Leadership And The Environment

People who fly think most people fly, but it's more like a few percent. A small fraction of people fly, let alone across oceans or multiple times per year. If you fly, it's probably your action that hurts people most through its environmental impact, but you probably rationalize and justify it. Unlike many other polluting activities, most of the money you spend on flying goes to polluting, displacing people and wildlife from their land to extract fuel and minerals, and lobbying governments to pollute and extract more.Stefan has been reporting and publishing on flying for decades longer than I've worked on it. I met him following a panel he participated in hosted by Stay Grounded on the impacts of flying on people and wildlife. That talk was on frequent flyer programs, but Stay Grounded works on many related issues.After sharing his background, Stefan talks about his research. My biggest takeaway: People believe a lot of myths about flying. Partly the industry promotes the myths, but people will do whatever me

"What I do doesn't matter" is one of the more common sentiments of our time. We use it to avoid acting when we see problems. A similar rationalization not to act: "I have faith that younger people will solve our environmental problems. After all they will be affected more." People say these things to avoid acting, avoiding personal responsibility.If anyone can say she deserves to relax and not have to work on problems, nobody would tell someone with incurable cancer she can't spend her time how she wants. Trish has incurable cancer. She worked her whole life to enjoy her retirement. She didn't grow up planning to act on sustainability. She didn't plan to take my sustainability leadership workshops, but her niece, Evelyn, and sister, Beth, told her about taking the workshop so she did.In this episode, you'll hear Trish sharing why acting on sustainability and leading others is spending her remaining time how she wants. She once envisioned flying around in her retirement. She could and no one would judge her. B

A blackout struck New York City and a large part of the U.S. northeast in 2003. It happened only two years after 9/11. How could we not first wonder if it was terrorism. I had been at work at the time. After waiting maybe an hour, we all walked down the stairs and went home. Phones worked for a while, so I called the woman I was dating and coordinated to meet at her place. I ended up hitch-hiking a ride there.The people who gave me the ride were having a great time. In a big van, they were picking up people here and there, navigating intersections with no traffic lights. We all had a great time, which continued when I reached my girlfriend's place. Later I heard of people dancing around bonfires and so on.For months afterward, when we saw someone we hadn't seen since the blackout, we asked each other's blackout experience. I soon noticed that nearly everyone enjoyed themselves.At first I thought it odd, since we suspected terrorism at first. After a while, I realized technology wasn't the unalloyed good I had

Dave and I go back years, to when we both wrote columns at Inc. I'm surprised I didn't bring him on before. He helps entrepreneurs, leaders, and aspiring leaders develop social and emotional skills, as well as college students aspiring to internships.We recorded now on the occasion of his new book, Get Over Yourself! How to Lead and Delegate Effectively for More Time, More Freedom, and More Success, on improving your skills working with others, like all his books. He shares stories of himself and clients, often personal, leading to practical advice.Sustainability requires changing American and global culture, which requires entrepreneurship and leadership.Dave's page, which links to his books and how to book him for a one-on-oneApprentice Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I met Erica in a online meeting of academics who promote avoiding flying. A major perk for many academics is that universities pay for flying to academic conferences, for research, and for other academic reasons, of where there are many. In other words, they often fly for free. (As an aside, since academics learned about our environmental problems first, people flying free and often include many academics.)I found her comments valid, including a criticism of something I said, so contacted her afterward and invited her to the podcast. I also think people who hold Nobel Prizes are more influential than those who don't, in general, and a goal for this podcast is to bring the most influential people.The conversation was fun and a blast! She does more than research and promote less flying. She lived off-grid long before I started, for example, something we could bond on.More than any actions, I found her tone and attitude engaging and infectious. She enjoys living more sustainably. Most of the world acts like each

Since recording this conversation, I've mentioned to a lot of people, "you wouldn't believe the situation with dyes and poisons in our clothes."The most common response has been something like, "Oh yeah, I've heard. It's terrible."Then I share some of what Alden shares in this conversation and they say, "Wow, I didn't realize it was that serious," and become very interested to learn more.Our clothing touches us intimately. Microfibers enter our lungs. Our children, everyone is affected.You'll value learning from Alden in this conversation, then reading her book To Dye For, then acting personally, then acting politically.Alden's home pageHer book, To Dye ForHer conversation on NPR, among many media appearances Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I heard about Sven through the articles below about the cultural change at Northwell, a chain of hospitals around New York City.I recommend reading the Post article before listening to this episode. It may read overly positive about the food, but Sven and I ate just after recording at the hospital the regular food they serve patients. It was incredible. I would never have dreamed food at a hospital could taste so good and look so appealing. I figured American hospitals had just capitulated and converted to doof.From a leadership perspective, I'm most interested in the processes and people behind changing a culture. Serving better food overlaps with the environment in that everyone knows and agrees high-quality food beats low-quality, especially at a hospital, and everyone knows clean air beats polluted air, but we created a culture that makes low quality hospital food and polluted air normal. Sven helped turn around a system and not just any system. Hospitals handle life and death, face heavy regulation, incl

