This Sustainable Life

Usually when someone does their commitment with the Spodek Method, they enjoy it. Nearly always they do more than they commit to. Sometimes someone really enjoys it.Jan went to town on his commitment. You might wonder if there's any appeal to picking up litter. Is it worth the effort? Who cares, anyway? After all, more people litter than pick it up, as anyone can tell by how much litter there is and how much it's growing.Yet the pattern I've discovered keeps happening. On the other side of working on sustainability is always community. I can't prove it always happens, but so far it does.In Jan's case, he found community, in particular, people who had long wanted to act. They were just waiting for someone to lead them. When someone did, they embraced acting.How many people around you are waiting for someone to activate them? How much community is waiting to form? How much easier do you think it will be than you probably expect, based on Jan's experience?

I participated in an online workshop in influence and persuasion that Josh led. We got in touch afterward and found our approaches to the practices and how to learn them overlap. We start this episode talking about his background and what led him to learning and training others in the practices. Then we talk about what we like about learning and practicing them, what works, what doesn't, misconceptions, and other aspects. Some related subjects include authority, extrinsic emotions, management, and such.We practiced the Spodek Method, him experiencing it for the first time. In this first conversation, he only experienced being led to share what the environment means to him and coming up with a commitment to help evoke that meaning. You can hear that beyond just participating in the exercise, he's also analyzing it as a professional. We'll have to wait for his second exercise to hear his experience and analysis of the whole exercise.

If you haven't listened to episode 781: My New Major Life Volunteering Community Project, four years in the making, listen to it first for context.That episode describes my journey to start volunteering as an auxiliary police officer and the background to it. Depending on how well you know me or not, you may find the activity as surprising as I do, though I seem to be a minority in that regard. Everyone else congratulates me. I remark on how different this part of my identity seems compared to the younger me who protested America's involvement in Central America, disrupted graduation to protest Apartheid, and knew friends who chose to be arrested at such protests.This episode recounts one of my first activities as an auxiliary. One month ago today I participated in uniform in the Sixth Precinct's September 11 memorial service. I didn't expect the experience to affect me as much as it did. It did, so I'm sharing it, along with how the activity emerged from living more sustainably, related to how living in unsustainable modernity inhibits introspection and reflection with constant distraction.

Jan is a listener of this podcast who contacted me about how it changed his life. He is listening to each episode, starting from the beginning. I invited him to be a guest and he accepted. We've also crossed paths through working with podcast guest Dave Gardner, and his work in Growthbusters and running for President of the United States.Jan is Dutch, living in Germany, so can't vote in the US, but acts on sustainability locally. He told me he found my podcast made him feel empowered to act in a world where most people seem resigned not to act.I invited him to share more and to experience the Spodek Method. Beyond recording this episode, he joined the sustainability leadership workshop.To other listeners: if you're interested in sharing, others can learn from you. I invite you to contact me. You don't have to be a guest, but you may like it. You can also connect with the rest of this growing community.

Toxic chemicals leach from food packaging into your food. Some of these chemicals disrupt your hormones. Some cause cancer. Some affect your children more. Some disperse into the environment and harm wildlife.For 300,000 years, humans lived without plastic. We created this system, maybe thinking only of the effects we wanted, imagining these toxic effects wouldn't happen. Maybe we didn't imagine they could happen. We don't have to create these materials or use them. We are creating more all the time. There's just so much oil, it's so cheap, and there's nothing stopping producers from creating and selling them. Nearly everyone agrees a role of government is to protect you from my taking or destroying your life, liberty, and property, yet businesses and government gain money and power from creating them.Jane's research and courses inform us of the dangers the producers don't want us to know about. In this episode, she shares how she discovered this problem, what she's doing about it, and details about the problems. She didn't originally intend to go in this direction, but chemicals from plastic were leaching into other experiments she was doing. The producer of the leaching materials didn't tell her. She had to do new research to find out, saw its seriousness, and kept going.It's scary to learn. Still, while I'd rather live in a world where we don't permit people to poison us and profit from it, as long as we do, I'd rather know than not know.The Food Packaging ForumTheir Crash Course in Food Contact Materials and HealthThe article she co-wrote published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology the day of this episode: Evidence for widespread human exposure to food contact chemicalsA CNN article on Jane's research that happened to come out the day before this episode: Toxic chemicals used in food preparation leach into human bodies, study finds

I started a new project volunteering in my community that is also a big life change I wouldn't believe I'm doing except that I am. In a sense I started the project over four years ago and it's only seeing the light of day now.Sorry I'm writing little about and the episode is long, but for now I wanted only those interested to learn in so you have to listen all the way through to hear the full scope and details.The episode I quoted in this one: 366: The Cops, Jocko Willink, and Joe RoganAnother episode I mentioned: 506: I lost $10 million on September 11, 2001. Here is what I learned from those who sacrificed and served.

Jack shares his love for nature and passion to care for it, how central it is to his life, how much of his time and focus he devotes to it. He shares his principles of individual choice over top-down regulation. He especially opposes government subsidy for squashing innovation, including industries he prefers, like nuclear. He's not anti-government.Listen to the episode for his views in more detail. He is as sincere as they come and has thought the issues through.I couldn't help wonder how many political conservatives and libertarians care deeply about the environment yet get called "not caring." If they care but approach it differently, if I said they didn't care, it would drop my credibility in their view.I valued this conversation for his sharing openly. I think we could use more like it. Plus we did the Spodek Method and can't wait to hear how his commitment goes. I predict it will affect his relationships. Heritage is influential. I wonder if it will affect politics.

Nick and I talk about freedom, liberty, personal action and, however paradoxical to most people, how important personal behavior is in changing systems. Then we talk about markets, regulation, and democracy and how they interact with community norms. Looking at the words markets, regulation, and democracy, they may look academic or abstract, but I think you'll find the conversation fun because it's personal. We don't talk theory. We're talking about how we live and work.A core of our conversation is where a society or state draws a line between things that benefit some people but hurt others. Some things may make messes but everyone agrees should be allowed, like exhaling or pooping. Others everyone agrees should be illegal, like putting poison in someone's food. But what about putting poison in the air in the process of doing something people like, like flying?We talked about free markets too.We also did the Spodek Method. Nick grew up near me, so his description of nature resonated more than most.Nick's profile at C3 Solutions

This episode follows up the last one, on how you can learn sustainability leadership through our workshops, so you can practice sustainability joyfully. You can teach others to, and teach others to teach others.If the process only led to a few people changing, or even many, it wouldn't be worth pursuing. Unlike almost any sustainability work, it can lead to global cultural change and a joyful, rewarding path to it. It doesn't require sacrifice or deprivation. It may look like it from our current culture, the culture that's lowering Earth's ability to sustain life, increasing isolation, and decreasing health, safety, and security globally, despite our reaching such pinnacles of scientific and technological achievement.Hear in this episode how we can change the world by having more fun.Then contact me to learn more and sign up. The next workshop begins September 10, 2024. You'll only wish you started earlier.The Sustainability Simplified Entrepreneurship StrategyContact me to learn more and sign up