"What I do doesn't matter" is one of the more common sentiments of our time. We use it to avoid acting when we see problems. A similar rationalization not to act: "I have faith that younger people will solve our environmenta…
A blackout struck New York City and a large part of the U.S. northeast in 2003. It happened only two years after 9/11. How could we not first wonder if it was terrorism. I had been at work at the time. After waiting maybe an…
Dave and I go back years, to when we both wrote columns at Inc. I'm surprised I didn't bring him on before. He helps entrepreneurs, leaders, and aspiring leaders develop social and emotional skills, as well as college studen…
I met Erica in a online meeting of academics who promote avoiding flying. A major perk for many academics is that universities pay for flying to academic conferences, for research, and for other academic reasons, of where th…
Since recording this conversation, I've mentioned to a lot of people, "you wouldn't believe the situation with dyes and poisons in our clothes." The most common response has been something like, "Oh yeah, I've heard. It's te…
I heard about Sven through the articles below about the cultural change at Northwell, a chain of hospitals around New York City. I recommend reading the Post article before listening to this episode. It may read overly posit…
About fifteen minutes into this conversation, it hit me how powerfully Stephen's commitment affected him. (Sorry I took so long to catch on, Stephen!) All he had to do was volunteer around a body of water. His experience sho…
Regular listeners and blog readers know I talk about litter and how much we wreck nature, especially my neighborhood's back yard, Washington Square Park. Click the links below to see some of the worst litter you've seen, in …
I'm searching for role models including people who changed cultures and undid dominance hierarchies, particularly people who came from status. I can think of many who came from subjugated classes, but not many who could have…
I have spoken and written at length how I see our relationship with polluting behavior as qualifying as addiction, a view that I think helps frame the challenge of sustainability. Overcoming addiction is harder than creating…
Regular listeners and readers of my blog will know my sustainability leadership workshops and one of the participants of the first, Evelyn (she's in the video on that link). After being the teaching assistant for a couple co…
Regular listeners know how I look for role models in similar situations to ours regarding the environment. We know our polluting and depleting are bringing us toward collapse, but instead of acting, we procrastinate on actin…
If John's specialty in deep history weren't valuable enough to understand how our culture's dominance hierarchy formed from the material conditions of the dawn of agriculture, he also specializes in American history, includi…
You'll hear Tony's story of rolling up his sleeves and doing some hard labor. You'll also hear the labor being just the start of the reward. He shares about the less tangible but not lesser results in community, emotional re…
I was reading Harper's magazine and Christopher's story was on the cover: Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”! It begins In the summer of 2016, a fifty-seven-year-old Texan named Stephen McRae drove east out of the rainfore…
Greenhouse gas and ocean plastic levels don't rise on their own. The cause of our environmental problems is our behavior, which results from our culture. The world's dominant culture pollutes, depletes, addicts, and imperial…
People complain they don't have time, money, or energy to live more sustainably, I think because marketers see the demand so come up with things to sell people to address the demand. Since neither buyer nor seller understand…
I follow podcast guest Maya Van Rossum on her work on constitutional amendments protecting a clean environment. You may have heard of the legal victory in Montana, Held versus Montana , earlier this year (yay!), Montana bein…
Regular listeners know I focus on understanding addiction. I see people in my neighborhood and in headlines nearly daily addicted to heroin, fentanyl, meth, and crack. Since our culture promotes craving and dependence as wha…
Casey is a longtime friend. One day a few months ago he mentioned in a call he was choosing to lower his carbon footprint to a few tons of CO2 per year. I hadn't been trying to lead or persuade him, so I started asking him w…
Last month I read Hamas-Israel story from an angle few will touch, but is critical: overpopulation, which I wrote about in my post Overpopulation in Israel and Gaza . The population in Israel and Palestine have both more tha…
Jacquie emailed me that this podcast is inspiring her. She wrote that she'd "always had a spark of interest in sustainability, but I mostly followed the herd mentality and went about my life not really making a conscious eff…
Living unsustainably means you need resources beyond your immediate environment. It requires you take from others. When done on a cultural level, it's known as imperialism. When we take their land too, it's colonialism. When…
I hosted two professionals who model population growth with different views, some complementary, some conflicting: Wolfgang Lutz and Chris Bystroff . I learned from both and recommend listening to their episodes first. I've …