Adventures in Sustainable Living

In my opinion, one of the most significant social issues of our time is social media and the effects it has had on our culture and how it has fundamentally changed the fabric of our society. 

Social media came rolling into our lives and promised a new way to communicate, make new friends, promote your business, and keep in touch with family. But years into this social frenzy, experts are now discovering that this trend actually...

Sooner or later the circumstances of your every day life are going to force you to make a trade off. It is part of being an adult, managing your own life and taking responsibility for your choices. Some times those trade off are beneficial. At other times we look back and say to ourselves “I’ll never to that again.” 

Our modern lives are full of trade offs, many of which are the result of our choice of short-t...

Who cares about the price of tea in China? This is something my father said quite frequently. He used this whenever we were concerned or focused on something that had no bearing on what was actually going on in front of us. 

Yet with the advent of the internet and especially social media, we are constantly bombarded with news feeds, friends, messages, posts, and everything else that fragments our attention and distracts us from...

I am always astounded when one single event in our world has a profound impact on the entire global economy. It is now possible for one small disruption in one country on the other side of the planet to affect our daily lives. How can this possibly happen?

You may not realize that this is the direct result of globalization. Many of our goods and services are dependent on a long supply chain that we cannot understand much less contro...

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 269

A 12 Month Plan for Sovereign Living Part Two

Most certainly we have all at one point in time come to the realization that we were tired of someone else telling us what to do. We become weary of someone making decisions that affect our well-being when we have no say in the matter. No where does this come more to the forefront of our lives as when we are teenagers. 

We reach that...

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 268

A 12 Month Plan for Sovereign Living Part One

As you well know, independence, self sufficiency, and sustainable living are at the heart of much of my life.  I talk about it, write about it, podcast about it and live it everyday. But I also accept the fact that if everyone lived the way I do, our society and economy would simply not work. Furthermore I realize that how and where...

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 267

The 30 Day Stop the Consumption Challenge Part Two

In last week’s episode I laid the foundation of why and how we shifted to a consumer culture. Although this was a gradual shift, it was also highly planned and organized. The Industrial Revolution was only the beginning. For the first time in human history our societies were able to produce more than we needed to live day-to-d...

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 266

The 30 Day Stop the Consumption Challenge Part One

Most everyone alive today has either grown up in or been conditioned to a consumer culture. We constantly purchase more than we need which of course requires the on-going production of more products. This in turn requires the extraction and processing of more resources which results in an enormous detrimental impact on our environme...

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 265

12 Month Sustainability Action Plan

It is sometimes difficult for me to believe that I have been living at the cabin for 30 years. I often reflect on how I went about building this isolated homestead, how much work it was and just how long it took. But I also commonly think about what I would change if I had it to do over again. 

Most people would look at what I’ve done an...

Welcome back everyone to the Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast. This is your host Patrick and this is E264 which is part two of Food Waste: The World’s Most Solvable Environmental Problem. 

In the last episode we covered the first five out of ten reasons why the reduction of food waste has such a significant positive environment impact. 

Unlike so many other global problems, reducing our food waste is one of th...

If you spend enough time watching the news, then you already know that our world has a long list of problems. Many of these issues, especially the environmental ones, seem so far out of our reach that we doubt whether or not our personal efforts will ever make a difference.  

The good news is nothing could be further from the truth. There are a lot of things we do everyday that make a significant difference for a whole list of ...

One of the advantages of working in different cultures is that you gain a completely different perspective on life. You step outside of your daily routine, experience different values, eat different foods, and make new friends. But such experiences also help you to realize some of the pitfalls of your own society. 

One of my favorite places to live and work is the Caribbean. People seem much less stressed. They have a much slow...

Over the past couple of years, you have listened me talk about a wide variety of topics focusing on sustainable living. While researching these topics, I have repeatedly come across articles that would condemn us for destroying the planet with the end message focused on how we should change the way we live. 

What I have notice over that past couple of years is that trend of what sustainable living focuses on is starting to shif...

Very early in the production of this podcast I produced an episode on the greenest countries in the world, meaning those that are the most environmentally friendly. Countries that are on this list are evaluated by very specific metrics and it takes decades of change to end up on this list. 

What always astonishes me is that the countries that are at the top of the list are some of the smallest countries in the world. Those at t...

Humanity is now the dubious owner of a long laundry list of environment issues that we have to solve. Obviously  some are more pressing than others. Despite this, we tend to go about our daily business as if nothing is wrong. Why is that? 

Do you ever stop to ask yourself why nothing ever really gets done. 

On the other end of the spectrum, has there ever been a time when someone looked at you and commented about how l...

Over the last several hundred years there have been an increasing number of people moving to urban areas. But have you ever ask yourself if it is healthier to live in the city or in a rural area. Or is it more environmentally friendly to live in the city versus the country side. Which lifestyle has the least environmental impact?

There is no doubt that urbanization has reshaped our land, our lifestyles and our resources systems. But...

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 257

How to Solve Our Global Challenges in One Generation

Years ago I built this really nice storage shed at the cabin. It is where we store a lot of our extra dry goods and it also houses our chest freezer. But, despite the size of the shed, it is in a perpetual state of disarray.  I have this really bad habit of just closing the door and ignoring it. 

I sometimes think that ou...

Most of us love going to the beach. There is something soothing about listening to the sound of the waves, relaxing in the sun and then cooling off with a refreshing swim. If you enjoy snorkeling, that adds another layer of enjoyment. If you are a scuba diver like I am, that adds a completely different dimension to enjoying the ocean. 

But what most people do not realize is that the oceans are not just vast bodies of water. The...

One of the things that humanity does best is to go about our daily business despite warnings that we should change. The reason for this is that we are better at responding to emergencies than we are about planning for the future. As long as life seems good we just keep doing what we are doing and all warnings that we are headed for a cliff are just noise in the background. 

Climate change is a perfect example. The first seminal...