How to Save the World | The Psychology & Science of Environmental Behavior

Today's guest is Dan White. He is the CEO and Founder of the award-winning impact-games development company, Filament Games. Dan is an artist and entrepreneur and probably the world’s most prolific games-for-impact developer. We talk about the nuance of how to create a game that engages, educates, and transforms people and we explore what happens when we put art, action, and impact together into an educational game format.

Dan and his team at Filament have created nine games specifically about the environment:

This month's guest expert on the How to Save the World podcast is Nicole Sintov, Associate Professor of Behavior, Decision-Making, and Sustainability from Ohio State University.

We'll be interviewing Nicole on her published research paper, "Guilt consistently motivates pro-environmental outcomes while pride depends on context."

The gist of this research shows that telling people they are performing worse than most others on environmental and climate action, stimulates people to do better.

We'll dig into the question, "Should we be showering people with compliments and positive feedback about their good efforts, or are we better just telling people when they are doing a bad job?"

Not that we need to ONLY make people feel guilty, but negative feedback gets a bad wrap and tends to be avoided, but there’s definitely a strong role for it - and it needs to be a tool in the toolbox of change.

MeshMinds makes planet-themed augmented reality games designed to massively increase engagement and social media sharing of environmental campaigns.

Kay and Olivier and I met when we were working for UNEP on the Clean Seas campaign. They do some really interesting work using the software Spark AR (that’s only used for instagram and Facebook applications) to make these very novel, light, immersive, and fun experiences - kind of like a mini or micro game - that people access by pressing the star icon on Instagram.

And holey moley, the things they make really work! Their game-like creations on Instagram have gotten millions of plays, shares, and viral marketing spreading by mastering this novel approach to engagement.

In this episode, we'll be diving into various creative ways you can use Spark AR and some of the theory to getting your project to really work.

Today's guest is environmental psychologist, Veronica Champine, PhD Candidate and Graduate Research Assistant at Colorado State University.

We're breaking down the science of "social diffusion" in her research paper "Understanding individual and diffusion behaviors related to native plant gardening" recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Her research explores the difference between asking people to take individual action vs asking people to talk to people around them and showing by example - that's social diffusion - an often missing link in many climate programs and startups.

We'll be diving into the power and nuance of helping people to get better at diffusing environmental behaviors in their communities - and what we need to do to become designers of social diffusion.

We can get better at telling the story of sustainability, climate, and greener futures. I wrote down these 24 evocative words, backed by science to motivate people, and riffed on ideas of how you use each of them to tell better stories to get people to join your environmental project. We need to be able to inspire epic feelings in people. Here are some examples of how you can do it. 

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We need to avoid the trap of getting caught up in a single idea. Ideas are plentiful. When it comes to climate or social change, an idea is just a hypothesis. Will your idea actually create the change you think it will? You'll only know by testing it. 

In this episode, I talk about how you need to have lots of ideas and rapidly iterate them. You need to test them and discover the causal mechanism of what works on people. The faster you can test and iterate, the faster you can get to the mechanisms of what people love and why they change. Work on your vision of the future world and less on your "idea." 

You need to tell the world why your idea or mission matters – and not just in any way. You need to tell a story that deeply resonates so that people will fund you, work with you, and take action to support you. In this episode, I talk through the power of using The Hero's Journey template to tell your non-fiction story – and how discovering this twelve-step structure dramatically changed the course of not just my environmental work,  but my life, and how it might change yours, too.

People come to me with all sorts of elaborate ideas to "change the world," like games, festivals, art projects, films, and apps.

Often, these ideas have little connection to how the idea will make a real change happen on the ground once people have "experienced" the idea . . . (i.e. "I suppose we'll just put a link somewhere, then people will . . . ")

This entrepreneurship model is back-to-front. If you have an idea to make an impact, you need to forget your crazy idea and go straight to a real human being and get them to make the change you are hoping your idea will influence them to make. Talk to ten people on your street. Call every person you went to school with. Talk to your dad's golf buddies. Get them to do a real thing and observe what it takes.

