This Sustainable Life

Silicon Valley, governments, and lots of people are pushing for efficiency. I do too, but only after changing systemic beliefs and goals.The greatest cause of global warming would have looked like the greenest clean energy innovation ever: the Watt steam engine. It led to our environmental problems today more than anything else.We'd be fools to think today's green clean energy will do any different. Changing beliefs and goals will create results, not ignorantly continuing the patterns that got us here, thinking we're different.Efficiency is different than reducing total waste. An LED will never compete with simply turning off the light. If you thought, but the light enables things, that belief, especially if you reflexively believe that the alternative to technology is the stone age, is the cause of global warming and our other environmental problems because it drives continuing the behavior that got us here.What I'm saying won't change that belief. In my experience few things change belief, rarely facts, figures, doom, gloom, guilt, shame. Definitely not continuing what you're doing. What does? New experiences and community.I'm not going to get into leadership and what influences motivations, emotions, beliefs, and behavior, but I'll tell you that if we don't change our behavior and beliefs, if we could magically return CO2 levels to pre-industrial revolution, we'd be back here pretty quickly.And our behavior for centuries has been to make things more efficient, ignoring total waste, which we've increased. Almost nobody wants to consider consuming and producing less, despite reduce, reuse, recycle starting with reduce.Folks, when people say that not acting now means we'll have to act more later to keep the earth able to maintain a population and society something like ours, they mean it. And people have been saying that for generations. If you believe efficiency only will make a difference, you aren't changing at all. You're doing exactly what got us here.Change would be to reduce.Here's one of the papers I alluded to. Quoting the paper:we find that higher energy efficiency increased rather than reduced energy use, because lower capital cost enhanced energy use by more than the increase in energy cost reduced it. This casts strong doubts on the view that energy-saving technological change has lowered fossil energy use. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Plastic is everywhere -- the oceans, landfills, and for 93% of us, our bloodstreams.Everyone promotes recycling, but it's not happening anywhere near the scale that we're producing it and pumping it into our world.Most people, it seems, are content to hope for the best and hope someone else solves things. In the meantime, they don't change their behavior and the situation nobody wants continues.Some people, or more often companies, make a big show of saying they'll make a difference, but they don't. They greenwash or something like that.Rarely, you'll find someone who makes it his or her business to figure out what's going on and suggest what can be done.Today's guest, Jack Buffington, works on supply chains, got a PhD in it, and wrote two books on plastics, what doesn't work, what does, and what he sees we should do next.Without getting technical, we geek out on plastics. You know you wish you knew more. We're confused by them. This conversation will reduce that confusion. I'm not saying we'll solve everything, but you'll see the situation more clearly. You'll know what those numbers mean. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this part of the conversation, Chase and I spoke about the environment.He's very thoughtful about it, though hasn't acted on it, for reasons he eloquently explains. I take the liberty of persisting politely, so if you haven't acted or want to influence others, you'll hear a lot of resistance that many feel but rarely express.If you're interested in developing your environmental leadership skills, this episode will show you a major problem you'll face: people hearing what they want or expect to hear more than what you say. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chase runs GirlsChase, one of the most trafficked sites for dating coaching, which recently celebrated 10 years in business.It sets itself apart from its peers, besides its longevity with basic material, not gimmicks, for men to improve their lives, still getting about 40% traffic from women.The episode is long because Chase shared in depth what I consider valuable for someone wanting to lead in the area of the environment -- an area people want to act in but most put off. He had to marshal his passion for most of those 10 years, developing community, listening, and motivating himselfYou'll hear the reward, in how he changes his customers' lives.First we talk about the dating education world, often misunderstood.Chase is a longtime friend. He's very thoughtful about the environment, though hasn't acted on it, for reasons he eloquently explains. I take the liberty of persisting politely, so if you haven't acted or want to influence others, you'll hear a lot of resistence that many feel but rarely express. