Share

cover art for 739: John Brooke, part 1: Deep history and how our culture formed

This Sustainable Life

739: John Brooke, part 1: Deep history and how our culture formed

Ep. 739
•

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 to answer these questions. It's a book of deep history and environmental history---that is, going back hundreds of thousands and even millions of years, treating how environmental changes influenced human behavior.

John and I talk about the field of deep history, how we learn the incredible detailed and fascinating histories of how environments changed and people reacted over many time scales. I would find the scholarship fascinating on its own, and all the more because it's relevant to our environmental situation today. Changes that started twelve thousand years ago started patterns that persist today. In fact, some of them are the dominant factors in how we interact with the environment, in particular how dominance hierarchies formed, what patterns they set into our culture, and how they persist.

I hadn't heard of this field before his book. If you hadn't either, you'll love it.

(He also studies American history including slavery and abolitionism, another relevant part of history. We'll cover them in our next conversation.)


More episodes

View all episodes

  • 789. 789: Solomon Schmidt: Author of Legal Gladiator, on Alan Dershowitz

    53:40||Ep. 789
    As a podcast host, I get pitched a lot of authors, books, and more. Most aren't relevant or are counterproductive to sustainability. I received an email promoting the author of Legal Gladiator, a biography of Alan Dershowitz. I knew the name from the news, but didn't know more than the name, maybe a whiff of his being controversial.I looked up the book and author and found both fascinating. I scheduled talking to Solomon unrecorded to meet him and see if the connection would fit. I like bringing leaders from any field to sustainability since the field nearly completely lacks it. Solomon and Alan both seem like leaders, so I invited him.Quoting from the book's page:Praise for Solomon Schmidt:“You are a very talented young man with a bright future ahead of you.”—Pres. Donald Trump “An amazing young author.”—Mike Tyson “[You have] quite a remarkable record. [I’m] really impressed.”—Dr. Noam Chomsky “Solomon, thanks for all you do.”—Gov. Mike Huckabee “Solomon...is perhaps the youngest child historian in America.”—Steve Doocy“Solomon’s doing the hard work and getting after it.—Jocko Willink “[I have] admiration for all [Solomon is] doing to make this a better world—and a more educated world.”—Dame Jane Goodall"A reputable author."—Rep. Jamie RaskinWe talk mostly about Alan, though also about Solomon. We don't talk much about sustainability, though the leadership shines. I am confident you'll find this episode, Solomon, and Alan fascinating. I'd love your thoughts.

  • 788. 788: Susan Liebell: John Locke, Stewardship, and the US Constitution

    01:11:19||Ep. 788
    I quote Susan in my book, Sustainability Simplified. In it you'll see how much John Locke influenced my long-term vision for the US to understand and solve our environmental problems. Learning about the Thirteenth Amendment, which (mostly) banned slavery, and its improbable path to passage and ratification led me to think about solving our environmental problems similarly.I learned that many people working to abolish slavery worked hard when drafting the US Constitution to make it able to support abolitionism and to disallow property in man. Slaveholders opposed them, so they accepted compromises. Still, they put enough into the Constitution to enable weakening the institution enough to eventually end it. I wondered if sustainability might have similar precedent, like some law or phrasing of the Constitution that might have disallowed polluting or depleting.It turns out there was. It was in John Locke's Two Treatises on Government. The more I researched the man, his writings, and our Constitution, the more he seemed to apply to our environmental problems. That research led me to a paper by Susan Liebell, which I link to below.My conversation with Susan explore the application of his work and theories.Her paper that brought me to her: The Text and Context of "Enough and as Good": John Locke as the Foundation of an Environmental Liberalism

  • 787. 787: Travis Fisher, part 1: A nonpartisan, libertarian view on the environment from the Cato Institute

    46:26||Ep. 787
    I've been curious in what ways libertarian views on the environment and sustainability differ from conservative views. Travis worked at the Heritage Foundation, which is more conservative, and now works at the Cato Institute, which is more libertarian. Since I haven't spoken to many libertarians directly, I'm interested in this conversation to learn, so it's a conversation, not a debate.Early in our conversation, he describes some of their differences and similarities, and why he chose Cato. He shares some of his training and background that led him to his views.Then we talked about a few issues: the Inflation Reduction Act, regulation, how government funding of many programs results in industries growing without being profitable from its customers. We look at several moral hazards, including government gaining money and power from permitting polluting behavior and distributing funding evenly so everyone votes for something even if it doesn't help.We recorded just before the election so talked about recording again after the election to talk about how its results affect the political, energy, and pollution landscape.

  • 786. 786: Jan Mulder, part 2: The joy of finding and leading community

    31:32||Ep. 786
    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?

  • 785. 785: Josh Bandoch, part 1: Teaching persuasion and leadership

    01:20:20||Ep. 785
    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.

  • 784. 784: Serving in Uniform on September 11, 2024

    14:42||Ep. 784
    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.

  • 783. 783: Jan Mulder, part 1: Listening to every episode of this podcast, starting from episode 000

    01:11:03||Ep. 783
    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.

  • 782. 782: Jane Muncke PhD MSc: Toxins in your food from plastic packaging. You'd rather know.

    43:39||Ep. 782
    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

  • 781. 781: My New Major Life Volunteering Community Project, four years in the making

    44:33||Ep. 781
    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.