I'm calling it the ACTION DESIGN THRESHOLD. Pass it before you write any code or spend any money - or before you even have an idea at all. Use Slack, Google lists, Zoom, Instagram, Canva, Figma, and Discord. Do it using your own email and your own phone number.

Just get a real human to do a real thing in the real world. You can do it with a conversation, a party, a poster, or a sticker. Create a 21-day challenge. Offer free consulting calls. Start a group. Just get out there and practice making change happen by talking to a human in real life.

Once you've succeeded in getting your first real human to do the action, then try and replicate it with two humans. Then try and get ten humans to do it.

What will it take to scale your actions from ten humans to 100 humans? Look for a pattern and an opportunity. What kind of actions do you need to design this scaling for? This is your idea that will work.

Any idea you have before you get ten real humans to change is probably a junk idea. At the least, it will need much pivoting. And if you can't get ten people to make a change from a conversation with you and any simple tools you give them, or you don't have the networking and marketing skills to find these ten humans, there's no way your idea will fly in a theoretical future when you have millions in funding.

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People often ask me why we should practice individual environmental behavior change when what we really need is "systems change." It's not an easy question to answer. We need "systems change" implemented by governments as policy (like plastic bans), economic levers (like a carbon tax), and physical infrastructure (like bike paths). Yet, all systems are made up of networks of individual people who influence systems and are allowed individual freedoms. The two cannot be separated.

In this episode, I talk about the social and political dynamics of government-enforced systems change. No two environmental scenarios are the same and each needs to be solved with a different approach to influencing individual people to take personal actions (like composting) and governments to bring in policy (like providing compost pick up). 

I see environmental psychology as a way to implement structural change across millions of people in a way that succeeds - because the solution is designed to harmonize with the human mind. In this way, systems change IS behavior change. 

I categorize scenarios into what I'm calling the "six buckets" that range in government involvement to help clarify the various arrangements of government control and individual freedoms that come with environmental change.

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Do you ever hear animals you never see? Secretive and rare animals, such as Eastern bristlebirds, can be most easily found by the sounds that they make. We can only do this, however, if we learn how to decipher their calls! 

In her PhD research, Jessie is exploring how to design future technologies that support people in becoming familiar with identifying bird calls from audio recordings. Birders and members of the public explored Jessie’s research prototypes, such as the Bristle Whistle Challenge. Conservationists and members of the public are likely to benefit from having enticing tools that include creative playful and task-oriented gameful interactions with bird calls. Such tools may support many people, whether learning calls for fun, or to support citizen science, ecology, or wildlife conservation efforts.

Jessie mentions these apps:

Fold IT - Protein folding game https://fold.it/

Zooniverse - https://www.zooniverse.org/

Rorshak ink blot test - http://rorschachinkblottest.com/

e-Bird app - https://ebird.org/about/ebird-mobile/

Frog ID - https://www.frogid.net.au/

I-Naturalist - https://www.inaturalist.org/

Otter-AI - https://otter.ai/

Cornel Lab of bird sounds - https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/

Xeno Canto bird sounds - https://xeno-canto.org/

Cat Tracker - https://cattracker.org/cat-tracker/

Does your website, pitch deck, and marketing material ACTUALLY explain what you do, clearly? Or is it a confusing word salad of environmental world-saving generalities? Remember this phrase: "If you confuse, you lose." In my experience, most climate and environmental projects struggle to simply explain what they do. In this episode, I explain how to write a "power sentence" in three easy steps so anyone can immediately "get it."

You need to follow the steps to write this power sentence because clarity is what creates the emotional connection with your audience. It's what will get people to fall in love with your project and want to sign up, donate, join, purchase, and share - because they instantly understand what it is. 

We'll also learn how to use the basic framework of The Hero's Journey to write a single paragraph that will hook people in to your story and tip and tricks on how to write better. 

Clear succinct copywriting is the secret to growing your movement. 

Imagine using augmented reality outdoors on a real city street to re-imagine the street and buildings around you covered in plants, trees, green walls, cars-free - or whatever your eco-future imagination can dream up.

Our guests today are Sebastian Schlecht and Robin Roemer. Sebastian is an architect from Germany who co-founded the Lala Ruhr project - an urban design lab that re-imagines cities with biophilic nature-based solutions. Robin is the co-founder of the software startup CityScaper which specializes in augmented reality and urban planning.

