Sustainability is the core motivation behind this blog. Over a decade ago, I started playing with a simple idea: a sustainable life can also be a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive one. 

Today, I consider this idea to be 100% proven. Indeed, we can all save the world by building better lives.  

This week’s posts explained this big claim in a bit more detail.

The checklist

• Why you should care about the environment. 
  • Nature delivers twice as much value to our lives as all human activity combined. 
  • Our continued destruction of nature threatens to cut off or even reverse these free services, making our lives deeply uncomfortable. 
• Save the world by looking after yourself. 
  • Food production is the single largest impact on our environment. It’s also one of the core ways in which we destroy our own health. 
  • Displacing the typical excessive meat-rich diet with a moderate plant-rich diet is a great way to help yourself and your planet. 
• Save the world by building wealth.
  • Consumption can only directly address basic human needs like food, shelter, and security. 
  • Satisfying higher human needs like love, esteem, and self-actualization is much better achieved by saving and investing than by spending. 
•  Save the world by embracing your creativity.
  • A creative life automatically crowds out consumerism and offers a direct route to esteem and self-actualization. 
  • Both consumption and creation tend to develop self-strengthening feedback loops.

So, there you have it. A sustainable life is not some painful sacrifice we must make to save the planet. It’s a proven pathway to happiness, health, wealth, and self-actualization. 

In my view, spreading this simple message is the single most promising pathway to a sustainable and just society.