Wolfgang Lutz is one of the world’s experts in projecting global population levels and demography. I contacted him to help understand the differences between projections based on demography like his and the United Nations’ versus systemic ones like in Limits to Growth.…
I was very curious to learn more about the Kogi and Alan’s interactions with them. Alan is deeply involved with their joint project to learn to restore nature as they have shown they can. “Restoring nature” doesn’t do justice for what they…
The International Society of Sustainability Professionals invited me to speak to their New York Chapter. Here is that recording. We “whooshed” out the participants’ words, so it’s just my speaking. Their mission is “ISSP empowers professionals to advance sustainability in organizations and…
Roz could have stopped at rowing solo across oceans to world records, awards, and national honors. She didn’t. She had done those things for a purpose: helping make our world more livable, less polluted. They gave her greater skills to appreciate her…
One of the most famous supermodels, Paulina needs no introduction. She’s here because mutual friends introduced us and her recent book, No Filter, that tells a different story than you’d expect of the once-most-highly-paid model. It deserves the positive reviews from the New…
I bring leaders from all areas to sustainability. The challenges to changing culture to sustainability aren’t in technology, science, journalism, activism, or politics, though all those fields are relevant. Their practitioners generally aren’t skilled in what changes culture: the social and emotional…
Oliver’s book Four Thousand Weeks deserves the incredible praise it gets. I’ve recommended it to many friends and can’t for the life of me put into words how he refines and changes how I look at time, priorities, how to choose what…
My passion for the possibility of doing for pollution what abolitionists did to slavery: transform it from something normal, as if part of nature, to forever seen as wrong. The more I learn the difficulty of conceiving of the Thirteenth Amendment, banning…
Bringing back Chris for first time since five years ago. Since then, his last book got big, as we briefly discussed. We started talking about meditation and at a high level, framed the conversation to come on how the mind works, outside…
Last night I had trouble falling asleep because before getting in bed, I noticed I had to record two podcast episodes first thing in the morning but I wanted to cook some stew, the forecast was for rain all day, and didn’t…
Do you want a job working in sustainability? If you want to wait for a job in the field, you’re going to wait for a long time. Most businesses’ models depend on growth, extraction, and exploiting resources. Many of the biggest and…
What can we learn from Buddhism to understand and respond to our ecological crisis? This question is the heart of David’s focus, as I understand it. We started by describing his journey from a more mainstream American childhood to Zen Buddhism and…
Reading Christopher’s story in the Pacific Standard, The Fallacy of Endless Economic Growth What economists around the world get wrong about the future, made me contact him. It was one of the only reviews of criticism of our culture’s attempting to grow…
The only was I can see how we can avoid environmental disaster leading to human population collapse is by changing our culture—every unsustainable culture but America most, as the most polluting per capita large nation. Can we do it in time? Humanity…
Every step I take toward sustainability leads me to learn how much humans have figured out how to live sustainably. I’m far from living sustainably, though I’ve come a long way. We are wiping out the cultures living sustainably these cultures, now…
Tony turns out to live a few blocks from me. I met him at his home, where we recorded. He shared his experience knowing E. O. Wilson, who, as Tony described, conceived of the plan to protect half the Earth’s land to…
Ethnobotanist Rodrigo Cámara-Leret first describes how podcast guest Alan Ereira chose him to live and work with the Kogi, who want to share, in my language, how to stop wrecking the biosphere. He has visited them and seen behind what they show…
Nadeem committed to reducing his doof. He bravely shares the challenge. Even in Norway, he’s surrounded by messages to keep consuming it. Imagine any other unhealthy addictive substance—cocaine, heroin, etc—was advertised and sold everywhere. On top of extra availability, imagine it was…
I’ve said before and I’ll say again that conversations like mine with Mark Mills are what I value and wish we had more of. We do our research, we have strong opinions, we agree on many things, we disagree on some things…
I can’t tell you how valuable (and entertaining) I found Daniel’s video series. Regular listeners and readers may know how important I find anthropology to solving our environmental problems. If we want to change our culture, we have to know why it…