This Sustainable Life

Food is important part of environment, as you know. The book Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman changed a lot for me. I came across it after my experiments avoiding packaged food, fiber-removed foods, and meat. Eat to Live showed me that the delicious diet I found by reducing garbage and pollution turned out healthy.You'll hear me at the beginning stumble a bit. I had prepared, but everything changed when I met Joel in person at his home. He showed me the plants he's growing in solar powered greenhouse. Now, I think I'm getting good at making my stews, salads, and desserts, but with his kitchen full of vegetables and fruit, he whipped together a salad more delicious than mine effortlessly.I invite people over and they seem to like the food and impressed with my technique. All he did was make a salad and offer some snacks, including dried fruit and a chocolate chia pudding, but he showed a mastery I haven't developed yet. I mostly associated him with nutrition and healthy eating. Now I associate him with everything I'm trying to create around the environment: based in science but once you get it, about joy, community, connection, family.I realized I'm barely started developing my food-making skills.So by when we started recording the conversation, I was trying to learn from watching.By the way, if you hear noise of something brushing the microphone, it's his adorably dog, who was running around us as we spoke.You'll hear something that made me feel great---he noticed the yellow in my hand skin color and told me it meant I was eating a diet with plenty of phytonutrients. The recognition felt great.Again, Eat To Live changed my life. I recommend his books, his videos, his advice, and now his lifestyle. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

[EDIT: moments after posting this episode, I found my first example of someone else posting on this idea only two months ago, Environmental Pollution: An Invisible Kind of Child Abuse, which got a positive response. I'm sure there's more.]After my third TEDx talk a few days ago, spoke to a couple that told me how much they reduced waste but wouldn't consider anything more. People love considering the biggest things immune from consideration, like flying or heating their homes to 70 degrees in the winter and cooling them to 60 in the summer, leaving the air conditioner on while they're out just so it's cool for thirty seconds when they get home. Or getting take out when they have vegetables in the fridge, most of which they throw out in a disgusting display of entitlement. My TEDx talk is about how after you act you'll be glad you did and wish you had earlier.I say people don't want to do small things, they want to do meaningful things and that when you act on something you care about, you may start small you may start big, but since you like it you'll do more, so as long as you keep working on things you find meaningful, big is inevitable.They said they loved my talk but he said, “I don't see how I can live my life without flying.”Actually, people keep asking me, what can I do. Everyone knows polluting behavior of theirs, from bottles and take out containers to vacations beyond the imagination of emperors before that they consider entitled to, to eating unhealthy amounts of meat and food flown around the world while local food they don't even consider buying while local farmers go out of business.The experiential, active learning educator in me wants to say, figure it out come back to me, and you tell me. It's not like millions of web pages aren't telling you. You can change plenty, most improvements as you cut out eating junk and other pure life improvements, before you have to challenge yourself. Generations ago nobody threw anything away. Now I have to help pay billions of dollars a year just to haul junk nobody wanted out of the city to landfills.Changing your life is the point! You're addicted to flying. It pollutes. If you want to change the outcome, you have to change the cause: your beliefs and behavior.My point is that you'll be glad you changed and no matter when you do you'll wish you had earlier. Nobody believes me. Well, you're not abstractly hurting people. You're hurting people and generations will suffer for your jaunt to Macchu Piccu.You have to change your life if it relies on behavior that hurts billions of people. No amount of dreaming for some deus ex machina invention like a plane that runs on rainbows will change that you're paying to pollute now. We have to change our behavior. Even if you think governments should change or corporations should change, every one living unsustainably will have to change too. You can't keep living the way generations of scientists have said will create the results we're already seeing and that we've seen nothing compared to what will come.So much I've said before. You're hurting future generations who are helpless to defend themselves.I started wondering, how different is neglecting to try to live sustainably from child abuse.First, not physically in the moment assaulting someone.But the similarities are strong. I wonder if there's something to this angle.For one thing, I'm not a parent so imagine some would react strongly, however accurate.Asked friends their thoughts. They surprisingly easily agreed. One pointed out how much people will defend themselves. If they don't stop, they'll rationalize why what they do is good and reinforce doing what they've done, filing the claim under groundless attack.I suggested targeting the message at children, who don't need to fly for work. For them to call out what older people are doing to most of their lives.A friend suggested changing beliefs so much might not be possible.I pointed out how we changed drunk driving from something sometimes okay to tantamount to murder. In my lifetime, you could say, “one drink