Leadership

I've spoken to a lot of people about environmental action and inaction. While I haven't done double-blind randomized controlled experiments, I have seen one broad trend: People who act on their environmental values do so for others. People who don't act on their environmental values do so for themselves. Action Typical reasons people give for acting include: "I want to leave the world better than I found it," "Other people breathe that air," "This beautiful world is a gift and it's my responsibility to steward it for others," and "I want the next generation to have as clean and pure a world as we did." Inaction Typical reasons people give for keeping doing what they're doing include: "I don't have time," "It's not a priority…

Here are resources I learn from and return to about joy, discovery, meaning, purpose, community (not doom, gloom, new-age fluff, etc), in no particular order. I'll keep adding to it. I recommend bingeing on all of it. Leadership and Teamwork The This Sustainable Life podcast When people hear my podcast name, they focus on the environment part. I consider leadership incomparably more important. We know what to do. The question is changing our behavior, which is leadership. I consider my book, Leadership Step by Step, the top resource on learning to lead. The Spodek Method: Making Meaningful, Sustainable Changes The Story of Stuff Main site Their short movies (my favorite part of the main site and one of my top starting points) The Story of…

People widely expect technology to solve our environmental problems. What technology? They don't know. Something someone will invent in the future. What about the pattern that technology has driven consumption of fossil fuels and plastic, accelerated using up resources, and created pollution such as plastic, carcinogens, and so on? But but but they make things more efficient. They do for a while, but the trend is toward accelerating the system creating the problems. You know the problems—sea levels, resource depletion, extinctions. Technology, especially speculative, unknown, future technology can be part of a solution. But technology itself at most suggests tactical approaches. The problems result from our behavior. Behavioral change is a strategic approach: how do we change our behavior on a global level? How do…