This is A Sustainable Mind, and I'm your host, Marjorie Alexander. So today's episode is going to be

quite a bit different from what you're used to hearing from me. Usually we do an interview with an

environmental leader or change maker, and sometimes every once in a while I do a solo episode

on a particular environmental topic.

But today I want to actually focus on how I can help some of you in the Sustainable Mind community.

So before I get into the how of that exactly, I want to talk to you about why I started this show.

And for those of you who listened to my

very first episode, you might know a little bit of this story. But I've had some big revelations in

how I've gotten to this point in my life because of this show. And I wanted to share some of that with you.

So I started this show, as a story goes, because I had a thesis project for my

master's degree. And while that is true, that's pretty much just the tail end of the story. So there

were really three reasons why I started this podcast. Number one, I was a big podcast listener for

years before this and was really frustrated because I couldn't find any environmental shows that were right for me.

And what I mean by right for me was number one, most of the shows that were out were not being produced anymore.

They were defunct. Some of them had a long run and others a very short run, but most of them weren't being recorded anymore.

Some of them that were still being recorded had terrible production value, and I won't point any fingers, but, man, it really, really turned me off.

Just, you know, the first couple of minutes of some of these episodes were just grading was incredibly difficult to listen to. And if I'm being turned off as a listener in the first few minutes, how am I ever going to get to the good stuff, the content that you're trying to put out to your community. So I was really frustrated with that.

And the third type of podcast that I was encountering was more current events or news. And a lot of

those came from kind of a doom and gloom perspective. And I didn't think that that was really

beneficial, that that was really constructive when we're all citizens of this planet. And we really need to figure out how we're going to

solve these problems. Mother Earth is going to be just fine without us. Really the people that we're

trying to save are ourselves as well as the other species that share this planet with us. And since I

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