This Sustainable Life

When I read Tom's book on sustainability, Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, I couldn't believe the book didn't exist already. I consider it the science book of the decade so invited him back. He shares about his motivation and goals in writing it. You might read my review of the book first, but you can jump into this conversation too.Here is an excerpt from my review:He taught a course to non-science undergraduates on the subject, called Energy and the Environment. He used the course to compile his posts, polish them, and make a self-contained comprehensive book. As far as I know, the only one like it, possibly because mathematics is the language of nature, so equations abound, but he explains them, so people who haven’t taken science or math classes since high school can follow.Showing the math means we don’t have to take his word for it. We can do the math too and think, judge, and act for ourselves. No matter our politics, age, industry, etc, we can access this book equally. The environment involves many branches of science, including physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, systems, and more, as well as fields including engineering, history, politics, philosophy, and more. Murphy brings them together like no other resource I’ve found. Many will shy away from devoting the time that the gravity of our environmental situation demands, but for enabling and empowering every reader to understand, think, judge, and act for themselves, I consider Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet the science book of the decade. I’ve read and watched a lot of books, videos, and articles. For reference, I consider Sustainability Without the Hot Air by Caltech-trained Cambridge physicist David MacKay the science book of the previous decade, and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, the science book of the decade before that, by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. (A video of David MacKay after his book led me to avoid flying, not as a burden but to increase my enjoyment of nature and connection to humans.) Read these three books, and you understand our environment.But wait, there’s more. Murphy has acted on his findings in his personal life. He didn’t just use an electric car or unplug appliances before doing so was cool, he measured his results and shared how doing so affected his relationships with his wife, peers, and students. He shares his life and profession. This book doesn’t teach raw information, it shares a lifestyle.I’m not saying the book is easy, only that I find it the most valuable book or resource on the most important area humans have faced as a species, and I’ve read and watched many.Murphy’s book is glorious. He writes about the wonder of nature, our genius in harnessing it, its limitations, and our folly at not measuring the sofa before trying to jam it into the elevator, or believing the self-serving interests suggesting a “new normal” without justification.The math is accessible to a non-science undergraduate. To someone with a PhD in physics like me, it is a symphony—pure joy when you understand it, even more when your study it. Beethoven didn’t write his Ninth for one hearing. Yo-Yo Ma has to study pieces and even with my PhD, I have to take time to understand its equations and application. I learn each time I read Murphy. You will too. The payoff is worth it for aesthetic pleasure alone. There are practical benefits to understanding the patterns: unlike Beethoven, the fates of civilization and millions of species, including our own, depend on our understanding and behavior.Tom's book: Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite PlanetMy review of it: The Science Book of the Decade: Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you ever tasted an heirloom tomato so delicious it was almost a religious experience? I used to think people who complained about supermarket tomatoes sounded full of themselves. How different can they taste?Then I tasted heirloom tomatoes with so much flavor, I couldn’t believe my taste buds. The next time I ate a mainstream tomato it felt like eating wet cotton.Do you know what they used to call heirloom tomatoes?They used to call heirloom tomatoes tomatoes. Our post-industrial values of growth, efficiency, externalizing costs, comfort, convenience, and extraction turned something divine into something available year-round at an affordable price but a fall from grace to say the least. In the way that my rare sips of scotch today give me more appreciation of spirits than the larger quantities I drank of beer in college despite drinking less alcohol, my net appreciation of tomatoes is greater now, despite spending less overall on them and only eating them in season.I mention this contrast for context.Every day we read headlines about environmental problems. Deforestation, sea level rise, plastic in our bloodstreams, forever chemicals crossing the placenta, lead lowering our IQs.We can dance around environmental problems all we want. We eventually reach overpopulation and overconsumption.Everyone thinks reducing population means killing people and reducing consumption means reverting to the stone age. More like switching from binge drinking cheap beer or eating industrial tomatoes to appreciating scotch or experiencing preindustrial tomatoes.Mainstream views, and, no offense but likely yours, are wrong on alternatives to both. They associate reducing overpopulation with the One Child Policy and eugenics, and the authoritarian, inhumane, and inhuman practices they led to including forced sterilization, forced abortions, and more. They associate reducing overconsumption with deprivation and sacrifice. We associate buying things with happiness and quality of life, so less must mean unhappiness and lower quality of life. If we don’t grow the GDP, people will lose jobs, we won’t be able to maintain our infrastructure, hospitals will close, mothers will die in childbirth, and 35 will be old age. Do you want to return to the stone age, Josh? Is that what you want?But the alternative to overpopulation is lowering the birth rate, which many nations have done through purely voluntary, non-coercive means, mainly education, access to contraception, and the freedom to choose their family size themselves—the opposite of the One Child Policy or eugenics. These policies throughout the world brought health, longevity, stability, prosperity though voluntary means—the opposite of mainstream expectations. Frankly I thought that way too and couldn't talk about it until I learned of it happening all over the world. Until then, I thought if the cure is worse than the disease, I’ll take the disease. The last place I want the government is in the