The David Goggins Approach to Radical Sustainability
We need to adopt the same principles he swears by to change our lifestyles to ones of radical sustainability.
The solutions are there, but we have to make some David-Goggins-esque decisions to get us there. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the YouTuber, David Goggins is a former Navy SEAL turned badass ultra-marathoner/motivational speaker.
He emphasizes pain and gain and swears a lot. To enact real global change, what we need is a David Goggins attitude towards sustainability and lifestyle choices ~ maybe without all the cursing. Our attitudes need as much “recycling” as our junk … which brings us to plastic.
In Chicago, nearly 90 percent of all recycling bins are diverted to garbage dumps. A cynic might see plastic and paperboard recycling as a band-aid. Reduce and Reuse are the actual solutions.
The cynic might be right. For those of you who have followed my writing, you’re familiar with my refrain of personal growth in the direction of sustainable lifestyles being the path to a positive future.
As part of my own journey down that path, I have worked hard at not “focusing on the negative,” and being more “solutions-focused.”
Here’s a solution: in 2011 Portland began providing weekly compost pick-up for all food scraps and yard waste. But most major U.S. cities are still treading water with recycling.
Globally speaking, China’s “National Sword” policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, resulting in plastic imports down 99 percent, paper down a third. The policy put the Australian recycling industry in the dumpster (no pun intended) and many communities in America started curbing their programs as well.
Focus on the solution, not the problem, I keep reminding myself. Recycling may well be a band-aid, and with China tearing it off, people of Earth have a choice: consume less.
That’s a major solution ~ perhaps the major solution. We just have to engage with it. We have to change our behavior and apply the same principles that David Goggins swears by that allowed him to drop 106 lbs in 3 months to become a Navy SEAL). Watch his motivational interview here.
Can we drastically change our lifestyles to ones of radical sustainability?
