237: Leadership versus Management, Systems and the Environment
The notes I wrote and read from for this episode:
Leadership means changing beliefs and goals. If you’re doing anything else, you’re following and perpetuating the system that created the results. Greater efficiency, recycling, reusing, etc are following, just accelerating, unless you change the goals. Are you clearly and overwhelmingly opposing growth and externalizing costs? If not, you’re polluting.
My most important goal is not efficiency. It will come if I achieve my goal. I talk a lot about how growth and externalizing costs produce pollution. My goal is not to reduce population and take responsibility. They will come if I achieve my goal. My goal is to change the beliefs that cause the behavior that produces the results. If you lower the population but keep the beliefs, we’ll get back here. If we change our beliefs, the change will come. Only if we change our beliefs will change come. “Be fruitful and multiply” and “you have dominion” and “growth is good” and “a rising tide lifts all boats” . . . these are the causes of environmental problems. And one more, beneath them all: “acting in harmony with nature is a burden or chore.” Change that one belief to “It’s a joy, delicious, community, and connection” will change everything in time. Absent that change, any other change will revert, unless it changes that in some way.
Nobody is doing it so I am. Whether I am succeeding or not I don’t know, but I consider it the most important goal, now that the science is clear.