About fifteen minutes into this conversation, it hit me how powerfully Stephen's commitment affected him. (Sorry I took so long to catch on, Stephen!) All he had to do was volunteer around a body of water.His experience shows the impact of intrinsic motivation. Maybe observing and spending time by the water means as much to you as to Stephen. Maybe it doesn't mean that much to you. It means a lot to him. Things mean as much to you that may not mean as much to others, but acting on them becomes meaningful. That resonance what happened with Stephen, because he picked his commitment based on his connection to nature.Wouldn't you love to be able to help others bring things they care about to their lives as Stephen does? You can, by learning the Spodek Method. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Regular listeners and blog readers know I talk about litter and how much we wreck nature, especially my neighborhood's back yard, Washington Square Park. Click the links below to see some of the worst litter you've seen, in a supposedly nice part of town.Today the opposite: someone who brings joy, fun, creativity, music, and dancing to the park. Alan began playing drums in the park three years ago and he rocks the place. Click to watch this video of him in action, though when he plays different music, he creates different vibes, so the video shows only a tiny slice of that magic.You wouldn't believe how much effort he needs to perform each time he plays. You also wouldn't believe how good playing makes him feel, and everyone else there too.If I report the awful, I'll report the awesome. Feel inspired to bring value to your community, even if it isn't designed for profit, though you should donate to his funds since he's a street performer and can use your support (I'll post a link when I get it from him). If y

I'm searching for role models including people who changed cultures and undid dominance hierarchies, particularly people who came from status. I can think of many who came from subjugated classes, but not many who could have declined to engage, but did instead.Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one. I could share more about him, but my guest today, Martin Doblmeier, made a wonderful documentary about him available online free. It's worth it to watch the documentary before listening to this episode if you don't know much about Bonhoeffer.Martin had more insight into Bonhoeffer than many. He met many people who knew him, and he featured them in the documentary. As you'll see, the documentary is thoughtful and considerate, which told me Martin must have thought deeply about what motivated Bonhoeffer. He shared about these things in the conversation. We also connected it all to sustainability leadership.Bonhoeffer (2003) | Full MovieMartin's film company: Journey FilmsMartin's film Sabbath Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/priv

I have spoken and written at length how I see our relationship with polluting behavior as qualifying as addiction, a view that I think helps frame the challenge of sustainability. Overcoming addiction is harder than creating new technologies or taxing things. It takes powerful internal social and emotional skills. Just acknowledging one is addicted and harming others is a big hurdle, let alone acting on it.Not seeing the huge challenges of taking on one's addiction and trying to overcome it, facing withdrawal and so on leaves us not doing the hard work and using effective tools like listening, role models, compassion, and so on. Now multiply the number of people addicted by billions. If billions of people are addicted to flying, container ship-delivered goods, air conditioning, and so on, we better start soon.Mattan and I talk about how well addiction describes the challenges of changing culture toward sustainability. He's an experienced professional in the field, but not a licensed or trained professional, t

Regular listeners and readers of my blog will know my sustainability leadership workshops and one of the participants of the first, Evelyn (she's in the video on that link). After being the teaching assistant for a couple cohorts, she is leading this winter's session.Often when I talked to her about leadership, she would comment, "We do that in social work too, but we call it" . . . and she'd mention a practice she was learning while getting her Masters in Social Work at Howard University. I'd heard of social work, but didn't know what people in the field did.She put me in touch with one of her professors, Stephen. We had a great conversation talking about the overlap between leadership and social work, which led me to invite him on the podcast. Here he speaks aboutSocial workThe overlap of personal action and change with systemic changeInfluencing without authority,The need to live the values you want to evoke in othersThe need for experience where you want to influenceand more.Doing the Spodek Method, he pi

Regular listeners know how I look for role models in similar situations to ours regarding the environment. We know our polluting and depleting are bringing us toward collapse, but instead of acting, we procrastinate on acting. We rationalize and justify our inaction. We abdicate our responsibility, capitulate, and resign to complacency and complicity.Humans behaved this way in the face of slavery, especially during and after the Atlantic Slave Trade, which led me to bring several guests who were experts on that period and people who acted against it.Humans behaved this way in the face of fascism too. I'm not comparing people today to Nazis, but to Germans who may not have been Nazis, and may even have opposed them, but continued paying taxes, supporting them, and not opposing them. This episode brings my first subject-matter expert in the field of the rise of the Nazis. I've written and brought guests on who knew some people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sousa Mendez, Raoul Wallenberg, and Oskar Schindler, but I

If John's specialty in deep history weren't valuable enough to understand how our culture's dominance hierarchy formed from the material conditions of the dawn of agriculture, he also specializes in American history, including slavery from before the Revolutionary War through to the Thirteenth Amendment.We start with his sharing what drew him to the two fields. Then I introduce what led me to want to learn from him. I share a main thesis of my book, starting with the journey that led me to see how today's industry and technology evolved from slavery. To clarify, I understand that machines and industry didn't help end slavery, but sustained the system, including its cruelty, just changing the mechanism.As I heard, my thesis is essentially accurate. He shared more history of how slavery evolved from before the Atlantic Slave Trade, through North American chattel slavery, how the framers of the Constitution handled it (or sold out on it), how it evolved with cotton, and more.If you are interested in how our cult

You'll hear Tony's story of rolling up his sleeves and doing some hard labor. You'll also hear the labor being just the start of the reward. He shares about the less tangible but not lesser results in community, emotional reward, enthusiasm to do more.Given his leadership role and experience, we talk about the Spodek Method. I took the liberty of pulling some what he said and formatting it. Listen to the conversation for context for the full meaning, but here's some:You opened some doors. The idea [to act] was there but I'd come up with excuses for why I couldn't engage now. If [I'm] honest I'll be a whole lot more effective right now . . . than I might be in fifteen years time. It makes a huge amount of sense to do right now so I thank you . . .because I don't know if I would have acted on it. Now that I've committed to it, I will.Very few have done what you've done: changing diet . . . stopping air travel. . .[Those] not doing it:Don't recognize what it takesDon't recognize the benefits of it, andCan't cred

I was reading Harper's magazine and Christopher's story was on the cover: Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”! It beginsIn 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

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 t

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 the

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 t

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. Y