calms me down. I drive better that way.”Or cigarettes. My high school principal smoked a pipe in the school building. Now people would view doing so as giving children cancer and addictions.My friend also suggested creating an alternative. An alternative to smoking is not smoking. For drinking and driving, we created designated drivers and programs to get rides home. If we don't create alternatives, people may feel they can't act, resulting in reinforcing beliefs that sustain polluting behavior, like that they can't do anything about it, which is a lie, I'll comment on now.There's plenty of low-hanging fruit in the form of leisure travel, especially in the US where you don't need to fly but there's beautiful land everywhere. A friend and I rode bikes from Philadelphia to Maine and back when we were 16 years old. The less fit someone is to do it, the more they'll benefit. Most people are near a coast with a beach.Most business travel is low hanging fruit easily cut in favor of not meeting or meeting by video.Anyway, the big difference, why this idea sticks with me not as shrill yelling or name-calling is that nobody suggests stopping child abuse by taxing it or raising its cost a few percent as a way to deter it. If a helpless child receives a black eye from a parent or is emaciated, we have decided as a culture that justice can go as far as taking a parent's child away, possibly the greatest execution of justice short of execution.And we consider it appropriate. We do almost anything to protect a child from harm.How about no future for billions of children facing starvation, disease, wars over resources, billions of climate refugees, and so on?How about an adult that takes pleasure in abusing the child? Do you also feel another level of revulsion? How about adults that fly first class to Acapulco, or India to pick a place nearly half way around the world, many for some meditation retreat or to see something they consider exotic? I take a bus to a meditation retreat. So can they, but they prefer to get their pleasure with tens of tons of CO2, maintaining a military to maintain the supply lines, destroy communities with the misfortune to live over the fossil fuel extraction site, and destroy the land and see there too.Should we add animal abuse?This recording is my first publicly sharing the idea, so it may need refinement. Maybe it needs rejection. I'm not proposing adopting it, but considering it. I wasn't abused. Would someone abused feel hurt or empowered? How would that feeling change as disasters accumulated? Might it not be strong enough?I also think they people who would share it would be children. I fear for my future and many of them face 40 years more of what scientists have predicted for generations and the adults who could have acted didn't. How justified or not would you consider children facing most of a life of a hellscape not of their making?How bad would it be for children to levy the charge at adults? Might it lead to fast change?When I hear an adult say they love how younger people are taking responsibility, I hear an adult trying to shirk responsibility—tragically a responsibility that he or she would consider improving his or her life to change. Well, how about when they children point out what you're doing?Could we move from merely taxing and making slightly more expensive to making many behaviors illegal, maybe with penalties on the scale of penalties we give child abusers?How is heating the planet, poisoning its air and water, using up nonrenewable resources, and not trying to change not abusing children—billions of children?What do you think of the perspective? If you see problems, can you think of ways to improve it? That is, if it did work and help, what would have had to change from what I shared to what worked well?I wonder if anyone has pursued this view before. I haven't heard it regarding the environment, though smoking and drunk driving campaigns seem to have sounded similar.How about a social media campaign showing pictures of people polluting with a hashtag #childabuse? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Lipton, who started and hosted the show Inside the Actors Studio, died yesterday.Here are the notes I read from for this episode:I could talk about how much I enjoyed the episodes, his humor, and a few things I learned from his guests that only his interviewing could have elicited but I will go deeper, to share how fundamental his work has been to mine.Many times I've said that if my courses existed before I went to business school and someone were teaching them, I would have taken them instead of business school and gotten more of what I valued. He helped me create them.Context: I had taken leadership classes but, despite high grades from top school, I didn't know how to act.Watched Inside the Actors Studio for entertainment.Noticed great actors excelled at social and emotional skills, beyond what my professors could do.Noticed they tended to have dropped out of school, been kicked out, or never enrolled.How to resolve this conflict?Also noticed names popping up a lot—Stella Adler, Lee Strassberg, Sanford Meisner, Group Theater, Harold Clurman, most of all Konstantine Stanislavsky.Looked them up and learned of tradition often called Method Acting that grew in America from Russia.Around recession because friend sold his business to take Meisner Technique classes.Asked him all sorts of questions about it. He suggested taking it.Realized actors didn't stop education. They switched style of learning.Experienced new levels of learning social and emotional skills, relevant to all relationships, not just acting.Taking it changed how I learned ASEEP fields, combined with learning about John Dewey and project-based learning, which led to how I teach leadership. Led me to start founding a school for leadership.NYU ended up hiring me to teach, which led