Leadership

Hear me on America Out Loud’s After Dark: How Pollution Destroys Life, Liberty, and Property

Audio / Freedom / Leadership / Models / Nature

Hear me on America Out Loud’s After Dark: How Pollution Destroys Life, Liberty, and Property

On my seventh appearance on After Dark with Rob and Andrew, I share how I've been diving into conservative history, thought, philosophy, and community. Both hosts have been on my podcast and I meet Rob periodically in person in Manhattan, where he lives too. About the hosts: Rob is the founder of The Multicultural Conservative Foundation, whose mission is to promote the political diversity of conservatism through social media. He has been interviewed by many independent news organizations regarding his views on black conservatism. In addition to writing and blogging, he is the author of a self-help book, “That Job Just Isn’t Into You: Starting Over When It’s Over.” Andrew is a social media pundit, writer, and podcast host. He believes in traditional Conservative values,…

April 3, 2024

A billion-dollar idea: Moonshot solar: modest solar for a larger market

Entrepreneurship / Leadership / Nature / Tips

A billion-dollar idea: Moonshot solar: modest solar for a larger market

A lot of solar companies are competing for the home solar market. I once read an estimate of fifty million homes for $30,000 per home on average, meaning a $1.5 trillion market. Since most people can't spare $30,000 for an investment that could take decades to pay itself back, if ever, these companies are marketing higher end homeowners. They are positioning themselves like BMW or Lexus. My only source of electrical power at home is solar too, but I spent less than $1,000 on my equipment. I'm positioned more like a bicycle. My goal is to help people need less---that is, to be less needy---and be more resilient and healthy. Since solar requires equipment that isn't clean, green, or renewable, I'm not promoting more solar…

April 2, 2024

Why I suspect non-European cultures influenced the U.S. Constitution more than most people think

Why I suspect non-European cultures influenced the U.S. Constitution more than most people think

Writing my book has led me to learn more about how the U.S. Constitution was written. I started learning about influence from other cultures than European. For example, this peer-reviewed article, American Indian Constitutions and Their Influence on the United States Constitution. It said “Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Wilson, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and other Founding Fathers were acquainted with Indian peoples, tribal governments, and indigenous theories of governance." Indigenous wisdom contributed to the Enlightenment and American democracy. It continued, “Indian nations and peoples impacted the formation of the current U.S. government, the Constitution that created it, and several specific provisions in that document ... The hundreds of years of interactions between native nations and English and American colonies, states, leaders, and…

April 1, 2024

See my solar panels from space

Leadership / Nature / Visualization

See my solar panels from space

I was talking to a solar expert on installing solar panels to my roof, now that my coop board has approved my looking into a pilot program. He brought up a satellite view of my roof. Check out this image from satellite view: If you didn't know what to look for, you wouldn't see it, but you can see my solar panels! All those black squares are tiling to walk on, but the thing I circled below is my solar panels. In other words, you can see my solar panels from space when they're there. Most of the time, they aren't there, because they're portable. Here's a recent view of them near that spot for a closer view. In the image below, I have them…

March 28, 2024

More fun overcoming solar challenges, this time in Washington Square Park

Leadership / Nature

More fun overcoming solar challenges, this time in Washington Square Park

Yesterday was sunny. I went to Washington Square Park. I had been scheduled to meet a friend in the park before the problem with my roof arose so combined activities. We spoke about an hour. I think he enjoyed seeing everyone approach and hearing their questions and my answers. Right off the bat several people asked me about it. Some were interested, some just curious, some weird. So far only men. [EDIT: minutes after typing those words, a day later and on Sixth Avenue, the first woman approached and asked. Did my typing send vibes to the universe to make it happen?] Here's a shot of me in the morning, before many people arrived. By midday it was full. I thought "maybe I should have…

March 25, 2024

Year 9, day 1 not flying

Addiction / Leadership / Nature

Year 9, day 1 not flying

I last flew March 23, 2016. If I calculated right, today begins Year 9 of not flying. I expected that first year to be the worst of my life. Now I see flying as tearing families, communities, and nations apart. Everyone thinks of flying as bringing them to distant family members. What scattered the family in the first place? You didn't bike away from your family. Likewise with feeling nature or business requires traveling flying distance for it. That it pollutes so much and displaces people from their land to take the minerals and fuel underneath has become secondary to it acting more like a drug: meth gives you a jolt of energy, but overall lowers your energy in life. Scenes like the one below…

March 23, 2024

Not giving up, day 2 without roof access. Others can give up; not yet me.

