May 10, 2020

As we continue heading toward planetary disaster, like the Titanic steaming toward its rendezvous with a big freakin’ iceberg, we might want to figure out how to prepare and manage our lifeboats. In environmentalism’s seedy past, a famous ecologist used the metaphor of lifeboats getting swamped to argue for a “screw the poor and non-whites” strategy to deal with the limits to growth. In search of better ideas and better leadership, Asher, Rob, and Jason discuss how we can reinvent lifeboat ethics and find prosocial ways to manage humanity’s shared crises. Bonus: find out what to do if you should find that the soles of your feet have fallen off.

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Show Notes

• The “door” scene after the Titanic sank
• The Mythbusters team asks whether there was enough room for Jack on the floating debris?
• Garrett Hardin’s article “Lifeboat Ethics”
• Eileen Crist’s excellent article “Decoupling the Global Population Problem from Immigration Issues”
• The leadership genius of Ernest Shackleton
• Nancy Koehn’s 2017 book about leadership, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times
• Book that details the misadventures of Douglas Mawson: Mawson’s Will: The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written