Episodes

People resist environmental projects to protect jobs, even to keep producing products that pollute. My absurd proposal to balance jobs with junk: put factories next to landfills. Despite it being absurd, the proposal would cr...

What emotions do you associate with environmental action? I find people associate shame and guilt with it. I find these emotions lead people to suppress the emotions and hide the behavior leading to it. I propose reacting to ...

One of my main goals for this podcast is to bring people who love acting on one's environmental values, seeing stewardship not as an obligation but as being a part of something greater than yourself, than any of us, benefitin...

Learning that humans only recently developed the concept of extinction. Much of the West, for example, believed in a Great Chain of Being, spontaneous generation, and a biblical flood. That perspective suggests that many past...

Tired of people saying what you do doesn't matter? Or personal action in general? They're confusing different types of action. In this recording I distinguish three of them so you can feel comfortable acting by your values wi...

I talk a lot about the lack of leadership in the area of the environment. Many people talk about change but don't lead it. Many others judge but don't support, which leads people to hold back on trying. Well, the mayors of Or...

Why a military general? Isn't the US military one of the greatest polluters on the planet? My goal is to bring effective leadership to the environment and your life because spreading facts, figures, doom, and gloom isn't doin...

The loudest voices these days seem to come from protesters because they design their actions for attention. They aren't necessarily the most effective. Many of us are outraged. Our emotions become intense. Emotional intensity...

Here are the notes I read this episode from: I see human population decreasing the Earth's ability to sustain life and human society. I have a goal of increasing that ability. Actually two goals: my other goal is for people t...

Here are the notes I read from for this episode. I've talked about what I call The Worst Problem in the World for about ten years, so I'm used to it and worked from scarce notes. The problem Example: Germans and Jamaicans In ...

The notes I wrote and read from for this episode: Leadership means changing beliefs and goals. If you're doing anything else, you're following and perpetuating the system that created the results. Greater efficiency, recyclin...

Here is the text I read from for this post: My environmental role models Why my role models? Because people keep saying what I do is inaccessible. That it's too much or extreme. That they need to balance. Well everyone believ...

People littering is creepy, like a tick or other parasite. It gets under my skin. I don't like it, but if I want to help people stop their parasitical, tick-like behavior, I feel it helps to understand them. Leadership rests ...

Here are the notes I read from to make this episode, sometimes diverging from them. Why I don't call our environmental situation a crisis. People think scientists will solve something or engineers will create a solution and w...

I've been sharing the sentiment of how people today seem to think of our times versus how people from other times would see now. I expect they'd view us with horror, disgust, and disdain. Today's post reprises that perspectiv...

Since recording this episode, Michael has become Google's Lead for Circular Economy. Michael took on a challenge many people consider: biking to work for a month. He challenged himself amid product releases at work and family...

When we pollute, we think we act for the reasons in our minds that justify that behavior, but those reasons generally come after we choose, motivated to justify behavior we consider wrong. Most environmental analysis looks at...

Brad identified the problem of people acting or not as our emotions and behavior, which many forces contribute to. We also talk about media and scientists. This refinement of the understanding to emotions points to what to wo...

I believe many people believe we live in an age of wonder and that people from any other time would envy us. I believe future generations will not look at our flying and pollution not with envy but with horror, as we look at ...

People keep describing my environmental actions as praiseworthy. I think they do it to make it seem harder and less accessible to do themselves what they expect will be hard, deprivation, sacrifice, and not what they want to ...

A few words on growth and how people misunderstand it, especially economists. I start by talking about my window garden cherry tomato plants and how the inability of the insects eating them to regulate their growth and up des...

Today's episode with guest Brad P, a dating coach and guru---well, former, since he's moved on, as he'll share---partly reveal a major part of my social and emotional development as an adult. He was in a sense my boss when I ...

Polio terrorized the world. People died and became paralyzed and there were no defenses to it. Science understood it and eventually Jonas Salk found a vaccine. Just having a vaccine wasn't enough. They needed massive global p...

People commonly misunderstand the goals of this podcast. I tried in this episode to clear up two common misunderstandings: They mistakenly believe my goal is individual change---to influence one person at a time. They mistake...