Leadership / Nature

Not giving up, day 2 without roof access. Others can give up; not yet me.

On my second day suddenly without roof access, I went out in the morning to the bench, came back in to go to the bathroom and eat lunch, then changed strategies from before. First, I ran into my building's handyman, who mentioned he knew a few superintendents on the block, so he may be able to put me in touch with people who can give me access to nearby roofs. I suspect something will work out in that directions because of the pattern: on the other side of challenges in living more sustainably is community. It keeps happening that whatever the challenge, solving it keeps involving people who enjoy helping. Tomorrow is forecast for rain all day, so it was safest to go out today.…

March 22, 2024

More solar challenges. Not giving up.

Leadership / Nature

More solar challenges. Not giving up.

My building is doing construction so I don't have roof access. Do I give up? Hell no! That's what everyone else is doing and it's making them miserable. And killing people (and wildlife). I have to figure out something longer term, maybe getting certified to go into a construction site (I've been trained and certified for things like it before, when my first company, Submedia, constructed our displays in subway systems around the world) or working with a neighbor to access their roof. In the meantime, I'm charging down the block and, when the sun allows, in a nearby park. It's not optimal, though I enjoy when neighbors and people passing by ask me about it. They're getting a kick out of it. On the…

March 22, 2024

The Sustainable Speakers Club hosted me. Here’s the video of my talk.

Leadership / Nature / Stories

The Sustainable Speakers Club hosted me. Here’s the video of my talk.

I spoke at the Sustainable Speakers Club, a Toastmaster event in the UK, on how to lead on sustainability and how not to. The theme was Transformational Projects the Motivate. It's tempting to think giving people facts and numbers will motivate them, but it rarely does. Learning their intrinsic motivation and helping them achieve what they already wanted to helps more. I share a story illustrating how action leads to theory more than theory leads to action. In the second half of this video, I take questions from the audience, especially giving a concrete example of someone I led. https://youtu.be/AhKDrWBGI5U

March 18, 2024

Dave Gardner for President of the United States

Leadership / Nature

Dave Gardner for President of the United States

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…

March 6, 2024

NYU’s sustainability deception (work-in-progress post)

Education / Leadership

NYU’s sustainability deception (work-in-progress post)

I teach at NYU and work on sustainability leadership. NYU talks about sustainability and to some extend sincerely tries, but it doesn't come close to its rhetoric. It completely misses on sustainability leadership, as distinct from sustainability. I don't see much integrity in its sustainability. The same follows for higher education in general, as best I can tell. I've been vaguely keeping track of discrepancies I find. I've had this tab open on my browser to keep track of some of it. I don't know when I'll polish up the writing in the post below or finish compiling all the discrepancies I've found, but you might catch some of what I've seen from skimming. I'll keep updating this post to add new discrepancies and refine…

March 2, 2024

Attend Flight Free USA’s workshop with me! (March 13 and 20)

Events / Leadership

Attend Flight Free USA’s workshop with me! (March 13 and 20)

The invitation below says it all, but some background first: Register Here Join this two-session workshop and learn how to inspire people to freely and joyfully move to living more sustainably so they thank you. Read the pledges of the people I influenced and ask: Do they sound like they're depriving themselves or sacrificing? Evelyn Beth Josh M. Eunnye Conrad Emily, which led to the Washington Post quoting her And me Most people expect talking sustainability is a drag, not inspiring. So how do I lead people to love doing what others can't imagine and if they try they think it's impossible. Register Here Register Here

February 22, 2024

Readers’ Pledges to Avoid Flying

Leadership / Nature

Readers’ Pledges to Avoid Flying

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…

February 6, 2024

Tough January: About three weeks with almost no sun. Learning in uncharted territory.

