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, 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 includeDan Pink, 40+ million Ted talk viewsMarshall Goldsmith, #1 ranked leadership guru and authorFrances Hesselbein, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, former CEO of the Girl ScoutsElizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize winning authorDavid Allen, author of Getting Things DoneKen Blanchard, author, The One Minute ManagerVincent Stanley, Director of PatagoniaDorie Clark, bestselling authorBryan Braman, Super Bowl champion Philadelphia EagleJohn Lee Dumas, top entrepreneurial podcasterAlisa Cohn, top 100 speaker and coachDavid Biello, Science curator for TED.Read more »
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, 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 includeDan Pink, 40+ million Ted talk viewsMarshall Goldsmith, #1 ranked leadership guru and authorFrances Hesselbein, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, former CEO of the Girl ScoutsElizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize winning authorDavid Allen, author of Getting Things DoneKen Blanchard, author, The One Minute ManagerVincent Stanley, Director of PatagoniaDorie Clark, bestselling authorBryan Braman, Super Bowl champion Philadelphia EagleJohn Lee Dumas, top entrepreneurial podcasterAlisa Cohn, top 100 speaker and coachDavid Biello, Science curator for TED.Read Less
What is Earth's carrying capacity? Why is it important?
Many ask how we will feed 10 billion people. Mathematician way of asking is if we can feed so many and if so how. Maybe we can't.
First, don't want to know. While it depends on many assumptions that aren't hard or measurable numbers, like standard of living, distribution of resources, and technology, we can say it's maximum misery per person.
How do we narrow it down? Could ask resources per person and how much resources Earth can provide. Limits to Growth projects how much planet would sustain from a systems perspective including history and how we live our values.
I prefer a historical perspective I learned from Alan Weisman based on the Haber-Bosch process, which enabled artificial fertilizer. Before artificial fertilizer, limitations on fixing nitrogen to grow food suggest Earth could sustain about 2 billion, enough to create Einstein and Mozart. Want people like Jesus, Buddha, Laozi, and Aristotle? We needed only a few hundred million to create them.
If we're over the planet's carrying capacity, especially by factor of 3 or 4, strategy isn't to ask how to feed 10 billion but if we can lower the population before processes like famine, disease, loss of critical resources, war, and so on do it for us.
I couldn't answer except in ways where the cure was worse than the disease, but the history of Thailand's Mechai Viravaidya's leading a nation-scale cultural shift from 7 babies per woman to 1.5, voluntarily, peacefully, leading to abundance, prosperity, and stability changed everything for me.
Mechai's success makes lowering the population plausible and fun. The limitations of growing food without artificial fertilizer make it necessary to avoid famine and other natural disasters. These two factors clarify our priority, it seems to me.