We see greenwashing everywhere — from product labels to fossil fuel ads. But it goes even deeper than that. Greenwashing gets in the way of climate policy changes too!
On this episode of Second Nature, we’re hearing how our community dodges greenwashing, talking through 4 questions to ask yourself to see if a brand is greenwashing, and we’re talking to Dr. Mara Einstein about how greenwashing has evolved with the rise of social media.
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🚫 Check out the Dirty Money list.
📞 Want to submit your Community Classified? We'd love to hear from you!
🌎 Find further reading and citations in the full show notes.
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For the past three seasons of the Second Nature, hundreds of you have shared climate actions you take in our own homes — composting, avoiding overconsumption, eating less meat. These practices give us a strong foundation for what comes next.
This season, we’re focusing our energy outward and making our efforts bigger by proxy with the help of community. This first episode serves as a mission statement for our season of community and connection, and we are extremely honored to have our first guest of the season be the one and only Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
Be sure to listen to the end of the episode to hear our first-ever Community Classifieds — an audio bulletin board of community climate efforts to join around the world. Want to submit your Community Classified? We'd love to hear from you!
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading and citations in the full show notes.
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Season four is coming soon, and this season, we're thinking big. Like the ever-connected mycelium networks beneath the world's greatest forests, we're reaching out to one another and finding ways to sync up with community and make efforts bigger than ourselves.
This season, we're coming together to focus our we're efforts where we have the most collective impact — from boycotting greenwashing to building resilience in climate disaster. With perspectives of our worldwide community, top-of-their-field experts, and of course some history and data, we're going to make this a season to remember.
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We're one week out from a new season of Second Nature! Before our season 4 launch, we wanted to bring it back to one of the community's favorite episodes from last season: Why Don't We Fix Things Anymore?
Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence have us in a disposable consumption cycle. But it hasn't always been this way. When and why did we stop thinking things were worth fixing?
In this episode, we get a history lesson in planned obsolescence, visit Adrienne Ferre, who is helping run a Makers Hub in LA, complete with a tool library and repair cafes. And we catch up on Right to Repair legislation with Commons' founder and CEO Sanchali Seth Pal.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.
📞 We'd love to hear from you! Season 3 submissions coming soon!
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Season 4 is underway! We’re hard at work on the new season and we can’t wait to hear your contributions. For the best shot at getting on season 4, please send in your submissions before November. But feel free to continue submitting through November as well.
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-> Short Survey: Tell us what you think of Second Nature
Whether you're a parent, an auntie, a coach, a godfather — there's a lot to think about when it comes to raising a more sustainable generation. How can we raise young people to take better care of the planet than the generations before them?
For our last episode of season 3, we're looking into the future to see to see how younger generations are thinking about climate change. And from plant-based eating to civic engagement, we’re finding out how folks are raising kids to take action.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading an citations in the full show.
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🐣 Here's Sanchali's list of sustainable baby stuff!
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-> 🚨 Tell your U.S. reps not to cut federal funding for public libraries.
-> Short Survey: Tell us what you think of Second Nature
Libraries are icons of the sharing economy. When we borrow books, media, and tools from the library, we save ourselves from needing to buy new stuff. But did you know that libraries are also community hubs for climate resilience? From heatwaves to hurricanes, thousands of people have used libraries as free spaces to escape the elements and find respite.
In this community episode, we're everything that our listeners get from their local libraries.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes and citations.
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Microplastics seem to be everywhere, inside and outside our bodies. These micro and nano particles are shedding from our clothes, our tires, food packaging — basically anywhere there's plastic. People, animals, and plants are consuming these microplastics, thereby complicating the issue and contributing to health problems. But what health issues? And how do we avoid them?
The science is still a work in progress, but today, we're finding out what we know so far. We’re going to find out from an actual scientist what we know and don’t know about the health implications of microplastics and what we can do about it. And we’re going to try our best to find our way to a place of understanding without complete overwhelm.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes and citations. Here's the MPI paper Barbro shared!
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NOTE: An early version of this audio has an error around 4:50. If you hear that error, it's likely because your podcast player downloaded the first version. Please re-download the episode to hear the correct version! And forgive us, as we're merely human beans 🫘 .