Leadership / Nature / Relationships

Tough January: About three weeks with almost no sun. Learning in uncharted territory.

Check the calendar below. I count three days mostly sunny in the past 23 days. Everything else has been mostly cloudy to full on rain or snow. I'm still going up every day that isn't raining. Many days not getting any power. I missed my first meeting today for not being able to plug in, but it worked out okay, I think for my explaining my situation. It was a first meeting, so I hope I didn't make a bad first impression, but the other person values sustainability, leadership, and sustainability leadership. I keep finding how on the other side of each attempt to live more sustainably I find community. After I realized I missed our appointment, I wrote I appreciate the note [where he…

January 31, 2024

Being Dick Fosbury and Debbie Brill

Fitness / Leadership / Models

Being Dick Fosbury and Debbie Brill

I've described what I'm doing practicing sustainability as being an explorer, the Wright brothers, and Roger Bannister. Each comparison had sense, but I think I found a better one: Being like Richard Fosbury creating the Fosbury Flop. He invented a better way to do the high jump. The videos below show how people did it before him and how he developed a new way. Compared to old ways, it looked backward. Nobody did it that way. He wasn't a great athlete, but he figured out how to do it better. He won Olympic gold. Now everyone does it how he developed. People do what he developed better. He's happy they do. Everyone seems to value sustainability, but I know almost no one who actually tries…

January 23, 2024

More depth on Robert Carter III

Freedom / Leadership / Stories

More depth on Robert Carter III

I've written about Robert Carter III a bunch here. He figures in my book a lot, as someone who could have remained corrupted by slavery, as everyone around him did in Virginia after the American Revolution, but he freed his slaves. Thomas Jefferson didn't, despite his brilliant words on freedom. [EDIT: Here's someone else's post on Robert Carter III: The Forgotten First Emancipator. An excerpt: Robert Carter, then, stands as the personification of the inconvenient truth that emancipation, even on a large scale, was entirely feasible in the United States, at least at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this way, his life serves as an indictment of the civic gods of America—Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee—who did…

January 18, 2024

Charging on the roof in the snow

Charging on the roof in the snow

The temperature was well below freezing (in the low 20s F or -5C), but today was sunny, the next few days will be overcast, and my batteries were low. So up to the roof I went. In fact, today works out to be a rare three-climb day, meaning close to fifty flights for my over-fifty-year-old bones, and a torn meniscus. But someone has to show it's possible so we can make living without an electric grid easier. If people did it for 250,000 years, why should we let technology make us less resilient and more dependent? By the way, the stone on the right is holding the panels down because it was windy, which is also why I lay the panels flat instead of angled…

January 17, 2024

Nelson Mandela’s daughter and granddaughter don’t get sustainability

Audio / Leadership / Nature

Nelson Mandela’s daughter and granddaughter don’t get sustainability

I was invited to an event at NYU with the daughter and granddaughter of Nelson Mandela, Dr. Makaziwe Mandela and Tukwini Mandela. You don't have to read or listen to much of my work to know his importance to me so I was interested to learn from family members who knew him privately and work for freedom on their own. It turned out the last question came to me. I thought I was giving them a question that would both give me a useful answer and be straightforward for them to answer. They had spoken about the environment and invited questions on it. I asked, roughly: in many areas people acknowledge individuals can't change everything, but they act. In sustainability, they say "what I do…

December 28, 2023

Thoughts watching Bonhoeffer (2003)

Leadership / Models

Thoughts watching Bonhoeffer (2003)

I wrote the notes below while watching the documentary Bonhoeffer (2003) directed by Martin Doblmaier. I want to learn from history to apply what people did to now. I don't want to sleepwalk into disaster that everyone can see happening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9vqxljH6Ok The tens of millions of people dying today annually from pollution and being displaced from their homes to get the fuel and minerals under their land are being killed not by my actions and yours, but by those of generations of people before us accumulating all that time. Two big difference between them and us: we are polluting more and we are aware of the effects. Our actions will kill and cause more people to suffer than past people and we're doing it with…

December 13, 2023

We can’t turn off our emotional systems and we all share the same emotions.

