Welcome

Welcome!!! I am so pumped that this is the first official email of the Sustain With Age newsletter and that you are a part of it!

If you didn't explicitly subscribe, well I thought you still might appreciate this - but you of course can opt out!

I am going to try my hand at as organic a growth as possible, but that will only be possible if those already committed to and excited about my content help share it and get others to subscribe. If you have a network, group, social media, or anything else, or even just forward to one friend or family member I will be greatly appreciative!

To be frank, while I will explore ways in the future to monetize, potentially through minor advertising, for now my entire focus is on delivery of high-quality, helpful, insightful, and exciting or entertaining content for you all. You are the reason I am doing this – yes because many of you have actually and literally asked for it. Besides sharing, the next best thing you can do is become a paid “subscriber.” There are no benefits now, though there may be in the future like exclusive content, but you will greatly help me find the time to do this! Go to the home page, scroll to the way bottom and hit “upgrade” under account. If just 9 of you upgrade or refer 5 people each, I can cover the backend costs of running this quite easily!

In addition to those who have complimented my writing, I have been trying to find a consistent response to those who ask me what they can do besides sit in despair or sign another petition. Well, here is my solution: formalizing my answers and storytelling into a newsletter!

Yes, there will be sustainability talk, but there won't be dwelling on federal government announcements. There will be ways to engage in your local community. Ways to enhance your impact without wondering if what you recycle actually made it into a new product like it was supposed to.

Putting this together has been a lot of work and I greatly appreciate you signing up and spreading the word!

People in my life have been telling me to share my thoughts more widely for a bit. Though sometimes they certainly tell me to keep them to myself too!

I have toyed with publishing a book for quite some time and have more than 1,000 pages written across numerous topics.

But frankly, I want to kick things into a more real-time gear which I have done through opinion pieces in various publications, but they are not always accepted and their timeliness diminishes quickly.

There are already a lot of newsletters out there, many of which come to my inbox from general and business news like Morning Brew, Axios, and Politico to climate focused ones like Heated, Pedestrian Observations, and Keep Cool.

I do not want to duplicate them, but also think I can offer a unique value that combines some of their elements and more straightforward reporting and thoughts with my own opinions and distillation of topics.

I plan to cover climate, business, and politics, but also zoom in on very nuanced topics like zoning, natural gas risk, gender, and more and I hope to interact with readers in a way that increases the value I offer to you over time and improves my understanding, perspectives, and approach.

While there will be focus, I also plan to be timely and opinionated in a way that jumps around, recognizing the intersectionality of issues, but addressing different things between editions of the newsletter, the format of which will itself evolve over time.

Who is my audience? Perhaps one of my adult cousins with kids who just can’t keep up with the news but would generally appreciate my thoughts on Sabrina Carpenter. Another might be a passionate European Union supporter looking for any updates on how we can reverse Brexit. Others too may be the elusive conservative against climate change (they do exist) who appreciate a “free market” conversation on climate regs. Regardless, I will have information I am sure you find interesting and other stuff you may just ignore.

I also hope you disagree with me at least occasionally otherwise I’ll be seeking your money to run for office since my insights must be unmatched!

If you want to take a look at some of what I have written before, check out my profile on MuckRack, follow me on BlueSky, or see a few specific highlights below.

Sustaining With Age

So, what does it mean to Sustain With Age? Part of my professional background includes working on sustainability (energy and water efficiency, reduced waste, and more) in senior living real estate and recognizing the intersection of healthcare, climate, and aging, sometimes referred to as aging in place.

In the newsletter and media context we find ourselves in, I believe this title will give me the most flexibility to address climate, but also all of the other topics many have told me you want to engage on like how to be civically engaged. Part of that is telling stories, but then also how to respond to them.

My work in corporate ESG includes employee trainings, project management, and certifications across energy, water, and waste and DEI and governance work. I serve as Treasurer of the Board of the Climate Solutions Accelerator of the Genesee-Finger Lakes Region and have lived in Boston, Chicago, Saratoga Springs, NY, and currently reside in my hometown of Rochester, NY.

This newsletter will leverage all of that as I hope to share practical “tips” and actions for you that have come up in my own life and work from the high-level business strategies on sustainability to retrofits you can make in your home to be more sustainable including the tax incentives and rebates that come with them because I learned many people don’t know how much money they leave on the table when they replace their hot water heater!

My personal political and activist involvements have also opened my eyes to the desire of many to make change, but also the persistent (and wrong) belief that there is little to nothing they can do actually do.

Like Seinfeld, I observe the everyday, but highlight it and comment on it in a way that hopefully you resonate with and potentially even act upon. Much of what I share I will have typed up anyway for myself - to vent and laugh - so if you like it, great! If not, I was going to do it anyway.

I very much look forward to sharing in this journey with all of you and thanks for reading - cause you certainly didn’t have to!

