EPISODE 23: Cutting Through the Noise On Climate: How to Do Something That Matters, Do It Consistently, and Then Move On with Your Life

07/24/20 • 46 min

“It’s impossible for everybody to have an off-the-grid, zero emission existence. We are all going to go about our lives and create emissions. What we say at Tradewater, what we encourage people to do is reduce what you can—by driving less, taking the train when you can, taking a train instead of flying—reduce where you can, and offset the rest.”

Gabe Plotkin is the Chief Operating Officer of Tradewater, a company that improves the environment and creates economic opportunity through the collection, control, and destruction of potent, high impact greenhouse gases.

Climate change is scary. The magnitude of the problem makes it hard for people to commit to direct action to solve it, hoping instead (reasonably but perhaps impractically) that government will do the work. The actions we as individuals do manage are spurred by sporadic panic: when there’s a catastrophic storm or forest fire, one jumps into doing this and that to reduce emissions. But after the adrenaline subsides, our attention is then caught by some other crisis and we neglect climate change.

This is entirely understandable and normal. But how do we counteract it? Just because something is a natural tendency doesn’t mean we should give into it. How can one replace inertia with calm, consistent, unstoppable action? This episode has a concise solution that includes the carbon offset credit, a tool that our guest, Gabe Plotkin, helps us come to grips with.

How to Find Out More About Tradewater & Carbon Offset Credits

More about carbon offset credits and why destroying the gases in refrigerants is critical to reaching drawdown—the time when the carbon load in the atmosphere levels off and begins to decline—can be found here.

To offset your household’s or your business’s greenhouse gas emissions, go here, to the Tradewatwer website. It takes only a few minutes. If you know yourself well and are pretty experienced in knowing that you get annoyed by too many options, don’t bother with the carbon calculator on the right hand side of the screen. Instead, use the left-hand side of the screen where you enter a straightforward dollar amount. The average household in America emits 20 tons of carbon a year, just go with that and pay $300. If you want to do more and can afford to offset both your home and someone else’s, enter $600. If you live in a small apartment in a large city, don’t own a car, and suspect you emit only half the greenhouse gases of the average household, enter $150. Or if you want to cover only one ton of emissions or maybe want to give that as a gift to someone, one ton is $15.

There are many websites from other reputable businesses like Tradewater that offer carbon offsets. But the point of this episode of our podcast was to reduce the volume of choices a person faces. Having an excessive number of options stands in the way of making a decisive, ethical action to make the world a better place. That’s why we recommend one specific website rather than saying something more general, like “shop around.”

HOW TO MAKE BIG CHANGES

Underneath the “reduce your emissions” mandate lie a series of essential soft skills. Without having the underlying abilities to make a significant change in behavior, someone typically starts off with enthusiasm and then trails off over time. It leaves a good-intentioned person feeling that they failed to follow through on something they genuinely care about.

The sources we recommend here help not just with reducing greenhouse gas emissions but with making any type of behavioral change. They explain why doing something small and repeating the action consistently is the most assured path to keeping the promises we make to ourselves. These books break down the science of how to adopt a new good habit or drop a poor one: “The Slight Edge” by Jeffrey Olsen; “Atomic Habits” by James Clear; and “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. Being able to follow through on something isn’t a personality trait; it’s a skill that can be taught, practiced and learned.

“It’s impossible for everybody to have an off-the-grid, zero emission existence. We are all going to go about our lives and create emissions. What we say at Tradewater, what we encourage people to do is reduce what you can—by driving less, taking the train when you can, taking a train instead of flying—reduce where you can, and offset the rest.”

How to Find Out More About Tradewater & Carbon Offset Credits

HOW TO MAKE BIG CHANGES

Previous Episode

Episode 22: The Grace of Going Unseen

“We live in a time and culture that value display and are largely indifferent to the virtues of passing unnoticed. It is time for all of us to reconsider the beauty, elegance and imagination that can come with being unseen.”

Akiko Busch, author of several essay collections, is on the faculty of the MA Design Research program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is a visiting faculty member at Bennington College. .

Akiko Busch is well-known for her writing on design and culture. Her essays continue to touch on those subjects although increasingly, it incorporates—or directly addresses—the natural world. Her books include The Incidental Steward, where she tries out and writes about various citizen science opportunities: pulling invasive weeds, helping gather data for research, and conducting ecological monitoring; and Nine Ways to Cross a River, where she attempted to swim across (and observe and meditate upon) nine wild American rivers.

For twenty years, Akiko was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine where she wrote about furniture, houses, and home design. “For me, writing about design was always about writing about a sense of fit,” she says. “How a spoon fits the hand. How a human body fits a chair. Or how a house fits a landscape, and how human beings can find a sense of fit with the natural world.”

How to Find Out More About Akiko’s Work

The best way to learn more about Akiko is to buy and read her wonderful books. The one that inspired this episode of The Shape of the World was How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency. Get her books from your local bookseller or you can purchase them online from The Shape of the World’s favorite bookstore.

You can find Akiko’s work in many other places, too. Read her New York Times essay on invisibility and her New York Times essay on the joys and lessons of swimming in wild rivers. (“Just Beneath The Surface”) In addition to invisibility, we spoke about water during the interview and in the future, will incorporate some of that content into another episode. So look for that!