Sebastian and Robin got together and created this world-first AR project where people could hold up an iPad or iPhone and see a greenified ecotopia version of the street they were on - and they could even design their own.

This style of augmented reality is that it’s embedded into a streetscape’s geo coordinates - and that requires creating a 3D model of the street and geolocating the ecological design to fit with the exact location where the user is standing.

We’ll be taking a deep dive into the tech stack that includes Lidar, GIS, and Google AR Core, with Robin about 20 mins in.

Connect with Sebastian and Robin on LinkedIn: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-schlecht-fromgreytogreen/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-roemer/

The Lala Ruhr Lab https://www.lala.ruhr/en/start-en/

City Scaper https://ar-gument.de/

We talk with environmental psychologist Anaïs Voşki. She's a researcher at Stanford University studying the effect that seeing the Earth from space has on astronauts' climate change attitudes and their sustainable lifestyles back on Earth. Her recent published research paper is titled “The Ecological Significance of The Overview Effect: Environmental Attitudes and Behaviours in Astronauts.”

The Overview Effect is an experience whereby people, especially astronauts, increase their environmental concern when viewing the Earth as a singular object from space. The Overview Effect is credited with not only influencing astronauts directly but also as being a keystone moment in cultivating the modern environmental movement.

Before the first moon landing in 1969, no photograph of the Earth had existed. These first photographs of Earth, coined the "pale blue dot," are thought to have elicited a new kind of environmental connection that had not existed before. 

Anaïs and I talk about the deeper experience of ecological transcendence that is embodied in The Overview Effect and how it could be applied to the practical design of encouraging more climate action and sustainable behaviors in the wider public.

In this episode, Katie talks through the latest published research from The Journal of Environmental Psychology Issue 79. She explains the psychological concepts and behavioral science principles in the studies and shares her thoughts on how they can be practicably applied to real-life programs, startups, and campaigns. 

1:17 Self Contol Skills Are More Important to Eco-Behaviors Than How Much People Care About the Planet Paper: When and how pro-environmental attitudes turn into behavior: The role of costs, benefits, and self-control 

6:12 People Have No Idea of the Climate Impact of Various Behaviors And Meat is the Big Ticket CO2 Item Paper: Knowledge, perceived potential and trust as determinants of low- and high-impact pro-environmental behaviours 

12:48 You Need to Tell People "**Everyone Else Around You** Supports Renewable Energy Policy" Paper: Effects of perceived social norms on support for renewable energy transition: Moderation by national culture and environmental risks 

16:05 Practicing Gratitude for Nature Will Help You Do More Eco Behaviors Paper: Gratitude to nature: Presenting a theory of its conceptualization, measurement, and effects on pro-environmental behavior 

19:54 Imagining Yourself Being Old Makes People Take Better Care of the Planet Now Paper: Enhancing environmental resource sustainability by imagining oneself in the future 23:01 Making People Feel Proud AND/OR Making People Feel Guilty About Their Eco-Behaviors Works  Paper: Pride and guilt predict pro-environmental behavior: A meta-analysis of correlational and experimental evidence 

In this episode, Katie talks through the latest published research from The Journal of Environmental Psychology Issue 79. She explains the psychological concepts and behavioral science principles in the studies and shares her thoughts on how the findings can be practicably applied to real-life programs, startups, and campaigns. 

2:19: People Who Care About Other People, Also Care About the Planet Paper: Self-construals and environmental values in 55 cultures 

4:37: Do This To A Menu and All the Meat-Eaters Will Order Vegan Paper: Menu design approaches to promote sustainable vegetarian food choices when dining out 

8:26: When Packaging Design Cues An Environmental Action Paper: A meaningful reminder on sustainability: When explicit and implicit packaging cues meet 

10.09 Quirky Novel Actions LIke Using Soap Nuts Can Break Other Bad Eco-Habits Paper: Doing Laundry With Biodegradable Soap Nuts: Can Rare and Novel Habits Break Bad Habitual Patterns?  

