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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:

250: Why talk about birthrate and population so much? Nov 22, 2019

Show notes

Readers and listeners have commented on my writing and posting lately about population and birth rates. Why do I talk about them? Isn't America below replacement level?

I recently finished reading Countdown by Alan Weisman, which I recommend. I read passages and commented on them in episode 248: Countdown, a book I recommend by Alan Weisman. It looked at population around the world, illustrating and describing research finding that we've overshot the carrying capacity, which will lead to population collapse.

That book put the issue top of mind, as does listening to the Growthbusters podcast.

This episode describes why I see value in discussion population.

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249: Florida Mayors Jerry Demings and Buddy Dyer, part 2: Humility and Action from U.S. officials Nov 20, 2019

Show notes

Since our first episode, I've been talking about these mayors choosing to pick up garbage. I believe that a man never stands so tall as when he bends down to pick up another person's garbage.

How many U.S. politicians can you name who bend down to pick up other people's garbage? Yet how many American streets, waterways, and beaches do you see covered with garbage? It wasn't always this way. We are letting it happen on our watch.

I hope Jerry and Buddy start a new trend among politicians. Get your hands dirty to make our nation and cities clean. If people we know don't do it, such as elected officials, we won't in general.

But if they do, we will---which will make them leaders, which they want.

Politicians, get votes by cleaning up your neighborhoods.

Yourself.

Show that doing so doesn't make you dirty. It makes our world clean. It enables people.

Your constituents want your leadership. They want clean neighborhoods. I believe you'll get votes by bringing cleanliness to them. You'll make yourself more approachable.

In this conversation you'll hear two people leading by example, with humility, at no cost, on something everyone wants for their community.

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248: Countdown, a book I recommend by Alan Weisman Nov 19, 2019

Show notes

I just finished an eye-opening book, Countdown, by Alan Weisman. It covers population.

Weisman traveled to and reported on about a dozen places' views and practices on population and family planning.

In this episode, I read a few passages that I found shocking. I barely scratch the book's surface, but I believe you'll find the sections equally noteworthy. I recommend reading the rest to understand this integral part of our world.

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247: Balancing jobs and junk Nov 18, 2019

Show notes

People resist environmental projects to protect jobs, even to keep producing products that pollute.

My absurd proposal to balance jobs with junk: put factories next to landfills. Despite it being absurd, the proposal would create a cleaner world.

Instead of making junk as a pretense for some counterproductive welfare, let's stop making it.

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246: The Emotions Around Environmental Action Nov 17, 2019

Show notes

What emotions do you associate with environmental action?

I find people associate shame and guilt with it. I find these emotions lead people to suppress the emotions and hide the behavior leading to it.

I propose reacting to pollution and polluting behavior with disgust. If someone hands me a plastic bottle of water, I feel disgust. I propose replacing the terms they've come up in Sweden for flight shame with flight disgust.

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245: Tia Nelson, part 1: Earth Day Nov 16, 2019

Show notes

One of my main goals for this podcast is to bring people who love acting on one's environmental values, seeing stewardship not as an obligation but as being a part of something greater than yourself, than any of us, benefiting everyone, and yourself.

As you'll hear, Tia's roots precede the first Earth Day. Her father started it. Despite so many problems remaining -- basically all of them -- she's the opposite of jaded. She's enthusiastic. Her joy, even in the face of setbacks, and as a democratic politician in Wisconsin, she's faced big ones lately, tells me the joy anyone feels from nature -- walks on the beach, picking apples, whatever you love about experiencing nature -- is available to anyone.

In other words, if you act more, you'll love it. As you'll hear, you'll very likely influence others, who will thank you.

I love hearing the transformation from talking about potential to determined action. I love hearing the transformation from talking about individual action in the abstract to individual action.</p>

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244: Lessons from extinction Nov 12, 2019

Show notes

Learning that humans only recently developed the concept of extinction. Much of the West, for example, believed in a Great Chain of Being, spontaneous generation, and a biblical flood.

That perspective suggests that many past behaviors we consider unconscionable may have seemed even humane then, like walking up to a rhinoceros and shooting it in the head. If you can't imagine it going extinct because new ones will form, how is shooting it point blank any different than slaughtering any other animal?

Since we are in future generations' pasts, how might they see our polluting behavior? If they live in messes we created, won't they likely see us as we see people shooting rhinoceroses point blank---that is, with horror?