bedroom. As it turns out, globally, the government is in the bedroom, promoting larger families based on disproved economic myths, trying to coerce people into larger families. Over hundreds of thousands of years, humans have kept our population at replacement. The past few centuries since stumbling onto fossil fuels are the aberration that we’ve born into, erroneously seeing as normal. For the two to three hundred thousand years of human existence before agriculture, our ancestors lived longer, healthier lives than the past ten thousand years until living memory. And now we’re making ourselves sicker and dying earlier than our parents.People associate consumption with quality of life. More stuff can improve life if you’re on the cusp. People you know imagine themselves cousins with such people eking out a living, as if they are like cousins or siblings. On the contrary, you and people you know are likely benefiting from their suffering and contributing to it. They are if they're using single-use plastic, flying, heating their homes too much in winter and cooling them too much in the summer. The alternative is joy etc. You and I aren’t on the margin. We have so much stuff, advertisers spend billions to make as want more because it doesn’t improve our lives.Since Earth's carrying capacity without fossil fuels is, as best I can tell, about two billion, leveling off our population doesn’t move us away from the population collapsing. The solution is to copy what many people around the world have done—to choose to reduce birth rate globally to well below replacement and to consume less. If you heard classism, nationalism, sexism, or racism in anything I’ve said, you stuck it in yourself. Such preconceived notions aren’t helping anyone.Reducing consumption and number of children in rich nations are easier physically, but people here are so entitled and spoiled that in our minds we think it's harder. We’ve lost the sense that technology has made us more dependent on it and less resilient. So we need to restore our culture—that is, role models, beliefs, images, stories—to historical ones including stewardship and Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. Nobody wants to be displaced from their land or have their air, land, and water poisoned.I've reduced my consumption and waste from average American by over ninety percent, all improving my quality life. I have no kids, though I could still have one and be below replacement level. I doubt I'll have one because I couldn't look my child in the eye knowing what world is in store for him or her. Yes, if you’re a parent, I’m improving your kids’ future, possibly more than you. Yeah, I said it.If you're like most people, facts, figures, logic, and instruction, however simple and sensical, won't influence your behavior. You'll change when about five people in your life do. So here are my changes:I haven’t flown since 2016 by choiceI take two years to fill a load of trashI’ve picked up litter daily since 2017My monthly electric charges have been below $1.95 this yearI buy mostly local produce year-round, including winter. The major exception being dried beans, which I buy from bulk and are my main staple.Last ate meat in 1990, vegan a big chunk of that timeI lead global leaders to change so I’m not acting alone, but working to change systems and cultureNow you know one person who lived like the average American, thought individual action wouldn’t make a difference, but voluntarily chose to live more simply and loved the results so much I’ll never return and only wish I’d acted sooner. Like you, I felt I needed to fly to make a living. My family is scattered around the world. Nothing about the change for me was any easier than for you, no matter how unique you consider yourself. So knowing my change, you're about twenty percent of the way to changing. Look for others and you'll change sooner. The number one predictor of someone installing solar on their homes is how many neighbors did already. Same with habits in eating, drinking, smoking, voting, and many other areas.What about efficiency and decoupling? Aren't we reducing consumption and waste while increasing GDP? This is a quantitative case. Before doing the numbers, you could imagine it going either way. After doing the numbers, decoupling is a myth. Actually, more a scam, like recycling plastic and carbon offsets. We want to believe so we can cling to our old ways, but once you see the effects are the oppositive of your fantasies, it becomes overwhelmingly clear. If you make a polluting system more efficient, you pollute more efficiently.We have been sold scam after scam by polluters. I doubt they mean harm, any more than an individual does when ordering takeout or flying. Systems often work differently than we expect, so they sound like they could work. The numbers matter. They don’t. Here are some of the scams:The hydrogen economyFuture generations will solve what we messed upRecyclingThe closed loop economyHow we'll feed 10 billion people by 2050Net zeroCarbon neutralElectrify everythingMarsFissionFusionDecouplingDemographic transitionsCarbon offsetsGeoengineeringThey all sound like they’ll work. Asbestos worked. So did leaded gasoline and marketing cigarettes to children. Then we learned they killed people and we stopped them.You probably suspected deep inside that carbon offsets were too good to be true. When you look at the systemic effects, they increase the problem. Same with fusion and all the others I listed. I have a PhD in physics, an MBA, and I’ve studied this stuff. Nobody wishes it worked more than I. I expected it would work as much as anyone. But they all accelerate the problems. To clarify: several of these actions could work as tactics within a strategy of lowering birth rate and consumption, but not as strategies themselves.In practice, as a culture we do the opposite of the first term in "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," while taking false refuge in the third, accelerating Earth's degradation while feeling good about ourselves. We live the pattern in most of the points above, increasing our damage while telling ourselves the scam trend is helping. Don’t believe me? Look at the numbers. Contact me for sources. The indicators of our lowering Earth's ability to sustain life are all increasing, especially CO2, plastic, deforestation, extinctions, and forever chemicals like PFOA.For generations we’ve known we were impacting too much and said later generations will fix it while buying into the latest scam trend to keep from the obvious. The tragedy is that the scams weren’t improving their quality of life. Research shows hunters and gatherers have higher qualities of life than most industrialized people outside the elite few percent.They all