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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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Latest Episodes:

810: Giora Netzer, part 2: Leadership coaching leads to far more than "just" the C-Suite Mar 31, 2025

Show notes

In our second conversation, Giora reveals more about his developing as a leader. If you listen for it, you can hear the vision he had for himself and his profession, but also the development he needed to realize it.

This podcast is about sustainability leadership. You probably envision a sustainable world, or at least trying with everything you can to help achieve it. Maybe you've adopted my vision and mission. Developing leadership skills and experience as Giora have is essential. We can learn from him.

Beyond his leadership skills and experience, his doing the reps earned him credibility and developed integrity, essential elements for effective leadership.

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809: Alexander Clapp: Waste Wars, how we profit off polluting the world claiming to help them Mar 28, 2025

Show notes

I found Alex when listeners sent me an opinion piece in the New York Times he wrote, The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie.

Getting to where I take years to fill a load of trash means I've researched waste a lot, so based on the headline, I thought, "yeah, I've read this story before. I'll skim it so I can say I read it and then move on to important things." Instead, I was fascinated and found plenty new. I had to read his book, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, which came out last month. I can't recommend it enough.

Whatever you know about waste and pollution, the book shares more and it's relevant to your life if you value liberty, freedom, justice, not killing people for profit, and not destroying your own health, safety, and security. Our system of waste forces us to act in opposition to those values.

We don't have to. We can change the system. Understanding it helps. Listen to this episode, read Alex's book, and read his opinion piece. Here are its opening paragraphs:

In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen.

Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again — dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America.

In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.” Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries.

The NY Times opinion piece Alexander wrote that led me to him: The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie
Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash at Hachette

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808: Silvia Bellezza: Sustainable Marketing at Columbia Business School Mar 21, 2025

Show notes

Silvia created the course Sustainable Marketing at Columbia. It's an elective and has become the class at the business school with the most students from other schools at the university.

In looking for a guest speaker on sustainable consumerism, she found the New York Times profile on me. She decided to invite me before realizing I'd gotten my MBA where she teaches. Only when we spoke did she learn I focus beyond just living sustainably to creating a leadership program with a mission to change global culture.

When I spoke to hear class, I spoke about changing culture, which in some ways conflicted with the marketing goal of selling more products. It also resonated with many of her students' interests in creating a more sustainable world. I got a lot of attention after class. We recorded this episode before I guest-spoke at another section of her course.

We talk in this episode about how that class went from her perspective as well as differences between sustainability leadership and marketing. We did the first part of the Spodek Method. You can hear that as a business educator, she analyzed it, so we talked about that analysis.

Silvia's page at Columbia Business School

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807: Giora Netzer MD MSCE, part 1: A leader I coached to the C-suite Mar 05, 2025

Show notes

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 what I focus on and I think is most necessary and lacking from sustainability.

Recently he told me one of the most heartwarming things I'd ever heard. Despite that our coaching focused on his professional life, he told me that coaching improved his relationship with his daughter in ways he couldn't have imagined. That improvement was one of the greatest changes to his life.

Since I teach leadership to people who took my sustainability leadership workshop, I asked if he would share for this podcast his experience learning leadership through me. I believe his experience will tell people in the sustainability simplified community what to expect from learning leadership.

In this conversation, Giora and I focus on three points in our coaching relationship:

Before starting: his decision to get coaching
His reaching the c-suite and finding the culture there
His transformation with his family and daughter

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806: Robert Fullilove, part 2: the spirit of the Civil Rights movement Feb 21, 2025

Show notes

Dr. Bob shares more about his experience acting during the 1960s, as well as today on helping prisoners and more. I hope you can hear the electricity I felt listening. Two kinds of electricity: one for the stories, another for how they resonated with the community, teamwork, and passion I see in the team I'm working with creating sustainability leadership workshops to change culture. He describes how they saw abolitionism as a role model movement. I see how they and abolitionism are role model movements for us.

We did the Spodek Method. Since he works on engaging people to create mass change, you'll hear him both responding and evaluating the technique.

