I don't know who is making this graffiti with my name on it, but I'm not complaining about it. I wonder who King Joshua is: Apparently someone else wonders too: I also didn't color it red, nor remember seeing concrete etchings filled in like that before. Others are keeping it simple, I guess someone born thirty-one years ago. I was in college in 1992. EDIT: Another sighting, this time on Sixth Avenue:
Why people mistakenly think sustainability means deprivation and sacrifice and think not polluting is extreme: I used to party with world famous DJs. Manhattan dance clubs gave me tables and an unlimited guest list back when I made art that a few clubs put in their VIP lounges. Sometimes amid an amazing party, someone would leave early to walk their dog or relieve their baby sitter. From my partying perspective, they looked crazy. Here was a world famous DJ, we're behind the booth, the party would continue all weekend, sometimes free booze, drugs, the works. Instead they're choosing to pick up an animal's poop, maybe get a baby's poop on their hands. Crazy! From their perspective, though, there was no comparison. A party isn't in…
I'm going to embarrass myself with this post. So be it. Longtime readers know I didn't sing growing up beyond Happy Birthday, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and some drunk karaoke, but as a result of being led through the Spodek Method, started practicing singing. First I sang fifteen minutes a day, turning off all my electronics. Later I started practicing singing exercises. I wrote a couple posts on it: Thoughts on singing and Why I’m singing. I didn't learn to sing well. I did learn that people who sing well got there through practicing. The better they sing, the more they practiced. Somehow, though I know in every other area people perform, you need to practice, somehow I hadn't put two and…
When I teach my core sustainability leadership practice, the Spodek Method, in classes and corporate workshops, I have participants pair up and practice it with each other. When there is an odd number of participants, one usually pairs with me, leading me to new commitments on my environmental values. At first I worried I’d run out of commitments after reading many ten-little-things-you-can-do-for-the-environment articles that promote the same things. Those CCCSC bludgeoning tactics (convincing, cajoling, coercing, seeking compliance: the opposite of how I lead) lead people to think there are are small number of things they can do. Even people who want to act meaningfully will do seven and consider themselves one of the good guys. I’ve found the opposite: The more people lead me through…
Addiction leads you to believe that you're getting more of the pleasure that the drug or behavior gives you. Gamblers feel like winners, and they do win sometimes, but they lose more overall. Meth users feel like they have more energy, and they do briefly, but they have less energy overall. In short: You tell me what you fear losing, and I'll tell you what you'll gain more of when you unaddict yourself. People addicted to flying, social media, binge TV, and other things that make them feel like they're propagating and adding to culture are demolishing culture. They're homogenizing it on the scale of travel and communication. When family and work was driving or walking distance away, more than driving or walking distance would…
This post is part 4 in a series including Part 1: What you’ll get more of when you stop polluting: what you love most Part 2: Martin Scorcese on our relationship with pollution Part 3: Why sustainability is so hard and polluting so easy, from the moving Trainspotting I'm continuing today the artistic representations of "What you fear losing when you stop an addiction is exactly what you'll gain" or "You tell me what you fear losing when you stop polluting and I'll tell you what you'll gain" have simplified how I understand and express the emotional terrain people live in and have to navigate to act more sustainably. I posted about how Martin Scorcese in Goodfellas effectively represented how we feel about our lives…
This post is part 3 in a series including Part 1: What you’ll get more of when you stop polluting: what you love most Part 2: Martin Scorcese on our relationship with pollution Part 4: Why sustainability is so hard for you and polluting so easy, from the movie Requiem For a Dream "What you fear losing when you stop an addiction is exactly what you'll gain" or "You tell me what you fear losing when you stop polluting and I'll tell you what you'll gain" have simplified how I understand and express the emotional terrain people live in and have to navigate to act more sustainably. I posted about how Martin Scorcese in Goodfellas effectively represented how we feel about our lives while polluting:…
This post is part 2 in a series including Part 1: What you’ll get more of when you stop polluting: what you love most Part 3: Why sustainability is so hard and polluting so easy, from the moving Trainspotting Part 4: Why sustainability is so hard for you and polluting so easy, from the movie Requiem For a Dream Do you remember the helicopter scene in Goodfellas? Henry Hill has a busy day delivering lots of things including guns, cocaine, and food. He has to do family things, meet his mistress, cook dinner, and all sorts of other things. He's getting everything done, taking cocaine for energy. If you ask him, he'd say he was being super productive. Only he's not doing anything meaningful. It's…
