Category Archives: Podcast

744: Stephen Broyles, part 1: What Is Social Work and How Does It Relate to Leadership and Action?

on January 24, 2024 in Podcast

Regular listeners and readers of my blog will know my sustainability leadership workshops and one of the participants of the first, Evelyn (she’s in the video on that link). After being the teaching assistant for a couple cohorts, she is leading this winter’s session. Often when I talked to her about leadership, she would comment, “We do that in social work too, but we call it” . . . and[…] Keep reading →

743: Benjamin Hett: The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

on January 22, 2024 in Podcast

Regular listeners know how I look for role models in similar situations to ours regarding the environment. We know our polluting and depleting are bringing us toward collapse, but instead of acting, we procrastinate on acting. We rationalize and justify our inaction. We abdicate our responsibility, capitulate, and resign to complacency and complicity. Humans behaved this way in the face of slavery, especially during and after the Atlantic Slave Trade,[…] Keep reading →

742: John Brooke, part 2: American slavery transformed to today’s industry and anti-stewardship of our environment

on January 20, 2024 in Podcast

If John’s specialty in deep history weren’t valuable enough to understand how our culture’s dominance hierarchy formed from the material conditions of the dawn of agriculture, he also specializes in American history, including slavery from before the Revolutionary War through to the Thirteenth Amendment. We start with his sharing what drew him to the two fields. Then I introduce what led me to want to learn from him. I share[…] Keep reading →

741: Tony Hansen, part 2: Volunteering hard labor creating meaning and generosity

on January 9, 2024 in Podcast

You’ll hear Tony’s story of rolling up his sleeves and doing some hard labor. You’ll also hear the labor being just the start of the reward. He shares about the less tangible but not lesser results in community, emotional reward, enthusiasm to do more. Given his leadership role and experience, we talk about the Spodek Method. I took the liberty of pulling some what he said and formatting it. Listen[…] Keep reading →

740: Christopher Ketcham, part 3: Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”

on January 6, 2024 in Podcast

I was reading Harper’s magazine and Christopher’s story was on the cover: Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”! It begins In the summer of 2016, a fifty-seven-year-old Texan named Stephen McRae drove east out of the rainforests of Oregon and into the vast expanse of the Great Basin. His plan was to commit sabotage. First up was a coal-burning power plant near Carlin, Nevada, a 242-megawatt facility owned by the[…] Keep reading →

739: John Brooke, part 1: Deep history and how our culture formed

on December 23, 2023 in Podcast

Greenhouse gas and ocean plastic levels don’t rise on their own. The cause of our environmental problems is our behavior, which results from our culture. The world’s dominant culture pollutes, depletes, addicts, and imperially takes over other cultures. Yet each person wants clean air, land, water, and food. How did humans create a culture that manifests the opposite of many of their values? Why do most people defend that culture,[…] Keep reading →

738: Jacqueline Bicanic, part 2: Sustainability doesn’t cost time and energy, it gives it

on December 19, 2023 in Podcast

People complain they don’t have time, money, or energy to live more sustainably, I think because marketers see the demand so come up with things to sell people to address the demand. Since neither buyer nor seller understand how nature or systems work, the offerings don’t help sustainability. Meanwhile, high demand and low supply means high prices, so people associate costing time, money, and energy with sustainability when they should[…] Keep reading →

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