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This Sustainable Life — Science & Medicine
This Sustainable Life

Do you care about the environment but feel “I want to act, but if no one else does, it won’t make a difference,” and “But if you don’t solve everything, it isn’t worth doing anything”?

We are the antidote! You’re not alone. Hearing role models overcome the same feelings to enjoy acting on their values creates meaning, purpose, community, and emotional reward.

Want to improve as a leader? Bestselling author, 3-time TEDx speaker, leadership speaker, coach, and professor Joshua Spodek, PhD, MBA, brings joy and inspiration to acting on the environment. You’ll learn to lead without relying on authority.

We bring you leaders from many areas — business, politics, sports, arts, education, and more — to share their expertise for you to learn from. We then ask them to share and act on their environmental values. That’s leadership without authority — so they act for their reasons, not out of guilt, blame, doom, gloom, or someone telling them what to do.

Guests include:

Dan Pink, 40+ million TED Talk views

Marshall Goldsmith, #1-ranked leadership guru and author

Frances Hesselbein, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, former CEO of the Girl Scouts

Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager

Vincent Stanley, Director of Patagonia

Dorie Clark, bestselling author

Bryan Braman, Super Bowl champion, Philadelphia Eagle

John Lee Dumas, top entrepreneurial podcaster

Alisa Cohn, top 100 speaker and coach

David Biello, Science curator for TED

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Latest Episodes:

740: Christopher Ketcham, part 3: Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist” Jan 06, 2024

Show notes

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 Newmont Corporation that existed to service two nearby gold mines, also owned by Newmont.

McRae hated coal-burning power plants with a passion, but even more he hated gold mines. Gold represented most everything frivolous, wanton, and destructive. Love of gold was for McRae a form of civilizational degeneracy, because of the pollution associated with it, the catastrophic disruption of soil, the poisoning of water and air, and because it set people against one another.

Gold mines needed to die, McRae told me years later, around a campfire in the wilderness, when he felt that he could finally share his story. “And the power plant too. I wanted it all to go down. But it was only that summer I got up the balls to finally do it.”

We talked about his doing the story, speaking with McRae, developing a relationship with him that involved his girlfriend and other people he knew. What's it like to hear your voice in an FBI file? Also, the media's and public's taste for such stories.

Whatever your views on how to respond, if you understand or support people like McRae or consider them counterproductive (he knows he's a criminal), you'll rarely find such inside relationships with such remarkable people elsewhere.

Chris's cover story in Harper's: The Machine Breaker Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist" (at archive.org)

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739: John Brooke, part 1: Deep history and how our culture formed Dec 24, 2023

Show notes

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, resist changing it, and promote it, even when faced with evidence that it's sickening them, isolating them, killing them, and risking killing billions more within our lifetimes? If we can't answer these questions, we'll have a hard time changing our culture and therefore the disasters we're sleepwalking into.

I've been trying to answer them. Learning about our ancestral past for 250,000 years before agriculture, why and how agriculture started, and what changes agriculture prompted tells us. John Brooke's book, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, starts to answer these questions. It's a book of deep history and environmental history---that is, going back hundreds of thousands and even millions of years, treating how environmental changes influenced human behavior.

John and I talk about the field of deep history, how we learn the incredible detailed and fascinating histories of how environments changed and people reacted over many time scales. I would find the scholarship fascinating on its own, and all the more because it's relevant to our environmental situation today. Changes that started twelve thousand years ago started patterns that persist today. In fact, some of them are the dominant factors in how we interact with the environment, in particular how dominance hierarchies formed, what patterns they set into our culture, and how they persist.

I hadn't heard of this field before his book. If you hadn't either, you'll love it.

(He also studies American history including slavery and abolitionism, another relevant part of history. We'll cover them in our next conversation.)

John's home page at Ohio State
His book, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey
A shorter article John wrote on deep history: Climate, Human Population and Human Survival

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738: Jacqueline Bicanic, part 2: Sustainability doesn't cost time and energy, it gives it Dec 20, 2023

Show notes

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 associate it with their gullibility and ignorance.