We're in an orchestra with a command performance impending. No one knows how to play even a scale. Instead of practicing their instruments, they're saying learning to play their own instruments would distract from the orchestra playing together. We have to practice as an orchestra without knowing how to play ourselves. They keep pointing at the musical score and reciting musical theory, but not putting their fingers on their instruments. They steadfastly refuse. They're saying someone will create better instruments and insist further on not practicing. They say they don't have time or money to practice, that it means deprivation and sacrifice. When someone tries to practice they say there's no point. They say it will distract from playing as an orchestra so they keep…
Sasha Laghonh invited me to her new series, Author Interviews by Sasha Talks | Celebrating the Arts, Culture & Life, to speak about writing. She's a longtime podcaster who has hosted me before. We speak about many aspects of writing: habits, style, motivation, goals, and more. If you're thinking about writing, I recommend listening. You don't have to copy my style or goals. On the contrary, developing your own will create the enthusiasm I feel for writing as much as I do. I don't claim to be the best, but important people review Leadership Step by Step and Initiative highly, almost as highly as people who do their exercises. Here's the conversation: Here is her full post (also on Blogspot, another format). Show notes Meet…
For context, I'm talking about myself before my sustainability experiments as much as anyone. I've concluded that someone trying to lead people to live sustainably when they haven't seriously tried themselves doesn't know the joys, physical challenges, (more importantly) emotional challenges, social challenges (people create more challenges than you'd expect), hopes, discoveries, and so on. I see them like someone reading a book on music theory trying to teach piano, or even hasn't heard music played. I've said before and will say again, only by practicing could I find that acting more sustainability brought joy, fun, freedom, and more rewarding results more than I ever would have expected. In this regard, sustainability is like most other practices. You have to practice to develop skills, experience,…
As a kid growing up, I avoided reading the New Yorker. My dad subscribed to it, so I figured I wouldn't like it. Now I consider its writing some of the best around. Over the summer, I picked up this framed poster of an iconic New Yorker cover from a neighbor getting rid of it. My opinion started changing in 1990, my year in Paris, when two things happened. First, when my dad visited, he knew I was craving things in English to read, so he brought six months of New Yorkers for me to read. I read each nearly cover to cover---announcements for events that had passed, the long articles, everything. I remember John Cheever's diaries being the long article in three consecutive issues.…
At an art show recently, I was looking at a painting that caught my eye and attention. It was of a beach or shallow ocean, viewed underwater so you could see the waves from below, with the sun filtered and refracted through it, echoing the waviness of the sea floor. Here's a similar piece by the artist, though online doesn't match the beauty in person: As I looked at it, a woman approached me who turned out to be the artist. I've shown art in shows and galleries, so like learning about artists' methods and perspectives. She said she was creating art showing Earth before humans. In particular, she said "before humans wrecked the planet" as if it was the most natural way to describe…
I found an article in the Philadelphia Encyclopedia about Mount Airy, where I grew up, "a national model of racial integration, " created through generations of conscious, deliberate work by residents, against opposing trends the article describes below, including white realtors trying to redline and black leaders trying to protect "blackness." My mom, dad, and stepfather participated in several institutions promoting Mount Airy's values mentioned in the article, especially West Mount Airy Neighbors and Weavers Way co-op. I wonder how much it caused my views to differ from the average American's. It's outside of my experience to grow up any place else. At my junior high school and high school, my skin color was underrepresented. How much do people assume I grew up in an…
About a year ago I started writing the first draft of my next book. If you count earlier iterations that only led to refining the outline and restarting, I probably started six months earlier, not that I kept track. I had finished my first draft a few months later, spring 2021. I knew when I started writing my second non-self-published book, Initiative, that I would write my next book on sustainability. I had just started This Sustainable Life, called Leadership and the Environment at the time, and anticipated podcasting would help develop it. It did. The new book will be much stronger for it. This time I worked with an editor far more experienced than before. At first, I reeled from the amount of editing…
I've never cared much one way or the other about kombucha. I've tasted it once or twice, but it comes packaged, so I avoid it. I've been making vinegar for a while from apples and water, sometimes adding sugar, since I have some a neighbor left when he moved. The vinegar tastes delicious and has resulted in a bunch of the yeast and bacteria cultures that grow as I pass them from one batch to the next. I figured kombucha and vinegar were similar, just kombucha had tea. I don't drink much tea. In fact, I have two containers of tea leaves at least ten years old in my cupboard for guests, but I rarely make any. Finally, it hit me; if I take over…