promote thinking “not me, not now, someone else, some other time.” They all fail to change our pollution. When you hear them, expect them to lead you to think palliative thoughts: “Despite all the problems, you aren’t responsible, your pollution doesn’t count, keep buying, keep consuming, keep flying. Don’t change.” These scams accelerate our lowering Earth’s ability to sustain life. Only two things work: fewer kids, less consumption and its resulting less production.If you want to pollute less, you have to change the system. Changing parts of a system won't do it. You need to change the system's values and goals from material growth to enjoying what you have and personal growth, from externalizing costs to taking responsibility for affecting others, from extraction to humility toward nature and honoring it, from comfort and convenience to the satisfaction of a job well done, and from efficiency to resilience. These new values aren’t new. They’re more fundamental for most of us but lost amid the advertising-driven craving.Leaders change cultures’ values. You can choose to lead and act first. I can tell you from my experience and seeing others that you will love the change. Instead of loss, you'll save money and time, connect with your values, connect with nature. I’m not talking returning to the stone age. The opposite.As I mentioned, heirloom tomatoes used to be called tomatoes. We can return to quality without losing modernity. We're seeing modern life decrease health, prosperity, and longevity. Eighty percent overweight and obese, millions dying from breathing air, tens of millions addicted to drugs, social media, Twinkies, and Doritos. My changes restore and increase health, prosperity, and longevity. Earth will host fewer people at a time, but more humans over the long future. Only they won’t barely survive in a poisoned, overheated hellhole.My route leads to us living happier with a bit less stuff, better food, closer to family, less flying and shipping but more appreciation of our world and selves. What's so great about ten billion anyway? If we have to level off, why not a sustainable number? Two billion was more than enough to create Einstein and Mozart. A few hundred million produced Buddha, Jesus, Aristotle, Laozi, Muhammad, and the pyramids. We're overcrowded. A Buddha or Jesus today born to a favela might never realize his or her potential.We can change that outcome. Most people focus on “one little thing you can do for the environment” or telling people how dire the situation. I won’t stop them, but they base their work on extrinsic motivation, often coercion ending up making people feel guilt and shame. I work with intrinsic motivation that is already inside you and unique to everyone. I don’t care if the first thing you do is big or small. I care that you care because if you do, you’ll find it meaningful. You’ll do it again. You’ll influence others. If you want to stop someone from doing something, a great way is to judge their first attempt. I do the opposite. I support after first listening.I’ve taught many people what they’re now calling The Spodek Method to find your intrinsic motivation to act on the environment. You'll find when you do you want to act more. When you act for your reasons, you'll find meaning and purpose, independent of magnitude, and you'll want to act again. Soon enough you'll influence people around you.The biggest change you can make is to lead others. It multiplies any other effect. To lead others you must first lead yourself. The Spodek Method does so. After you've led yourself, lead others with the Spodek Method.My next book will teach it, as will upcoming courses. Or you can listen to me teaching it to one of my podcast guests, Jonathan Hardesty. I’ll put the link in the show notes. If you go to his third conversation with me you’ll hear me describe step-by-step how to motivate someone to share and act on their environmental values to create joy, freedom, fun, community, connection, meaning, and purpose. You can lead others through the method and they can lead you. You’ll love the experience and all it leads to. Leading others and teaching them to lead yet more others and to teach them to lead will transform culture.We’ll restore the bounty of nature, where industrial tomatoes are a sad memory of humanity’s brief addiction to craving and tomatoes are tomatoes, unspeakably delicious. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Frederick was a great sport in allowing me to explore working on a patterns that happens sometimes but that I had let slide before.We started talking about nature, then his commitment. About halfway through I noticed that his motivation to the commitment from his first episode didn't seem to come from inside, which I believe led to him doing the task for extrinsic, not intrinsic, reasons, resulting in him doing his task perfunctorily.Then came the part that may be uncomfortable to listen to---or may be intriguing or fun. I can't tell because I was in the conversation. I tried to find a new sledding hill of his to ground a new activity. From then on we had a cordial conversation, but at cross-purposes. I don't think he understood what I was getting at and I couldn't see how to explain my point any better.I'm grateful to Frederick for maintaining his interest. Those interested in starting a podcast may find a lot to learn since guests often disconnect from their sledding hill and feel they have to fix something or do something big. I don't think we reached a resolution, but I think we valued the conversation. If you're considering starting a podcast in the This Sustainable Life family or to do The Spodek Method with many people, you'll find this conversation educational. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Longtime readers of my blog know how much James Suzman's first book influenced my thinking and views of possessions, community, ownership, modernity, and a range of similar topics. A top question I've asked anyone who might know is how populations that didn't grow despite sharing our biology that has grown exponentially for centuries.If knowing history is wise and knowing history farther back wiser, James's living with the San Bushmen of southern Africa gave him a few hundred thousand years to know. We can't know exactly how their lives today resemble their ancestors, but the overlap is greater than zero and suggests a huge alternative to the knee-jerk dichotomy people can't see past today of capitalism versus communism. Human beings lived for two hundred thousand years, maybe three, in ways that were neither.You can imagine the changes in climate, other species, terrain, and more in that time. Their stability endured a thousand times longer than the time since the Industrial Revolution led us to put our whole species in the realm of extinction.As the world looks to technology to help us out of the mess technology wrought, flagrantly disregarding Einstein's admonition that acting by what got us into a mess won't get us out of it, James's work suggests values, behaviors, and cultures we can learn from.We covered topics like these. I bet you'll find our conversation fascinating.Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of RobotsAffluence Without Abundance: The disappearing world of the BushmenIn GQ: James Suzman Interview: Our Collective Fixation on Productivity Is Older Than You ThinkIn the Wall Street Journal: ‘Work’ Review: Foraging for the Good LifeIn Harvard Business Review: The Fundamental Human Relationship with WorkIn The New Yorker: What’s Wrong with the Way We WorkTiming and Management of Birth among the !Kung: Biocultural Interaction in,Reproductive Adaptation Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrew co-hosted me on MAGAMedia with past guest Rob Harper, so we've spoken there several times, but this conversation is our first one-on-one.We start by talking about our meeting and how talking to each other means talking about issues we normally don't in our usual circles, but that we enjoy learning from each other, not getting angry despite different viewpoints. We both want to increase meaningful communication as opposed to the more prevalent mutual provocation and dismissal in American political conversation between people who vote differently, to the extent they communicate.Andrew shares his growing up in a Democratic household and what transitioned him to appreciating and supporting candidate and then President Trump, as well as meeting Rob, partnering, and starting their show together. I suspect most listeners to a podcast with the word 'sustainable' in the title don't talk to many Trump supporters. He also talked about division within parties and commonalities across parties. I wish I had more conversations like this one and heard more of them with others.My favorite part with most guests is their answer to what the environment means to them. You'll hear a lot of genuine, long-held views and observations about the environment. You'll also hear it lead to first-time action, I believe with a smile on his face.After Dark Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Isn’t a refrigerator essential? Isn’t life with them better?I thought so. I’ll quote my mom from my podcast to illustrate where I came from:I grew up where it was easily ninety degrees every single day. In fact, where I worked, the store if it got ninety degrees outside we got to close the store and go home because it was that unsafe. To me, air conditioning was wonderful. And to my mom and my grandmother, not having to use ice box refrigerators was great. I really appreciate all of that today and I understand that we’ve gone overboard with air conditioning. It’s really bad for the environment and one should learn how to get along with these temperatures.But Josh, it was really hot in South Dakota. Unless you had really, really good screens, when you opened the windows you were covered with mosquito bites. I don’t want to revisit that at all ever. I am willing to use fans and cut out a lot of air conditioning but to me it means giving up a lot that made my life a lot better.I didn’t have much but what I had was good. It seems to me like you’re asking me—not you personally—but we’re saying stop doing these things that brought joy. I’m not excessive.Her experience is no air conditioning bad, air conditioning good. No fridge bad, fridge good. Most of us share the experience and belief. It’s our culture. As long as we don’t challenge our beliefs and culture, we’re stuck polluting. We’ll keep sleepwalking into an uninhabitable Earth.But people lived without refrigeration for hundreds of thousands of years. Were they all miserable all the time? Other cultures always look odd until we get them.Changing Culture from Polluting to StewardingTo change American and global culture to embrace stewardship and pollute less, not thinking it means deprivation, sacrifice, burden, and chore, but joy, fun, freedom, connection, community, meaning, and purpose, a leader needs experience in three areas:Leading peopleScienceLiving the values he or she proposes others adoptMost people have one or two. I know of almost no one with all three. Many scientists, educators, and journalists know science, but not how to lead. They spread facts, figures, and instruction, where rarely lead people to change. Many leaders don’t know science so they promote ideas that sound nice but don’t work.Even among people who lead and know science—a rare combination—few to none have tried to live sustainably. Sadly and unintentionally, they present solutions as abstract at best, more often as something even they don’t want but we have to.I’ve Been to the Mountain Top and Seen the Promised LandI don’t avoid packaged food and flying to deprive myself, nor because I believe my contributions divided by 7.8 billion round off to more than zero. I do it on a personal level to live by my values and not pollute. But from a sustainability leadership perspective, I do it to learn what living sustainably means and what the transition requires.Changing a lifestyle isn’t a matter of new technology or instruction. It takes new role models, beliefs, stories, images, support, community, and things like that. The challenge of building muscle at the gym isn’t know what weights to lift. It’s how to go when you don’t feel like it or your friends discourage you, handling injuries or slow progress, diet, sleep, great coaching, and so on.In Martin Luther King speak, to reach the promised land, you have to climb the mountain, which few people want to do first. They don’t see the value. Someone has to go first and show it can be done. A few will follow. Then it becomes mainstream.Why I Unplugged My FridgeI recorded a podcast episode that goes into more depth, but the biggest reason I tried the experiment is that renewable power sources are intermittent. Could I live so if the power went down I didn’t suffer? Making grids have more uptime costs money, reduces energy security, and requires highly polluting peaker plants and nuclear.We’re on a treadmill of every time we enable our grid to provide more power and uptime, we use it all up. We started browning out power grids with air conditioning in the 1940s. Since then we built them to much greater capacity, but we see brownouts as much as ever. We keep making ourselves dependent at tremendous cost and insecurity for marginal benefit. That’s our choice.What if we made ourselves resilient? What if, like most of the world, we could handle the power going down more? We’d save money, increase energy