It will be a little bit aggregation so you don’t need to scour every news website - I’ll do that for you cause I like it. It will be my own commentary on developments. And it will be updates about things I or colleagues are working on that might inspire you or foster a connection to help you in your own sustainability journey.

For now, I intend to address both the personal and professional sustainability journeys. So much of our news and other newsletters segment these, but you may be a homeowner and work in banking and I can ensure you know how to be sustainable in both. You may be a renter and work as an environmental engineer - we’ll have plenty to talk about in both realms.

I realize I may go “off script” in my writing which is why I’m not setting a strict one off the top.

One week we may discuss mental health and climate and in another, the intricacies of implementing induction stoves in commercial settings, to be followed by a hyper-local discussion on high-speed rail and public transit in the Rochester area with applicability to businesses and general residents/taxpayers.

We won’t be able to “have it all,” but we also don’t have to limit ourselves and I hope to bring that concept into our discussions here.

We also won’t be doom and gloom, but I won’t lie through optimism either. We’ll talk politics, but what I find most relevant, and I won’t just leave us with problems or groans. I hope to inspire you to take action locally and wherever you work.

If you arrived here from my personal life - yes you will get some of my crazy stories and encounters. If you came for climate or policy or sheer curiosity - welcome, I can assure you that you will not be bored.

Whether you read for entertainment, learning, or some combination, great! Let me know why you signed up or if you have questions or suggestions. I want this to become a community you can engage in so my line will be open and I will be as responsive as possible.

So, have you figured out what it means to sustain with age yet?

One example: Volunteering has personal benefits to us and of course the communities or organizations we are supporting. How do we quantify that beyond number of hours contributed or do we need to quantify it at all to recognize it as beneficial in multiple ways? To both the individual and the community.

The point is sustainability is not some niche environmental concept - it transcends ideals of progressivism (not just in the political sense), inclusion, and truly anything that has a stakeholder. As individuals we are our own stakeholder.

We often address our own health as individuals, but have we viewed ourselves holistically to understand, beyond the acute forms of health we are accustomed to discussing (perhaps blood pressure or iron levels) to understand how we are simply sustaining ourselves? Mentally, physically, spiritually, and likely in other ways we do not yet even fully understand.

Now, I would argue that to sustain ourselves individually we also need to “zoom out” and ensure our community is sustaining itself, along with our family and friends. In doing so we need an earth that sustains itself. Air that is fresh, water that is clean and accessible. We need support systems for the moments we cannot effectively sustain ourselves and that too can apply beyond the individual to entire communities that need support whether at the neighborhood, street, city, state, national, or global levels.

The concept of mutual aid has taken off in recent years, especially during covid, but it has been a staple of intergovernmental operation for decades. Fire departments and other emergency services have to cross our arbitrary lines of “jurisdiction” often, but they would not do so if not for legal agreements many of us do not even realize exist.

Increasingly, collaboration is taking form in a preventative and proactive way rather than only for such responsive and reactionary interventions.

All that to say, we have much we desire to sustain - whether we recognize that consciously or not - and we can utilize this framework at different levels and to promote different outcomes or success metrics. Again, that can be health and climate, or it can be financial in order to support other goals of development.

I will give a plug here to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals - a group of 17 ambitious goals aimed to be achieved by 2030. There are whole topics we need to separate and integrate at the same time to “solve.”

We will say much more about sustaining and aging and sustaining over time across all topics, but for now I hope you have a better sense of where I am coming from in my writing and no it will not always be this long. As always, you can reply to this email or reach out at [email protected] to ask, comment, or just chat!

Just a few topics we’ll cover: Energy, water, waste, sustainability, utilities, aging (aging in place, senior housing, growing up), healthcare, foreign policy and affairs, book reviews, the death penalty, prisons, judicial system (especially at the state and local level), politics, accessibility, gender, LGBTQ+, the just transition, kitchens (residential and commercial), and refrigerants/cooling/heating

Where Do We Go From Here?

How often will I be in your inbox? Not sure

What kind of content? A big variety, but always what I find interesting, links to other sources, and, ideally, real actions you can take, because news without solutions will rarely serve you.

This will only work with your help so thank you in advance. Below you will find some more fun stuff and I will be playing around with sections like these throughout our journey together so hit me up if you like or hate something, with questions, ideas, or anything else. This is your newsletter as much as mine!

You may truly not know what is coming next week and I hope that anticipation is tied to a feeling of excitement! Yes I will be giving my take on college sports and NIL, but focusing on how that ties into higher education and sustainability, likely followed by a piece on senior living and healthcare in the context of wildfires in California and North Carolina.

It might not all feel great to read, but I won’t leave you with only despair either or homework. I aim to help you formulate your individual plan to sustain - as a person, in your career and relationships, and as a part of your community which can mean a lot of different things.

Together we will Sustain With Age. Ourselves, each other, our communities, workplaces, and more!

Peace,

Kyle