This Sustainable Life

I've learned in leading that you can lead people best when you meet them where they are. That means speaking their language and understanding their perspective.Many people I talk to take their cues from the Bible, including guidance on how to act regarding the environment. Among them, the term stewardship plays a key role.A steward is one who manages another's property, finances, or other affairs. Everyone views and means things uniquely, but I understand them to mean the world and everything living on it, if we steward them, they aren't ours, but we steward them for both the true owner and future generations so they can enjoy and steward them for their future generations.This episode explores the source of stewardship as an environmental role as the interpretation of dominion, replacing dominance and ruling with responsibility.I then apply that result to another key area waiting for interpretation: being fruitful and multiplying. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brandon loves negotiation and teaching it. He learned from the top in the field and practices it apparently 24/7. We start our conversation by covering negotiation as developed by an FBI hostage negotiator---Chris, his father.More than the family nature of their business or the FBI basis of his training and technique, I enjoyed his educational approach to negotiation. Brandon wants to help you improve. Keep in mind, his view of negotiation is not the mainstream view where you just use tricks to defeat your counterparty under high-stakes tension.Listeners who have read my books or taken my courses, or know and appreciate what I call Method Learning, will hear that Brandon's teaching technique is like mine: you learn from practicing the basics.The conversation sounds tactical at the beginning---things like what words to use and what goals to seek in a negotiation.As we continue, you'll hear him reveal strategy, and it's not just to win. It's closer to how to live and participate in relationships.I hope you get as much out of the bottle example we talk about as I did, seeing the richness and depth available to grow a relationship in any negotiation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Everybody talks about political polarization, the communication messes this nation and world are in, and how people who disagree can't talk to each other any more, so we can't resolve conflict.I do it too---that is, get into conversations where I shut down meaningful communication---though less than before, telling me that we can learn to communicate effectively. I've learned tremendously the times I've reversed that trend---that is, to listen to people I disagree with. I learn from them, probably more than I learn from people I disagree with.Today's episode covers an interaction within a community of people formed to increase dialog. Even in a community for that purpose, I find them not knowing what to do about it, even augmenting the problem.One of the problems, as I see it, is depriving students the experiences that teach the social and emotional skills to handle difficult social and emotional situations. Teaching more facts, knowledge, and abstract analysis don't help, yet schools at all levels pile on that strategy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I studied physics and spent time in universities, I met a lot of Nobel laureates. Physics is Nobel heavy so Columbia physics connected me to 3. Other science departments led me to another 1 or 2. The business school led me to another.Seth Shelden and ICAN---the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons---won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons"Their goal is a UN treaty like the one to ban land mines for nuclear weapons. After forming in 2007, about 2 years ago they achieved, with the help of many others, The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is adopted at the United Nations by a vote of 122-1. The Treaty, which prohibits nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices, will become law when ratified by 50 states.I wanted to bring someone on who is working on something many want but people don't see how. I hope you'll listen carefully. I picked up something I hadn't expected---a new frame for how to view nuclear weapons. It's not about the physics or engineering. I figure I know a fair amount about game theory and negotiation. While global thermonuclear war is beyond just a complex chess game, my frame still saw it that way.I disagreed with people who said nuclear weapons, through mutually assured destruction, created peace since World War II, but Seth suggested a different perspective than negotiation or brinkmanship.He doesn't look at the situation like two superpowers or even a moderate number of nuclear states. I'll let him describe it, but his view suggests different strategies than I would have come up with and makes important different players.Let's hear a new (to me at least) view on abolishing nuclear weapons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People ask me if I worry or lose sleep from my environmental habits in a world where most people pollute profligately and unnecessarily.In this post I try to illustrate by analogy how it feels. How would you feel if you were magically transported to the 50s or 60s and most people smoked and drove cars with no safety equipment but they all considered it normal? Or to 1850 Alabama and someone offered you products made by slave labor?Here are the results to a search on "Mountain Dew teeth," to which I refer in the audio. This click is safe, it's just text search results, but you may want to prepare yourself before clicking from there to images or videos, except that you see equally unhealthy things in the litter, exhaust, and pollution around us all the time.To expand on parallels with living in an environment accepting slavery, here are episodes 098: Would You Free Your Slaves? and 040: Which is easier, freeing slaves or not using disposable bottles?. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tom's Do The Math blog is one of the best site on internet. If you measure a site by how much it can improve a reader's life and human society, I challenge you to find one with greater potential. A couple peers include Low Tech magazine and Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which is a book that you can download for free.Tom makes the physics behind the environment and our interaction with it simple and accessible. If you don't like math, well, it's the language of nature, so it's important to understand what's happening in nature. But even so, the point of collecting data and calculating results isn't for the sake of the math. It's to get past it to get to your values and to act on them.The point of the math is to get past the mathWhen W. Edwards Deming initially apparently contradictory statements make sense, you understand the point of taking data and calculating results. He said:“Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.”and"Management by numerical goal is an attempt to manage without knowledge of what to do"Doing the math frees you from confusion to enable talking meaningfully about what to do.Regarding the environment, as long as people can think they can just switch to solar for everything that needs energy or that they can close some imaginary loop and recycle everything, they'll do things that lower Earth's ability to support life and human society. They'll feel confident and happy as they step on the gas, thinking it's the brake, driving toward a brick wall.Nature is the perfect mathematician. It doesn't react to your feelings about waste or aspirations but what you actually do.Tom's conclusions