security, and could get by with only renewables, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Renewable Electricity Futures Study.Imagine! We could live on only solar and wind by spending less money. A major hurdle is refrigerators. Making our culture resilient to them could save us money, make us resilient, and enable us to switch to renewables. Can we live in the modern world without them?Before I unplugged mine the first time, in December 2019, I doubted I could make it a day or two. I made it three months! The next time I tried, last November, I made it over six and a half months!What I learned Living Without a Fridge for Six and a Half MonthsFace problem, then solve it. Don’t try to solve it in the abstract. It’s easier to figure out how to preserve food when your food is going to go bad if you don’t than to imagine what you’d do hypothetically. Then your imagination comes up with more possibilities than would arise, paralyzing you from acting.We connect with other cuisines more by living in our own culture than visiting others. February and March in New York mean parsnips, beets, potatoes, and mostly root vegetables plus the greens I fermented or sprouted. What sounds subtractive actually makes the process constructive and creative. How do I make what I have taste good? This restriction connects me more with other cultures because their cuisines emerged from that constraint. We may use different vegetables, but we connect culturally. Now I see visiting another culture for a weekend or even a few months more like visiting a zoo. We also undermine our own culture. Most tourist places have restaurants from everywhere. We’re turning once-unique cultures into a global mesh with decreasing distinction. Cooking local moves in the other direction.Less tech means more connection. Less technology forces me to learn what to do from family, friends, and people with similar goals, like authors and people who make videos. This exercise connected me with people. It revealed that technology generally separates us more than connects us. Of course, exceptions exist.Fermentation and sprouting are easy and fun. Before this experience, fermentation sounded scary, dangerous, and hard. I didn’t think about sprouting at all. Now I see fermentation as how civilization began and quick and easy, producing rich and complex flavors. I can do it simply now, basically chopping vegetables, adding salt, mixing them, and putting them in a jar. I started with sauerkraut and vinegar and moved to chutneys, kvass, and fermenting random vegetables and fruit to keep them edible. Bean sprouts took less time and effort at pennies a pound.The exercise was about resilience more than power. Few things are more repellent than neediness and entitlement. Do you know anyone you like more for their neediness? Well, needing a fridge is needy. Our technologies are supposed to make us more capable but are making us more dependent and needy.Whole fruits and vegetables last longer than I expected. Before this exercise, I thought packaging extended the lives of things, but fruits and vegetables, especially root vegetables, stay fresh a long time. Cabbage, beets, potatoes, and winter vegetables can stay fresh weeks to months without special treatment, longer with fermentation. A lot of packaged stuff starts going bad soon after opening. Some of it never decomposes because it contains no nutrition to attract microbiota that would eat it.Living by a value anew makes me want to solve more, like going off-grid. Since I started by thinking this challenge was beyond my abilities, I considered it a goal, and a stretch at that. As the weather warmed, I expected every week to be as far as I could go. Then March led to April. I kept expanding my skills to ferment and keep things fresh otherwise, which led to May, which led to June. The more I learned the more I saw I could do more. For example, seeing monthly electric charges on my bill of $1.70, $1.70, and $1.40 got me wondering how low I could go. Could I go off the electric grid for months at a time? I don’t yet know, but the question prompted me to start researching and experimenting with living on solar. I’m seeing if I can disconnect from Con Ed next time. Stay tuned.We’re freaking spoiled and entitled. American culture and the cultures of most peer countries make us dependent, spoiled, and entitled, insensitive and dismissive of people we know we’re hurting. Most people who are spoiled and entitled don’t know it. No one said no to them and they prefer keeping it that way. But I think we all know they’d prefer not to be spoiled if they knew. We are spoiled. We don’t want anyone denying us our fleeting indulgences either, but expand our horizons and we’ll stop being so entitled. In the middle of my experiment, the New York Times posted When One Fridge Is Not Enough, which started: “For many Americans, a second fridge—and sometimes a third—is another member of the family” with pictures of giant refrigerators filled with expensive, unhealthy, needless doof. Member of the family? What happened to us?Everyone wants to protect elderly and helpless, not thinking through that you can adjust for them. Common first reactions to hearing what I’m doing begin with, “You can do it because you’re privileged,” though not with questions to learn if I am or not. Something about me leads people to conclude that I must be privileged and out of touch with the lives of others. In any case, of course people range in their dependence on refrigerators and other technology. That some people need more doesn’t mean we can’t change for everyone else, nor should it stop us from thinking and discussing the possibilities.Freedom is opposite of neediness. The more I needed a fridge, the less freedom I had. I don’t mean political freedom. I mean mental, emotional, and physical freedom. Needing a fridge means dependence. Not needing one opens the world to where and what I can eat.The key word in “dependence on foreign oil” isn’t ‘foreign.’ It’s ‘dependence.’ Pundits talks about our dependence on foreign oil as if needing it from another country makes America unstable. On the contrary, the dependence is the main problem. Wherever it comes from, neediness means people can control us. When has desperation improved your life?Sustainability isn’t a goal or target but skills that once you start you find more. Speaking of commitments to pollute less, I picked up the following pattern from my podcast guests: guests who had already acted in stewardship the most tended to come up fastest with new things they could do. People who hadn’t done much tended to give up or push back. They’d say they already drove an electric car and avoided bottled water, ask (rhetorically) what more could they do, and declare themselves one of the good guys and stop thinking about it.Future generations will recoil in horror at our choosing comfort and convenience that contributes to ten thousand years of degrading Earth’s ability to sustain life. We wantonly create suffering by compartmentalizing activities we think will improve our lives from the pollution they cause.I’m describing a social, emotional problem. Technology rarely solves social and emotional problems Solving our social and emotional problems will not likely come from more tech. More often it will come from less, which helps us learn our values and act on them.Learn Resilience Like Learning to Raise a ChildHow does one learn to raise a child?You can learn all you want before the child is born, but giving birth is where the learning begins. All the hypothetical becomes real and counts.If we want to lower emissions, building more solar and wind is nice. I’m glad we’re doing it, but we’re using more than we need. Shutting down fossil fuel-based energy will transition us faster. Of course, plan for the helpless so their lights don’t go out. But face the problem to solve it. Analyzing and planning more than we have keep delaying and confusing. Let’s give birth to the baby. When we face actual problems, entrepreneurs will innovate the solutions to them. Not economists publishing papers on their imaginations. Create new markets. Use different metrics than GDP.Baker’s DozenHere’s a baker’s dozen lesson 13. Turning on fridge felt gross. I plugged it in at last because today hit 90F (32C) and yesterday began my summer CSA, meaning many fresh leafy greens that would wilt in the heat.I unplugged it November 22, expecting to last to March and made it to June instead. Next time I’ll start earlier to get month or two extra. Maybe October or September. Maybe I’ll try sooner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The average American watches 5 hours of TV per day. Many fly or drive around for fun. If we want to pollute less, will we lose the ability to enjoy ourselves?I've written before how Vincent Stanley's commitment to turn off his computer Friday mornings and Nicola Pirulli's walking me through The Spodek Method led to me turning off all my electronics and practicing singing daily. Since starting, I've missed a couple days, but have loved the results.Until recently I only sang songs, nothing attempting to learn, just to enjoy. Now I'm moving to voice exercises. I resisted doing them partly because I need to use my computer to play the recordings so decided to relax that constraint the days I practice my exercises. I expect that doing them enough will improve my singing. For now, here is the "before" version of my practicing beginner voice exercises.When I listened after, I was mortified at my inexperienced voice. I have a long way to go. But I expect that practice will make perfect, or better, and it will be hard to imagine I sounded like this.It begins with a story I think you'll like. Listen the exercises at your own risk, but I recommend turning off your power and seeing what you find to replace screens and burning fossil fuels. You'll be bored, maybe mortified, but it's not what you give up. It's what you replace it with.The recording I got the exercises from Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I didn’t think of how small my building’s elevators were when I bought a sofa after moving into my current apartment. It didn’t fit. The deliverymen tried to bring it up the stairs too. They made the first landing, but couldn’t make the turn to go up the next flight.They had to take it back. I ended up paying a $300 restocking fee plus big tips for the deliverymen’s extra efforts. Plus I lost weeks with no sofa. Now I know my home’s limits. Living within them is no problem when I know them, only when I didn’t. A few minutes of measurement and geometry could have saved me that trouble and improved my life.Can homo sapiens’ elevator, also known as Earth, fit us all in? As with my sofa, maybe a bit of calculation is worth saving the trouble of finding out if our sofa can fit. We’re past the point of eyeballing it. Our sofa is civilization and billions of lives.I doubt even those who study sustainability most can answer Important questions likeCan fusion save us? Will it?What works between solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, and other options? What doesn’t? Why not?What unintended side-effects are we missing?Do we risk losing civilization? If so, how great is the risk?If we take the gloves off, can geoengineering and other last-ditch efforts work?How hard will saving it be?What do we have to do to make it?These questions have answers, whether we find them out or not. There are a lot of books on the environment. I’ve read a lot of them. Most just describe our situation and what will happen if we don’t fix it. Some talk about what we can do, but they don’t help us understand. They don’t describe the patterns, just the results or instruction. We have to trust the writer.We’ve all heard to eat less meat. How much less? Will all the things they tell us to do solve the problems? How can I tell? What if I don’t eat less meat? Between eating meat or not, why can’t I see any difference in the world? Should I bother trying or just enjoy life to the max?We’re just told the problems and what to do. Maybe school should have taught us but it didn’t. After decades of poor science education, few teachers know how to teach science. They spout facts and instruction. Most analysis and activism is done without context or knowing nature’s patterns, based on feelings. Some envision a world of 10 billion thriving, others a collapse well before.Sustainability leadership is my life passion and frankly I don’t find most resources on the environment useful or readable. From the IPCC report Greta Thunberg gave to Congress to An Inconvenient Truth to articles suggesting “one little thing you can do for the environment,” they describe results and tell us what to do. They don’t help us understand beyond “coral reefs are bleaching” and oversimplifications like “CO2 acts like a blanket.” We have to take their word things like biodiversity is good and pollution is bad.Even knowing all the data doesn’t tell us the patterns. Will buying an electric vehicle matter? Does flying matter? How much? Enough to save lives? How can I tell, or do I have to take your word for it? Most of all, what about when they clash with other values? What if someone else says jobs or energy security is more important? Is there conflict? If so, how do we resolve it? What if we don’t want to emit greenhouse gases but our mother is sick, flying distance away? Or we feel our job depends on it? What about someone else saying the economy depends on my buying more stuff?Only knowing data