Tag Archives: environment

Episode 56 Beth Rattner

For much of our history, we’ve struggled against nature, even working to tame it as we built civilizations. However, the field of Biomimicry turns the issue around 180 degrees and shows us how to learn from nature as our best teacher. If we study nature and begin to embody its design laws into our creations, we can live in greater harmony and life flourish.

Human systems design has been flawed for more than a century, and none greater than after the industrial revolution. We’ve created enormous pollution, waste, and harmful toxins. As a result, the health of the planet and all of us is suffering and our future sustainability questionable.

In this week’s Regen360 iTunes podcast we learn from Beth Rattner, Executive Director of the Biomimicry Institute, which was founded by Janine Benyus and Bryony Schwan in 2006. The Institute is helping us learn from nature through its programs and tools including ASKNature.

Our future resiliency requires a nature-based design approach to everything we do. I hope you’ll join us to learn more. We need to “view nature not as a warehouse of goods, but as a storehouse of knowledge and inspiration for sustainable solutions.”

David Gottfried

From Hulk to Activist – Mark Ruffalo

To create a healthier, sustainable future individuals must awaken and embody their beliefs by their everyday choices. It also requires the work of visionaries and activists, like Mark Ruffalo, who use their voices and activism to manifest change and inspire others to answer their own inner-call.

Mark’s story is BIG and STRONG. You may know Mark Ruffalo best as “Hulk” in the movie Avengers I & II, in addition to other leading roles (The Kids are Alright is my favorite). While I love his films, I’m most impressed with how Mark has used Hollywood acclaim as a foundation from which to make the world a better place. In addition to acting and filmmaking – Mark’s a powerful humanitarian, environmentalist and Activist!

I met him years ago through his work trying to green New York by leading the fight against fracking and then his work with the Solutions Project inspired by Stanford, my alma mater, where I got the green bug.

I was excited to interview Mark Ruffalo for my first Regen360 podcast to learn more about him and his realistic plans for making the change to green energy using the technology we have right now and not toxic to our aquifers and health.

You can listen to my full interview with Mark on REGEN360 Podcast Episode 1. Below are some of the highlights.

Mark’s Hears the Call Early

As a boy in 1970s Kenosha, Wisconsin, Mark had a passionate love of nature.

At the time, me and my friends formed a little group called, “The Foresters”…our dream was to…protect the forests. This power plant was [in Kenosha] and I started to notice…how it degraded the vibrancy of the life there. I think that was probably where my environmentalism started.

Mark’s grandmother lived on Lake Michigan, and during visits, he noticed fish and lakeside wildlife had growths and sores that weren’t natural. The more he paid attention he realized environmental pollution was destroying life as we know it.

You Can Effect Change

Through his early participation in movements to reduce pollution, change emissions policies for coal power plants, and clean up Lake Michigan, Mark was struck by the reality, “you could effect change…you could be a steward of your environment…there were things that could be done – and we did a lot.” The Lake Michigan’s clean water and the disappearance of cancer-ridden fish and dead birds were evidence of this.

Eventually, Mark moved his family to New York, had a successful acting career and decided it was time to put his social conscience to work making a difference in the global community.

I had three kids; it wasn’t just me and my wife anymore…and I don’t like the future that’s being promised to us today by continued fossil fuel usage and our mass consumption…I want to change that.

The Solutions Project is a Powerful Movement for Change

The Solutions Project is exactly that – a platform for creating plan-based solutions for the entire US. Their plans for all 50 states include:

  • Take each state to 100% renewable energy by 2050, based on the technology available today.
  • Creating millions of jobs
  • Saving 250,000 lives per year by reducing fossil fuel pollution-related deaths.
  • Saving the country millions (potentially trillions) in healthcare costs by mitigating pollution.

One of the organization’s goals is to create viable plans that acknowledge not everyone is a “tree-hugger,” meaning global solutions need to make good business sense.

Walmart doesn’t put solar on all their stores because they’re tree-huggers. They [do it] because it stabilizes their costs for long-term energy – and that’s good business.

Mark learned this lesson in the midst of the hydro-fracking fight. He realized a significant percentage of the population doesn’t want to sacrifice anything to change the lives they’re living now. Thus, environmental arguments and solutions must be universally viable. This led him to partner up with VP of Tesla, Marco Krapels, Stanford expert, Mark Jacobsen and other visionaries – eventually founding Solutions Project.