Is climate news stressing you out? Same. We're experiencing funding cuts to environmental agencies, while climate disasters like heatwaves and storms persist, and wildlife and environmental protections are at risk. It's a tough time to be an environmentalist, and all this stress and sadness can lead to climate anxiety (aka eco-anxiety).
If you've felt anxious about the state of our climate, you're not alone. We thought it was a perfect time to bring back this episode from last season, where we hear from you our listeners, to hear various ways to cope with climate anxiety through nature, community, and gratitude.
If you're looking for more resources to help with climate anxiety, we highly recommend this list from the team at All We Can Save.
🌎 For photos of our contributors and further reading, check the full show notes.
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-> Stop State AI Regulation Ban in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act
When you ask ChatGPT to write a cover letter, make your grocery list, or edit an image, what's actually happening in the real world? As AI gets bigger by the day, it's requiring more and more energy, water, and land in communities around the world.
Tech companies are investing billions of dollars in data centers and technologies to power AI, but are they also investing in sustainable and equitable resources to keep it going?
Today, we’re going to take a step back from the chatbots to understand the true impact of AI, how we’re tracking and regulating that impact, and we’ll find out what it will take to build a sustainable future for AI.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.
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Farmers market season is upon us! As we've started seeing spring crops here at markets in the Northern Hemisphere, we're thinking about the power of locally grown food. As our food supply chains have gone global — we’ve gained more access to nutritious foods in areas where they may be hard to grow — but we’ve lost touch with seasonality and the source of our food. And we’ve lost touch with plenty of foods altogether.
Locally grown food not only gives us more nutrients, but done right, it can bring biodiversity to local land, build climate resilience, and even offer diversity and economic resilience in our communities.
Today we're reconnecting to local food through our global community, connecting the dots between food justice and equity,
and learning more about how our food system favors big agriculture.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.
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Microplastics are seemingly everywhere, even our clothes. From production through wash days, synthetic fabrics are shedding microplastics into the air and water. It's a big issue that's going to take shifts from manufacturing to our own homes, and we wanted to start tackling this big discussion with the help of our friends at the podcast, Conscious Chatter.
Earlier this year, host Kestrel Jenkins spoke with Dana Zhaxylykova. Dana is an environmental scientist and microplastics researcher, who's originally from Kazakhstan and currently based in Germany. She uses Instagram to share practical and actionable tips about microplastics through a scientific lens.
👖 Hear more from Kestrel and Conscious Chatter here.
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The climate crisis has a way of making hard things even harder — and that includes gender disparities. From their professional lives to their personal lives, climate change has left many women vastly under-resourced and at risk, all while taking on the heavy toll of caring for their families and communities through climate mitigation and resilience.
In this episode, we hear how the climate gender gap is affecting our community, talk to WOCAN founder Jeannette Gurung about how women continue to work through vast climate inequities around the world, and we hear from Commons' founder and CEO Sanchali Seth Pal about how health disparities women face as a result of climate disaster.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.
📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.
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Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence have us in a disposable consumption cycle. But it hasn't always been this way. When and why did we stop thinking things were worth fixing?
In this episode, we get a history lesson in planned obsolescence, visit Adrienne Ferre, who is helping run a Makers Hub in LA, complete with a tool library and repair cafes. And we catch up on Right to Repair legislation with Commons' founder and CEO Sanchali Seth Pal.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.
📞 We'd love to hear from you! Season 3 submissions coming soon!
📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.
📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.
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This episode originally aired on June 12, 2024.
Becoming more conscious consumers is a pivotal step in building a more sustainable economy, but how do we deconsume in a consumerist world? When we buy less, we save money, cut down on clutter, and lower our emissions. This collective shift has another big impact — helping us to steer the economy away from disposable products, unsustainable resource use, and dangerous supply chains.
On this episode of Second Nature, we hear listeners' take on overconsumption and their tips for deconsumption. We also chat with climate activist and educator Lauren Bash about Buy Nothing groups, Repair Cafes, and her own deconsumption journey. Plus, we find out who's doing all this overconsuming and the impact it's having on the rest of the world.