Something Cool from Akiko’s Book

In How to Disappear, Akiko discusses Invisible Mending, a short film made by the South African artist, William Kentridge. You can watch it here in its two-minute entirety—go ahead and click the link, it’s worth it. Akiko’s book is full of gems: artists to look at, authors to read, and other bits of culture to explore, pursue and marvel over.

Correction

In this episode, Jill mentions that certain types of baby birds disguise their scent when predators are nearby. What she was thinking about was something she learned from David Sibley’s book, What It’s Like to Be a Bird. But she misspoke; it’s the adult birds, not the babies. During his interview with The Shape of the World in April, 2020, David Sibley said, “I was stunned to learn that ground-nesting birds become odorless when sitting on their nest. The chemical composition of the oil that they use to preen their feathers changes. It becomes a compound that is odorless. So while the adult bird is sitting on the ground incubating eggs, the nest is camouflaged by an absence of odor.”

A Note On How This Podcast was Recorded

While recording this interview, both Jill and Akiko were sheltering in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic. While it’s not uncommon for podcasts and radio programs to have speakers in two different locations, the current situation is different. Instead of being in separate studios with good equipment, both host and guest record in their homes on laptop computers. Ralph Loza, the show’s audio producer, listens on Skype and helps troubleshoot problems.

You may have noticed on shows besides ours—including even huge commercial talk shows on television—that the sound quality is iffy these days. We just wanted to let you know why and how we’re adapting. We sacrifice perfect sound quality to preserve the health of the host, the guest, and everyone we might come in contact with if we were to record in a studio. Some episodes this season (the ones that sound better!) were recorded before sheltering started.

Photos from Iceland, which the 10^th chapter of Akiko’s book on invisibility discusses. “The Icelandic people live with an invisible population called the Huldufolk, remnants of Celtic mythology perhaps, but still very much present in the country’s cultural imagination. So the little cabin in the crease of...

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Episode 24: Humans Need Nature

“I’ve always thought about not only humans but also the other living things around us as part of our realm, one that we can work with and relate to... Many animals live in social societies, and I believe that we are driven by social relationships. We are animals, and we need to better understand our co-inhabitants on the planet.”

Jeanne Gang is an architect and the founder of Studio Gang, an architectural design firm located in Chicago, Paris, San Francisco and New York.

Jeanne Gang has an explicit intention to make the human built environment as kind as possible for birds, nature, wildlife and the Earth’s atmosphere. Jeanne’s breakthrough moment was the design of Aqua, a residential tower in Chicago. Opened in 2009, Aqua was the tallest building ever designed anywhere in the world by a female architect. Jeanne conducted personal research and analysis to invent design features that would make Aqua less likely to be a building where birds strike the glass and perish.

International design awards and prestigious commissions piled up for Studio Gang after Aqua. In June of 2020, Phaidon press issued a new monograph on Studio Gang. The high profile Gilder Center, a new wing on the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is currently under construction. This fall, the first residents of Vista Tower—a new hotel and condominium building taller even than Aqua—will move into new homes in the bird-friendly building.

What Jeanne Has to Say About How Her Practice Works

“I’m an architect, but the way that I see our practice working is similar to and parallel to the way an ecologist would work. We’re studying the relationships between living things and between us and our habitat, our planet, our cities. It’s about studying relationships and not the individual elements themselves... what we try to do is to design so that we facilitate better relationships, improve our relationships, between each other and the environment.” (Excerpt from podcast)

How to Find Out More About Jeanne’s Work

Visit her buildings, either virtually or in person. For more on the principles and insights that inspire her, watch these extraordinary short videos: Toward Terrestrial, Rhythm, and Flow. And check out the work of the French philosopher Jeanne mentions in the podcast, Bruno Latour.

You can also buy and read the Phaidon book on Studio Gang’s work from Seminary Coop Books (or your own local bookstore) and watch this video about it. Or watch her Ted Talk, “Buildings That Blend Nature and City”. Jeanne and Studio Gang have authored two books you can order from your local book store: Reveal (2011) and Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago’s Waterways (2011), the latter of which explored the possible reversal of the flow of the Chicago River, returning it to its original path.

And if, sadly, you live oceans away from any city where Jeanne has buildings, book a ticket to fly through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago five years from now. The design team led by Studio Gang was selected to design the airport’s new international terminal.

How Can I Help Make the Built Environment Better for Nature, Too?

If you live in Chicago, ask your alderman and the Mayor to support the Chicago Bird Friendly Design Ordinance. Chicago is a major fly-through-and-rest-awhile zone for migrating birds in both spring and fall. For thousands of years, birds have taken this same journey—but now big tall buildings sticking up in the sky cause the birds to sometimes smack into them. In the past, this was no one’s fault exactly—no one intended to put something up that killed birds. As Jeanne Gang has proven, if architects avail themselves of the knowledge that is out there on why birds collide with buildings, steps can be taken in the design stage that will prevent it from happening.

This type of thing may sound small but it’s not. In the podcast, Jeanne Gang talks about why having citywide regulation is so important. Find out what’s going on in your own city—and if the answer is no...