15:26 Personal Experience of Climate Disaster Makes People Support Climate Change Mitigation Paper: Exploring how climate change subjective attribution, personal experience with extremes, concern, and subjective knowledge relate to pro-environmental attitudes and behavioral intentions in the United States 

18:18 Telling People It's Eco-Friendly Doesn't Really Work Paper: The Limited Impact of Positive Cueing on Pro-Environmental Choices 

20:46 Being Rich and Able to Consider Long Term Future Helps to Consider the Planet Socioeconomic status, time preferences and pro-environmentalism 

23:45 How To Stop People Flaking Out (Moral LIscencing) After They Do a Few Good Deeds Paper: Regulatory focus and self-licensing dynamics: A motivational account of behavioural consistency and balancing 

How to Save the World is a Podcast About the Psychology of What Gets People To Take On Sustainable Behavior and Climate Action. Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to get magnitudes more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product. Sign up for Katie's free behavior and gamification design course at katiepatrick.com 

Get a copy of How to Save the World on Amazon This podcast is supported by our friends at Earth Hacks who run environmental hackathons, Conservation X Labs who promote community-driven open tech development for conservation, and Climate Designers - a network of designers who use their creative skills for climate action. You might enjoy joining their communities and events.

This episode is about testing if putting people into groups and asking them to compete towards an environmental goal works to get the group members to increase their environmental behavior, compared to asking people as individuals can often fail to get people to take the action. Group competition (like we see in sport) is a powerful psychological mechanism that has been largely untapped by the sustainability profession and it could be harnessed to reach our climate goals. 

Our guest today is Assistant Professor Laila Nockur Ph.D. from Aarhus University in Denmark. She recently published a paper titled “Fostering Sustainable Behavior Through Group Competition.” She specializes in the study of the "social dilemma." It's a tricky incentive problem that plagues most environmental change missions. A social dilemma means that to do something for the greater good (which ultimately helps everyone), each individual person has to make a personal sacrifice. These problems all involve an "environmental commons" - a resource we all share like the air, climate, streets, oceans, and forests. Laila's research shows how we can override the vexing problem of the social dilemma by putting people into groups and asking groups to compete against one another to reach an environmental goal. 

You’ve probably heard people say that "You just need to make (an environmentally polluting thing) expensive." Monetary incentives DO work to motivate people, but how much and for how long? And are there other more effective ways to change behavior than literally paying people to go green?

In this episode, I speak with professor Florian Kaiser. He’s a former Co-Chief-Editor Journal of Environmental Psychology; Professor of Personality and Social Psychology; Otto-von-Guericke University; in Germany and he’s published many many papers on how environmental attitude influences behavior (which aren’t always the same thing) and some of the less obvious difficulties in getting financial incentives work to drive pro-environmental behavior.

Professor Kaiser explains the deeper nuances of how attitude drives behavior from his research into The Campbell Effect. We explore why the value-action gap can be untrue, and how sustainability program designers can't isolate a single behavior out of the context of a person's wider environmental value system. Behavioral nudges, gamification, and incentives work, but they work best on people with high environmental attitudes - and with an environmentally attuned audience, the behaviors will stick long term. His insights illustrate that we can't short-change the development of a person's deeper environmental attitude and jump straight to simple behavioral incentives if we want to achieve deep and permanent social change. 

Professor Kaiser's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/fgkaiser/

Professor Kaiser's Published Research https://www.ipsy.ovgu.de/ipsy/en/fgk-path-980,1404,31,196-p-210.html

Jan's research papers here:

Are you getting sick of messages of climate doom and dystopia? There’s another way to talk about the future.

In this episode, I'm chatting with Professor Joshua D. Wright on his fascinating research into the power of the “environmental imagination” and how it drives both practical behavior change as well as political action. It’s about communicating “solutions” instead of “problems” – and it makes a dramatic difference to how people respond to the information, form groups, and lead movements. The effect of thinking of an alternative world is more subtle and nuanced than it seems.

I think this might be the first research investigating the effect that looking at, and thinking about, ecotopian futures has on our pro-environmental behavior. I have a hunch that this research might be part of a growing zeitgeist of people moving out of overwhelm and into empowerment and agency over the future of our planet.

