Michael took on a challenge many people consider: biking to work for a month. He challenged himself amid product releases at work and family obligations as his wife traveled, so he couldn't just start. He had to plan and work at it. Even so, he created cheerleaders of his riding in his coworkers. Before all that, you'll get to hear about his spectacular blow out. Michael clearly explains his plans, actions, and results -- what worked and didn't -- so if you're thinking about biking more or any environmental action, you can use him as a role model. I'm curious if he'll follow his personal experience with leading people more at Google or steering Google beyond where he would have otherwise.

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 the science of what pollutes more or less. Today I look at the mental processes and emotions behind choosing polluting behavior. Almost always pollution results in separating yourself from others---you don't want to pollute your world. Avoiding polluting connects you with others because you account for your effect on them. Acting sustainably and regeneratively build community and connection. I suggest that when you get this pattern and internalize it, you will stop trying to justify what you've been doing that pollutes and that those behaviors and results will…

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 work on that I see few environmentalists unaddressing: emotions, feelings, and community, not technology, innovation. Almost the only emotions they evoke are fear, panic, and worry, which don't motivate acting on the environment. They motivate disengaging from the speaker. If you associated attraction coaching with trickery or games, you might not expect this identification. On the contrary, Brad knows about relationships, people, and teaching. These things happen to lead to more intimacy---physical, emotional, and intellectual---and they are big elements of leadership. We talk about vegetables, CSAs, helping people…

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 slave holders and people who didn't resist Hitler. The sooner we get that into our thick skulls, the sooner we'll enjoy life with less craving, excuses and acting like spoiled brats. How many spoiled brats do you know where you think, I like how spoiled that person is, I'd like to be like them? But they don't know it, do they? So we don't know it either, spoiled brats that we are, telling ourselves we can't live without eating pizza in…

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 do. Making what I do sound good makes what they do normal. I prefer to see not polluting as normal and polluting as abnormal and worth changing. I feel that praising someone for not polluting is like praising someone for not kicking puppies or abusing their children. I suggest seeing not kicking puppies as normal and kicking them as abnormal. This episode explores this perspective.

Should I drive growth instead of letting it happen? What do you think? 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 destroying the plants and thereby their own population. Can we outdo bugs? I'm not sure. An educated friend showed surprise to me that his having four or five kids is one of the biggest effects he could have on the environment. How can we not get this? People don't seem to think in this area but instead parrot knee-jerk irrelevancies that distract from that if we don't control our population, nature will for us,…

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 coached mostly men but a few women on dating and attraction skills, which I did before coaching executives, entrepreneurs, and so on on leadership, initiative, entrepreneurship, and more mainstream things. The episode begins with a long introduction to address the extraordinary misconception about coaching dating and attraction, especially for men. While I haven't kept it formally secret, I haven't shared it publicly, though I tell all my coaching clients soon after starting working with them since it opens up the coaching relationship and makes…

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 public projects to disseminate it. Is the connection to our current environmental problems obvious? As I see it, our behavior is causing the problems. If I'm not too full of myself, this podcast's technique, which I describe in my TEDxNYU talk, in a sense inoculates people from inaction on environmental values. It changes people to where they enjoy wasting less and taking responsibility. We don't need a massive global public works, but what if we spread that technique globally. Instead of trying to figure out how to feed 10…

The Leadership and the Environment podcast 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 mistakenly believe I act on my environmental values to lead people by example. On point 1, this podcast focuses on leading people through community. You may hear me leading one person at a time per episode, but I'm not picking people randomly. I'm picking people on more people's community than most others. My goal is for listeners to feel, "I'm not the only one doing this. People in my community are too. It's time I acted more." I'm working my way to people known by hundreds…

This episode is two thoughtful, intelligent people sharing environmental thoughts. I think the thoughts we share are what a lot of people think but don't share enough. We cover action, leadership, motivation, caring, beliefs, integrity, and Adam's challenge on "imperfect" (which I put in quotes since I prefer non-supermarket apples) apples. I suspect you'll hear things you've thought about but maybe haven't shared, not just environmental, though we mostly hover around there. Most conversations I hear devolve into abstract, academic, analysis and blame, things like government should do X, corporations should do Y, or this law should pass---anything but acting themselves. Yet acting raises awareness more than awareness leads to acting. And the fastest, most effective way to influence companies, government, and other institutions is…

Between insects, kelp, vertical farming, lab-grown meat, and other clever options, why didn't we think of them before? Because we had better options! Few meat eaters choose crickets over steaks and hamburgers, but we've squandered what was once plenty with overpopulation. We've become more efficient, but we've lost abundance. With a lower population we could keep abundance.