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When many people enter my apartment for the first time say something about it being minimalist. I feel like I have a lot of stuff because I have many things I don't need, mean to get rid of, but haven't. Apparently, my amount of many things is well below most people's thresholds.I also bristle at people labeling me, so whatever the label, I usually don't like it.But the label minimalist especially bothers me. I think it's backward.I've tried a lot of things in life -- sports, art, science, entrepreneurship, business, religion, reading, writing, travel, meditation, yoga, dancing, clubbing, girls, solitude, and more than I can list.Through it all, certain things always resurface and come back as the most valuable and meaningful, bringing the most joy, satisfaction, happiness, and what I want most in life.Relationships with family, with friends I have emotional, intellectual, and when appropriate physical intimacy, where we've allowed ourselves to open up and be vulnerable, the beauty of nature in sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, responsibility for how my actions affect others, stewardship of the resources we share, contributing to something greater than myself, leading to a sense of oneness, teamwork, duty, honor, learning, striving to make myself and my world in some way better tomorrow than today, harmony, service, freedom.None of these things require material possessions. On the contrary, stuff gets in the way of many of these things. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I love watching Dr. Michael Gregor's videos on nutrition.A common theme of his videos is how medical school barely teach doctors nutrition and exercise despite how important they are for health. He shows how industrial food companies promote profit over healthy diets and expensive, risky medicine over avoiding foods and sedentary lifestyles that cause the problems they purport to solve. He provide his videos for free to make available what saved his grandmother's life: healthy food.I see diseases from eating junk and living inactively like headaches from hitting your head against a wall. You can take medicine to decrease the pain, but stopping hitting your head against the wall will work better, cost less, and result in no side effects.Likewise, you can take medicine to fix the problems from a standard American diet, but you might as well switch to vegetables, fruit, legumes, and other foods that don't sicken you. They taste better and cost less when you learn how to shop for them.Actually, changing to fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, etc in my experience worked better because besides the health and cost benefits, it's delicious, which not hitting your head against a wall doesn't match.He's posted hundreds of videos worth reposting, but I'm choosing today's because it's relevant to environmental leadership.He published the transcript, which I'm going to read from and comment on to show its relevance to environmental leadership. I believe what he calls the best kept secret in medicine can guide us to the most valuable lesson for environmental stewardship and clean air, land, and water.I recommend watching the video if you haven't already.https://youtu.be/0W_OBRmAz2YDr. Gregor starts:Even though the most widely accepted, well-established chronic disease practice guidelines uniformly call for lifestyle change as the first line of therapy, physicians often do not follow these guidelines. Yet lifestyle interventions are often more effective in reducing heart disease, hypertension, heart failure, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and deaths from all causes than almost any other medical intervention.I add:The same follows for environmental leadership. Everyone knows that lifestyle change to pollute less is the most effective way to protect the environment, but few environmental leaders do. On the contrary, they tell others to but they don't themselves.Case in point: when I thought about, say, coal miners in Kentucky, when I thought about them losing their jobs, which would undermine their longstanding communities, I would say that while challenging, the coal miners have to accept that times are changing, that their field pollutes, and they have to change. However it affects their job, their family, and their community, they have to change.But then when I asked myself about, say, reducing flying, I would think, “sorry, I can't change, my job requires it.” or my family requires it. Same with eating less polluting foods, reducing plastic, etc.That is, when I thought about others changing, those others have to accept the change personally for the good of the species. When I thought about myself changing, the exceptions I didn't accept from others, I thought the world had to accept from me.In other words, I was very slippery on applying difficult standards on others to myself. I don't know you, but if you've flown or used unnecessary plastic recently, you're probably equally slippery. You probably hide it from yourself, as I did, which we call denial. Denial is easier than changing your lifestyle, but it also twisted me up inside, since part of me knew I was lying to myself, which was all the more twisted for someone pursuing and teaching leadership.I look for reasons to justify not changing, not looking beyond the here and now. Yesterday I may have thought, “I'm going to avoid packaged food for a week,” but today my friends just opened a bag of chips. What's one chip or two? Besides, they opened it, not me. That's how I felt for a long time before just committing to the practice, overcoming the hurdle, and learning to avoid nearly all packaged food. Now it's easier, cheaper, more convenient, more social, and better in every way I care about, as I've mentioned here