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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:

220: Michelle Tillis Lederman, part 2: Making it habitual makes it easy Sep 18, 2019

Show notes

Not often do I hear something in a podcast conversation that's a new habit I'm going to try. This conversation with Michelle led to two. I recommend them both and I'll try to find a way to report back how they go.

Plus she shares how her book, the Connector's Advantage, keeps growing, now internationally.

We talk environmental leadership. She shares her experience with plastic bags, something a lot of people tell me they want to do, but keep putting off. Note how she says when you commit to something it becomes a habit. It can be that straightforward. Habitualizing something makes it effortless. Michelle speaks with experience.

I always think of diapers since I know so many parents. People say avoiding plastic bags or packaged food is hard, but from my perspective, changing diapers seems like it takes a lot more effort, attention, and patience than bringing bags to stores, yet first-time parents go from zero to 100% changing overnight.

When people commit, they act like leaders and stewards. Fears about other people being problems transform. They see others as part of the solution. Acting on environmental values builds community.

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219: Regretful decisions Sep 17, 2019

Show notes

I share thoughts in today's episode I didn't have the heart to share with family on their way to vacationing in France.

In my lifetime I've seen the world change and our understanding of it change from we can't really raise sea levels to knowing with certainty that it's underway and we're causing it.

People younger than m used to think and hope that we'd slide by, missing out on the worst, hoping future generations would figure something out.

If you're younger than about 80, I believe you know enough that you no longer live in a world where you can honestly believe others are doing it, not me, or plausible deniability.

Future generations have figured something out: reducing consumption, reducing how many children to have, enjoying what you have. I've embraced this solution and found that it is fundamentally about community, compassion, empathy, love, stewardship, and what everyone I know values more than willful ignorance or even clinging to those values applied to a world that no longer exists.

That discovery of community, compassion, love, and so on enables me to say that if you keep applying those values as you would in the world of the past, you will live to regret knowingly choosing decisions that caused suffering and misery.

Living in the world of the past has a certain charm to it when you want to play princess or prince, but no longer when you want to play jet-setter world traveler.

Accepting today's world is hard, but acting on it brings joy.

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218: To Those Who Say They Can't Stop Polluting Sep 16, 2019

Show notes

A friend told me the other day that while I could reduce flying, business people couldn't. It's not so easy for them, actually impossible.

Did he forget that I have an MBA? That I started a business with an 8-digit valuation, that operated on four continents? That nearly everyone I know flies as a matter of course? Did he not imagine the work I turned down?

More likely he didn't think about it. This morning I woke up before the alarm and though about his perspective.

The overwhelming response to my suggesting that people can reduce their pollution---a statement of empowerment---is claims of helplessness. Also claims of some solidarity with other helpless people.

Today's episode both savagely and, I believe, with empathy and compassion, attacks these false excuses.

The trees burning in the picture are in the Amazon, the results of a system our money drives. More details in the episode.

The bottom line: more than anything else, I'm talking about empowerment. The results of acting are community, joy, discovery, personal growth, love, family, and so on. That's what stewardship brings, what you can create more of. Starting the shift is hard, yes, but the results of living by your values are your values.

The results of a search "tips environment". Results may change, but when I checked it returned well over 100.

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217: Adam Quiney, part 1: Leadership for the Smartest Person in the Room Sep 14, 2019

Show notes

Adam studies brilliant people and leadership. There are many leadership coaches and researchers. If you like me and my way of doing things, which is geeky, you might be geeky yourself. You probably like leadership too.

We get to his research results about halfway through the conversation. He focuses on helping people like you and me understand and improve leadership. In this conversation we focus on blind spots, among other topics, but his in particular. But Adam's focus and specialty on brilliance emerges. He's vulnerable and open.

I recorded this conversation almost a year and a half ago, so you can hear I hadn't developed a voice yet. Still, some meaningful nuggets from both of us, in fact some points I haven't shared in a while, like, regarding blind spots, nature not losing track of any molecules.

Back then I hadn't yet learned to see when people talk about people as their environment, they're playing it safe. We all know acting on the environment starts hard. So I was glad he moved to bruised apples that would get thrown away. I don't accept that imperfect looking apples are materially lowering quality of life. After a while, supermarket apples look weird. Farmers market ones look less uniform but have more flavor.

Most environmental action is like choosing the apples corporate buyers don't. They don't fit someone else's values, but they tend to taste better and cost less. After you get used to them, the old ones look weird, even creepy in their uniformity and too much shinyness.

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216: Brandon Voss, part 2: Negotiate Like Your Environment Depends On It Sep 10, 2019

Show notes

We start talking about how to learn---you have to practice. This is one of the most important things to get, not just in learning but in life. Too many people read and analyze, expecting to learn. If you don't change your behavior, you aren't learning, which I took a long time to learn.

If you read and analyze, you behave impersonally---that is, you don't learn social and emotional skills.

Then we talk about his smiling challenge. For what I said last time about it ducking acting environmentally, it showed how experiential exercises work. Reading and traditional learning alone don't get behavioral results like these.