Find his paper here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494420306885

What is environmental leadership? Everyone who is trying to improve the world needs to activate people to do things they have not done before – and every time you are trying to persuade people (especially many people) you are practicing the art of environmental leadership. In this episode, I go through 14 specific things you need to do in order to activate a group of people to make change happen. These techniques are based on the social science of group dynamic theory, social network analysis, social imitation, tipping points, behavioral science, and good ol' human bonding. 

There are many climate and sustainability-themed groups that meet regularly to learn, talk, and network. These groups are nice, but this style of group fails at implementing the core principles that can make a group a powerful force for change. 

You've probably heard that famous quote by Margaret Mead, "Never think that a small group of people can't change the world. It is in fact, the only thing that ever has." By implementing the 14 techniques in this podcast, you'll be able to step up as an environmental leader of a group (even if it's just a group of a few friends), activate other humans around you, and have the kind of influence in the world you want to have. You might be surprised at how quickly it works!

I may host an environmental leadership workshop sometime soon. Send me a DM or email at kp@helloworlde.com if you like the sound of it! 

In order to build a new world, we must first imagine what it will be. In the episode, I created a guided meditation you can use to enter a deep state of relaxation which allows you to experience different brain frequencies that bring out new creative ideas, visions, and inspiration that isn't possible while using your regular "busy" executive functioning style of thinking. Take a quiet 35 minutes of uninterrupted time to listen to this meditation. The meditation will take you through a body scan followed by a guided story that will help unlock your creative energy and shine a light on how you'll use it to transform the world. 

In this episode, we're chatting with Professor Jaap Ham. He's a leading cognitive scientist who researches how people respond to seeing their electricity use displayed with colored lights that glow red if you used too much electricity, or green if you are saving energy (also known as "persuasive technology" or "ambient signaling").

His research has shown that colored light is one of the most effective ways to influence people to change their behavior: red=bad, yellow=ok, green=good. Then why aren't we using colored light as a design tool to encourage more pro-environmental behavior? The evidence suggests that we should be. 

Professor Ham also studies how robotic cats help people to change their energy consumption. The toy cat smiles when you use less, and frowns when you use more – evidence shows it’s a surprisingly powerful way to change behavior.

In this episode, I talk about an important initiative by a group called Green Roofs for Healthy Cities to create a $500 million dollar fund that will be used to build and maintain new green roofs for schools across America. This bill will create thousands of green jobs, introduce thousands of children to eco-building design, and have big environmental results for energy efficiency in schools.  

If we want to see biophilic eco-cities take hold, we all need to support initiatives like this that will help make hundreds of green roof projects happen. 

In this episode, we’re talking with Naomi Augustine-Yee about her recent work as Innovation Lead at Magic Leap. If you aren't familiar with Magic Leap, they make those headsets where you can see a visualization of augmented reality superimposed over the real world.

I think she has worked on one of THE most interesting “Fitbit for the Planet” styles of technology projects. She and her team created a real-time digital twin of the city of Los Angeles. That means anyone can put on a Magic Leap headset and “see” the entire city of LA, along with the real flows of data, as they are happing in real-time – like air pollution, traffic, kilowatt-hours, and water use – all as if you were looking at the city re-created on a boardroom table. 

We can also use AR to create an immersive experience of an alternative world. We can create AR experiences that visualize what a better eco-friendly futuristic world could look like in a way that is much more salient, inspiring, and impactful than a 2D picture or video might be.

Check out the blog article on my Medium page to see the pictures she’s created - they are quite wonderful.

In this episode, I sat down with Jesse Schell, author of the canonical game design textbook, The Art of Game Design, and asked him how he would go about saving the planet as a game designer. Jesse is a Distinguished Professor of Experience Design at Carnegie Mellon University and the CEO of Schell Games.

Think about these qualities :  peak motivation, obsessive focus, a drive to win, life-long mastery of a complex skill, desire for epic planetary-wide quests — it all sounds like a pretty good skill set to save our real planet, right? 

Manifesting these emotions listed above is the craft that game designers specialize in.  People who specialize in game design are a treasure-trove of design-thinking insight about how to get people into a state of obsessive flow, hack into human happiness, and pique the reward system of the brain.