Jacquie didn't complain about costs, but she did say she was too busy. She was even busy working on sustainability. I suggested in our first conversation that cause and effect might be the opposite of what she expected. That is, I suggested that her busy-ness wasn't keeping her from nature but that her disconnect from nature was distorting her values to where she did many low-value things that kept her from what she valued more.

I based this prediction on seeing the pattern many times. I think of it mostly in people insisting they buy takeout food (really mostly doof) and coffee to save time because they're so busy, but the ones who switch to sit down for meals and coffee find it gives them more time, not less.

In our second conversation, you'll hear many things, including this pattern play out in Jacquie acting on her intrinsic values and seeing where it leads.

I recommend connecting more with nature to help restore your values and priorities, which will create more time and energy in your life, allowing you to save money too.

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737: Michael Gerrard: Considering a stewardship amendment with a foremost environmental lawyer Dec 15, 2023

Show notes

I follow podcast guest Maya Van Rossum on her work on constitutional amendments protecting a clean environment. You may have heard of the legal victory in Montana, Held versus Montana, earlier this year (yay!), Montana being one of the three states with such an amendment.

Maya appeared on a panel, Securing Climate Justice Through Green Amendments: The Held v. Montana Victory, that discussed that case. The more I learn, the more I realize that however impossible it may sound, we can't solve our environmental problems for good without amending the Constitution.

On the panel with her was Michael Gerrard, professor at Columbia Law School, one of America's foremost environmental laws. In today's conversation we talk about the possibilities about a constitutional amendment banning unsustainability. Mark my words: we will make one happen. If you're like I was, you'll think of how impossible it sounds for a dozen reasons. How could it pass? How could it be enforced? How would we define sustainable? Would we return to the Stone Age. But the more you think about it, the more essential it will sound, which may take months of consideration, or did with me.

Listen to learn more on constitutional law and the environment from a top practitioner and teacher.

The panel Michael appeared on with Maya: Securing Climate Justice Through Green Amendments: The Held v. Montana Victory

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736: Mattan Griffel, part 1: Online opioid addiction treatment that (actually) works Dec 06, 2023

Show notes

Regular listeners know I focus on understanding addiction. I see people in my neighborhood and in headlines nearly daily addicted to heroin, fentanyl, meth, and crack. Since our culture promotes craving and dependence as what many would call "good business," I see people on those drugs not as outliers or anomalies from culture. I see them as slightly more acute versions of mainstream America.

I see addiction to doof as serious as addiction to illegal drugs. Increasingly medical professionals are recognizing what they would call ultra-processed foods as addictive. Plenty of other polluting things---fast fashion, cell phones, etc---are addictions our culture promotes. The product sells itself! What could be better for the GDP.

Mattan cofounded Ophelia, which treats opiate addiction online. He shares the deaths he and people his community experienced that prompted him to start the company. You can see in his bio his entrepreneurial background.

He brings a unique, healing, effective, passionate voice to addiction. You can tell the time and effort he's put into understanding the people he helps.

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735: Casey Mahoney, part 1: A Jazz Musician Lowering His Impact to 3 Tons CO2/Year in L.A. Dec 03, 2023

Show notes

Casey is a longtime friend. One day a few months ago he mentioned in a call he was choosing to lower his carbon footprint to a few tons of CO2 per year. I hadn't been trying to lead or persuade him, so I started asking him why, what prompted him, was it hard in Los Angeles where people drive everywhere and some people say they need air conditioning, and so on.

Knowing me and my actions prompted him, but there was more to it. He faced challenges from his family and profession, but found parts easy too. He started biking to jazz gigs by electric bike. What jazz musician bikes to perform?!? . . . with his equipment in a bike trailer?!?

I had to bring him here. If a jazz musician in Los Angeles can bike to work and enjoy it, a lot more people can than admit it. I think of jazz musicians as where cool originated. I see Casey raising sustainability's coolness for everyone.