to my books.The structure of how I teach and coach leadership, initiative, entrepreneurship, sales, and social entrepreneurship is Meisner Technique.The exercises are similar, but drawn from their respective domains instead of acting.Start with basics and build toward mastery with no big jumps.Results include students consistently saying they didn't know they could learn these things at all, let alone in a structured class.All this comes from James Lipton making known the style of learning from Inside the Actors Studio.I since realized the structure exists in teaching to play musical instruments, to sing, to dance, to play any sport, improv, the military hence basic training, and all ASEEP fields.In a totally other direction, since I interview people on the podcast, I follow him a lot—supportive, not confrontational, getting to know the person, though I don't do the quick end questions.I went to see them record Inside the Actors Studio live twice. Sarah Silverman and Bryan Cranston. 5-hour events. I loved. I brought notes to leave to invite him to be a guest on the podcast. Spoke to several people. Actually, went to his office at Pace and spoke to people there, but nothing came of it.Thank you, James Lipton for helping form two of the foundation stones everything I do rests on.Blog posts of mine referring to James Lipton or Inside the Actors Studio:Method acting, leadership, and improving your life, from James LiptonSeeing my inspiration, Inside The Actors Studio, live Observations on leadership and success from Inside the Actors StudioLeadership lessons from method actingHow to turn lemons into lemonade, part I Observations on leadership and success from Inside the Actors Studio More on leadership and success from Inside the Actors Studio: what anyone overcame, you can tooGeorge Clooney on being yourself in the face of adversity Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I describe how important I consider the accessibility of my personal behavior solutions -- a matter of integrity, not to be confused with behavior to influence others, which is a matter of leadership.Here are my notes I read from for this episode.Access and its importance to me. Food available in food desert. I spend nearly no money on fitness. Yes, I live in a nice neighborhood, but I don't make much more than the average American. I treat Greenwich Village as a village -- that is, I try to meet my neighbors, local farmers, local shopkeepers, and not try to escape every few months. I don't buy expensive things like Marie Kondo sells. I buy little I don't need. My most exotic recent vacations include a ten-day meditation retreat a bus ride away and a train trip across the country.My top food habits include foraging for food within walking distance, though some berries a subway ride away, and getting the most abundant and cheap vegetables in season. I eat more beans than almost anyone. I carry bags with me and sometimes containers and bring food home from events. I make my own sauerkraut and vinegar, which take minutes to prepare. I buy nearly all my clothes from thrift shops. I rarely eat out, nor do I waste money on soda, coffee, or doof, which most Americans spend thousands of dollars a year on. I don't spend money on a TV or any subscriptions and use my cell phone's hot spot for wifi. I air dry my clothes on a drying rack.I haven't flown in years, saving more thousands of dollars. I don't think I've spent money on alcohol in years -- nothing against it, I've just come to prefer my calories come with nutrition. I haven't bought a book in years but read what I can online without paying or borrow from the library. I borrow about two or three books a month.computer used, all free software $50 month for phone, internet, everything podcast not making money but costing nearly none while creating purpose $50 for microphone and a little for hosting. More for editing. Books cost little to write, substitute for tv My two couches I got free from neighbors, as anyone in New York City can if you check CraigsList free. For that matter, my mattress I got for a couple hundred dollars that way too. My kettle bells too. I scan CraigsList for months to find them and then pick them up by subway. you get the ideaI still buy thingsno car or payments on it, under $20 week on subway some will say I was privileged no matter what they are reason for 2016 election result and maybe next one mom loved on welfare street, hence the 5 muggings, not particularly privileged. learned to connect with women on personality not spending money.Picking up garbage for an hour while taking a walk. common practice because I trained myself so it makes me feel clean.I cut my own hair. I used $1.90 in electricity last month and put my bill online to see.For those who don't know, PhD physics programs pay tuition and give a stipend, so I incurred no cost there. If anything an opportunity cost in not earning money for the pay for equivalent work had I gone into finance or engineering. I'm still finishing paying for the MBA. I went to a public high school. I got into Columbia on my merits. My dad went there, but since Harvard wait-listed me, where I had no connections, I figure I didn't get in for legacy reasons.My father's father made enough to pay for Columbia undergraduate and some of my apartment's down payment.All of this adds up to accessibility. I know the tug to say, "Oh, something about him is special that makes it easier for him." Well, How to save I just mentioned is available to everyone. My splurges include my rowing machine, which I bought about ten years ago, and my kettle bells, also going back years. I bought them all used from CraigsList, including taking a 62 pound kettlebell home by subway.If everyone can't do anything I do, I look for what everyone can. A solution that doesn't work for everyone doesn't work. Of course, food and vacation opportunities vary by location and climate, so I don't propose people follow my solutions exactly so much as the process and attitude to apply in their lives to solve for themselves what I've solved for myself in my life.Not watching TV is available to everyone, as are bodyweight exercises and drying your clothes without a dryer.If you think I have some way to do what you can't and you assign it to privilege, look inside yourself. What can you do besides judge others? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I met Brent through guest Tia Nelson, both Wisconsin celebrities---she in politics, he in sport---who work with the Outrider Foundation.He is this podcast's first MLB pitcher in string of athletes from the Olympics, NFL, Americas Cup, beep baseball, and more. I bring athletes because they excel in the key leadership domain of personal growth and development.In a world based on polluting, environmental action requires challenging yourself to grow and develop. Early leaders like this podcast community have to swim upstream, acting against cultural norms.Besides winning on the diamond, as you'll hear from Brent, he is also developing himself, his teammates, the Brewers organizations, and the Brewers fans to act environmentally. Professional athletes not being known for hugging trees, he's choosing to take on challenges he doesn't have to. He wrote of his stewardship and teamwork in Winning Over My Baseball Teammates to Strikeout Waste.In this episode he shares why and how. We also talk about the professional athletic experience---what it's like being on the mound, to work your way to the majors with no guarantee, to recover from injury, and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is Earth's carrying capacity? Why is it important?Many ask how we will feed 10 billion people. Mathematician way of asking is if we can feed so many and if so how. Maybe we can't.First, don't want to know. While it depends on many assumptions that aren't hard or measurable numbers, like standard of living, distribution of resources, and technology, we can say it's maximum misery per person.How do we narrow it down? Could ask resources per person and how much resources Earth can provide. Limits to Growth projects how much planet would sustain from a systems perspective including history and how we live our values.I prefer a historical perspective I learned from Alan Weisman based on the Haber-Bosch process, which enabled artificial fertilizer. Before artificial fertilizer, limitations on fixing nitrogen to grow food suggest Earth could sustain about 2 billion, enough to create Einstein and Mozart. Want people like Jesus, Buddha, Laozi, and Aristotle? We needed only a few hundred million to create them.If we're over the planet's carrying capacity, especially by factor of 3 or 4, strategy isn't to ask how to feed 10 billion but if we can lower the population before processes like famine, disease, loss of critical resources, war, and so on do it for us.I couldn't answer except in ways where the cure was worse than the disease, but the history of Thailand's Mechai Viravaidya's leading a nation-scale cultural shift from 7 babies per woman to 1.5, voluntarily, peacefully, leading to abundance, prosperity, and stability changed everything for me.Mechai's success makes lowering the population plausible and fun. The limitations of growing food without artificial fertilizer make it necessary to avoid famine and other natural disasters. These two factors clarify our priority, it seems to me.Mechai Viravaidya's TEDx talkMy episode 279: Role model and global leader Mechai Viravaidya Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alan Weisman's book Countdown changed my strategy to the environment. It ranks among the top most influential works I've read, watched, or come across, up there with Limits to Growth.Why? Because when you look at environmental issues enough, and it shouldn't take too long these days, population always rises to the top as one of the top issues. Many people today hear about projections that the population will level off around 10 billion. Actually, the ones I see project that the population will keep growing exponentially then, just slower than now.If you only look at one issue---only climate, only deforestation, or only extinctions---they seem possibly solvable, but they're all linked. Solving several at once---say meeting power needs while the economy falls apart and food becomes scarce---looks impossible.Also, since nothing deliberate limits population growth, we're lucky if it levels off. We aren't choosing where to level it off and 10 billion looks three to five times what the Earth can sustain. Cultural changes could promote more growth. Many populations are promoting maximum growth today---very powerful religions and autocratic rulers for example.I don't want to rely on luck for our species' survival. Besides, my research into what Earth can sustain says that we're over the limit. If we're heading toward a cliff, simply maintaining our speed and not accelerating doesn't stop us. We have to decelerate.Despite the convergence of all these issues, for years I held back from talking about population. People don't like others meddling in their personal lives. I don't want the government in my bedroom. People overwhelmingly associate population talk with China's one child policy, eugenics, and Nazis. I did too. I didn't see how I could improve a situation by suggesting to avoid misery later through misery now.Still, I knew some cultures---island nations that lived centuries or longer, for example, or the bushmen in southern Africa whose archeological record went back hundreds of thousands of years---kept their populations level, so they must have developed some mechanism.In some past episode of this podcast, with Jared Angaza, for example, I pondered aloud how to find out how they did