about solutions and admonitions against non-solutions point to what works. A path forward becomes obvious and simple when you understand the math and physics. You may not initially like it, but you can change what you like, as sure as most of us learned to like vegetables despite preferring ice cream as children.The result is clarity and mental freedom. The challenge, knowing what works and doesn't, is seeing the madness of people acting without understanding these things.The result is living by your values with confidence, not just hoping for the best. If anyone wonders where my views come from, it's analysis like Tom's. Also Low Tech Magazine, Limits to Growth, and Sustainability Without the Hot Air.There's a lot science that I support and value, but find inaccessibly complex, even with a PhD in physics. Tom's work is accessible. People think the science is hard and scientists confusing. It doesn't have to be.What the math saysTom's main conclusions point to reducing consumption as the most viable solution to our environmental problems. Without it nothing else works. You think you have a solution without reducing consumption? Read his blog. I bet he covered it and showed its limits.My experience shows reducing consumption as improving most Americans' lives, at least the first 80% to 90% reduction. Missing from nearly every mainstream message I've heard but clear from Tom's life, my life, and a few others is that consuming less brings joy, meaning, purpose, community, and relationships along with cleaning our air, land, and water.If you think reduction is an economic problem, read Tom's blog on his conversations with the economist because growth is a bigger problem.Meanwhile human societies sustained for hundreds of thousands of years without growth. Our growth since Adam Smith has picked all the low hanging fruit, high hanging fruit, and now we're digging under the sea for every scrap of oil we can find and polluting everything for a few moments of forced smile.Read Tom's blog and you learn we could create happiness, meaning, purpose, and community instead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From our first conversation you know Tim's history as a musician and founder of the Eden Project. This time you'll hear the passion of a man who loves restoring the Earth's ability to sustain life and human society.He talks about the spirituality of his work, connecting to the Earth, eating, and growing. For city dwellers like most of us, he shares the potential for that connection available to all of us. We have to take the steps, but the emotionally rewarding results are there.As you listen to this episode about food, plants, land, connection, community, and many things wholesome, I recommend contrasting Tim's world with, say, Facebook or Doritos. In my experience, they disperse community, make connections superficial, and plasticize nature to create craving for brief, regrettable alleviation from that craving. Are they worth it?Usually I prefer second episodes to cover the personal challenge a guest did. In Tim's case we didn't, though it's hard to miss that he lives a life of having done so for years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura and I go back a few years, from being on her podcast.We talk about her concept of emotional obesity: a parallel between physical health and emotional health. I find it a rich analogy on many levels. Characteristics of addiction to food that cause obesity resemble thoughts that cause emotional obesity.She describes her concept in more detail, but I find most helpful about it that it enables you to make yourself emotionally healthy in the ways you make yourself physically healthy. You'll note the parallels in problem and solution as she describes it.Think of thoughts you kick yourself with. If your friend said those things you'd leave that friend. Yet we keep doing it, unable to see that we can stop it.Dwelling in unproductive thoughts and blame doesn't help.We expand it to environmental obesity, where we look at addictive environmental behaviors, another approach that helps understand and solve behaviors we don't like. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark and my second conversation it about happiness, pleasure, meaning, and purpose, though it sounds like it's about personal growth, food, and environment.In our first conversation, he didn't really connect on the environment at the start. This time you'll hear it resonates with him, largely through health and food.I see the pattern over and over: people protect themselves from saying the environment means much to them but when they talk about it, they care deeply. I think mainstream strategies to act on the environment---"try this one little thing," "if you don't, you're destroying the Earth," facts, figures, doom, and gloom . . . none of which do I call leadership---lead to people protect themselves from revealing how much they care.Making it moral, about facts, right, and wrong and other ways that motivate people to protect themselves motivate people to protect themselves.Change will come from the opposite tactics: opening up, allowing people make mistakes and learn, not feel compelled to comply or to impose judgment on them.Environmental action won't come from people knowing more. Nobody knows everything, but nearly everyone knows enough to act on. Change will come from people feeling comfortable acting.I'm not saying Mark revolutionized his life and I don't know how often he'll return to farmers markets, but I heard that he meaningful enjoyed visiting it, activating a new aspect of food for him.Food was already a big part of his life, message, and journey. Yet getting fresh vegetables from the farm was outside his horizon.How many things are outside our horizons?It kills me that people treat things we talk about like chores or distraction. Acting on shared values creates connection and community. I can tell Mark and I will have a great time when he visits New York. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Outside the MBA world, not everyone knows McKinsey. Within it, and at the upper echelons of business and government, McKinsey advises some of the largest and most influential organizations, including governments and the world's largest companies.If a company wants useful advice, it has to share everything, which means McKinsey is privy to the secrets of the most influential people and companies.McKinsey is hierarchical. After business school people start as consultants, they move up in management to partners. Later directors. Eventually you end up at Global Managing Director.Today's guest, Dominic Barton, was the Firm's three-time Global Managing Director.Since effective leadership is fundamentally about influencing people's behavior, Dominic influenced the influencers of the most influential people and organizations, where the stakes were highest and repercussions greatest.High stakes and repercussions? Sounds relevant to the environment in 2019.One of this podcast's most important topics to me is our agreement that environmental change will come most effectively by leading people. Technology, innovation, regulation, taxes, and so on may change, but people drive it all.My goal in this podcast is to bring effective leadership to the environment. The more knowledgeable a person seems, the more likely to say, "We can. The question is will we." Will is the domain of leadership, not engineering, science, education, journalism, or the usual places people look for environmental guidance or change.Today's episode brings the upper echelon of global leadership to the environment.His schedule made phone was the only way to record. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.