many times, though I don't hold to zero packaging, as evidenced by my having to empty my garbage after 16 months. A lot of that garbage was food packaging.Anyway, back to denial. I found an easy way to handle denial is to find someone I looked up to who did what I felt was wrong. For example, even if I knew flying polluted more than scientists said was acceptable, I saw those scientists flying all over the world themselves. While a small part of me asked, “should they do that, aren't they violating their own recommendations?” a greater part said, “If they can fly, so can I,” and I could quiet the feelings of being twisted up inside acting against my values.I was still acting against my values, so the feeling twisted remained.Now back to Dr. Greger. His video shows evidence that doctors who advised lifestyle change while showing they didn't change themselves, for example clearly showing they smoked while advising patients not to smoke, were less effective than those who showed they exercised.See the connection? Scientists or would-be leaders who suggest change that they don't do don't effectively lead. I'm glad Al Gore got us as far as he did, but just like surgeon generals who smoke and promote cigarettes won't lead people to stop smoking, I believe the next step in people living by their environmental values will come from leaders who also live by them.I'll read the rest of Dr. Greger's script. Try to translate mentally from tobacco to pollution, from smoking to flying, eating meat, using unnecessary plastic, and so on, from exercise to wasting less and enjoying living with less waste.If I want to lead, a lot of people consider integrity important in people they consider following. If I say one thing, do another, and tell others to do a third, people aren't going to follow me. Integrity by definition isn't something I can have in one part of my life but not others. I'm only fooling myself if I think I can act with integrity in general when I feel twisted inside from acting against my values.The good news to all this is the discovery of how much better I found my life when I acted by my values. Beyond the twisted feeling being replaced by enthusiasm, community, self-awareness, and so on, I find more happiness, fun, and so on.Quoting Dr. Greger, in what applies to environmental leadership:“Some useful lessons come from the war on tobacco,” Dr. Neal Barnard wrote in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics. When he stopped smoking in the 80s, the lung cancer death rate was peaking in the U.S., but has since dropped, with dropping smoking rates. No longer were doctors telling patients to give their throat a vacation by smoking a fresh cigarette. Doctors realized they were more effective at counseling patients to quit smoking if they no longer had tobacco stains on their own fingers. In other words, doctors went from being bystanders—or even enablers—to leading the fight against smoking. And today, he says, plant-based diets are the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking.If we were to gather the world’s top unbiased nutrition scientists and experts, there would be very little debate about the essential properties of good nutrition. Unfortunately, most doctors are nutritionally illiterate. And worse, they don’t know how to use the most powerful medicine available to them: food.Physician advice matters. When doctors told patients to improve their diets, which was defined as cutting down on meat, dairy, and fried foods, patients were more likely to make dietary changes when their doctors advised them to. And it may work even better if doctors practice what they preach. Researchers at Emory randomized patients to watch one of two videos. In one video, a physician briefly explained her personal health, dietary, and exercise practices, and had a bike helmet and an apple visible on her desk. And in the other, she did not discuss her personal practices, and the apple and bike helmet were missing. For example, in both videos the doctor advised the patients to cut down on meat, to not usually have meat for breakfast, and have no meat for lunch or dinner at least half the time, as a simple place to start improving their diets. But in the disclosure video, the physician related that she had successfully cut down on meat herself, and perhaps not surprisingly, patients rated that physician to be more believable and motivating. So physicians who walk the walk—literally—and have healthier eating habits may not only tend to counsel more about diet and exercise, but also appear more credible and motivating when they do so.It may make them better doctors. A randomized controlled interventional trial to clean up doctors’ diets, called Promoting Health by Self Experience, found that healthcare providers’ personal lifestyles were directly correlated with their clinical performance. Healthcare providers’ own improved well-being and lifestyle cascaded to the patients and clinics, suggesting an additional strategy to achieve successful health promotion.Are you ready for the best-kept secret in medicine? The best-kept secret in medicine is that, given the right conditions, the body heals itself. Treating cardiovascular disease, for example, with appropriate dietary changes is good medicine, reducing mortality without any adverse effects. Yes, we should keep doing research, but educating physicians and patients alike about the existing knowledge about the power of nutrition as medicine may be the best investment we can