LATEST BLOG POSTS

I was reading The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future, by Gretchen Bakke, “One of Bill Gates’s Favorite Books of 2016,” where I learned that refrigerators didn’t follow the grid. I had it backward. Fridges didn’t come about for health or to improve food quality. Fridges became popular to drive more energy consumption, and therefore pollution and depletion. It turns out Bakke gave a talk on[…] Keep reading →

Once, all garbage biodegraded. All garbage would turn into food for something within time scales relevant to human lives. Not today. Plastic can take centuries to degrade, during which time they kill wildlife and poison us. Plenty of residue from our culture poisons more, like pesticides and home cleaning products. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors could just drop the parts of the fruit, vegetable, or animal they didn’t want to eat on[…] Keep reading →

Longtime readers know Rob, Andrew, and I appear on each other’s podcasts and programs. They strongly support Trump. I strongly support sustainability leadership. Many people who support Trump or act on the environment consider the other group the enemy. We are friends. I recently appeared on their podcast-now-videocast: When Sustainability Meets MAHA And Making English The Official Language. It was evening and I disconnected my apartment from the electric grid[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Platoon, directed by Oliver Stone: Let me give you context to what prompted me to watch this movie after so long. I don’t remember when I first watched it. Before learning about sustainability, I thought technology would solve our problems. Mainly I thought fusion would, but along the way nuclear, solar, and wind seemed promising. As I learned more about each, I learned that they didn’t[…] Keep reading →

I wrote in my post a couple days ago, Racist jokes, polluting, depleting, and integrity, I lamented how environmentalists missed the greatest point of acting by your values: credibility and integrity. Sadly, sustainability lacks both. I wrote: Does anyone believe that not polluting or depleting once or twice will end our environmental problems? Of course not. The point of not living sustainably is not to solve all our environmental problems.[…] Keep reading →

I hope I don’t start a habit of posting references to articles, but it’s hard not to share ones that say “In the next 30 years, we’ll make four times more plastic waste than we ever have.” That headline came from science.org, which referred to a journal article, Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made, from Science Advances. We’re drowning in plastic. It doesn’t break down on human[…] Keep reading →

What is integrity? Does it matter to you? Wikipedia describes it as Integrity is the quality of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or earnestness of one’s actions. Integrity can stand in opposition to hypocrisy. It regards internal consistency as a virtue, and suggests that people who hold apparently[…] Keep reading →

I was listening to a podcast ostensibly about sustainability and nature. The particular podcast isn’t important because this pattern happens in many places. One of the guests was talking about tourism that seemed no different from any other tourism, but she called it eco-tourism. The only difference I could tell from any other tourism was the name. People were destroying cultures and ecosystems as much as any other tourism. The[…] Keep reading →

Are you reaching your potential, professionally or personally? Have you wondered what would happen if you got coaching? Giora did. A friend of his who was a client of mine recommended he get coaching from me. We worked together for several years. People who think my podcast is primarily about sustainability may think it’s off-topic, but those who know I focus primarily on leadership will see this conversation is exactly[…] Keep reading →