore, which I hear from environmentalists. He recounts examples of Islam and sustainability, practiced naturally, not just following a recent trend.The Cambridge Central MosqueThe University of Cambridge Faculty of Divinity: Dr Timothy WinterThe Independent UK: Timothy Winter: Britain's most influential Muslim - and it was all Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.