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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:

440: Andrés Reséndez: The Other Slavery Feb 20, 2021

Show notes

About six months ago the parallels started forming for me between our global economic system today that creates great suffering on the scale of hundreds of millions of people with nightmarish cruelty, but also people benefiting from it looking the other way or saying "what I do doesn't matter" or "the youth will solve it". . . And the systems of slavery.

Also looking for role models who changed systems of that scale.

My historical knowledge of abolition and slavery was limited. You've heard guests Adam Hochschild, Manisha Sinha, Eric Metaxas, and others sharing historical background on the systems of slavery and abolition, as well as individual abolitionists. I believe we can learn from them and honor them by learning from them. Our situation is different, but on the scale of billions and we are alive to act.

Today's guest, Andrés Reséndez, wrote The Other Slavery, a book on the enslavement of Native Americans, mostly by the Spanish. I knew little about it and what I did know was off. Our conversation covers the different character of the Spanish enslaving Native Americans to mine gold and silver, leading to global trade and a different character.

Motivating me was to consider how future generations would look at us. Listeners may recall from, say, my conversation with Rod Schoonover, the scientist in the US State Department who described the suffering facing climate refugees in Central America. Once they cross borders, they face war atrocities. Then there is Syria and more. We can expect those numbers to increase by some estimation into the billions of climate refugees, as one of many places our system generates cruelty for our way of life, which is totally optional. We don't have to extract, exploit, and so on. I believe that there is nothing more meaningful and purposeful than to take responsibility for how our behavior affects others.

What more can we do for the past than to learn from it, to avoid repeating the mistakes of exploitation and discounting where our material wealth comes from?

I ask myself what I would have done then. Would I have accepted the silver?

Would I have said what I did didn't matter?

I have to be honest with myself because I can easily say I would do then what I today would. What do I consider right today? Can I look away from those at the receiving end of my plastic, pesticides, jet fuel, and so on?

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America

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439: How to Fix Texas Feb 17, 2021

Show notes

Here are the notes I read from for this episode

How to fix Texas

Just got off conference call a Texas attendee couldn't attend because her power was out.
There are helpless people suffering. I empathize with them and feel compassion. I support helping them.
If we want to prevent future suffering, we have to look at systems. That's not ignoring present pain or loss. It's preventing future pain and loss.
In that call, one person had been in touch with the Texas person. She told us of ice forming inside her house and other problems.
The present attendees lamented each mention of a problem as if she were suffering some horrible hardship. For tens of thousands of years, humans have lived without power including in the cold, including sudden, unexpected cold.
Is it not obvious that what we call technology and innovation has made us dependent, needy, and the opposite of resilient?
I'll repeat that people in hospitals, homeless, elderly, and others have always needed extra help and they do today. Nothing of what I'm saying suggests neglecting them.
But she also talked about our Texas friend tweeting. However spotty, she has the internet.
Let's talk systems.
NYTimes headline: A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids: Systems are designed to handle spikes in demand, but the wild and unpredictable weather linked to global warming will very likely push grids beyond their limits.
While the proximal reasons may be technical, the systemic cause is our dual focuses on meeting demand no matter what and growth but not focusing on resilience. The result is that when demand is always met, we grow (population and consumption) until we hit problems like this. Then we build more capacity.
It costs a lot to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.999%, but we do it every time.
The savings to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.9% is also huge. Most of the world does fine with under 99% and we could too if we built our systems and lives to handle power going down sometimes, even unpredictably. Hospitals, elderly, etc would need special treatment. The rest of us could reduce our needs and learn from how people lived all the time for hundreds of thousands of years.
We'd save tons of money, live healthier, and pollute a lot less. We'd learn to treat nature with a bit more humility and respect.
Listen to my episode on why I unplugged my fridge. I didn't do it because I expected my power savings would amount to anything divided by 7.8 billion.
I did it because other cultures as well as humans for hundreds of thousands of years thrived without power. While some disasters, like Vesuvius erupting, we can't defend ourselves against, we can prepare for cold without polluting.
My main results for unplugging my fridge? More delicious food from increasing my skills and experience preparing it. Saving money. Increasing my freedom, decreasing my neediness.
Again, repeating my compassion for helpless people in pain now, whose rescue and support I support in the moment, I suggest seeing this weather as impetus to make your life more resilient, less needy, to support a power grid more resilient and less brittle but, and a culture not so entitled, spoiled, dependent and needy that its answer to everything is something polluting more, deepening that entitlement and being spoiled.
If you can't live without power dropping for a few days even in terrible weather, and you aren't someone that lions would have eaten in previous eras, you're part of the problem. Fix yourself without drawing more power and polluting everyone else's world.
If your society suffers from the only way it handles problems is to use more power, polluting more, leading to suffering from by people who aren't polluting so much, which for Americans means the entire rest of the world outside Saudi Arabia and its oil producing peers and maybe some insanely rich tax havens in the Caribbean, fix your society.
Changing culture and systems begins with changing values. In this case from coddling, spoiling, externalizing costs, and ignoring others' suffering to resilience and freedom.