Are the words ‘vegan’ and ‘vegetarian’ helpful or harmful to the quest to reduce society's ravenous meat consumption? Gregg Sparkman is a Ph.D. student in social psychology at Stanford University who specializes in the study of how to get people to eat less meat. In this interview, he takes us through the many fascinating (and often counter-intuitive) dynamics of what it takes to get people to measurably reduce their meat intake - and it’s not what you think. We talk about social norms in messaging and in particular his specific field of ‘dynamic norms’ where he proved that simply changing a few words in a message has the proven capacity to double the number of vegan meal choices. This episode is a rare gem and an absolute must for anyone trying to influence ethical, plant-based, or sustainable eating habits. Gregg explains many crucial psychological concepts often left out of the vegan and vegetarian movement’s attempts to change the world.  Contact Gregg Sparkman Gregg Sparkman {at} gmail.com if you're interested in more behavioral science on getting people to eat less meat.  

In this episode of the How to Save the World podcast, I talk with Dan Stokols, Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus at the University of California Irvine.  Dan has recently published a book, Social Ecology in the Digital Age, and he talks to us about what the field of *social ecology* is all about. In a world that often compartmentalizes issues into bite-size boxes, Dan illustrates the importance of taking a “systems thinking” view – and urges us to look more deeply at the interdependence of the many systems around us and how the very small, such as a piece of litter, is governed by a larger system of forces. Dan explores the need to look at the human behavioral dimension of environmental issues to truly understand how to solve the planetary challenges we’re facing in the 21st Century. 

You can easily see the number of calories in your peanut butter and your car’s safety rating. But this publicly available data comes from hard-won battles - and the numbers behind many of our most crucial issues in healthcare, environment, and finance are either under lock and key -  or they are simply not even measured. In this month’s podcast episode I interview Harvard University Professor Archon Fung Ph.D. about what happens when we turn important data that is often hidden and contentious into a publicly available resource for the world to see. 

This episode is the recording of a talk I put together about my thoughts and theories about why creativity is the missing link in saving the world. This talk covers the technical creative process, the positive constrictive imagination, the neuroscience of optimism and creative productivity, and most of all, it makes a powerful and scientifically robust argument why we need a positive vision of a future world in order to solve the world’s biggest problems. 

Planet Labs has launched nearly 200 very small satellites in the atmosphere that take high-resolution images of the earth just about every single day. Today’s guest Joseph Mascaro is a Ph.D. tropical ecologist. He is the Director of Academic Programs at Planet Labs and has the fascinating role of helping conservation groups and academics use these spectacular images of the earth for good. We talk about how fast-paced agile technology development can be used to support environmental protection, how images help us emotionally connect with issues in a way that plain data tend not, and how (counter to popular environmental belief), going to Mars is essential to protect life on earth. Don’t miss out on this fabulous episode!

If you are a conservation organization wanting more information on forest cover, ice-cover, fires, or anything you can see from the air, check out planet.com

This understanding lead me to coin the term, the “two lenses” approach to social change.

The two lenses approach means,

1) Your problem needs to be understood through the lens of measurement or data.

and

2) Your solution needs to be understood through the lens of behavioral psychology.

It’s easy to talk about saving water, but how do you *actually* get people to make real water reductions that you can measure? Environmentally friendly actions are known by psychologists as one of the most difficult things we try and get people to do. A new technology company called WaterSmart has been developing an app that shows you how much water you use compared to your neighbors – and it works. We talk about the technology behind modern water smart meters, what it takes to design for behavior change, and how the water industry’s new immersion in big data is changing how we get people to change for the better. 

What can Russian dolls possibly have to do with changing the world?

It’s a metaphor that I borrowed from a book called “The Big Leap” by PhD psychologist Gay Hendricks. He used the metaphor of “Russian dolls” to describe the process of digging deeper into oneself, and into the subliminal drivers that guide the real reasons we do things. A bit like the process of asking “Why . . . why . . . why?” To peel away the layers of the onion of our life decisions, or to open up the Russian dolls of our inner selves to find the little one that sits in the very core.

Hendrick’s metaphor for digging deeper into the self seemed to also fit beautifully for digging into our strategy for how we change the world.