but not patterns, we can’t think or decide for ourselves. We throw up our hands. For generations we’ve said we’d act and in fact we have, yet we keep lowering Earth’s capacity to sustain life and society. Could our ignorance be causing our attempts at solutions to augment the problems? Might our current attempts at solutions be exacerbating the problems. Are we on a road to hell paved with good intentions?A New HopeTom Murphy’s new book, Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, changes all that. It empowers us to understand, think, and act for ourselves.Murphy earned his PhD at Caltech and teaches at UC San Diego. A decade ago he started the Do The Math blog, where he did more than answer the questions above. He showed how he found the answer so you can too, so you can think for yourself. I called it the best site on the internet (tied with Low Tech Magazine).Murphy’s sofa-doesn’t-fit-in-the-elevator moment came in 2006, shortly after moving to San Diego, considering the value of his home. He wrote:I pored over articles on the matter, and found two camps. One camp provided rafts of alarming quantitative analysis of the peril: sub-prime lending, soaring price-to-income ratios, unprecedented unaffordability by average families, vulnerability to any weakness in other sectors. The other camp said that the housing market was manifesting a new normal, that San Diego’s universal appeal would prevent a price drop, that scary lending practices were easily skirted by re-financing before interest payments ballooned. I chose to go with the quantitative analysis over the hand-wavy platitude-based set of beliefs, and am glad that I did.He sold at the height of the market. On seeing the success of applying quantitative analysis over hand-wavy platitude-based opinion to life, instead of moving to finance like many physicists, he applied it to the environment. He saw hand-wavy platitude-based beliefs and couldn’t stand it. He began applying physics to how we create energy, population, and so on in Do the Math.To the chagrin of his dedicated audience, since 2015, he posted only once. He told me on one of his appearances on my podcast that he had answered the most important questions so didn’t have more to write.But he wasn’t done. The blog was an unorganized string of posts. He taught a course to non-science undergraduates on the subject, called Energy and the Environment. He used the course to compile his posts, polish them, and make a self-contained comprehensive book. As far as I know, the only one like it, possibly because mathematics is the language of nature, so equations abound, but he explains them, so people who haven’t taken science or math classes since high school can follow.Showing the math means we don’t have to take his word for it. We can do the math too and think, judge, and act for ourselves. No matter our politics, age, industry, etc, we can access this book equally. The environment involves many branches of science, including physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, systems, and more, as well as fields including engineering, history, politics, philosophy, and more. Murphy brings them together like no other resource I’ve found. Many will shy away from devoting the time that the gravity of our environmental situation demands, but for enabling and empowering every reader to understand, think, judge, and act for themselves, I consider Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet the science book of the decade.I’ve read and watched a lot of books, videos, and articles. For reference, I consider Sustainability Without the Hot Air by Caltech-trained Cambridge physicist David MacKay the science book of the previous decade, and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, the science book of the decade before that, by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. (A video of David MacKay after his book led me to avoid flying, not as a burden but to increase my enjoyment of nature and connection to humans.) Read these three books, and you understand our environment.But wait, there’s more. Murphy has acted on his findings in his personal life. He didn’t just use an electric car or unplug appliances before doing so was cool, he measured his results and shared how doing so affected his relationships with his wife, peers, and students. He shares his life and profession. This book doesn’t teach raw information, it shares a lifestyle.I’m not saying the book is easy, only that I find it the most valuable book or resource on the most important area humans have faced as a species, and I’ve read and watched many.Murphy’s book is glorious. He writes about the wonder of nature, our genius in harnessing it, its limitations, and our folly at not measuring the sofa before trying to jam it into the elevator, or believing the self-serving interests suggesting a “new normal” without justification.The math is accessible to a non-science undergraduate. To someone with a PhD in physics like me, it is a symphony—pure joy when you understand it, even more when your study it. Beethoven didn’t write his Ninth for one hearing. Yo-Yo Ma has to study pieces and even with my PhD, I have to take time to understand its equations and application. I learn each time I read Murphy. You will too. The payoff is worth it for aesthetic pleasure alone. There are practical benefits to understanding the patterns: unlike Beethoven, the fates of civilization and millions of species, including our own, depend on our understanding and behavior.Learning math and physics here is like learning biology and chemistry when you start gardening or sports. You don’t need to start with anything. You won’t reach your potential, but you won’t get injured either. You’ll learn by doing. Any gardener will soon learn about species and seasons. Lifting weights taught me anatomy and diet. Sailing will teach you tides and fluid dynamics.Math doesn’t give answers. It doesn’t have values. People Do.Humans have values. What we consider good, bad, right, and wrong stands outside math and science. Euclid derived all of Euclidean geometry from five axioms but he had to start with them. Likewise, math lets you get from your values to what to do but it doesn’t tell you your values.Engineers often think math tells you answers. They promote nuclear power for not emitting CO2 or electric vehicles because they are more efficient, but do our deepest values include avoiding CO2 emissions and efficiency?Murphy describes how nuclear fission and fusion work, their hurdles to implementation, and so on, but then treats the science and technology as only the starting point to decide their value. Most analyses and people confronted with waste and pollution see more efficient sources and less polluting sources as the