make.”I hope anyone considering leading, whether in the area of the environment or anywhere, gets the hint, that you'll enjoy life more and lead more effectively if you act in accordance with your values. If you value clean air, clean land, and clean water, you'll enjoy polluting less.Here's Dr. Greger's video again:https://youtu.be/0W_OBRmAz2Y Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A lot of people say, "Josh, easy for you to act on the environment. You don't have kids."First, I could point to former guest Bea Johnson, who with her husband and 2 sons, produce less than a mason jar of trash per year, whom I see as role models to aspire to.I could point out former guest Jim Harshaw, who involved his four children and wife in his personal challenge. They loved the process and he used it to bring them together.Now I can point out Colonel Mark Read, whom you're about to hear talking joy, fun, bringing family together and not in small ways. Acting on their environmental values connects them across generations, which he then brings to West Point cadets.The point is not to copy what we do, but to find what matters to you and act on it. One by one, other things will follow. I make things work for my life. They make their things work in their lives. If I lived your life, I'd make it work. You can too.Family is only one aspect I could focus on with Col. Read's results. Once you find emotional reward in it, results are a matter of time. I had no idea when I started that I'd reach the level of taking 16 months to fill a load of garbage. Looking back, I see that once I started, that result was inevitable because it's fun, delicious, and rewarding.Hearing Mark's experience reducing waste with his family, you tell me if you think they're done or just starting.How far do you think they'll get?West Point has long traditions. It might be that changing how they do things is hard. It may be that the changes fall within their basic values of service and stewardship. Or maybe something else.We'll see. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Srini has run his podcast over 10 years, written several books, hundreds of articles, interviewing hundreds of researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, me, and more.His business is helping people develop themselves -- to dream, to play, to create, to go on adventures, to find your path.In this conversation we talk about his development and how he got to help others. It's more on the leadership development end of the Leadership and the Environment spectrumIf you aspire to more in your life, I recommend listening. He shares himself. We talk about surfing, writing, flow states, and daily practice, things that help you develop. Many people have gone through changes in their lives. Srini learned to share such changes with others so you can emulate them.About this episodeThis was an early conversation, from over a year ago, but only made it through the editing pipeline now. I was still developing how to talk to guests acting on their values, so I sound clumsy. I find it reveals the development of this podcast.Listening now, over a year later, having developed the technique to work with globally-renowned leaders that's become a TEDx talk on its own, it's almost painful to hear my clumsiness and Srini's generosity to play along.But it also shows how to develop: try, practice, rehearse, iterate, listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As a professor of leadership, host of this podcast, and constant student of acting by my environmental values, I live and work in the intersection of leadership, education, and the environment.Ken Robinson does too, but with a big difference: he's been here for decades longer, actively practicing in each. This episode approaches each of education, leadership, and the environment from several perspectives.I can't say anything better than his voice carries the wisdom and vitality of someone who has worked here for longer and with greater passion than maybe anyone I've met and I'm in this world.I'll keep this writing brief. Let's listen to Ken Robinson.One last caveat: our schedules meant recording by phone, meaning the audio quality isn't like being in a studio, but I believe you'll find Ken's message transcends the medium and hope you listen for what he says, not the equipment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Business, based growth, loves the ideas of a circular economy and recycling because both promotes more, but may keep us on track to unsustainability, global warming, plastic, etc.I don't know the answer, but the city of Charlotte contacted me about their Envision Charlotte programI told them I'm cautiously optimistic and am not sure what they're doing is in the long run helpful. I'm not saying it isn't but since few people get the difference between efficiency and total waste, few people are working on reducing total waste.They put me in touch with Amy Aussieker, their Executive Director, and we had a great first conversation where I said the above and she was game for a conversation. I admire her putting herself out there. I put myself out there too, not sure the balance I wanted between promoting someone acting on something important and challenging her forYou'll hear my first time challenging someone on these issues. I'm not sure where it will go, but I appreciate her openness and thoughtfulness. I hope I balanced my competing interests for the listener. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.