On November 25, Thanksgiving, I posted Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day. Make it Buy Nothing Season. Give the gift of your presence and attention. Most Americans consider the next day Black Friday, a day to buy things. I consider it Buy Nothing Day, a day to buy nothing. I ended up buying something Thanksgiving, which prompted me to consider going for longer than one day and try to make it a Buy Nothing Season and to buy nothing material besides food for December or so. Technically, I planned to travel over New Years, so I bought train tickets and two Covid testing kits, which are material things, but the event I was planning for got canceled so I returned them. Amtrak kept twenty-five percent but…
When I pick up litter from a pile or collection, I don't always pick up all of it. I imagine conversations in my head if someone asked why I left some. Sometimes the drug users in Washington Square Park will point me to pieces I didn't pick up. I think they feel like they're doing me a favor, maybe based on thinking I like picking up trash just because and not condescending. Anyway, I think the following words, which I'm deciding comprise a poem. I'm not going to pick up everything. But I'm going to pick up something. I'm not going to pick up nothing. Will you pick up anything? I'm no poet, so don't ask me if it counts as rhyming when the words…
The average American watches 5 hours of TV per day. Many fly or drive around for fun. If we want to pollute less, will we lose the ability to enjoy ourselves? I've written before how Vincent Stanley's commitment to turn off his computer Friday mornings and Nicola Pirulli's walking me through The Spodek Method led to me turning off all my electronics and practicing singing daily. Since starting, I've missed a couple days, but have loved the results. Until recently I only sang. Now I'm moving to voice exercises. I resisted doing them partly because I need to use my computer to play the recordings so decided to relax that constraint the days I practice my exercises. I expect that doing them enough will improve…
I didn't think of how small my building's elevators were when I bought a sofa after moving into my current apartment. It didn't fit. The deliverymen tried to bring it up the stairs too. They made the first landing, but couldn't make the turn to go up the next flight. They had to take it back. I ended up paying a $300 restocking fee plus big tips for the deliverymen's extra efforts. Plus I lost weeks with no sofa. Now I know my home's limits. Living within them is no problem when I know them, only when I didn't. A few minutes of measurement and geometry could have saved me that trouble and improved my life. Can homo sapiens' elevator, also known as Earth, fit…
I watched the documentary Dominion on how the factory farm system treats animals. It's brutal but important. It shows many graphic scenes so I know the link below won't play inline, but the producers made it freely available. Click through to watch it online. I recommend watching Dominion when you're ready for a sobering gut-punch you'll wish you had watched earlier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko Why I recommend it I last ate meat in 1990, went vegan several years ago, and when vegetarian at less animal products than anyone I'd met who called themselves vegan (different people seem to define zero differently), but I don't consider eating meat immoral or wrong in any absolute sense. When I read James Suzman writing about people in hunter-gatherer societies hunting as…
I doubt I'll ever write a novel, but if I do, a long time ago I thought of an idea. I've never told it to anyone. My idea is a full novel written on an almost momentary incident, written from several people's perspectives, each in a different chapter. I generally think of writing it on a single pitch in a baseball game. The perspectives would be the pitcher, batter, catcher, umpire, an infielder or two, an outfielder or two, and maybe some people off the field, like a fan or two, a coach, and maybe someone watching on TV. How would I construct a narrative about a couple seconds? I think people's thoughts in intense moments like that become heightened so I'd explore the characters'…
Jonathan and I have a good rapport. We joke around. I love his expressiveness as an artist. I think he values stewardship more than he's behaved so far in life, so I hear him enjoying aligning his behavior with his values. In this episode we review his leading his kids and wife in The Spodek Method from last time. You'll hear touching family interactions. The I teach the second interaction with guests---how to lead that conversation.
Before I had an outline and composition that worked for this book, I wrote a lot, but kept having to restart. I was spinning my wheels. Then I started working with a coach. She didn't know anything about sustainability or stewardship, but she knew about writing. I could separate my two broad challenges---structure and content. By structure I mean the craft of writing, which included composition, time writing, focusing on the reader. I'm not e. e. cummings. I'm not trying to change the form of books. Shakespeare's sonnets were no less creative for sticking to the sonnet form. She knows writing and enabled me to separate out the craft so I didn't have to worry about it. Once I had an outline I liked, I…
Anyone who knows me knows I read and watch a lot on sustainability and the environment. Most of their information I already knew or I find they disengage people. The Story of Stuff team's work stands apart, especially The Story of Plastic. I recommend watching all their videos, starting with the short below, since you're here. Following last year's panel on the awesome, tragic movie, The Story of Plastic, they've released a short for its anniversary. In their words The Story of Plastic (animated short) pulls back the curtain on the plastic pollution headlines, revealing the true causes and consequences of the global plastics crisis. This animated short is a companion piece to The Story of Plastic (documentary), which premiered in April of 2020. https://youtu.be/iO3SA4YyEYU…