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 give a thorough answer to. We do need "systems change," but the truth is that all systems are made up of individual people who are allowed individual freedoms. The two cannot be separated.

In this episode, I talk through 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), governments to bring in policy (like a carbon tax), and the physical infrastructure to be made available (like bike paths and EV charging stations). I categorize scenarios into what I'm calling the "six buckets" that range in their government involvement to help clarify the various arrangements of government control and individual freedoms that come with environmental change.