Episode 426: Why unplug

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438: Avoiding Creating Trash, Advanced Edition Feb 14, 2021

Show notes

When they hear I take two years to fill a load of trash, people ask how I do it, what's in my trash. In this episode I share a couple stories from last week of facing things entering my life that would result in my having to take responsibility for trash---acquiring a new cell phone and acquiring bagged food.

I've done things like these processes enough to know that they result in joy, community, and connection. It may sound like too much effort or annoying. Regarding too much effort, I put the stories in context of how much people put effort and time into TV and gyms, which my practiced lead to saving time and money, resulting in plenty to spare. Regarding annoying, I used to think so, but you'll hear that my interactions as they happen, not how you might erroneously imagine, result in more understanding.

Some day our culture will prevent things like these interactions happening. We'll look at single-use packaging how we look at asbestos.

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437: Bill Ryerson, part 1: Population matters Feb 10, 2021

Show notes

No matter what you think we should do, everyone gets that there is some connection between population and sustainability. Everyone knows our population is increasing. We're consuming more than ever.

How do we talk about this issue? I think most people shy away from it. I know I did, until recently feeling "what's the point in talking about something we can't do anything about?" I saw problems with overpopulation but the only cures I knew of seemed worse than the disease.

Today's guest, Bill Ryerson, has been working on these issues with tremendous effects increasing prosperity, stability, freedom, and things everyone prefers---think the opposite of the One Child policy. He shares what he does, his sources of inspiration, why what he does works, and how it started for him with Mexican soap operas.

Actually, it started long before with action of the sort nearly everyone talks about today---laws, information, facts---but it didn't work. The Mexican soap opera started what worked, and has around the globe for decades.

After you list, read the book Over. You only have to see a few images to get the value, and understanding that seeing can create.

I hope this episode helped loosen the grip of beliefs of mainstream culture. I wish I had heard things like it decades ago.

The book we talk about, Over

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436: You're right, it's not fair! Feb 07, 2021

Show notes

The notes I read from for this episode:

It's not fair!

Back from picking up litter
Forecast, a few inches of snow
Just want coffee, not to dispose. Ancestors could
Just want to travel, not pollute.
Don't want to think about others all the time
Just want to relax
Tons of trash from last snow
Asked cafe to ask people not to litter around trash
Not our responsibility, city, customers
Someone else, some other time, never me, never now
Yet improves life
So no, it's not fair. Others got to do without thinking what if we do, we hurt others, people far away
But any parent knows responsibility improves, stewardship
If we live by their values, tragic
If we live by values of cultures that have endured, joy, community, connection
So no, it's not fair, but what will you do about it
What will you do about your contribution?
Not zero.
Lament? Take responsibility? Live in past? Create future?

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435: Etienne Stott MBE, part 1: Olympic gold medalist climate activist Feb 06, 2021

Show notes

I met Etienne on a holiday conference call of Flight Free UK, which celebrates what life brings when we enjoy people, culture, cuisine, and so forth around us, not flying all over. The concept would have sounded crazy to me before trying, but the attendees had made that transition.

Etienne spoke joyfully about his working with Extinction Rebellion in the UK, a wonderful contrast with two things. First, his Olympic gold medal, which he overcame a huge deficit to win in front of a home crowd, after an injury months before that left the tiniest window to recover and retrain from. Second, the joy he spoke of getting arrested in civil disobedience acting with XR.

I saw a role model---someone with a prominent voice who acted from internal convictions.

Before talking protest, if you know me, you know I love the parts of sports, athletics, and competition that help us reach our potential---physical, mental, spiritual. I love learning of people surpassing imagined limitations to learn more about ourselves as individuals and humans. So of course I started by asking him about sports and Olympics.

Then we spoke about the passion we share on stewardship and leadership, not just passively watching, nor accepting that it's hard or

undesirable.

For Etienne to say, as you'll hear, that he's doing the most important work of his life after the dedication to reach a global pinnacle of sport reinforces to me how valuable stewardship is in our world now. However many people call what we do extreme, role models like Etienne remind me that helping others is not extreme. It's just the start.

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434: Manisha Sinha: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition Jan 27, 2021

Show notes

You've heard me speak and bring guests who are experts in the history of abolition and slavery, particularly in England. I learned about well-known abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. Manisha Sinha, today's guest, goes into more depth and nuance to movements in North America and beyond.

She is the Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. I met her then as a student, around 1989 or 90.

She wrote The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and recently featured in The New York Times’ 1619 Project.

Her multiple award winning second book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition brought me back to her. It won many awards, as did she.

Among the many new perspectives I picked up from her are the initiative and importance of the enslaved. I'm mostly focusing on helping us who like flying, air conditioning at the slightest warmth or humidity, and such without concern for people half of whose countries will be submerged or the nearly ten million who die just breathing air poisoned by factories making our stuff---helping us to see that acting in stewardship not only isn't futile, but is deeply personally rewarding and effective.

I see from her the importance of connecting with people helping themselves elsewhere. How can we get their message and their experience to us, the users of polluting technology, shareholders in those companies, buyers of the products?

How can we help us see today that future historians will see us as we saw the people the abolitionists opposed?

How can we help us see the parallels and follow their footsteps?