True Change Requires Concrete Plans – Not Theories

Mark points out we need a second industrial revolution to clean up the mess of the first, and the unbelievable reality that in the decades of theorizing and talking about it – nobody has broken out with a realistic, do-able, real-life plan – until now.

We can…theorize…all day long…it’s a topic of conversation. But once you have a plan backed by some entity or university, like Stanford, now you have a deep science to…create a debate that has credibility...it actually shows you how you can do it.

With their plan, you don’t bring on new fossil-fuel technologies when the old ones become obsolete – you replace obsolete fossil-fuel technology with green technology.

It’s very gentle, it’s very elegant…it’s not asking anyone to give up anything…just to begin using what’s available.

This can all be done with wind, water and sun – and each state uses its own resource to make the plan a reality. There’s absolutely zero need for fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Best of all, this is all available to us today.

Replace Doom & Gloom with Abundance

I love how Mark wants to transform the doom and gloom approach the environmental movement is known for with a vision of the abundance waiting for us on the other side.

The bottom line is a future including fossil fuels is a brutal and ugly one – but switching to the green energy model right now immediately equals a positive future where many global health issues are obliterated,  Mother Nature is honored and protected, and humanity achieves liberation and abundance.

I’m grateful to the fossil fuel industry for giving us the 70-years that brought us through the…technological revolution. Now we can evolve…

What a treat it was to discuss these and other issues with Mark. It’s time for us to support the plans put forth by the Solutions Project for a completely practical – not to mention kinder and healthier – future.

Don’t forget to check out this (Episode #1) and other inspiring interviews with our world’s leading environmental visionaries at REGEN360’s Podcasts. Are you ready to let REGEN360 help your vision become part of a greener, more sustainable movement? Sign up for my priority waitlist to create your own legacy.

Episode 49 Dr. Jeff Bland

The world of medicine (and health) is undergoing a revolution. We’re moving from highly specialized towards a new holistic model that is more personalized. This monumental shift is grounded in starting with “root cause”, the logical place to understand the disease. And yet, we’ve moved away from this practicality in standard practice.

There’s a global movement underway in how we treat patients called functional medicine and now being adapted to ourselves in personalized lifestyle medicine. With technology giants like Apple and Google taking on health data collection and beaming it to the cloud, we now have the ability to become what Dr. Jeff Bland calls “citizen scientists”. The opportunities are unprecedented and exciting!

Join me in this week’s Regen360 iTunes podcast show where I interview Dr. Jeff Bland about the advent of function and personalized medicine. He’s the founder of the renowned Institute for Functional Medicine which is setting the professional standard for this new method of practicing medicine, and also bringing the discipline home into our personal lifestyles. Dr. Bland has written 11 books and over 120 scientific peer-reviewed research papers on nutritional medicine and the interface of genetics and environment. He’s been a professor and had the honor of mentoring with two-time Nobel Laureate, Dr. Linus Pauling.

Listen in to learn more about the future of medicine and health, and some organizational concepts for starting or boosting your own movement into your work. There are so many similarities between Dr. Bland’s work and the Institute for Functional Medicine and my work in green building with the USGBC and LEED. Both are movements for health: of people and the planet, and their interconnectedness, which is finally happening.

To understanding that health is personalized, and begins with our lifestyle.

David

Episode 17 Jean Rogers

Today, more than ever we need to build and scale organizations to not only boost economics, but add in the other two tenets of what is known as the triple-bottom-line: economy, sustainability, and social equity.

If we are to save Earth and preserve life sustaining elements [air, water, soil, precious resources] capitalism must embrace these essentials in its calculation of profitability and net worth.

In order to make this happen, it’s imperative that the essence of making money and determination of value incorporates a triple-bottom-line calculation in determining the ultimate valuation of corporations.

Fortunately, global companies are waking up to embracing environmental and social equity practices [including health] into their business operations and reporting. Transparency is an essential operating principle for us to be able to evaluate organizational performance in these

For this week’s Regen360 iTunes podcast show I’m privileged to host an interview with Dr. Jean Rogers, the founder of the foremost non-profit establishing corporate financial accounting standards for sustainability. She’s a rare inspiration and brilliant in her vision and execution of the movement building organization she founded know as SASB.

I first met Jean when she was writing the green building standards for San Francisco’s LEED Platinum California Academy of Science, and then later on for Treasure Island.

In this interview, you’ll learn the details of “greening” corporations through the power of financial standards reporting, as well as many facets of creating a global movement. Get ready to be inspired…

-David

Learn more about Jean Rogers here!