Lies We Tell Ourselves When We Pollute We all want clean air, water, and land, yet pollute more than necessary. Leaders act with responsibility, accountability, and self-awareness. Our leadership vacuum on the environment I hook my audiences easily in my workshops on my podcast, Leadership and the Environment, by saying, Raise your hand if you like pollution, rising sea levels, and more plastic in the ocean than fish. No hands ever go up. I continue, Now raise your[…] Keep reading →

Elizabeth Kolbert presents a practical adult perspective on the environment. This is what’s happening without fanfare, without sensationalism, something that adults can act on. I highly recommend her book The Sixth Extinction for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and I highly recommend reading her many articles in The New Yorker in which she treats these environmental issues, often adding a human element, a historical perspective, but not telling you[…] Keep reading →

Reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s haunting The Sixth Extinction was difficult but enlightening. She presents what most people fear facing but is happening around us. We are causing the loss of almost unbelievably large parts of the natural world on which we rely without realizing it—sleepwalking, I would say. Her writing in the New Yorker covers more issues most people are too uncomfortable to learn about: overpopulation, the limits of technology to[…] Keep reading →

The more I cook for myself, the more I appreciate nuance, subtlety, complexity, variety, and so forth in food, as well as the expression of the person who prepared the food. Also, the more I see others as stuck in the yummy phase, which describes the United States population increasingly in number and increasingly in areas beyond food. What’s the yummy phase? The urban dictionary defines it effectively: The period[…] Keep reading →

Dave Gardner lived a successful mainstream corporate life, but then started looking at the world around him and seeing problems mainstream society is missing. After scratching the surface, you can’t help but find our drive for growth—usually enumerated through GDP and population—at the root. Dave created a documentary, Growthbusters, questioning growth. He’s asking the critical questions of our time that nearly everyone is ignoring, leading them to miss important issues[…] Keep reading →

My Inc. post today, “The Business Skills That Will Solve Global Warming,” begins The Business Skills That Will Solve Global Warming Science and education got us far, but won’t get us to the finish line. We need to understand what motivates people and use it to change our behavior. As New York City prepares for another 74 degree November day this week, it’s getting harder to remember that warm weather isn’t climate. Sadly,[…] Keep reading →

Want to make a difference? Many environmental organizations tell others what to do—trying to pass laws, spreading facts, promoting new technologies, and such. I support them, but I think they’re missing what’s most important today in the United States. People know what they should do and what they value. They aren’t acting consistently with it. They want to pollute less, create less garbage, reduce their emissions, but they aren’t. New[…] Keep reading →