Leadership

Dave Gardner and I have appeared on each other's podcasts and have become friends. He is one of the few people who understands our environmental problems and works on it. I learned about him from his documentary Growthbusters (my comment is the first on its YouTube release), which showed him running for office in Colorado on a platform to shrink the local population and economy. He didn't win the election, but showed strong. He's decided that no politician will acknowledge or even see our environmental problems so he's running for President. He doesn't pretend to have a strong chance, though people ask him what if he takes enough votes from Biden as a third-party candidate to change the outcome. I trained with him on early…

I pledged on Flight Free USA to avoid flying. Then last year, I inspired someone to avoid flying, which led to the Washington Post quoting her. At December's year-end meeting of organizers, I pledged to inspire five people in 2024 to pledge. I inspired five to pledge in January alone! A few cited my influence. All took my sustainability leadership workshop. I recommend it! Check out their pledges. Here's Evelyn's If you had asked me a little over a year ago the likelihood of me giving up intended flying for the rest of my life, I would have assured you the likelihood was slim to none, probably closer to none. I was a world traveler and proud of it. I had explored other cultures, lived…

You might remember from my conversation with podcast guest Tony Hiss a passage from his book, Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth, that inspired me for the bold story it told. I'm finally copying that passage here. I'll put in bold the bold part that psyched me up, to ask for what we fucking need: Back in 1997, [Steve] Kallick was with the Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia, beneficiary of much of the fortune of Joseph N. Pew, founder of the Sun Oil Company, when he and his colleagues began thinking about the Boreal. They were also working on the roadless rule, in what Kallick's boss at the time, Joshua Reichert, who has a Princeton doctorate in social anthropology, called…

Flying a private jet to a climate conference seems the height of being out of touch and acting counterproductively. If you feel that way, have you considered how much of your expenditures pays for extracting, polluting, and depleting? What fraction of your spending goes to filling your gas tank, flying, air conditioning, heating, industrial agriculture, buying things that require pollution to make like packaged food, takeout, houses, cars, nearly all meat, computer chips, and so on? Since plastic, flying, air conditioning, cars, and artificial fertilizers didn't exist more than about a century ago, human life requires none of those things. Since people in cultures without those things see those things and choose to resist imperialism, colonialism, and assimilation, humans can thrive without them. Yet most…

Yet again I heard someone saying individual action won't solve our environmental problems so we shouldn't even look at it, and this was a major public speaker. He repeated the idiocy that, as he saw it, BP creating the personal carbon footprint was a coup for distracting us from them. I'd love to see all these people who oppose individual action in 1850, saying, "you can't end slavery so don't free any slaves." No, I'm not equating pollution and slavery. I'm pointing out that living by your values is always a good choice, even if you can't fix all the world's problems yourself. Polluting kills people. If you do something that kills people and you don't want to kill people, you have to stop doing…

People respond to my disconnecting from the grid and all saying, "it's great that you're leading by example." I'm not leading by example. I don't believe leading by example works in sustainability. People have filled their hearts and minds with rationalizations and justifications why what they are doing is good, right, and normal for them. Seeing someone acting differently doesn't change their view. On the contrary, it often leads them to strengthen their beliefs about themselves. They respond, "I can see why you can avoid flying [or whatever more sustainable behavior], but I can't because I have to work for a living [or whatever rationalization and justification]." I lead through the Spodek Method: the technique to create a mindset shift followed by continual improvement. I…

I recently asked Is the greatest impediment to someone living more sustainably their resources, especially time and money? and formed the hypothesis that people with money and time are both the biggest cause of our environmental problems and resist changing the most. I'm just developing the approach and understanding, but predict and expect it will become a major point in where to focus our efforts. Going to the Amazon or coral reefs distracts us from who decides to extract, who pays for what polluting and depleting provide, who benefits from it, and whose behavior if changed would help the most. It seems obvious to me that rich people decide, pay, benefit, and could help most by changing. It's still a hypothesis, so I welcome challenges.…

This realization hit me this morning. It will seem counterintuitive, especially to people living in overdeveloped countries. The majority of people in them see people suffering from environmental destruction and want to focus on helping them. We should help them, but we should realize they aren't causing the problems. The more resources, especially time and money, someone has, the harder it is for them to stop polluting and depleting. Almost everyone who reads these words doesn't remotely live sustainably but cares and wants to do what they feel is the right thing. They see corporations and governments polluting more and think they're doing what they can. On the contrary, they are as much the problem as anyone and their resistance to see their contribution, how…

Evelyn took my Spodek Method workshop in the spring, then was the TA for the two summer sessions and will lead the fall workshop. Everything else you need to know about her background is in the video below. She's transforming herself and diving into sustainability, loving the challenges and changes. We approach it similarly but differently. Most of all, we enjoy each other's company and riffing off each other. We decided to start recording a livecast series and weren't going to wait for ourselves to figure out the software to start, so recorded our first episode. We'll stream soon. I don't think you'll hear anyone else approaching sustainability and sustainability leadership as we do. I think you'll enjoy it and future episodes. I wouldn't be…