Also, he started acting more on wrappers, which I didn't talk about. If I had chastised him last time on doing too little, I think that imposing my values on him that way would have inhibited him to doing more. I tried to react with nonjudgmental support for where he was, not counting what I said in the post-conversation audio, which he didn't hear.

Not sure if you heard how the conversation was about support and reward, while still focusing on doing things. At least that was my goal. I consider support one of the most critical elements of leading.

Most conversations I see on the environment are analytical and judgmental---"government should do this," "corporations should do that

. . . anything but "I'm going to act."

I read his saying that he was already doing things as revealing a common but tragic result of mainstream environmental message: that acting distracts or is a chore. I felt that way, but with experience I've made acting on my environmental values become something that adds joy.

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215: Jeremy Ryan Slate, part 2: How long have you gone without a phone? Sep 04, 2019

Show notes

When was the last time you went without a cell phone for more than a few hours? Jeremy went longer than he expected, but as chance favors the prepared mind, he was ready to take advantage of an opportunity.

It sounds to me like he enjoyed using less power, however modest the reduction, he did it and discovered fun and improved relationships. Once we created machines to save labor. Now I see we create machines to create craving, which makes us miserable. Or at least the absence seems to enrich our lives.

I'm thinking about taking more digital vacations. Everyone says they're hard but rewarding---like Jeremy or Vincent Stanley, Director at Patagonia, in an earlier episode---a pattern I find signals experiments I like.

His experience leads me to wonder what lower limit I could get to in using my cell phone.

The big picture is that I hear little things lead to big, important things.

What can you start with?

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214: Are we smarter than bugs? Sep 02, 2019

Show notes

Bugs will infest a plant until they kill it, then when it dies, they die. It's happening to the fig tree and cherry tomato plants in my windowsill garden. If they could keep their population low enough to avoid killing the plant, they could live longer.

We seem to be doing the same with Earth's non-renewable resources. From a species perspective, what benefit do we get from fast cars and cell phones if we can't stop ourselves from overshooting the planet's resources and causing our population to collapse. As a species we would not likely go extinct from a collapse, but our global society might not recover.

Plenty of human civilizations have collapsed, their ruins covered by sand and jungle, with barely a sign they existed. Do we want such an outcome on a global scale?

Avoiding that outcome means controlling our population differently than bugs---seeing non-renewable parts of nature like oil and choosing not to use them, or renewable resources and choosing not to use them to where they become non-renewable, like fish and clean air.

Are we smarter than bugs?

The math behind how finding extra resource, even other planets, don't help, by Tom Murphy.

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213: Joy from disgust Sep 02, 2019

Show notes

I don't like my world being full of junk "food," litter, and pollution, but if it is, I'd rather see it for what it is and feel a disgust that motivates me to change it than to keep myself in denial and passively, complacently accept it.

Yesterday's stop at a highway rest stop reminded me how we dump garbage onto the world and into ourselves. Today's picking up litter reinforced it, though I do it daily.

So today I discuss disgust, which I hope you all feel, not because I think you'll enjoy the feeling, but, if the world is a way you consider disgusting, I think disgust will motivate you to act.

When enough people feel that disgust and act on it by, say, picking up other people's litter until no one litters any more or not buying what Burger King and Starbucks sell until they sell more wholesome food, we'll feel joy and elation at the beautiful world we restore.

My game is joy, personal growth, discovery, meaning, purpose, and such through action.

Pictures of my CSA farm

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212: The Amazon Burning and Us Sep 01, 2019

Show notes

What's the difference between burning rain forests for someone's livelihood and family in the Amazon and paying for people to drill oil that we squander in the rest of the world?

I'm not asking to accuse. I see some differences, but not big ones.

If you're easily offended I recommend not listening to this episode.

Letter from Birmingham Jail excerpt
Joshua Becker's book The More of Less

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211: Michael Werner, part 1: Dream job results from environmental leadership Aug 28, 2019

Show notes

Not everyone gets his or her dream job. Michael Werner did, on sustainable product design at Google and Apple. Since our conversation he's become Google's lead on circular economy. Whatever your thoughts on these companies, he is in a position to help lead them in areas of great importance.

How did he get those positions? By working up the ladder? On the contrary, by leading from the start, before people were following.

A major goal of this podcast is to show that if you want to lead, especially on the environment, a successful path is to start leading now with what you can. Waiting for a position to open doesn't work as well. Acting creates opportunities and Michael is an example.

I'm glad to hear people within big companies with major inertia are working on sustainability, but they have challenges ahead. It's also rare to find people who get what I described as reusing and recycling, or efficiency in general, is tactical. Reduction is strategic, as I spoke on in episode 183: Reusing and recycling are tactical. Reducing is strategic.

Most companies prefer recycling and efficiency because they drive growth, which makes people feel better, but is the opposite of reduction. I haven't looked into Google's practices.

Note, this was an early episode. I didn't ask Michael first about what the environment meant to him, so I didn't connect his challenge to something personal. I got lucky that he had something in mind at first. But I think leadership works far more effectively when the leader makes the person feel comfortable sharing their values, which makes it feel more meaningful. It wouldn't have worked with someone less enthusiastic and didn't lead him to find his project as meaningful.

Still, I think he's doing it for himself. We'll hear in his second episode.

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