Regular listeners know I’ve been asking people what the environment means to them as part of the Spodek Method. Many people respond with touching answers that I would call something close to life-altering. Maybe more like life-guiding, life-enhancing, or giving meaning and purpose. I’ve heard of increasing research into psychedelics recently. Reading reports of people who took psylocibin in clinical settings with guides for the experience, I was struck by[…] Keep reading →

Wolfgang Lutz is one of the world’s experts in projecting global population levels and demography. I contacted him to help understand the differences between projections based on demography like his and the United Nations’ versus systemic ones like in Limits to Growth. He gave a comprehensive overview of who projects and how, at least as much as can be covered in under an hour. Some highlights: Who projects based on[…] Keep reading →

I was very curious to learn more about the Kogi and Alan’s interactions with them. Alan is deeply involved with their joint project to learn to restore nature as they have shown they can. “Restoring nature” doesn’t do justice for what they are doing. They are also sharing different ways of seeing and interacting with the world, which, as I understand from Alan, is not how they see the world.[…] Keep reading →

The International Society of Sustainability Professionals invited me to speak to their New York Chapter. Here is that recording. We “whooshed” out the participants’ words, so it’s just my speaking. Their mission is “ISSP empowers professionals to advance sustainability in organizations and communities around the globe.” I described my work, my path to get here, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, how you can’t lead others to live by values you live[…] Keep reading →

Roz could have stopped at rowing solo across oceans to world records, awards, and national honors. She didn’t. She had done those things for a purpose: helping make our world more livable, less polluted. They gave her greater skills to appreciate her purpose and implement it better. As with most people, the challenges looked insurmountable to her. But unlike most people, she had once made a list to row across[…] Keep reading →

One of the most famous supermodels, Paulina needs no introduction. She’s here because mutual friends introduced us and her recent book, No Filter, that tells a different story than you’d expect of the once-most-highly-paid model. As she describes in our conversation, she spent formative years behind the iron curtain, ingraining in her how to thrive with less, not more, which she caries with her until today. She also wasn’t always[…] Keep reading →

I bring leaders from all areas to sustainability. The challenges to changing culture to sustainability aren’t in technology, science, journalism, activism, or politics, though all those fields are relevant. Their practitioners generally aren’t skilled in what changes culture: the social and emotional skills of leadership. Most people don’t know that living more sustainably improves their lives, not the reversion to the Stone Age or Mad Max apocalypse our culture teaches[…] Keep reading →

Oliver’s book Four Thousand Weeks deserves the incredible praise it gets. I’ve recommended it to many friends and can’t for the life of me put into words how he refines and changes how I look at time, priorities, how to choose what to do, why, and how to feel about it. The best I can come up with is that instead of worrying what I’m missing or craving doing what[…] Keep reading →

My passion for the possibility of doing for pollution what abolitionists did to slavery: transform it from something normal, as if part of nature, to forever seen as wrong. The more I learn the difficulty of conceiving of the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery, let alone passing it, the more possible a parallel amendment on pollution seems. Jim and I continue our conversation on abolition’s history, mainly from the vantage point[…] Keep reading →