Casey's home page (he's done more than play jazz)

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734: Alon Tal, part 1: Israel, Hamas, and overpopulation from a former Knesset member Nov 29, 2023

Show notes

Last month I read Hamas-Israel story from an angle few will touch, but is critical: overpopulation, which I wrote about in my post Overpopulation in Israel and Gaza. The population in Israel and Palestine have both more than quintupled since 1950. There are plenty of sources of problems there, but not many places can handle that kind of growth, especially when mostly desert.

The article led me to read Alon's book The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel. You can't understand the situation there without including population---including human violence and environmental degradation.

Alon isn't only a professor. He also served in the Knesset, Israel's parliament. He's one of the few politicians to talk about overpopulation. In Israel it's impossible to miss, though many people still want to keep growing it.

In our conversation, we talk about population, participating in politics, the meaning of his book title The Land Is Full, and Hamas.

Alon's page at Tel Aviv University

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733: Jacqueline Bicanic, part 1: Listener as Guest: Australian University Student, Very Active in Sustainability Nov 25, 2023

Show notes

Jacquie emailed me that this podcast is inspiring her. She wrote that she'd "always had a spark of interest in sustainability, but I mostly followed the herd mentality and went about my life not really making a conscious effort & just thinking about ways I could reduce my impacts. In the last couple of years, it’s like jet fuel has been added to that spark and it’s changed the trajectory of my career aspirations, and had a significant impact on my life as a whole. . . It’s comforting to know that there are people all around the world who feel similarly to me, and it’s been inspiring to hear other peoples’ stories. I find this especially helpful on the days where I feel helpless/hopeless or even on low energy days."

She asked me for advice, we got to emailing, and I invited her to be a guest, following the lines of other impassioned listeners who contacted me. You wouldn't believe it from her sounding natural and confident in our conversation, but she hadn't been on a podcast before.

In our emails, she talked about how busy she was, which I hear from everyone, especially businesspeople, who say: "I'd love to work on sustainability. It's very important to me. I just have to do this one thing first, then I'll get to it." If you've felt that way, you may learn a lot from Jacquie and our experience doing the Spodek Method.

Working on a podcast may sound like me talking to guests a lot. There's a lot of solo work, so I can't help but quote her from her first email again, since I appreciate her validating all that solo work: "Again, I’m a hug fan of the show and yourself. You’re an inspiration and a wonderful reminder that individuals don’t have to fix the worlds problems overnight by themselves."

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732: Siddharth Kara, part 1: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives Nov 21, 2023

Show notes

Living unsustainably means you need resources beyond your immediate environment. It requires you take from others. When done on a cultural level, it's known as imperialism. When we take their land too, it's colonialism. When we take their labor, it's slavery.

All of these things are happening in the Congo. If you think solar and wind are sustainable or avoid human suffering, read Siddharth's book Cobalt Red. If you listened to my last conversation with Adam Hochschild on his book King Leopold's Ghost, you know about the west's cruelty in the Congo. It hasn't ended. Adam put me in touch with Siddharth.

The book will change your views on what we call clean, green, and renewable. Siddharth doesn't outright say it, but it seems every rechargeable battery, therefore every phone, electric vehicle, laptop, and so on should be labelled: "Produced with slave labor."

Cobalt Red
Reviews in the New York Times and L.A. Times

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731: Debate and Understanding on Population Projections with Wolfgang Lutz and Chris Bystroff Nov 18, 2023

Show notes

I hosted two professionals who model population growth with different views, some complementary, some conflicting: Wolfgang Lutz and Chris Bystroff. I learned from both and recommend listening to their episodes first. I've also recorded episodes with many guests and solo episodes on population:

I invited Wolfgang and Chris to talk about their different views and see if they could learn from each other and we could learn from them. That's this episode. I clarified I wasn't looking for Crossfire-like talking past each other but seeing what each or the other is missing and mutual learning. I think you'll enjoy the conversation. My only regret is that we couldn't have talked longer because we could have covered more.

Past guests who spoke on population

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