Does understanding others with compassion lead us to act with compassion?

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243: Confusing distinct modes of acting Nov 11, 2019

Show notes

Tired of people saying what you do doesn't matter? Or personal action in general?

They're confusing different types of action. In this recording I distinguish three of them so you can feel comfortable acting by your values without the naysayers and navel-gazers distracting you.

The three categories are

Personal action, like avoiding packaged food
Leading others, like hosting a podcast
Influence one's local community, like sharing joy

Distinguishing them protects me from feeling dissuaded when others confuse one person not polluting with that person trying to change the world. Nobody says, "why do you bother not murdering? You can't stop everyone from doing it." Yet they still say, "why bother avoiding meat? People will still do it."

They're confusing personal action with leading others.

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242: Florida Mayors Jerry Demings and Buddy Dyer, part 1: United States government officials acting Nov 10, 2019

Show notes

I talk a lot about the lack of leadership in the area of the environment. Many people talk about change but don't lead it. Many others judge but don't support, which leads people to hold back on trying.

Well, the mayors of Orlando and Orange County Florida went out of their way and found me. Most guests I seek out. Instead, they took it on themselves to put themselves out there, risking judgment on an issue they don't have to.

Most don't, I believe because it makes them feel exposed and vulnerable. But a top trait of effective leaders is that they like accountability.

You don't have to make acting environmentally you main focus, but the start is to act, which they've done. From a leadership perspective for a public figure to step forward achieves more than whatever the outcome of his or her first step.

If what they do seems hard, Jerry and Buddy's swimming upstream will make it easier so all who follow feel like they're swimming downstream.

I intend to help them make personal action a trend among leaders, which will lead to group action.

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241: Lt. General Paul Van Riper USMC, part 1: Thoughtful strategy before technology Nov 06, 2019

Show notes

Why a military general? Isn't the US military one of the greatest polluters on the planet?

My goal is to bring effective leadership to the environment and your life because spreading facts, figures, doom, and gloom isn't doing it. Leadership is about people. Technology and innovation have historically increased pollution, as I described in other episodes. Nearly everyone promoting technological solutions is unwittingly continuing the drive toward efficiency that created our environmental situation and continues to augment it.

They miss that increasing efficiency doesn't necessarily lower total waste, which is our problem, as a glance at any plastic-covered beach or Beijing sky will attest. Again: efficiency has overall increased total waste.

I invited Rip after reading about the Millennium Challenge, where, in preparation for Desert Storm, the military invited him to come out of retirement to lead the "red team"---a ragtag group to fight the "blue team", representing the 21st century US military strategy using every advantage they could---technology, data, weaponry, size, intelligence, and so on.

It sounded like a setup---not a test but a cake walk to showcase what they considered an unstoppable, titanic force.

Titanic might be the best term because he mopped up the floor with them. I'll put links in the text for write-ups on this historic David and Goliath exchange.

You'll hear in this conversation why they so miscalculated and how he saw things differently that worked. More importantly, I hope to focus you on the value of focusing on people.

Rip shares the inside story you won't find in those accounts. I was rivited, and he built it up from talking about his beginnings as a lieutenant, learning strategy like Von Clausewitz that remains timeless, US military development since WWII and Vietnam.

If the relevance to the environment isn't obvious, I'll clarify. Acting environmentally means facing an apparently unstoppable juggernaut. It's not CO2, plastic, and mercury but the beliefs and goals driving people to keep doing what they used to---meat, flying, having as many kids as they feel like, buying SUVs, and so on.

Everyone who says that's human nature is confusing following a system. Systems can change. Growth wasn't always a goal, nor did people ship their garbage halfway around the world, nor did it take centuries to decompose. Cultures that had to deal with their garbage learned to live sustainably.

So can we. We can learn from Rip's teamwork, historical knowledge, vision, and all the things that make up leadership to lead ourselves and humanity to overcome our Goliath: the beliefs keeping us doing what got us here.

Rip has made a big impression on me. I don't know what makes a general. Talking to him, I think it means learning at a cultural level, or learning deeply about people.

I think we who want to influence human effects on the environment can learn from this experience and view. He talked about senior leadership. In my view, we lack senior leadership

PBS Frontline interview with Paul Van Riper
PBS Nova interview, The Immutable Nature of War
Wikipedia on the Millennium Challenge 2002

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