🌎 To see photos of our contributors as well as citations, and further reading, check the full show notes.
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A great way to cut down on overconsumption is to get a handle on what you’re consuming. If you want a sustainable spending buddy to help you track the emissions of every purchase and gives you personalized tips, try the Commons app.
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Often on urban lots, behind chain link fences, adorned with hand-painted signs, plots burgeoning with fruits, vegetables, and flowers, flanked by compost piles — the humble community garden feels like a salve for so much that ails us.
On this Community Voices episode, we're going from Los Angeles to Brazil to hear how community gardens have brought people much more than fresh fruits and vegetables. With food prices on the rise and so many of us losing touch with the abundance of our communities, we thought it’d be nice to hear how community gardens have helped you, our community.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.
📞 We'd love to hear from you! Season 3 submissions coming soon!
📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.
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The secondhand clothing market isn't equipped for textile recycling. So when your donated clothes don't sell, where do they end up?
With the rise of overconsumption and fast fashion, clothes have piled up in thrift stores, landfills, and incinerators around the world. Countries like Ghana and Chile are dealing with fashion waste from countries like the U.S., UK, and China, and the impacts are vast.
Mountains of clothes lead to fires, polluted waterways, dying ocean life, and lost livelihoods. So how do we stop the cycle? How can we donate with purpose and dignity, and get fashion brands to actually take accountability for the full lifecycle of their clothes?
Listen to hear what our community does with their used clothes, how a new law could force companies to clean up their act, and how Los Angeles's Suay Sew Shop is dealing with the untenable amount of clothing donations from wildfire relief.
➡️ If you want to support Suay Sew Shop, you can browse their site here and contribute to their Textiles Aren't Trash fire relief campaign. By the way, you can earn rewards for Suay purchases and donations in the Commons app!
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.
📞 We'd love to hear from you! Season 3 submissions coming soon!
📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.
📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.
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In a capitalist society, value is measured in dollars and cents. But the resources we take from planet Earth can't be repaid in any kind of financial currency, and we're already paying the price for the debt we owe.
So the question on many people's minds is "Can we even have ethical consumption under capitalism?" In this episode, we find out that despite having differing opinions on the answer to that question, we often agree on the solutions for what comes next.
Listen to hear how our community answers the title question, economist and sociologist Juliet Schor helps us plan for what comes next, and Commons founder and CEO Sanchali Seth Pal explains how modern and historical boycotts can be tools for collective action.
➡️ If you want to vote with your dollar, join our April challenge in the Commons app (available in U.S. and Canada) This Earth Month, we're avoiding the brands spending millions to block climate progress.
🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.
📞 We'd love to hear from you! Season 3 submissions coming soon!
📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.
📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.
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Feeling bummed out by climate setbacks? Or maybe you're outright angry? We're here for you.
With 40% of Americans starting to align their money with their views, it's clear that we're ready to push back on recent climate challenges.
In season 3 of Second Nature, we're balancing hope and action — from company boycotts to community gardens. With the help of community voices from around the world, top-tier experts, and a dose of history and data, we'll give you all the motivation and inspiration you need to take climate action that matters.
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This episode originally aired on June 4, 2024. We're about to break ground on season three, the soil outside is warming up and we're ready to get our hands in the dirt. So we wanted to revisit this episode as we prep our gardens for spring.
Stoops, balconies, and windowsills are ripe for growing food. Today, we're riding out the ripple effect that urban gardening can have on our lives and the planet.
Second Nature is your community for practical, sustainable living. On this episode, we're getting inspiration and practical tips to start small, fruitful home gardens in urban spaces. We're also talking about the carbon footprint of home gardens and realizing the ripple effect that growing our own food can have on our lives and the environment.
🌎 To see photos of our contributors and their gardens as well as citations, and further reading, check the full show notes.
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Second Nature is a podcast by Commons, the sustainable spending app that tens of thousands of people use to track their footprint. Earn rewards for climate-friendly purchases and find new, action-based content in the app every week. Download the app and join our June Collective Challenge: Sustainable Transit.
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