I started to explain gamification as a kind of “motivational wrapping” we can apply to human behavior. 

In this video, I interview Xiaojing April Xu Ph.D. about what it takes to motivate people to do eco-friendly things. It turns out that it’s often not what you think it is. We talk about interesting phenomena like the Value-Action-Gap, The Crowd-Out Effect, and whether financial or environmental information is more motivating to get people to change. Xiaojing April Xu conducts post-doc research in the behavioral science of energy efficiency at The University of Tennessee.

Have you ever felt like you had a special kind of skill, or a calling, or some bigger reason for existing on the planet? Have you felt like there is more to life than just working a regular nine-to-five job? Or being a struggling activist working for a pitifully low salary in a sweet but ineffectual non-profit?

Do you get that weird feeling that “there’s gotta be more to life than this?”

I’ve had this feeling forever. I think you probably have it too.

I believe this feeling is a calling that is telling you that you are not operating from your creative genius zone and that you really need to be.

From my book, How to Save the World, pg 41.

Did you know that heatwaves kill more people than all the other weather-caused fatalities (like from cyclones, floods etc) put together? Cities around the world are getting baking hot. Extreme heat gets a lot worse when you live in the city, because of all the concrete and asphalt and it’s called an Urban Heat Island. In this episode, I speak with the very fun and enthusiastic Jeremy Hoffman Ph.D. from the Science Museum of Virginia about a study he conducted that involved getting volunteer drivers and cyclists to ride around the city in Summer wearing a thermometer. What he got was a map of Virginia’s urban heat island. We talk about the frightening dangers of urban heat islands, but also the exciting opportunity we have to use heat data to catalyze a massive revolution in urban greening. The cities of the future are ours to invent. We can all get to work to plant more urban trees, install more green roofs, and turn old car parks into gardens, and really change the world with easy practical contributions to the built environment. 

Where does all your trash really go after you throw it away? Dietmar worked on the MIT Trash Track Project where they attached GPS sensors to hundreds of pieces of garbage and followed it around the country. We talk about the good and bad side of smart cities, the growing trends around data in urban legibility and we explore some significant flaws in the recycling industry for solving the waste problem. 

I got this sense a few years ago, that if people could see the numbers that made up their environmental footprint (such as the litres of water they used in a shower or the number trees felled to make their toilet paper) in an immediate and easy-to-understand way, then this data must, absolutely must, cause the person to use less resources, right?

I had such a strong hunch about this connection that it has obsessed me ever since.

This episode is about why the public disclosure of data matters and how it enables change. 

Why do some people seem to consider environmental issues deeply, while others glance over our greatest earthly challenges and seem to hardly care? Our capacity for a “systems thinking” mindset can help tell us to answer why. Today’s guest, research psychologist and geographer Stephan Lezak, conducted a study that measured people’s tendency towards systems thinking and how this correlated to their environmental values. He found that people who rank higher as systems thinkers substantially consider environmental issues to be more important. In this fascinating conversation, we discuss what it takes to see the grey areas and the vast interconnectedness in a complicated world, the mistakes we make in our reasoning, and how we can build a new generation of systems thinkers in schools and universities today.

In this video I talk with Kimberly Hunter, the VP of Communications at one of the Bay Area’s most interesting new environmental data companies. Aclima is the first company in the world to map out air quality by specific address by attaching air sensors to the Google cars that take images for Google Street View. We discuss the fascinating evolution of electronic sensors that are now starting to cover the world that are telling us information that we never had before. This detailed environmental data is opening up a huge change in the way governments and individuals make decisions and could even lead to a future world where sustainability is fully automated.

Here’s the problem: Many people start projects without understanding much about what it is they are trying to change in the world. I mean, they don’t look into the data about their problem.

You may have heard the saying,

“If you can’t measure it, it probably doesn’t exist.”

That’s well and good for scientists, but what does this mean for social-change entrepreneurs, world changers, and designers? Or creative people in general? The brutally honest truth is: if we can’t measure the impact we are having on the world, we probably aren’t having any at all.

Let this sink in for a moment:

Despite your best intentions, you may very well not be making any meaningful impact on the world.