If comparing environmental stewardship with abolition seems a stretch, listen to Manisha.

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433: Adam Hochschild, part 2: Abolition then and pollution today Jan 25, 2021

Show notes

If you've followed my development on how to view acting on sustainability, you've seen a marked change when I learned about the British abolition movement of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Today's guest, Adam Hochschild, wrote about that period comprehensively in his book Bury the Chains. We talked about it in our first episode and in more depth this time.

Until I learned about this movement and this group of people, not unique but important actors, I saw few to no role models of what Adam points out is rare: people devoting themselves to helping other people become free.

We present ourselves as potentially suffering from environmental problems, but we are benefiting from ignoring how others suffer for our way of life. You are almost certainly more like the absentee landlords and shareholders in companies profiting from slave labor thousands of miles away than like the people suffering.

Adam's book gives us role models of people who said, "I could benefit and even though everyone around me does so, I cannot support or benefit from this system. I will make it my life's mission to end it." In their cases the distant sufferers were in the Caribbean. In ours it's Indonesia, the Philippines, India, southeast Asia, Africa, Central America, and most of the world.

This time I picked up on the importance of slave rebellion, telling me we have to connect with people on the receiving end of our disposing of plastic and the exhaust from our cars, jets, and power plants.

I also wanted to learn about the personal side of the people Adam portrayed. How did they persevere through discouraging times? We're facing discouraging times. Most of us could in principle pollute a lot less, but our culture creates resistance.

The more I learn about abolition, the more I find their movements and results relevant and inspiring. How better can we honor their legacy than to use it to reduce suffering today? To me, learning that people faced resistance like we face and overcame it as we'd like to. We have the benefit of their history. If you'd like to lead yourself and others to reduce suffering by changing culture and systems, I can't recommend enough to learn about people who have succeeded before.

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432: Matthew Stevenson, part 2: What can environmentalists learn from disarming racism? Jan 22, 2021

Show notes

Many people talk about responding to threats or people they disagree with with empathy, compassion, treating everyone with respect. In practice, I see people doing the opposite. They don't feel, "I'm right, you're wrong." They feel "I understand reality, you don't. I have to teach you." or often they feel they have to force them.

Likewise, on the environment, nearly all environments try to convince people who disagree with them through lecture, facts, figures, and charts. When that doesn't work, they resort to shame, guilt, eventually disengaging and trying to outpower them through legislation.

Matthew Stevenson did the opposite. He practiced what many preach and it worked. In our first episode, which I recommend first, he shared how he worked and his mindset. The more I heard, the more fascinating I found it. More to the point, the more practical and effective I found it.

The word convince, by the way, comes from the root -vince as in vanquish, to defeat. Attempts to convince generally provoke debate. After all the person was already right in their own mind before you talked to them. Maybe you're wrong. If you aren't open to it, why should they be? When was the last time someone defeated or vanquished you and you said, "Okay, now I agree with you and I'll follow you."

I invited Matthew back because he shared how to do what many of us talk about and we know great historical figures practiced, but few of us know of people-on-the-street role models we can follow.

Would I have predicted when starting this podcast, this effort to bring leadership to sustainability, that I would talk about a white nationalist website Storm Front with an orthodox Jew? I doubt it, but I find him one of the best role models for me. Most guests I think of as role models for listeners, experimenting sharing environmental values most of us don't, acting on them, doing what almost no one has yet so we can all learn from them.

With Matthew, he's doing what I endeavor to. It's emotionally incredibly hard when I feel I know I'm right or that I understand reality but they don't to end up condescending or sounding self-righeous because I feel self-righteous, it's hard then to conjure up humility, empathize, listen, and get to a place where they're right and I'm wrong.

So he's a role model for me. His strategy took a long time but it worked and the solution is enduring. Plus he laughs and jokes about it.

He didn't convince, vanquish, or win. He made a friend.

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431: I sang every day for two months, unplugged (still going) Jan 20, 2021

Show notes

What do you do if you use less power? No social media? No listening to music? No TV?

Sound like a fate worse than death?

Inspired by guests on my podcast who find amazing activities to live by their environmental values, I committed to turning off all my electronics to sing every day. I've almost never sung in my life beyond Happy Birthday and The Star Spangled Banner so I'm mortified to play my remedial results live, but I love it. I know I'll keep going so today's recording isn't the end.

I recorded singing a couple songs at the beginning. to record I opened the laptop, all other times I sang with the power off. At night I had to open the door to the hallway to read the words until I started singing outside during my daily walks picking up litter.

So far I've spent zero dollars on it. The first two weeks I sang fifteen minutes a day. Later I shifted to at least one song, so a few minutes a day.

Today's episode starts with my describing the experience and a few stories, then with neither pride nor shame, I play the "before" recording, then the "after."

The track listing:

Before

14:42 The Beatles, Across the Universe
19:30 The Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps

After

22:40 The Beatles, Across the Universe
26:28 The Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps
28:44 John Denver, I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane
31:26 Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi
33:01 Spandau Ballet, True
36:12 The Cure, Pictures of You
38:54 Earth, Wind, and Fire, September
42:19 Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land

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