Education

I don't talk much about history here, but my father was a history professor and I grew up with history being a big part of family life and how we viewed the world. My dad knew a lot of history. It was one of his major lenses through which to view the world. Growing up I didn't like that view. Everything seemed to warrant lectures, from art museums to tourist places we visited. He didn't understand science, sports, competition, or entrepreneurship, so we didn't understand each other on many things. But my recent book, Sustainability Simplified, in tracing the development of dominance hierarchies from the dawn of the Holocene until today into a global culture that we feel unable to escape or see alternatives to,…

Last week I announced Emily Wang’s Own Workshop on Sustainable Building 9/14. Today I attended it and learned more than I expected to, which happens when you get your hands dirty from digging into clay. Here's Emily in the structure we helped build, a chicken coop at none other than Drew Gardens, where I hold my twice-annual cooking workshops in the Bronx. If you read Emily's blog, which I recommend, you'll see she refers to me sometimes, including her taking my sustainability leadership workshop learning the Spodek Method. She's in the video on this page describing her experience in the workshop. You might guess I connected them. You'd be right. It happened after Emily started taking natural building workshops and asked if anyone in the…

UPDATE: Emily posted about the workshop. Check out A Smashing Week Building with Cob in NYC. Lots of pictures, descriptions of cob building, and matching my appreciation for Drew Gardens. I attended, though don't appear in the pictures since I rode my bike there and knew I would ride back, about 90 minutes each way. The post referred to me, but not by name. See if you catch the reference. As one example of a graduate of the Sustainability Leadership workshop's implementing what she learned, Emily Wang is leading two workshops in natural building, here in New York City, in particular, in the beautiful Drew Gardens. Register here If you're like me, you've heard about cob, adobe, and other natural building terms more and more.…

I've written before that to fix our environmental problems we have to change culture. Say you wanted to learn a culture to where you were fluent in its language and culture. Which would work better? Say you wanted to learn Nigerian language and culture Read books by people who haven't lived in the culture or spoken that language, with the intent that only after you learned them fluently you would move to Nigeria ... or Go to Nigeria and learn there? I took years of French lessons in school and learned more in the first two weeks there than in five or six years of classes here. Likewise, I learned a lot of science relevant to sustainability, but learned more in avoiding packaged food, avoiding…

My friend who teaches kids sustainability, among other things, invited me to join her with some of her students and their parents sailing in New York Harbor. She had me speak to them about things like taking five years (and counting) to fill a load of garbage, not fly, and so on. They loved it. I loved it too. I enjoy being on the water, when the wind, currents, and tides dictate my pace. Daily worries disappear when sailing. I'm also scheduled to talk to them about astrophysics later. Coincidentally, they're reading Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, though the version for kids. They're around 10 to 15 years old. We couldn't go out most of the day since the winds were too high for…