solution. Obviously, they pollute less, right? Not so fast. You have to do the math. What patterns have we followed before? If we follow them again, what will happen? People familiar with systems may expect systems to behave differently than their elements alone. Murphy does the math and suggests clean fission and fusion would compound our problems. Don’t believe him? You can do the math yourself, but if you just feel confident based on hopes, dreams, and fantasies, you’ll benefit most from his book.Most science books tell you results of experiment or predict some outcome based on some model. The IPCC reports, for example, tell you our best understanding of our climate measurements and where, given our patterns, we’ll end up or could end up if we change our behavior. The results show lots of numbers. They do math but they don’t enable you to do math. Books like the Uninhabitable Earth describe such predictions in prose, again not enabling you to do math.Who Should Read ItAfter generations of this nation denigrating science, math, nature, and education of them, I’m under no preconceptions of how popular this book will become. People feel guilty thinking and talking about the environment when their responsibility comes into play. Still, everyone can understand it. You’ll love it when you work through it.Every policymaker, CEO, and media programmer will benefit their audiences from knowing this book. Even if leaders don’t read it enough to understand it, this book enables them to have on staff or retainer someone who understands the math from doing it. That leader can choose not to talk in equations. He or she may even wave his or her hands and speak in platitudes, but can start from understanding, not ignorance.Why You’ll Love the MathI wrote how mathematics is the language of nature and that Murphy’s book is a symphony. The video below of a master class will illustrate what I mean (and put a big smile on your face, there are more of his videos here). Ben Zander is a conductor, musical director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and bestselling author. He speaks sometimes in English but other times through the piano. Because music is the language of music. Zander can’t communicate in English the sound and meaning of music where a few notes on the piano communicate everything.https://youtu.be/b2S-OjTb4nUAs music communicates music, equations describe nature. I know people more fluent in music will hear more than I do from Zander, but I love what I hear and value hearing what I can. You will gain as much reading Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet.Enjoy the book!Here is a video Tom and some peers made of the book:https://youtu.be/2fbOWhJy7So Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexandra's commitment illustrates a result I keep finding. People who have acted to live sustainably the most already find new ways to act more than people who haven't. People who haven't done much, or acted for extrinsic reasons like an article suggested "one little thing you can do for the environment" instead of intrinsic, say they can't think of anything.I conclude that reducing polluting is skills you learn, not a target you reach. As with all skills, mastery brings joy, self-awareness, satisfaction, and expectation of more success through more practice. Alexandra has been mastering these skills for decades and shows mastery in this episode. How does mastery show in sustainability? In this case, I heard her having fun, connecting with people, learning, and enjoying the process.When last we heard from her, she shared how much she loved a particular hummus. She and her husband ate a container a day. A plastic container, that is, meaning a pile of plastic that would exist for centuries, maybe millennia, before breaking down.Yet anyone can make hummus. Why not her? She could get the ingredients as well as anyone, maybe better ones. She committed to making hummus from scratch.The challenge resonated with me since avoiding packaged food started my journey of acting, which led to finding pressure cooking chick peas beat the texture and flavor of canned. Plus my mom makes amazing hummus and baba ganoush. Alexandra shares how she got advice from me and a chef friend for her results.EDIT: At a reader's request, here are my mom's recipes, quoting her email to AlexandraHumusPut about 2 cups of cooked chickpeas into food processorAdd juice of one lemon...Tahini (about a teaspoon or so)Add olive oil...I am guessing that I use about 1/4-1/3 cup olive oil, maybe more? Add several cloves of garlic (I do chop before adding; start with less, you can always add)Add salt (really important for flavor, cannot skimp....)Process until smooth; may have to stop and push down the sides. Start with less oil and add as you process to get the right consistencyTaste and adjust whatever needs adjusting.===========Baba Ganoush (Israeli style)I start with medium size eggplant and zap for a couple of minutes in microwave, just to get the inside a bit warm.Grill eggplant over an open flame burner (don't know how to do this with electric burners)Stay with the eggplant; you will have to turn it often to get all sides cooked. Don't worry about charring; that only adds flavor. Use a skewer or long tined fork to check for interior doneness.Remove and let cool on a plate.Carefully pick off (and discard) charred skin; don't worry, though, if you miss specks (adds to the flavor)Remove to chopping board (mine is wooden)Start chopping the eggplant; as you do, add some salt, minced garlic, olive oil, juice of lemon (to taste) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A topic making among the most headlines these days are digital mobs and their justice reacting to what people say. I've touched on it somewhat in this podcast and on my blog and I feel the risk teaching at NYU, which has kept me from expressing myself as openly as I could in the past. Another way of looking at this phenomenon is that we have become more vigilant about respecting groups that society hasn't stood up to before.We all see it. We all have opinions. Frederick approaches the phenomenon from a less partial, legal standpoint: what is going on? What risks are there? Who faces them? How can we respond? How should we respond for what reasons? How is technology changing our discourse?What do Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake have to do with it?What was appearing on Jon Stewart's Daily Show like?A reason I wanted to bring him on was to learn his views on my talking about abolition, a movement we can learn from, and attraction coaching, which informed my leadership practice. So I got to ask him his experienced views.My episode on his podcast: Cybertraps Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.