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805: Osprey Orielle Lake: Founder and Executive Director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) Feb 19, 2025

Show notes

I was pleasantly surprised in reading Osprey's book The Story is in Our Bones that she also sees the need to change culture, including elements like our stories, role models, images, and beliefs. Focusing on cultural elements doesn't mean ignoring or leaving out measurable things like greenhouse gas emissions or plastic waste. On the contrary, focusing on those things without addressing our stories tends to result in people complying at best, more often feeling despair at the lack of vision.

Regarding role models, she also looks to sustainable indigenous cultures, and not to give solar panels or western-style schools to, as if we know better, but to learn from with humility.

She uses different language, which I tried to learn from.

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804: Robert Fullilove EdD, part 1: Lessons from America's Civil Rights era and effective action today Feb 13, 2025

Show notes

People call my behavior extreme, though I'm just acting in service of others. To be more precise, I'm acting in love for others. When people suggest what I'm doing is too hard, I sometimes remark how during America's Civil Rights era, some people went to jail for different people's freedom.

Nobody looks forward to going to jail, yet people did. Their actions make mine look easy and fun. Still, I suggest, I bet they consider those actions of going to jail or even being attacked by dogs or beaten some of the best events of their lives. I doubt they regret it. I wanted to confirm my beliefs.

I didn't go out of my way, but I looked out for people who had marched, protested, and gone to jail then. Then, a few months ago, I saw Robert Fullilove speak on a panel on leadership for Columbia's alumni community. He stole the show. That is, he was entertaining, engaging, fascinating, and informative. He spoke about many things: education, public health, prisons, and, catching my ear most, his involvement in the Civil Rights era.

I brought him to the podcast as soon as I could, meeting him in his office. We talk about all the topics he did and more: education, public health, prisons, his involvement in the Civil Rights era, and more. In particular, not only does he not regret going to jail for other people's freedom, he considers that experience essential for him teaching public health today.

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803: Nick Loris, part 3: Liberty, freedom, sustainability, and Rock Creek Park Jan 28, 2025

Show notes

You probably came to hear Nick's experience exploring Rock Creek Park in Washington DC based on his childhood experiences in nature with his father. Since we recorded shortly after my visit to DC, where I missed Nick but visited his friends and colleagues, and podcast guests, Jack Spencer and Travis Fisher, we talked about them. I mentioned visiting Heritage and Cato. Then we spoke about differences between conservatism and classical liberalism, as well as their different approaches to energy and the environment.

Then we spoke about his experiences recreating the awe and wonder he recalled from his childhood. I predict you'll find the experience heartwarming.

We inadvertently ended on a cliffhanger: if his experience improved his life while leading to consuming less and requiring less extraction, what if everyone improved their life while lowering overall economic activity? I think you'll enjoy our build up to that view. You'll have to wait like us for the next conversation.

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802: Lorraine Smith, part 2: The hidden, dirty secrets of corporate "sustainability" work Jan 14, 2025

Show notes

I start by sharing how much value I get from participating in Lorraine's weekly coaching group.

Then she shares her path to coaching on sustainability. She worked in the heart of the corporate sustainability accounting and reporting. She saw it mostly did nothing and often exacerbated the situations it purported to solve.

She has created a practice that exposes and helps fix these problems. I ended up coaching her back in asking her to clarify what a potential client would see in her work to start working with her.

As I wrote before, Lorraine understands our environmental situation more accurately than nearly anyone. We have to change our culture. Transforming leaders of industry is necessary if we expect to change the system.

Lorraine's home page

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801: Travis Fisher, part 3: Restoring time with family Jan 09, 2025

Show notes

Meaningful interactions don't have to be complex. Travis simply shares his experiences in nature in childhood and finds ways to recreate the emotional experience today. To me the most meaningful part is the result: he expects to spend more time with his children (and dog) doing something he's meant to do a long time. It doesn't cost money. It sounds like it will give him more time. The cleaning part, we'll see how it goes, though I predict the activation that comes from that part of it will affect him.

He works in policy so he describes how he sees personal change leading to systemic change more than trying to start with something top-down alone, like working from government or coercion. As I understand, he sees more than most that starting from intrinsic motivation, as the Spodek Method does, can lead to exponential growth in cultural change.

Time will tell, but I see it happening.

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