it, though it may have come up when I was a guest on his podcast. I could only wonder what worked but couldn't promote what I didn't know.Countdown changed all that. Alan found and reported on numerous examples in today's world of cultures lowering their birth rates without coercion, without top-down government authority, voluntarily, desired by all participants, leading to abundance, prosperity, peace, and stability, the opposite of where overpopulation takes us.Countdown tells stories of 21 places, some promoting growth and results aren't pretty and some where they've lowered birth rates and they're remarkably pleasant, even prosperous and stable. He talks about the top ones in this episode.We have tough times ahead of us. One change simplifies everything---a smaller population achieved voluntarily, peacefully, joyfully. Alan has researched firsthand more than almost anyone. He has more than enough reason to despair if he wanted to. If he's not, I conclude that everything he's found nets out to say we can do this.Family planning, education, and contraception seem technologies and practices that can work more than carbon sequestration, solar planes, and everything else. They're cheap, they're available, they make sex more fun, they've overcome cultural resistance outside the gates of the Vatican!Read his books and Limits to Growth.I'll do my best to bring him back.Past episodes I based on Alan's books258: The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman251: Let's make overpopulation only a finance issue250: Why talk about birthrate and population so much?248: Countdown, a book I recommend by Alan Weisman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here are the notes I read from for this episode:Outward manifestationBeen saying latelyWhen you see pollution, dingy skies, sea levels risingAny one person listening may not haveBut if American, likely more than nearly anyoneLess technological, more social and personalResults from our behavior, from our choicesFrom our beliefs, stories, images, desiresOpposite would be stewardship, caring about others first, serviceWhy leadership mattersCrazy part is harmony with nature simplifies lifeCreates joy, community, connectionNot about guilt or shame, just perspectiveIn all fairness, some past systemsI'm just like everyone else. When I think of something fun and polluting, I think, maybe it won't matter, the plane was flying anywayThat's the cause of global warming and our climate problemsMaybe I'll get away with it. Maybe my contribution won't countYou can blame it on lots of things, but that attitude and ones like it are at the root of that behaviorThe outward manifestation of that thought is pollution Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lorna's challenge is one of the longest and most personal at over a year.I also couldn't wait to bring her story to you most because within weeks she was reporting the joys overcoming the challenges. We've become friends through her challenge. Within months she started sending senior executives my way as her sharing her challenge with them led them to follow.In other words, Lorna didn't experience sacrifice or burden. She experienced personal growth and friendship. At least as I heard.Don't take my word. Listen for yourself.Maybe because we met through guests Tensie Whelan, NYU-Stern's head of sustainable business and Vincent Stanley, director at Patagonia, she's outgoing and friendly. Or maybe from her experience leading, which she describes in her TED talk that came toward the end of her year buying no clothes.In any case, I keep having to remind myself she's from the C-suite of Danone, a 30 billion company, and that she helped Danone USA become the largest B-corp yet.If anyone could claim to need clothes, she could. Listen to what she found instead. I hope you find similar relief from compulsion---saving money or time, connecting with family, having more fun, etc---as well as what else she found and shared.Lorna's TED talk, undistracted by what to wear, focusing on leadership and rhinoceroses. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I ask people their reasons for polluting activities like flying, take-out, taking taxis or ride shares where public transit serves. They consistently tell me that they love these things. They love visiting family, seeing remote places, etc.If you feel similarly, you're about to face some tough love. These motivations came to mind while listening to Thomas Kolditz on a podcast I listen to and that has featured me. He is one of today's premier leaders and leadership educators. A few words about him:Tom Kolditz is the founding Director of the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University–the most comprehensive, evidence-based, university-wide leader development program in the world. The Doerr Institute was recognized in 2019 as the top university leader development program by the Association of Leadership Educators. Prior to Rice, he taught as a Professor in the Practice of Leadership and Management and Director of the Leadership Development Program at the Yale School of Management.A retired Brigadier General, Tom led the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point for 12 years.I heard him on The Leadership Podcast, hosted by Jan Rutherford and Jim Vaselopulos (who interviewed my in 2017 “What An Ivy League Degree Can’t Teach You.”).I recommend only listening if you're prepared for some straight, sobering talk on what those motivations mean.I also include a quote from that conversation about our sorry state of leadership education, which I relate to our sorrier state of environmental action education.The Leadership Podcast with Jan Rutherford and Jim VaselopulosThe Thomas Kolditz episode I quotedThomas Kolditz's pageMy episode, What An Ivy League Degree Can’t Teach You Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.