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 communities around the globe." I described my work, my path to get here, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, how you can't lead others to live by values you live the opposite, and concepts relevant to sustainability leadership. I didn't take them to task as much as I could have for living unsustainably, undermining their credibility and trust.

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 purpose and implement it better. As with most people, the challenges looked insurmountable to her. But unlike most people, she had once made a list to row across an ocean and, finding no impossible steps, she did it. Over and over. It's easy to look at her today and figure, "of course she could do it. She's an ocean rower. She was born that way," or something like that. But before she did it, she was a disgruntled employee and spouse looking for…

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. As she describes in our conversation, she spent formative years behind the iron curtain, ingraining in her how to thrive with less, not more, which she caries with her until today. She also wasn't always considered beautiful. I'll leave you to read the book to learn about the toilet bowl incident we allude to in our conversation. In any case, you'll hear someone much more approachable, humble, and resilient that you'd expect. We recorded in the winter. She agreed to meet me in Washington Square Park to pick up litter…

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 skills of leadership. Most people don't know that living more sustainably improves their lives, not the reversion to the Stone Age or Mad Max apocalypse our culture teaches us to fear. From the start of the conversation, Derek distinguished that he sees himself as an explorer, not a leader. He's exploring the frontiers of life following his whim or what he finds around him. He suggests that leaders give more direction to others to help them follow. He acknowledged with a "touché" that…

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 to do, why, and how to feel about it. The best I can come up with is that instead of worrying what I'm missing or craving doing what I can't, which leads to a life of feeling like I'm missing out and scarcity, it leads me to construct and build, which makes me feel abundant. I can enjoy what I am doing instead of missing what I'm not. It forces me to think deeper questions than just what would increase my productivity. Productivity…

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 slavery, let alone passing it, the more possible a parallel amendment on pollution seems. Jim and I continue our conversation on abolition's history, mainly from the vantage point of his book Freedom National. I understand a lot more of the history of thirteen slave colonies becoming thirteen slave states then a nation of free and slave states, then with the Thirteenth Amendment, a free nation of thirty-six free states. Jim knows it backward and forward. He helps clarify that history for me and…