If you haven't listened to Brent and my first two episodes, I recommend listening to them first. Also, I recommend reading Milwaukee Brewers' Brent Suter Sharing Love and Joy. I haven't approached the environment from a religious view and Brent and I spoke about plenty of interesting things the first two times, so we didn't get to it. Lately listeners have probably heard how much William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and their peers have become role models. I wrote Brent to see if he knew more about them and could share. He said he was happy to. I'm not used to talking about religion in public, but he was and was happy to record. I reread the story about his Christianity and was pleasantly…

We correct two big misunderstandings. First, most people associate acting on the environment with obligation, chore, deprivation, and sacrifice. We lead them to feel that way when we tell them what to do. We may think we're right because the science says so, but leadership depends not on how right you are but how the person you want to motivate feels. Second, people don't know Deming, or associate him, to the extent they know him, with statistics and how they felt about math problems in school. When you get Deming, you see understanding patterns reveals effective leadership, which is liberating, even fun. Kelly shares how digging dirt and planting plants became fun when led effectively. Since everyone cares about the environment in some way---after all…

Of Adams' earlier books, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves changed my approach to sustainability---my hopes, expectations, role models, strategies, . . .  a lot. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award, the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His stories recount people righting unfair situations. You'll hear how the British abolitionists of the late 1700s and early 1800s took on and overcame the most profitable industries funding the largest empire the world had ever seen. No other situation connects to our environmental situation as much as it does. We're desperate for role models. Reading his book felt like coming home…

My second Behind the Mic conversation with Dan McPherson gets to why I've talked about race lately. Why on a podcast about sustainability, leadership, and the environment, do I take the risk as to talk about a topic that straight white men get canceled for? If it didn't further my mission of helping restore Earth's ability to sustain life and society, I wouldn't let another topic divert attention. Whatever problems people struggle over, if anything ties us together, we breathe air, drink water, and eat food that we are sleepwalking as a nation, culture, and species into poisoning. This episode presents a topic connected to race I've talked a lot about with friends and family to figure out how to treat publicly but that I…

I started this podcast November 30, 2017. In this episode I reflect on before starting the podcast, the fears and hopes driving it, the friends it brought me, some challenges, some joys, accomplishments, and such. I also share how it changed me and how if you want to change the world and love doing it, you can too. I've trained a few new hosts starting their versions. Between my personal growth, the guests, the hosts starting their branches, and feedback from listeners, I can't tell what part I love most. Here's to another three years! Here's to another thirty years! . . . though I hope we will have changed course enough before then not to need it.

Let's talk fatherhood and sustainability. "Josh, you don't understand since you don't have kids, it's impossible to avoid producing waste," people keep saying. Since they say other things I've done is impossible before learning I've done them, I expect they're making excuses and that I could solve parenthood problems too. Without kids I haven't solved their problems (though guest Bea Johnson has in her family of four that produces less landfill waste than I do), but I expect I could. Balint became a father since he was a guest. We decided to record a new challenge for him as a father. The first episode we just spontaneously started recording, so we didn't set up microphones. I decided to trade catching the moment for sound quality.…

The Global Top 30 Gurus named Chester the world's number 4 best leadership speaker, trainer, and thought leader, as I happened to find while researching before our conversation. I had to ask him about it, which led to him sharing about it. Naturally, he spoke humbly about it, but we get some inside views of his rarified level of the corporate and government leadership world. (The list named two other podcast guests and one who hosted me). When I asked about his path, he shared so many wonderful and helpful stories, I kept asking him for more. I wanted to hear about his bottle commitment, but our conversation became a master class in more than becoming a leadership guru, but also to manifest any passion.…

Between asking about recovering from a heart attack in your 40s and about water bottles, where do you start? As it turns out, they're more closely related than you think. We started talking about recovering from the heart attack. Dan has faced his mortality several times before, so fear of death didn't hit him most. We talked more about changes to his lifestyle, particularly diet, which connected with sustainability. As a leadership community leader, Dan noticed and shared about his emotional experiences. Since we're friends who talk a lot, I think you'll find the conversation more friendly than most, so I think you'll hear more intimacy than with many podcast conversations. Dan seemed to reach a greater ratio of change to effort than many guests.…

In June and July 2019, you may remember reading about Rod Schoonover in the NY Times, State Dept. Intelligence Analyst Quits to Protest Blocked House Testimony, Washington Post, CBS, and more in the links below. He resigned in protest as a long-time government intelligence and security researcher and analyst, focusing on a field he helped create---climate security. He focused on learning how environmental changes would affect the security of the United States. If you're American, that's your life and mine as our nation leads the world in plunging the Earth into uncharted environmental territory. The White House blocked his testimony to Congress---not disagreed, blocked. Even places like the conservative American Enterprise Institute went on record saying how things like that don't happen in the US.…

Food started me on this journey. If it's not a major source of joy, community, and connection, the opportunity is there to make it so. Marion Nestle does it. She returned after recently launching her book Let's Ask Marion, which I consider her most accessible. I read What To Eat, around 500 pages, and loved it, but Let's Ask Marion is under 200, with quick chapters, though still comprehensive in covering her most important topics. Our conversation covers background not in the book of her and her co-author, Kerry Trueman, who researched the questions, asked them, and planned with Marion the book's structure and content. Since her first appearance on this podcast, I sat in on her class at NYU---one of the benefits of teaching…