This Sustainable Life: All Episodes

673: Jim Oakes, part 2: Can We Go From Abolition to Anti-Pollution?

673: Jim Oakes, part 2: Can We Go From Abolition to Anti-Pollution?

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…

672: Chris Bailey, part 2: How to Calm Your Mind

672: Chris Bailey, part 2: How to Calm Your Mind

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…

671: How Pulling Off a Challenging Day Off Grid Feels

671: How Pulling Off a Challenging Day Off Grid Feels

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…

670: Jeffrey Shaw: Self-employment and Sustainability

670: Jeffrey Shaw: Self-employment and Sustainability

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…

669: David Loy: Ecodharma: Zen Buddhism and Sustainability

669: David Loy: Ecodharma: Zen Buddhism and Sustainability

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…

668: Christopher Ketcham: Growthism Versus Sustainability

668: Christopher Ketcham: Growthism Versus Sustainability

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…

664: Rodrigo Cámara Leret: Learning how the Kogi heal the land

664: Rodrigo Cámara Leret: Learning how the Kogi heal the land

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…

662: Mark Mills, part 4: What to Do Next

662: Mark Mills, part 4: What to Do Next

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…

657: My video series, episode 01, introduction, part 1

657: My video series, episode 01, introduction, part 1

Part 1 of the introduction shares a few stories to frame how I approach sustainability, then describes the outcomes I designed it to bring about, mainly to enable you to lead yourself to a more sustainable future that you’ll find preferable to…

655: Donald Robertson, part 2: Seeking a Wolf

655: Donald Robertson, part 2: Seeking a Wolf

Donald committed to seeking out seeing a wolf. He shares about his experience on this commitment. He shares his deep connection and commitment to nature and how the project affected it. Donald thinks and acts in systems. We know we are a…