Awareness / Education / Leadership

We can’t turn off our emotional systems and we all share the same emotions.

I've held off on writing this post since I think some people may misunderstand me. My goal is to help raise self-awareness. NYU has posted posters like this one all over campus. I think they are mostly responding to the Israel-Hamas situation, though could apply to others. I grew up not learning much about emotions or making myself aware of them. Leadership classes in business school moved me to increase my self-awareness, by which I mean consciously being aware of what emotions I feel in a given moment and how the human emotional system works. I've found improving this self-awareness among my life's greatest improvements. I consider it a big part of maturation. As best I can tell, our emotional systems all share the same…

December 6, 2023

See the Daily Show’s segment on me: “Is it Possible to Live “Off the Grid” in Manhattan?”

Creativity / Habits / Leadership / Nature / Volunteering

See the Daily Show’s segment on me: “Is it Possible to Live “Off the Grid” in Manhattan?”

Here's just the segment with me: and the whole episode (I appear about 11:10). https://youtu.be/MQrpXEF3pZE I liked it more than the New Yorker piece on me, though that's not saying much. I laughed out loud several times, partly since I remember the recording. For example, after she put the Skittles in the kombucha, we saw their dye run off and they turned an unnatural ghostly white. I wanted to share about doof, since the concept is so important, but how much can you fit in a few minutes. I was glad to see they showed me volunteering, delivering food to the community center, and picking up litter. You couldn't tell the volunteering exactly, but it added depth. They linked to a couple of my four…

November 29, 2023

The Daily Show showed my living disconnected from the electric grid in Manhattan.

Freedom / Leadership / Nature

The Daily Show showed my living disconnected from the electric grid in Manhattan.

The Daily Show aired their segment on my disconnecting from the electric grid in Manhattan! I just learned, so haven't seen it myself yet so can't comment on it. I hope it was funny, informative, and inspiring. EDIT: I posted the video and some comments on it: See the Daily Show's segment on me: "Is it Possible to Live "Off the Grid" in Manhattan?". The point isn't my personal impact. The point is leading others. You can't lead others to live by values you live the opposite of. Systemic change begins with personal change. I'm happy to answer questions, but the big answer is that over 4 billion people live in cities. If none of them think they can disconnect from the grid, they won't…

November 28, 2023

I hear young people seethe with rage at old people, especially boomers

I hear young people seethe with rage at old people, especially boomers

I hear young people furious at Boomers in particular, but old people in general, for causing a problem, then abdicating responsibility on acting, instead saying "I am encouraged by young people acting." What jerks! Act yourself! Stop capitulating and continuing your insouciant damaging. You have more assets, connections, resources, and what it takes to accomplish things. Not acting personally but teaching young people just teaches them not to act and abdicate their responsibility too. You know they don't just listen to your words, especially when cowardly and empty. They watch what you do, which they learn more from. Boomers and old people can teach young people best by acting themselves. I like boomers' music, but not their cowardice.

November 14, 2023

When people mean when they say “you have to make sustainability easy for people.”

When people mean when they say “you have to make sustainability easy for people.”

Talk about acting more sustainably and people act like it's hard. When they say "you have to make it easy for people," they mean you have to make it easy for them. They're saying that they won't change, but hiding their intent, acting like they're just doing what everyone else does. And if all you do is make it easier, it will never be easy enough for them. If you're looking for extrinsic motivation, you'll never overcome inertia in the form of comfort and convenience. You'll never feel inspired or fulfilled either. Just empty. If you're polluting, depleting, and neglecting stewardship, it's worth challenging yourself. You'll be glad you did afterward.

November 9, 2023

Inspirational environmental F-bomb

Leadership / Nature

Inspirational environmental F-bomb

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…

November 2, 2023

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